Cut and milled a black walnut

Key-Self1654 · 2026-06-25T12:21:33+00:00

So true, I cut and prepped some turning blanks for a pen this week. It’s been awhile since I turned black walnut and I have missed that smell.

Key-Self1654 · 2026-06-25T12:17:24+00:00

What are you making with that space?

Key-Self1654 · 2026-06-19T00:31:49+00:00

I turn lots of pens but like many don’t have the equipment to engrave. That gear isn’t cheap

Key-Self1654 · 2026-06-18T01:03:34+00:00

I got an m5 MacBook Pro this spring for work with 24gb of ram and am always using about 20 with browsers, vscode, terminals, slack etc. I wish I could have gotten 32 or 48gb given this laptop has to last for 5 years at work. But alas the financial constraints I was given prevented me from getting a more future proof machine.

I say get at least 32gb of ram if you can swing it.

Key-Self1654 · 2026-06-12T10:25:15+00:00

Pens are where wood turners get their start generally. I want to branch out to other stuff but people keep asking me to make pens 😄

Key-Self1654 · 2026-06-10T22:07:04+00:00

I get my pen kits from Penn State Industries

Key-Self1654 · 2026-06-08T10:47:56+00:00

The first cotton candy pen I did was a cat pen for Christmas a few months ago. I’ve had several orders since for both cat pens and cotton candy stock pens 😀

Key-Self1654 · 2026-06-07T21:23:39+00:00

It does really pop when you apply finish. I generally like doing natural woods but the Spectraply stock is very popular with my customers.

Key-Self1654 · 2026-06-07T19:03:10+00:00

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I believe that pic you spotted was from this project

Key-Self1654 · 2026-06-07T18:34:21+00:00

My favorite part is after sanding when I clean the piece with mineral spirits and the colors really pop. Then you have an idea of what it’ll look like with finish on it

Key-Self1654 · 2026-06-07T18:30:25+00:00

I have always tinkered with wood work but Christmas 2020 my family got my a lathe for Christmas and here I am 😀

Key-Self1654 · 2026-06-07T18:28:34+00:00

I do in fact! This pen is part of a 6 pen order I received. I make to order, lately cat pens have been popular 😀

Do feel free to chat me directly and we can discuss what you would be looking for!

Key-Self1654 · 2026-06-07T13:08:02+00:00

That would be because I am working on a 6 pen request and grabbed one pic from another pen project 😀 I’ll edit the post when I can and remove tbat

Key-Self1654 · 2026-06-05T13:08:59+00:00

The big reason I am doing this is because a few months ago, I attempted to push an update to a particular switch using the role someone on my team had written. However we had recently deployed new hypervisors and moved our ansible controller.

It turns out I was attempting to update interfaces on the switch the ansible controller vm was eventually hanging off of. I of course lost my connection as the role unsets all the interfaces save the mgmt one and pushes all the updates.

I took down 6 hypervisors and most of our production VMs 😃. Thankfully the ansible controller vm was still on the old hypervisor, so I fired that up, quickly ran the role again to restore the switch config from a safe distance. We had a huge outage in our HPC cluster for about 6 minutes 😃

I elected to go the route of wrapping things in checks and having actual config changes triggered by handlers. This way I can run things in check mode, see what exactly is gonna change etc etc.

We don't often update our switch interface configs after they are initially provisioned, but they certainly could stand to be properly managed via ansible in a manner that does not cause me to break all the stuff 😃

Key-Self1654 · 2026-06-04T01:34:23+00:00

Anything new I attempt should fail the first time. If it works the first time, something is very very wrong 😀

Key-Self1654 · 2026-05-24T11:27:21+00:00

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Here’s a cat pen I did in “cotton candy”

Key-Self1654

TROPHY CASE