A small Python script I wrote to help me focus when I am supposed to work, and prevent access to procrastination-friendly websites.

Get it here

I was reading a book about woodworking, where it was stated that it is very important to keep your tools sharp. Nothing new really: it makes sense that your sharp cutting tools have to be sharp. What I did not really realize was how sharp is sharp – Apparently, a chisel should be sharp enough to shave the hair off the back of your arm.

I found several videos on Youtube that show different methods for sharpening your chisels (and plane!). Some use sharpening stones, others use sandpaper, but the technique is mostly the same. I was lucky to already have sandpaper of different grits, from 120 up to 1600 – so this was what I used.

I was not dedicated enough to the sharpening process, and did not get to the mirror-edge razor-sharp shave-your-hair grade – but my efforts did improve the usability of my chisels and plane significantly.

I continued the work on the headstock, chiseling and shaving it straight. Also seen in this picture is the beginning of the truss rod route. I have found it quite difficult to route a 5mm wide route with a 6mm chisel, so I will get a new chisel before I continue with the route.

It has been quite long since I first considered building my own guitar. It has also been long since I first wanted to get into woodworking/sculpting. I’ve finally taken it beyond the aspiration phase to actual execution. I will be documenting the process in a series of posts, of which this is the first.

I began this journey by reading a lot about guitar building online, browsing different forums and reading construction logs. I also spent much time looking through guitar-making related products in shops like StewMac, Luthiers Mercantile International, Warmoth etc.

The next step, that took about a year an a half, was deciding to go for it. I bought Melvyn Hiscock’s Make Your Own Electric Guitar, which I think is very well written. It is full of transcribed personal experience, that will save you time and errors, and guide you through the entire build.

Beginning to gather supplies, I started to design and choose what my guitar will be like. At first I considered making it an SG clone. I really like the SG and was avid about getting one after I first tried it. I then decided that given the effort put into building my own guitar, I’d rather try a more interesting custom design. And thus, the very fun part of sketching out guitars in pencil has began.

Eventually I came up with 3 designs that I liked enough to refine and illustrate:

and the chosen finalist:

I decided to go with Mahagony for both the neck and the body, Rosewood fretboard, Gibson scale length (not accurate in the sketches) and a two humbuckers setup.

My next decision was not use power tools, unless I will absolutely have to. The are few reasons for choosing so. First, I do not own a router, a sander or any other of the woodworking associated power tools, and I don’t know anyone who does and can lend me his. Second, I’m going to be building the guitar in a room in an apartment – meaning I have to go low on noise and mess. I hope that it will end up as a wise choice, and I don’t mind the extra time and effort that manual tools require.

Once I had everything at hand, things became more interesting. I started by cutting an angled headstock out of the neck blank using a Japanese Ryoba saw. I followed the method outlined in this tutorial.

I then planed both the cut part and the rest of the neck. When I saw the effect of the plane on the sawn wood, I finally realized what planing is all about. I glued up the parts and clamped everything overnight:

I made my first building mistake in the way I clamped the parts. Applying perpendicular pressure on an angle filled with glue caused the parts to slid and the result was not as I have first planned:

The result however, was far from bad. First, I had enough room for mistakes, as the neck still has to be narrowed down and shaped. Minor inaccuracies in this early stage can be easily handled. Moreover, the slipped parts have created just the correct width for the headstock, meaning I will have less work when shaping it.

That’s as far as I have gotten. Next, I’m going to make more planning and measurements in order to get the scale length right, and then I will be working on routing the truss rod route and cutting the rough shape of the body.

It’s an alarm clock application for S60 phones (more specifically Nokia 5800) written in Python

The code is NOWHERE near what you’d expect of released code to be – this is NOT a release, rather a preview

This is my first piece of code written in S60 Python. The code is not pretty, not well designed, not nothing – it’s just a proof of concept; helping me get to know the S60 python modules, and wake up on time.

The main feature of this program, that I could not find a ready-made S60 application that already accomplishes this, is the use of a random tune for every alarm.
Don’t you hate it when you choose a song for an alarm clock, and find yourself hating the song ever after? Spazzing just a little bit every time you hear it?
By choosing a random song every morning, you get to hear many of your favorite songs, without slowly developing hate towards them.

The second feature, is “fade in”. The song is initially played in low volume, which is gradually turned up.

Don’t rely on this code to wake you up for important meetings, it is probably full of bugs. It can’t save your last alarm properly (even though it tries to), but it will save your songs path.
It is also semi-automatic, meaning you’ll have to set the alarm every night, it won’t do so automatically (yet!).
It won’t survive phone shutdown either.
It seems like python can’t overcome these obstacles easily, but I’ll try to improve it in the future. If I tried to code it with the bare Symbian API, it wouldn’t have reached the somewhat functional state it is in today…

I only post it here because I have started using it almost daily, and that both lowered my motivation to work for a more complete solution, and urged me to post the code somewhere, as other people may find it useful.
It can also serve as a demo for S60 Python API use.

I have only tested it on Nokia 5800 which is S60 5th edition, with python 1.9.4.
Other configurations may cause nuclear fusion.

Feel free to do whatever you want with the code.

The Code

As a side note, during development I have used pys60-compat which is a wxPython based implementation of portions of the S60 python framework – meaning it let’s you run python code written for s60 in a testing environment on your desktop.
It is somewhat outdated, and I have added some extensions of my own, which I may release in the future.

A friend had told me about Sandcastle and I looked it up. Sandcastle is a project by Microsoft, that is intended to create MSDN-style documentation from .NET assemblies…

I had managed to achieve my goal quite easily using Sandcastle, and I thought about sharing my experience to serve other people as a guide. This is just a quick write-up of what I did – I did not read Sandcastle’s documentation and I believe that I don’t know how to operate it to its full potential.

1. The first step is to download and install Sandcastle.
2. Next, if you haven’t done it already, you have to tell Visual Studio to build XML documentation files. This parses all your comments ( in the C# format ///<summary> etc…) and creates an XML file that we will feed into Sandcastle. To enable XML documentation, you have to go to Proect->(Project Name) Properties… and tick the relevant checkbox in the Build menu:
3. We will now launch the Sandcastle GUI application, located in C:\Program Files\Sandcastle\Examples\generic ( replace C:\Program Files with wherever you had installed Sandcastle).
4. Add your assemblies (exe/dll) and XML comments file to the relevant list boxes and choose the desired output format. Enter you project name under “Name”.
5. Hit “Build”. The build process can take a while, and it may seem like the program is frozen, but it’s not.
6. Your documentation files should now be ready in  C:\Program Files\Sandcastle\Examples\Your Project Name
7. If you chose CHM as an output format, you will now have to compile the CHM file. To do this you need to download and install Microsoft HTML Help Workshop
8. After installing HTML Help Workshop, you will have to run hhc.exe (from the directory where you installed it). hhc takes an hhp (HTML Help Project) file as an argument. Sandcastle has created this hhp file for you, and it should be in your Sandcastle project directory. Just run “hhc yourproject.hhp” and this will produce a CHM file in the project’s directory.

That’s it. You should now have your compiled CHM help file with nice MSDN-style documentation.

As I mentioned earlier, I don’t really know Sandcastle and will be happy to get some tips in the comments section if you have any.