Hey, check out this Rubens' Tube! What’s a Rubens' Tube? It’s a tube filled with flammable gas with a transducer on one end and holes drilled in the top. You light the gas on fire. When you play a sound into the tube that is a harmonic of the tube’s resonant frequency, you get patterns in the flame! I built this one at South Side Hackerspace: Chicago with the help of my friends Dmitriy and Josef.

I made an end-grain cutting board, and it’s about the coolest thing. It’s 1 3/4" thick and made from white maple. I’ll take you through the steps I followed. I’ve been a metal guy for years now. I love welding, I love machining, but recently I discovered that glued wood joints can be far stronger than I ever thought. We kinda needed a second cutting board, so I watched a few videos and read a few guides and decided I could probably build one.

###Corrections: 4% != .004% : When I was writing the article, my brain translated 99996 into 96000. Big difference. It turns out that I’m unable to dequeue somewhere between .004% and .20% of messages in about half of test runs. ###Note: I’ve been chatting with some very helpful RabbitMQ-knowledgeable people, and they have some suggestions for the issues I’m seeing that I’m going to check out. I will update this article with my findings.

I hate capslock. It’s a horrible, horrible key, and it gets even more in the way on my split ergonomic keyboards at work. I’ve tried registry hacks to kill it, but they don’t seem to work. Here’s how I deal with capslock: Obtain a small, flat-headed screwdriver. Insert it beneath the Capslock key. Pry downward. If you ever need capslock later, just use a pen to poke the little capacitive sensor.

Once every three seconds, that’s the magic number. Some more interesting information: I pointed a Doubleclick click counter at a super-simple web service I wrote, running on a web server I rent, and I ran a test that follows the DLCK redirect. Here are the results:

I ran 300 clicks at 4s per click, then 500 clicks at 2s per click. As you can see, almost all of the first 300 clicks made it to the web service, but only around 380/500 2s per click clicks made it.

One of the projects I’m on seeks to proxy web beacons. Basically, I have a WSGI app that serves a 1x1 px gif, and then triggers a Celery app that goes out and actually “clicks” on the intended web beacon. During preliminary load testing with a Doubleclick beacon (actually a Doubleclick link counter), we discovered that requesting that beacon 1000 times in 5 minutes (one request ever 1/3 second) only reported around 30 “clicks.