I made this cart in June of 2008 about a week before the 4th of July. For some reason it never got posted to my blog. The redwood came from some raised beds in my yard that I ripped out. Parts of it were pretty badly rotted - I mean spalted - but there was enough to make the cart. I only had to edge glue the two long side pieces on the top to get boards big enough. The plans came from Ron Hazelton , I saw it on his show the year before but didn't have time to make it. I made some...

I'm setting up a computer for my parents that will be running Windows and I thought that I'd also throw Linux on there for emergencies. It would give them something that they can plug things into that I can remote into and run diagnostics on. I don't want it to boot Linux unless they choose it from a menu, so after installing Ubuntu 11.10 I needed to change Grub to boot Windows by default. Normally I would just modify /etc/grub.conf or /boot/grub/grub.lst and shift things around...

Thirty years ago I became a programmer. (My sister did too.) On Saturday, March 20, 1982 my parents bought an Apple II+. I remember spending a long time in the store dreaming about all the great programs I was going to write. Getting a computer was definitely one of those life changing events. Both my career and my favorite hobby revolves around programming computers. Here's what my mom wrote in her journal that day: We took the big step into Computerland today! After breakfast we...

I meant to bring home my power supply this weekend, but I forgot and left it at work. It was the motivation I finally needed to build a new one. I had been thinking about it for a long time, but since the old one still works, there wasn't any real reason to do it. My old AT power supply My old power supply is a modifed AT power supply. It was easier to work with because of the way the power switch was wired. In fact, after removing the huge bundle of cables, the hole was the perfect...

I've seen lots of pages out there on making squibs or e-matches, but all of them used some method of making some chemical goop and then dipping your wires in it. I didn't want to mess with making goop, and I didn't want to mail order a bunch of chemicals that make the goop. So far this method that I'm using has worked very well for me, and the only "exotic" thing you need is the nichrome wire. What I'm using is 22-24 gauge solid pair wire, little tiny gold tubes,...