Wednesday, March 10, 2010

New DIY - Origami Seed Starting Kit

DIY Origami Garden “Squash” Starting Kit
Total Cost: $6.45 – $12.00

Materials:
12 - 8” x 6” pieces of newspaper (any free periodical, the Onion would work)
1 - bag of seed starting mix ($3.50)
2 - rectangular Dominick’s salad bar containers (free if you ask nice) or (full of salad $5.99 a lb.)
1 - matching Dominick’s salad bar container lid
1 - 16 oz plastic bottled drink, ($1.20 beverage type of your choice)
1 - Squash seeds ($1.75)

Tools:
- metal skewer for making holes
- pen for marking
- pair of scissors


Make the 12 origami “garbage bins” using the accompanying instructions.
http://en.origami-club.com//newspaper/garbagebin/garbagebin/index.htm

This should take a few minutes each so settle in for a half an hour. Mean while drink the 16 oz beverage and eat your salad.

You should now have 12 bins (slightly diamond shaped), an empty plastic bottle and empty salad container. Rinse the bottle and cap, put aside. Wash and dry salad container before continuing.

Make Drain Tray:
Take one salad bar container and trim the bottom off. You want to be left with a very shallow pan about 3/8 inch deep. Snip the scalloped edge of this piece following the grooves.

Make Label Stakes:
Take the scraps from the container and trim off the edges. Then follow the grooves and trim off 12 pieces of plastic, (2 scallops wide and about 2 inches long).

Make Drain Holes:
Bring the metal skewer, drain tray and the 16 oz bottle close to the stove, turn a burner on and heat up the skewer. (If you don’t have a gas stove light at candle and use the flame from it to heat the skewer.) With the hot skewer poke 8 holes in the flat bottom of the drain tray. On the bottle, about 1½ inch below the cap, within a space the size of a quarter, poke 7-8 holes. Poke another hole 1½ inch down on the opposite side of the bottle. Fill ¾ the way with water and recap. The bottle is now a watering can.

Put the drain tray inside the second salad container bottom side up. It should “float” or bounce back when you press down. The seed bins will weigh it down.

Fill “Garbage Bins” with Dirt:
Prepare starter mix par the directions on the package. Fill your paper bins to a ¼ inch bellow the top.

Start Seeds:
Plant seeds in the bins par directions on the seed packages. Write plant names on your label stakes and put in the seed bins.

Using your watering bottle water your seeds to lightly saturate them. Cover with the salad lid and put in a sunny window or within 2” of a florescent lamp.

Keep moist. Wait…

When seeds germinate remove lid.

Thesis Update

My thesis updates are ongoing at Weblog Andrew Oleksiuk 2010

Geospatial Environment Kit

[Link to Geospatial Environment Kit]

On approaching this task, I felt I had to explore coding and distribution platforms. I looked into Facebook at Sabrina's suggestion and it seemed a little complicated at the outset. I thought it I could to a rapid prototype to leverage distributability on the web without application specific distribution models. I figured it couldn't be to hard to do as a Javascript AJAX (advanced javascript and XML) interface. Looking onto some rapid development environments I figured basic basic compliance with common browsers would not be too hard.

For the text editor I used TextWrangler
I would be building a suite of applications (pages) for the kit.

I wrote the code in some several chunks but I'm unsure of where the conditionals (or what kind) should go. Here's the basic structure:

header
Javascript
Function

body
Javascript
HTML code
I realized in the body I would be using forms and I wanted to make sure I was able to manipulate a second window. This let me to the decision to adopt functions to create a separate window for the result of the survey constituting the result

For questions (user input) , I decided on forms. I was able to get basic text entry to work. But I still want to experiment with radio buttons as per my proposal. Since the basic structure of the process is to ask questions and deliver custom results in the form of a list. So I am translating yes/no logic questions into show/don;t show specific page elements (such as document.write).

The survey questions are:

is there a shower in the bathroom
is there a tub in the bathroom
is there a garbagecan in the bathroom
is there a sink in the bathroom
is there a toilet in the bathroom

so I need the folowing code fragments:

If shower = yes, display "Clean the shower"
If tub = yes, display "Clean the tub"
If garbagecan = yes, display "take out the garbagecan"
If sink = yes, display "Clean the sink"
If toilet = yes, display "Clean the toilet"

to display as the result

I am using one function to create the window.

Do I need to use a second function to process the conditionals? If so, does the order of the functions in the header matter?

Or is there some way to express the conditional text formatting in the body with the forms and then send the whole thing up to the create window function?