Category: Walker Engineering
We Talk About House Styles #intheoffice
via 99percentvisible
Someone in the remote office was looking at houses for sale just last December. We were having difficulty communicating the style and this chart from Pop Chart Lab came along. Now we have a cheat sheet to talk through styles rather than the realty listing which is often mistaken, taking a single feature and claiming an entire architectural style.
This poster from Pop Chart Lab began as an ambitious attempt to document vernacular architecture around the world. “After diving into the research,” say the poster’s creators, “it quickly became apparent that this wasn’t going to be feasible due to the volume of data.” Instead, they ended up focusing on single-family homes in the United States, settling on 121 hand-drawn houses representing urban and rural residential styles, including: Colonial, Romantic, Victorian, Eclectic, Modern, Neo-Eclectic with subsections such as Italian Renaissance Revival and Ranch.
They also included an infographic from Part Select whhich goes in depth on key details.
A/B Testing and 3D Printing
It is August and the doldrums as far as Engineering and Consulting practices are concerned and that is GREAT. There is time to take on all the more serious projects that I am too busy with at other times.
I setup my new-to-me 3D printer: 3Dsystems Cube 3 and tested it by printing a new key cap for my keyboard.
Then I got down to serious A/B testing with the setup seen here
I received a Bean Box from Seattle Roasters and I needed to improve the pour from the machine on the left which doesn’t have the same pressure mechanism as the old Capresso on the right (which is used at work).
What I lacked was a really good espresso tamper, so I printed this one , it turned out great!
Now I have the rest of the week while I work in the woodshop to complete a thorough A/B test. So far, the tamper has made a significant improvement regardless of the grinder.
Pretty snazzy and useful for a second object print.
How to Find The Best Laptop Under $600
From an article on makeuseof which addressed the question I had of how do I find a really good mid range laptop when mine went out last. I finally was handed a used one that I put an SSD drive into. I am now looking to upgrade the SSD drive for more space.
This article explains why is is so difficult to compare units, still the final two ACER units are a solid recommendation:
Acer Aspire E5-573G: As mentioned earlier, the E5-573G may use the slightly older Broadwell generation of CPU, but it’s paired with the NVIDIA GT-940M GPU and includes a 15.6″ 1080p screen, and 6GB of RAM. You won’t find a better performer anywhere for the money.
Acer Aspire E5-573G 15.6-Inch Gaming Laptop (Intel Core i5 5200U, 8GB, 1TB, NVIDIA GeForce 940M 2GB, Windows 10 Home)
Intel Core i5-5200U 2.2 GHz (3 MB Cache)
Price: $499.99Acer Aspire V3-572PG-767J: This laptop uses the 4th generation Haswell architecture, along with the unupdated GT-840M GPU. It’s a solid performer and for $533, you could do a lot worse. There haven’t been big performance increases with Intel’s 5th and 6th generation processors, except within their integrated GPUs and in battery life. However, this unit uses a discrete GPU, so there’s not a tremendous difference between this laptop and modern ones.
Acer Aspire V3-572PG-767J 15.6-Inch Touchscreen Laptop (Platinum Silver)
Intel Core i7-4510U 2.0 GHz Processor (4MB Cache)
Price: $594.21
Job Site Tiny House Consulting
I spent time with Alex helping him with a complicated site built door set.
One Step Forward… Two steps back
Two steps back.
It has been awhile since we have posted anything, and as usual, it feels like so much has happened. We had so much that we were excited to update you all on, until today when we hit a bit of a…speed bump. I’m going to give you all a quick update on the past 2 weeks first though.
The French doors, oh boy, those French doors. The deal that we got on the doors fromReFit on Mississippi ended up costing us just as much as the original sliding glass patio door (not including my sanity, which I lost quite a bit of). After a week of taking a crack at them on my own, I called in reinforcements. Tiny house curious engineer extraordinaire, John, came to the rescue. After another three days of work, we ended up getting those doors in correctly. What I learned from this whole project? Buy pre-hung doors.
John fixing one of my mistakes
Thar she swings!!!
Still standing!
