I made these step stools based on one my dad built, which was based on stools  his  dad built. The light green one in the back is the one I grew up with. It was always in use, sometimes as a step stool, sometimes as a chair, sometimes as a sawhorse, sometimes just a place to pile things. One thing that was pretty common though with the old stool is that it was very easy to tip over while standing on it. After having my sister's kids fall off while playing my arcade machines I...

As a web application developer I build a lot of web sites. Generally when getting input from a user a form is used. When I build the form I use standard "old school" techniques and after every form submit a new page is sent back to the browser. It works but it's not considered user friendly because there are too many pages involved and it steers the user away from whatever it they were on. This is especially true of posting comments. On many sites adding AJAX functionality has...

I needed to disassemble an iPhone 3GS and there's a lot of guides out there on how to do it, but not one had a good picture of connector 3. People would  describe what to do, but without seeing it, it's hard to guess what they mean. I kept poking at it delicately trying to figure out what to do and I was afraid of breaking it. In fact, I started to pick at the wrong side and I almost broke it. So here's some close-up pictures of that connector and how it flips up and down....

These are some mats that my family and friends have been using for a couple of years at the 4th of July party at my house. My mom made them using bed sheets and Foil-Bubble-Foil insulation. The sheets are just sewn into a flat "bag" and the insulation is inserted and then they are sewn closed. At first I thought we would need to quilt them or sew across them to keep everything from slipping but it turned out to not be necessary. It's nice to have something to sit on in the...

We have an old Dell PowerEdge 2650 that has been sitting unused and now needs to be setup as a FileMaker server. We couldn't find a Windows Server edition that was 32 bit, but FileMaker will work fine with Windows 7, so we ordered Windows 7 Professional 32 bit. The 2650 does not have a DVD drive, but no problem, we have an external USB powered DVD drive. Unfortunately the 2650 has no USB boot options. Win7 booted via PXE A few weeks ago I needed to install Windows 7 Ultimate on a...