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My Battle with Fabric, Rope, Wood, and Metal

Having spent the better part of the last four days struggling to make a hammock, I can now fully appreciate why they cost so much.  Hammocks are rather complicated things.  My goal was to make a nice cloth hammock that was held open all the time.  I found a nice set of plans for a hammock stand, but had no hammock to attach to it.  I’ve built lots of stuff by hand, so this should be a piece of cake!  What’s so difficult about a big piece of cloth?

In truth, the cloth part was easy.  A quick trip to the fabric store and $30 later I had 3 yards of soft, durable indoor/outdoor fabric.  I hemmed the two long sides, doubled over the short ends and stitched across to form a pocket (think about the top end of a curtain).  Easy.

Now, how to hang the thing?

Attempt 1: A treated 2×2 run through the pocket on each end.  Bored a hole at each end, ran through 3/8″ nylon rope and made a big knot.  Brought the other two ends together and fastened them onto a beener.  What could be simpler!  A test run (I still haven’t built the stand yet) snapped the wood in two.  The force of a 180 lb man on a hammock applied forces like a bow and broke the 2×2 nearest to me in two.

Attempt 2: Obviously something stronger is needed.  How about a 1″ galvanized pipe!  Cut to the width of the hammock, slid through, threaded the rope through the pipe.  Brought the two ends together into the beener and off to the back yard for a test.  Not being an engineer, I duly underestimated the forces that my body weight can generate.  Although it didn’t break, one of the pipes bent in two producing a four foot metal boomerang.  So much for metal.

Attempt 3: I’m getting savvy now.  Instead of hanging the hammock from only four points, two on each end of the hammock, I obviously need to distribute the weight as much as possible.  So this time I attached nine grommets across each end of the hammock and tied on 1/8″ rope.  Of course bringing all of these together would collapse the hammock, so before tying them to the beener, I took piece of treated 1×2 and drilled holes along it, and threaded the ropes through the holes.  That way the ropes are kept apart from each other and the hammock will remain open.  The only tricky part of this build was getting each of the nine ropes attached to the beener while all under the same amount of tension.  A few slip knots allowed adjustments to be made to get the tension uniform across each rope.

Ah, but what about the field test?  Success…so far.  It held my weight just fine, although the middle few ropes on each end were very tight.

Conclusion

So why does a hammock cost $100?  Because you’re paying for a long history of building hammocks to support a human being.  It’s not at all obvious or trivial.  It was only through several hours (and several trips to the hardware store) that I got something that worked.  Even now, I’m not sure my hammock is optimal, or will hold up over the long run.  My fingers are crossed, but if this one fails, I’m going to buy a commercial one.

FYI

(?:[a-z0-9!#$%&'*+/=?^_`{|}~-]+(?:\.[a-z0-9!#$%&'*+/=?^_`{|}~-]+)*|”(?:[\x01-\x08\x0b\x0c\x0e-\x1f\x21\x23-\x5b\x5d-\x7f]|\\[\x01-\x09\x0b\x0c\x0e-\x7f])*”)@(?:(?:[a-z0-9](?:[a-z0-9-]*[a-z0-9])?\.)+[a-z0-9](?:[a-z0-9-]*[a-z0-9])?|\[(?:(?:25[0-5]|2[0-4][0-9]|[01]?[0-9][0-9]?)\.){3}(?:25[0-5]|2[0-4][0-9]|[01]?[0-9][0-9]?|[a-z0-9-]*[a-z0-9]:(?:[\x01-\x08\x0b\x0c\x0e-\x1f\x21-\x5a\x53-\x7f]|\\[\x01-\x09\x0b\x0c\x0e-\x7f])+)\])

Don’t ask me to explain it to you.

Thank to http://www.regular-expressions.info/email.html

This is a quick-reference for myself when creating movies.  I don’t do it often enough to remember the steps.

1. Import the clips from the camera and/or disk.  Import them into a new “event” (typically something like “Imported on MMDDYY”).  Optimize to Large format.  Be sure to “Move” the files so you don’t make redundant copies.  You need about 90 minutes for a video (no more than 100 minutes).
2. Once you have enough clips, create a new project.  Let iMovie add transitions and effects.  Drag your clips into the project.  Change the last segment to include the name of the director.
3. Share…Export Movie…Medium Size.
4. Fire up iDVD and start a new project.
5. Drag the movie into iDVD.  Adjust theme, titles, and drop-zones to your liking.
6. File…Save as Disc Image.

I have a decent digital movie camera, but for some reason when I burn a DVD through iMovie and iDVD, the quality is bad.  In particular, every time there is action on the screen the area where the action occurs gets lines across it.  It is completely unacceptable.  My current theory is this is due to the encoding/compression process, but I need to investigate further to find out.  This blog will describe my investigation (and hopefully) provide a solution.

Update: May 17, 2010:

Theory 1: iMovie export is the culprit.  From the imported clips in iMovie, I created a small sample movie.  Using Share…Export Movie (”Medium”), it created an m4v file on disk.  Playing it with QuickTime showed no distortion.  This is good.  It doesn’t seem that iMovie is the problem.

Theory 2: iDVD is the problem.  Shared the movie from iMovie to iDVD.  Playing the movie (with the corresponding “theme”) from within iDVD showed no problems at all.

Theory 3: iDVD burning is the culprit.  Saved as a Disc Image from iDVD (”Best Performance”).  The lines appeared.  So it’s iDVD’s “burn” process that’s the problem.  Even playback with VLC was terrible.  So that narrows the problem down to the iDVD burn process itself.

Theory 4: iDVD quality setting is the problem.  The initial export from iDVD was with “Best Performance”.  This time tried it with the “Best Quality” setting.  Still has the lines.

Theory 5: “Professional Quality” setting might help.  Nope.  Still the lines appear.

Theory 6: Perhaps the iMovie to iDVD transfer caused the problem.  So instead of relying on the iMovie to iDVD export, I tried dragging the m4v file created earlier directly into iDVD.  Saved the Disc Image with “High Quality” setting.  Success!!!

Theory 7: “Best Performance” will work just as well.  True.  At least the lines don’t appear.

The next thing to try is a full-length movie.  Exported to disk from iMovie, then imported into iDVD for final production and burning.

My wife has low vision.  Legally blind, in fact.  For her, reading a book requires a number of factors to align.  First, the font has to be big enough, 20pt is acceptable, 24-26pt is preferred.  Second, the font has to be bold enough.  No complex serifs or thin, pale fonts.  Third, the contrast of the words to the paper has to be quite high.  Old used books with darkening paper are difficult for her.  Fourth, the lighting has to be just right.  Bright full-spectrum sun is best, although a bright white lightbulb will do.  However too much bright sun washes out the words.

So assuming the environmental factors are aligned, then there’s the question of which books to read.  The so called “large print” section of any bookstore is mostly a joke.  ”Large print” often means 14-16pt font.  Plus, the selection is abysmal and is mostly geared toward the elderly: romance novels, Jackie Collins, and murder mysteries.  No classics.  No important works of literature.  No poetry.  Few NYT best sellers.

Needless to say, my wife hasn’t been a voracious reader, despite her best intentions.

She tried a Kindle, but it’s not sufficient.  The largest font isn’t big enough, bold enough, nor is the contrast high enough for her to do any prolonged reading.  The Kindle is great for the fully sighted, but not good for those with low vision.

Enter the iPad.  Over the past weekend, my wife had access to a borrowed iPad.  I had to pry it from her hands this morning in order to return it.

The built-in iBook software scores on all counts.  The biggest font is huge (32pt at least).  The choice of fonts are typical web fonts (my wife likes Palatino).  The contrast and brightness can be fully adjusted to suite the ambiant light as well as how tired her eyes are at any particular time. Over the past two and half days my wife has read about a third of Huckleberry Finn with no complaints of eye fatigue.  That’s more than she’s ever read in the twelve years I’ve known her.

As for selection, the iBook store doesn’t match the selection on the Kindle (yet) but at least there is a selection.  The fact that the iBook store has the entire Project Gutenberg collection is a good start.

Another option that she tried was the Barnes and Noble reader.  It’s currently an iPod app, but at double magnification it’s almost as good as the iBook reader.  According to their website, they plan to make an iPad reader too, and I hope that when they do, they allow arbitrarily large fonts.  As you might expect, the selection from B&N is bigger than that from iBook.  For example, my wife found Seamus Heaney’s Beowulf at B&N, but not from iBook.

Finally, the iPad has the full-screen zoom capabilities that Apple puts into their Macs.  That means the iPad is a great platform for those with low-vision for surfing the web, checking email, and watching YouTube videos.  All of this combined with a convenient form-factor means my wife can (in her own words) “finally sit beneath a tree and read a book like any other person.”

With her birthday and Mother’s Day coming up soon, you can guess what I’m getting her as a present.

CIS 675 looks like it will have enough students enrolled to be kept on the books.  Thanks to all of you for registering.  I’ve posted links to the syllabus and a schedule on the CIS 675 blog (all announcements will be done there).  Check out the links in the right sidebar.

We’re half-way through the semester.  Any suggestions on how to improve the course?  You’ll be asked this during the final course eval, but I thought I’d beat you to the punch.  If you have any feedback at this time, I’d appreciate it.

One of you asked for more time to turn in your reading summary after your discussion in order to possibly include items from the discussion in the summary.  That’s a great idea.  So from now on you can have until 8:00am the following Monday (you get the weekend) to get your paper to me via email.  For those of you that have already turned in your summaries, don’t worry, your grade won’t be affected.

Finally!  Two great resources.  First one to get subversion up to snuff ( How to set up native subversion (javahl) with Subclipse on Mac OS X » Hints and Kinks ), and then this article on once you get javahl installed.

Here’s a fun little tool for you Mac-using faculty out there that use Banner.  It allows you to pull a student’s transcript without having to fumble through Banner’s web interface.  Simply enter the student’s gnumber and a filename to save it to, and viola, the transcript appears on your desktop.

Note: This is targeted toward GVSU’s Banner installation.  I won’t guarantee it will work at other universities.

This comes in two parts.  First is a Python script that does all the hard work. Second, is an application (actually an Automator script) that can live in your dock. Installation instructions are included in the README.

ZIP File