nvrtd.design Blog

I've been working on the whereabouts clock in fits and starts since I got the grandfather clock body. I've disassembled the top third of the clock (since that's the part that I really care about at the moment) and started stripping off the old stain and making some small repairs as needed. I've polished up some of the hardware to make it a little shinier, but still retain some antiqued look to it. I bought some glass to insert into the door, but it might be too thin. I may need to have Heather get some from a stained glass shop or custom glass shop to get it to fit right. We'll see what happens when we get there. I finally found a decent supply of brass for the face. I tried all the big-box stores first (since I was there anyway) and got nothing. The hobby shop had some, but only tiny pieces. I ended up going to Metals4U up the road and got a pretty big piece for about $30. I hope it's thick enough to etch. I will have to glue it onto some thin ply o...

I've been looking for the past several weeks for a suitable clock body to install the whereabouts clock. I tried calling around to a few clock shops to see if they had any busted clocks with intact frames, but I didn't have any luck with that. Seems that most people have busted clock mechanisms in pretty frames that they want to be fixed. I pretty much left my search up to Craigslist after that. I found a guy in Austin selling a broken wall clock that I thought would work. $50 later and I have a clock that is too shallow for my parts. It's a beautiful clock, so for a few more bucks at Hobby Lobby I replaced the movement. Of course, after doing that the old movement works again. Oh well. I kept looking through old posts and found someone selling a "Baby Grandfather Clock." Its design is more like a mantle clock, but it was really about the size I was looking for. However, it too was too shallow. If I left it as a tabletop clock (as it could be) the dept...

Tonight I worked quite a bit on the location code. I had started just to expand the list of known locations in the script, but that proved to be very long and probably not very efficient. I figured that adding the known location data into the MySQL database would provide an easier way to search for that data. I also added a couple tables to the database. One is a simple username and location table for storing override data. When a user is not set to "GPS" it will turn the clock to the specified location instead of using the GPS data. This will be used quite a bit for testing and also in the iPhone App I want to write. I also added a scheduling table for the kids. When the script runs it will check to see if there is a defined schedule for "now" and set the location according to the schedule. The next thing I want to do with the code is to utilize the override table to attach the kids (who don't have phones) to a specific user. Now it's just hardcod...