Wood Goggles on Etsy

Wired has a pretty cool overview of a nice home makeover in the Steampunk style. It seems quite well thought-out:

Photo courtesy of Wired Magazine

[via reddit]

Our forum’s very own k-9 has produced a beautiful Electrical Gaming Device out of an XBOX 360 console:

See the whole build on the forum

As those who follow our twitter feed are already aware, we had a planned outage recently that took quite a bit longer to complete than hoped.

The short version, for those interested:

• Our hosting facility needed a power upgrade to meet updated building codes
• When the power came back online, we discovered that a PMU on our rack was marginal, preventing hosts from coming back online
• Once this was fixed, there were some networking issues (firewalls and routers not keeping pre-power-down state)
• And our NAS volume had bad RAM that kept the main server’s filesystem from mounting

Our host was very professional and worked hard to restore service lost as a result of these unfortunate events, and is working with us on compensation for the downtime.

My apologies for the extended outage; watch here and the Engine Room for updates in the near future that should limit the impact of future outages.

Andy Tibbetts of Portland, Oregon in the US is building a Steampunk pirate ship:

The C.S. Tere is a 100% custom-built steam punk pirate ship. She has a hand built steel frame encased in wood, driven by a 10 foot diameter hub-less front wheel and two steel wheels in the rear. The ship will be powered by a 3 cylinder engine which drives hydraulic pumps.  Steering is rear wheel and occurs from the captains’ deck.

To this end, a Kickstarter project has been, well, kicked off. Check out the video:

[Tip of the tri-corner to BoingBoing]

On Friday 24 June, 2011, we will be moving servers to a much nicer neighborhood.

There will be down-time associated with this move, starting sometime after 12:30 GMT; the Blog will be in read-only mode, and the forum will be in maintenance mode. My plan is to complete the move in less than 24 hours, but it’s possible we won’t be back online entirely until the following Monday.

After the move is complete, visiting brassgoggles.co.uk URLs will redirect to brassgoggles.org URLs for up to two weeks, after which both will work the same way. You should continue to use brassgoggles.co.uk when entering URLs. This is needed because of how the Internet’s address-book scheme (DNS) works, and it’s the only reliable way to ensure that the transition is as smooth as possible.

During the move, status updates will be posted to http://twitter.com/brasstech.

Ladies and gentlemen… we’ve outgrown our server once again.  But thanks to many generous souls, we have the funds to make a move.

This move will result in some — though hopefully minimal — interruption in service, and I encourage those interested in progress to follow @brasstech on Twitter for more detailed updates.

Over the US Memorial Day weekend, our new co-located server will be mounted in it’s home, and your humble admin will begin preparing that server to accept the Brass Goggles blog and forum.  This new server is many times more powerful than our current “Virtual Private Server” machine: it is real, industrial-strength hardware. This upgrade will help with blog and forum performance, and pave the way for new features and capabilities.

Due to a very nice donation of time and equipment by one of our community who wishes to remain anonymous, the hardware only cost us $1100 US; however, our monthly cost is going up to $50/month; while this is cheap, all things considered, it’s more important than ever to support Brass Goggles financially if you’re able. Currently, we have funds to make the move and cover the next 3 months of operation. As always, I prefer to keep Brass Goggles an ad-free environment, and your donations make this possible.

Nick Rayburn advised us of his delightful ruby slipper automaton:

Used with permission of Nick Rayburn

Ruby Slipper automation in action

A previous post, 1863 Blackburn Agricultural Engine has been updated. We were notified that the images were being used without permission or attribution, and regret the error.

modelengineeringwebsite.com has been gracious enough to work with us, and has provided us with the permission to use these images.  The post has been updated in accordance with this agreement.

Thanks to the folks at modelengineeringwebsite.com for their understanding (and shiny stuff!).

Via Wondermark comes a great collection of photos of the Penny Farthing Championships in Evandale, Tasmania. Here’s just a taste: