About 15 years ago, a friend of mine informed me that Sensirion would send a sample of one of their temperature sensors to anyone who filled a form on their web page (I’m not sure if this is still the case). After the Sensirion sensor arrived in the mail, I wired it to my PC’s parallel printer port, wrote a little code, and built a simple web page that could display the room temperature.

• Our strawberry plants have yielded a couple of mediocre berries every day
• The verdict is out on our first broccoli plants. They do not resemble what we get from the grocery store
• Cherry tomato yields are good (production is exceeding consumption)
• Carrots are tasty, but small
• All flowers are beautiful
• Pole beans are excellent
• Chives are excellent
• We added a third pot of sweet corn. In spite of our late start, it looks like yields have increased and quality is good.

I stumbled on an interesting article, Copyright quirk leaves James Bond up for grabs in Canada, in the Globe and Mail the other day.  In Canada, copyright expires 50 years after an author’s death.  Ian Fleming died in 1964, which means his James Bond series of novels have become a part of the public domain in Canada.

However, this might be short lived. Michael Geist, a Canadian academic specializing in intellectual property and technology law issues, writes that Canada will likely accept extending copyright to life plus 70 years in the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) Free Trade negotiations.  It has been life plus 70 years in the United States since 1998.

My toy subway car has generated some local interest!

Check out:

• Extra, Extra: 3D-Printable Subways, Pride’s New Executive Director, and Having Your Say on the Scarborough Subway in the Torontoist
• A Rocket for your pocket: North York dad’s design lets you 3D-print your own subway car in the Toronto Star
• Model subway car built with 3D printer on page 3 of the January 29th Metro (I couldn’t find this one online)
• Willowdale dad prints TTC subway car for wooden train set at Inside Toronto (Metroland Media, publisher of the North York Mirror)

After learning OpenSCAD basics in a previous project,  I set out to build a toy Toronto TTC subway car for Brio-compatible wooden train tracks.

I stumbled on a simple drawing of the TTC H6, and started tracing the simple features in Inkscape, exporting the shapes to OpenSCAD, and adding depth to the design.  For more information about the TTC H6, visit the Canadian Public Transportation Board’s page.

I haven’t worked in 3D at all before, and I was looking for a simple project.

As with the Brio/Duplo wagon, I was thinking about what was within my ability, and not commercially available.  I decided I would try to build a custom tire valve stem cap with my daughters’ school logo (a polar bear).