You can send presents anytime!

  Thanks mom for the presents! I LOVE the crocks. Katie says you have good taste. I just can't decide what I want to put in them. I have to get batteries for the pepper grinder. I think that will stay right next to the stove. I tried the cake pan, but burnt the brownies. I haven't found the box with my timer in it yet, so I kinda winged it, and got distracted. Oh well, next time, right?


  Anyway, I used the boxes from your presents to make a Kitten Castle. There are several rooms inside, and this neat, recessed 2nd floor entrance onto a balcony. Of course they LOVED the boxes before I made them into the castle.


 Aren't they cute?


  They seem to like me, I wander from room to room they are usually about 30 seconds behind me. Wanting to be in the same room, but in typical feline fashion, pretending not to.


The naming contest is still open, leave a comment with name ideas. They are currently being called 'Brother' and 'Sister', so you only have a little while before they stick.
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Score. Eighty dollar pots and pan set on clearance at walmart for fifty four bucks. They will do until I get myself a good set.

Truck Cleaning Day

When Katie came and picked up Gecko (my old car), her brother and sister in law came down too. We went to the beach friday night and, well, my truck got full of sand!
  I wandered through target today looking for Mink Oil for my shoes and stopped at the vacumn cleaner section. There was a stray box for a Durabuilt 12 volt twin-motor auto vacuum cleaner. I wandered over to the automotive department, and saw it was $14.99. I bought it. I need to get the new-truck toys to go with my new truck, right? I even bought a $10 pack of assorted new-truck cleaning rags.

  The goofy thing works pretty well. I am glad it has the detachable motorized rotary brush attachment, as the plain vac part wasn't sucking up any of the sand. The little crevice tool is JUST long enough to get between the seat and the side of the truck. I banned Todd and Sarah from the truck for today because they tracked so much sand into it. Doesn't really matter, they are back home, attending a wedding today.

Durabuilt 12 V Twin-motor Auto Vacuum Cleaner Available at Amazon.com

After vacuuming the truck out, I decided to try the leather & vinyl conditioner stuff that the dealership gave me. So I did the dash and so forth. It's amazing all the little dark marks on the oddest spots.

I was going to work on my folding kayak, but as I was getting all the stuff out, it felt like rain. A quick check of the weather showed that it was indead going to be a nasty little storm cell. South Florida (I think the whole state really) is suffereing from a severe drought, and they have us on a strict water rationing, down to grass watering and vehicle washing 1 day a week. I decided to take advantage of the rain, so I washed my truck in the rain. I got it all cleaned up, but the rain died back to a nice gentle rain, and I went in to check to see what happened to my nice, nasty storm. It had vered south, so the worst of it went west of me. Great, I got a half rinsed truck. So, I put on a dry shirt, and drove to Taco Bell for supper. They are tearing up the road in front of Taco Bell, I can't get there, drive around, I can sneak in through the back ally - which is currently bare dirt due to the road construction. So, my nice, clean, freshly washed and (now thanks to the drive in the rain) rinsed truck is now full of mud.

I just can't win can I?

2007 Ford Escape

 I bought myself a present today. In my typical fashion I bought myself the best of the bottom. I bought a tricked out 2007 Ford Escape. It isn't the hybrid that I have been dreaming about, but I just can't afford one of those (much less FIND one). Ford is offering 0% financing on their trucks and I qualified!


 Dude, it has EVERYTHING, (well, not a GPS, as my mom pointed out), keyless entry, security system, moonroof, the bigger 3.0 V6 (vs the 2.3 liter), in dash 6 disc CD changer that reads MP3 Discs and has the speed-dependant volume feature, class II trailer hitch, power everything (although I think a power seat is a bit excessive if you ask me).


 I test drove a lot of cars today. They had a nice little Focus with 3600 miles on it, but with me being so tall, the 4 door Focuses have a terrible blindspot with the door pilar. The older cars coming off of leases were not much cheaper then new, and with the financing I got on the new, it would have worked out to be the same money in the end.


  I like how it drives, it fits well. I can see out of it. I can actually use ALL the review mirror! Part of the view isn't cut off but the roof. And the best part... NO dealership vandalism - no sticker on the back of it!



Well, enough of me rambling, on with the VIDEOS!









Yeah, I know it may not be a big deal for a lot of you, but this is the first car that I bought having SEEN it first. It's the first car I bought that didn't have MORE miles on it then the prior one. And while it's the smallest of the SUVs that Ford makes, it is totally tricked out!

Shark Cordless 2 speed rechargable sweeper

 I picked up a Shark Cordless Sweeper yesterday. I needed a vacuum, and this came recommended from Katie's brother Matt. I let it charge the 20 hours needed and gave it a try. It claims to be able to run for 50 minutes. Time will tell if that claim is true. It works pretty gosh darn good. It is quite, which is very nice. I do wish that the little wall-hugging sweep was on both sides. I realize that 90% of the population is right handed, so it makes sense to put it on the right side, but it would be nice to push it down the left wall to get into those tights spaces.


 The first thing I saw was that it would make an excellent platform for making a DIY robotic vacuum cleaner. The drive system can simply clip onto the little short handle and everything is ready to go! Turn it on, and let it go. I am thinking a 2 wheel drive system, with bump sensors all the way around. Give the controller a basic bump, back up a bit, turn 180 degrees using only one wheel, and go program. The robotic sweeper should do pretty gosh darn good at cleaning an in entire room systematically. If I can get the drive system to track well, I may work on a way for it to dead-reckon where it has been, and where it hasn't hit an obstacle yet, so it will actively try to cover the entire area.


 The beauty of it would be that you simply unclip the robotic part of it, and stick on the telescoping handle, and you can touch up where it missed, or pre-clean the bad spots, and let the robot do the whole room.

This is the closest I could find on Amazon.com. It looks like it has more features, and is priced less then I paid for mine. It is getting poor reviews though... I hope I don't have the same troubles.

Cutting the long bolts down to size.

I couldn't find bolts that where 5/8ths, or 7/8ths or 9/8ths, so I had to make them.


 From what I have found the best tool for the job is an electricians wire cutters. I am not fond of this style of wire cutter for doing electrical work, but the built in bolt cutters are the handiest! You can see that I "modified" this brand new pair of Channel Locks brand wire cutters with a extra padded handle. I knew I was going to be cutting a lot of bolts and this makes it easier on the hands.


 You thread the bolt into the threaded side of the bolt cutter.


 I wanted to cut 1/8th of an inch of the bolt off. This is about the thickness of the tool. I found that if I run 2 threads out past the end of the tool, I get the perfect length.


 After you cut the bolt, you have to unthread the bolt from the cutter. This acts like a die and cleans up the threads on the bolt.

Table Saw

 Katie dropped in Thursday night unannounced. Lucky me! She had her brother's truck, so after I took her to lunch today at a chinese restaraunt, we went to Lowes to pick up a table saw I have been looking at for a few weeks now and a sheet of plywood. The last saw they had. Every other person who walks through that door is likely to toss the box that the saw came in, but I am only going to use the thing every six months or so, right? Of COURSE my box is completely mangled. No point tearing the thing down and re-packing it for storage now.
 The saw is a "contractors" saw, so it is designed to be portable. The legs fold up, and it has a handle and wheels so it can be pushed around where you want it. Really quite slick. It weighs in at a trim 73 pounds. I am not going to want to put it up on a shelf or anything, but it is managable.
 The table expands to a pretty big size. The table goes out like 16" before you can expand the table out with the rip fence on it. Pretty cool. There is a section in back to help hold the material as well. I also picked up 2 adjustable, folding roller stands. I knew I was going to have trouble manhandling a sheet of plywood by myself. I am likely to go get 2 more if I ever need to do a full sheet of plywood by myself again.
 This is all that is left of my $26.95 peice of 1/2 inch birch plywood. I am cutting it into 1 inch strips to make the frame of a folding kayak I am going to make. I made $2.21 worth of sawdust in the dust collector which caught probably 3/4 of the sawdust and on the ground. I had to go to Target and get a little hand broom to clean off the saw and clean up my mess.

I am tired. I walked about 5 miles today between going to Target and Skyline for supper, plus I was on my feet all afternoon assembling and working that saw - I am used to sitting on my duff all day long.

Oh yeah! I put the whole saw together and only had one little un-opened baggy of spare parts! (I think they are adjustment shims to square up the saw blade to the table incase it is off. The instructions don't mention them beyond the parts list)

Hawking Technologies USB 804.11G wireless adapter.

 
A friend of mine was looking for a Wireless card for her computer. I saw this at CompUSA and recomended it to her. She hasn't picked it up yet, but when she does I will report here how well it worked for her.

I think I want one of these. The USB form factor is really nice, no cracking a case and using up a PCI slot. I like how it has a removeable (and extendable) antenna. I also think that the 2 inches that the length of the USB moves the antenna away from the computer case would probably help with interference. You could also plug the USB devise into a hub or at the end of an extension cable to optimize location for reception. All in all, I like it. Now if they would only add a gig of memory to the device, and install the drivers right on the unit.

Car Phones

I recently read an article on cell phone usage while driving and I think I figured out part of the why cell phones and driving don't go well together.

First, the difference between holding the phone and the hands free set.
Driving with the hands free set allows both hands for the wheel. This most closely emulates having a person in the car with you. I even notice a concentration difference between having the set on my right ear (easier) and my left ear(seems harder) probably because I am more used to having the passenger on my right side.
As for hand-holding the phone, I think this shifts your focus from the steering wheel and driving to your phone and the conversation. I seem to "loose" where I am at much more often with the phone in hand.

Needless to say, I try hard to not drive hand holding the phone, but when I need directions, I find that I miss turns more often and have a harder time reading the road signs with the phone in hand then with a hands free set.

Now as for why having a passenger is better. I think the reason is the passenger is participatory with the driving. The report even mentions that the conversation switches to current the traffic twice as frequently with the passengers then when on the phone. I also believe that passengers help navigate. I know I ask my passengers to play an active role in navigation when I am driving to a new location.

For example, I was talking to Katie tonight on the phone on my way home from some friends' house. Traffic was pretty bad (probably post Superbowl traffic) and it was wet and rainy. I shifted focus from my conversation to completely focus on the road while navigation my exit. Katie kept talking, oblivious that I had tuned her out. If she had been in the car, she would have noticed and paused the conversation until I was through the intersection. I think this example shows how phone conversations while driving can be distracting.

What do you think?

Creuzer's 'Quarium Cam

Well, I found a camera that is small enough to slip between my fish tank and the tank stand. It wasn't as cheap as I was hoping, $28, but it wasn't bad either. The camera I got is a GE MiniCam Pro.

I have it basically wedged between the tank and the stand. It is propped up on an extra suction cup thingy for holding the filter inlet and outlet pipes to the tank. It is on the right side of the tank looking left. I picked direction because the tank isn't quite in the middle of the stand and there was more room.

The camera is focusable, so I focused it in about 1/2 way into the tank. I am hoping that this will be enough for the tank.

I have set up my template to include a photo that updates every 30 seconds on the top of my blog. Not many people visit my blog, so it isn't going to create a lot of traffic.

The tank cleared up a lot in the last couple of days, which is good.

I really had to futz with the settings on the camera to convince it to take a photo that wasn't hard to look at. I still don't think it is great, but, hey, nobody is perfect.

I am not really happy with the view. A closeup of that large piece of driftwood isn't all that exciting. And don't hold your breath for any fish, they aren't coming before I get back from vacation.

It looks like I need to clean the glass in front of the camera, it is smudged.

What do you think? Fun investment of $28? The camera I really want is $280, but then you would be able pan and tilt and zoom in and all kinds of fun stuff with that one!

'Tis the season...

I needed a timer for my fish tank lights. My big Coral Life Light Fixture has 2 grounded plugs so I need a heavy duty timer.

Christmas time is the best time to buy timers because it's about the only time most people need one. You can find some that are pretty fancy.

I found this one at Target. It looked really promising. Digital timer, 3 grounded outlets, and when I replace it with my homebrew controller, it will still be very useful.



It is fairly easy to program, not as easy as dials to switches to set. It is set like a watch is. Set a few buttons and your done.
This one has 3 modes, pure timer (up to 8 of them, so I can set them daily, weekday, weekend, and all week). It also has a photo eye, so it can turn lights on at night. It can also turn on with the photoeye, and turn off by the timer. Pretty cool actually.



I liked the look of this one, I can hang it on the back of my aquarium stand. I picked up a small package of wood screws to hang it.

It works. It turned my big lights off tonight. I think the lights running constant for 5 days straight over Thanksgiving lead to the aquarium turning on me.

Time will tell.

Mom's Christmas Present

I am buying my mom the Internet for Christmas. (Shhh don't tell her even though she already knows!)

She shall get bigger tubes!



I will now be able to send my mom more internets without worry that this movie will block up all the tubes. Even better yet, she might actually be able to VIEW this movie.


I ordered my mom Wild Blue Satalite Internet Service this morning to replace her current dial up and 2nd phone line. It looks like she is going to save ten bucks a month or so with the new service. It will also be faster. I bought the hardware, the installation, and her first month of service.

Hopefully it gets installed before I arrive. I remember last year and the slow internet connection! Good Senator, I need my own personal internet tubes unblocked by your streaming 10 or 12 movies and a book at the same time.

Another Cool Gadget

All right, you should know me by now. I love cool stuff. I stumbled across an item at Walmart (I should really quit going there, it's getting expensive) that I just had to have. In fact, I left it there, told my mom about it on the phone after I got home, and decided that I needed to go get it, and drove back to Walmart to get it that same night.

What is this miraculous new invention? It is a Brinkmann Portable Oven. Yes, a small, propane oven. It is soooo cute!
 


Here are some of the reasons I got the oven:

1. I wanted it - the best reason of all
2. It was only about $55
3. It will be a lot of fun camping
4. It will be a lot of fun during hurricane season
   1. While everyone else is complaining about eating saltines again, I can tell them about the fresh bread and muffins that I was enjoying fresh out of the oven just that morning!
5. It is just darn cool!

The box says that it can bake at 400 degrees for 4 hours on a single small propane cylinder. It even came with a free cookie sheet, which is a good thing, because this oven is really small. The pan that came with it basically fills the oven with it's imposing 9 inch square bulk.

I had asked my mom what kind of pans did she think would work better, glass or metal. I was thinking glass because you can't scratch the Teflon off of it. My mom said metal so I didn't have to worry about breaking it while I was camping. I did one better. I got those new silicone pans. Here are the reasons I got the silicone pans:

1. They won't break when I drop them
2. They won't scratch
3. They fold and flex and make it easier to pack
   
4. They will fit in the oven even if they don't fit - just push hard, they will fit!
5. They are just cool in their own right

The set came with the following pieces:

• Round Cake Pan
• Muffin Pan
• Bread Pan
• Spoon/Spatula - it works well enough to pop cookies off of a cookie sheet
• A pot holder/gripper - pretty handy, and it has a little magnet in it so it will stick to metal stuff
  

I bought the oven Sunday night, and it was too late to be able to play with it more then to unpack it and put the pieces together. Last night I was out getting my haircut, so I couldn't play with it last night. Tonight... Tonight was the night. I went to Publix and got a bunch of assorted bread, muffin, and biscuit mixes that say 'just add water' on the box. I stopped at target, and got the silicone pan set I had scoped out on my way to Publix. I also bought the biggest tube of ready-to-bake chocolate chip cookie dough Target had.

Lessons Learned

I got the oven going right around dusk. It took a few minutes to get up to temperature on the high setting. Maybe 20 minutes or so? I had enough time to wash the pans and get stuff unpacked and so forth.

I put 4 cookies into the metal pan that came with the oven and stuck them in for the 10 minutes that the directions called for on the low setting, the thermometer reading a perfect 350 degrees. 15 minutes later, they came off and when I tried them they still weren't quite done.



I put the muffin tin I had prepped with cookies onto the top rack. I made smaller cookies for the 2nd pan of cookies. The oven was reading about 400 degrees at this point. The 2nd pan of cookies turned out much better. The muffin tin on the top rack wasn't even close to done. So I turned it back on high, and set the 3rd pan of cookies into the oven. 10 minutes later I started to smell something funny. The photo below says it all.




The oven had worked itself up to around 450 degrees. I am thinking that given time and a calm day, this little oven might hit 500 if you let it.

Future Plans

Some of the thoughts I had for this oven include:

• Fresh bread when your camping
• Fresh cookies at a tailgate party
• Maybe fill a tuna can with wood chips and make a small smoker out of it if baking a chicken or something in it
• If kids are with, those personal sized pizzas would fit perfect in the oven, and the fussiest of eaters would be happy
• Fresh muffins to go with your morning coffee in the morning. You could probably put the coffee pot on top to keep warm while baking the muffins.
• If camping with a larger group, if you warm it up, and then shut it off, you could use it to keep some food warm while the rest of the food is cooking.

*This blog post is a little different for a couple of reasons. All the photos where taken with my new cellphone camera. I wrote and published this post from the new Google Docs (formally writely.com). Docs couldn't post to blogger for some reason, so I copied and pasted it into Picassa. This document is publicly viewable at: http://docs.google.com/View?docid=d3cxzdx_6dwx4tk.
 

You know you live in South Florida when EVERYTHING is a potential Hurricane Supply

I wanted to get a 12v air compressor for the trunk of my car. The front tires on the car are low, and I NEVER think to air them up when I am at the service station.

Anyway, I stopped over at walmart today to pick one up.

I must say, I think I found a nice one. A Battery Powered Air Compressor is something I would have laughed at 2 years ago, but now....

The biggest selling point to this unit was a built-in flashlight. When you don't have electricity for 2 weeks, a flashlight is a mighty handy thing to have. This one has a BIG battery with it.

The 2nd selling point on it is the 12 volt power plug. This may not seem like a big deal untill you don't have power for 2 weeks and you need to charge up that cell phone (They are pretty good about getting the cell phone towers back up and running, much sooner then the regular phones, electricity, or sometimes even the water it seems). After Wilma, I loaned out my little power inverter so cell phones could be charged up - I guess it had made the rounds too. All of this automotive stuff is rather handy to have around when the outlet in the wall doesn't work. The only problem with it is you tend to need gas to run it with, don't let me get started on THAT can of worms.

A third neat thing about my new gadget-of-the-day is the air compressor (and you thought that this would be the first thing). It has an auto-cutoff switch when the air pressure hits a pre-determined air pressure. You spin the face of the air pressure guage to set the desired air pressure. I haven't TRIED this yet, but it seems to be a pretty good idea to me. I could air up my car tires in the dark if I so desired. I don't desire to do this. But the possibility is there.

I am curious to see how accurate the built in gauge and the auto-cutoff feature are. One good thing will be I won't have my tires aired up to different air pressures like they do in NASCAR - the Ford Escort just isn't that high-performance. *grin*

Everything gets all bundled up in the "boot". It came with the usual suspects for getting lost - those little plastic things that you use for filling up beach balls and whatnot. These have a spot to get clipped to the door so they won't get lost. I imagine about 30 seconds in the trunk of the car, and they will fall off and get lost, but hey, it is the thought that counts.
It came with a small wall block to charge it up with. There is also a double ended 12volt cord so I can plug the thing into the car and the 12volt socket on the compressor.

All in all, the unit seems to be pretty well laid out. Whomever designed this must use his often to have had to make it this fancy and functional. 

Thermo-Electric Coolers

OK, so I am living in a "Mother in law" sweet, which consists of a bedroom, a bathroom, a closet, and an outside door. A very nice place, right on the water, massive hedges grown into arches over the driveway. Very nice people, so natually I don't want to bother them too much.

So I decide that I am going to get one of these fancy Thermo-Electric Coolers, basically an iceless cooler that you can plug into your car/the wall. They seem a bit handier then a small fridge (especially considering that I have one or two of those laying around in WI). It would seem to be useful after I get a different place to live - camping, hurricanes, etc.

I do my homework, and decide to get one. A little bit of online research shows me that all have this nifty feature that most people would consider "useless", they are not only coolers, but they are warmers as well. Now, most people would go, why would I want my cooler to warm? Seems a contridiction. Well, I belong to a cooking club, and we get together once a month and see how cunningly we can poison each other. Actually, most everyone seems to be quite the accomplished cook, but I digress. Anywho, we seem to either overwhelm the fridge, or fight for the oven. I am thinking, "gosh, a place where we can keep things warm while people are getting settled, PERFECT, this little gadget is getting all the more usefull."

So, superbowl sunday, I make a trip to the local Super Walmart at 5 oclock. I figured the entire male population is going to be sitting in front of the TV, and most of the women will be babysitting their boys. WRONG. Lesson 1, superbowl sunday, there is a run on coolers. Don't expect to buy a cooler on superbowl sunday. They are all sold out. Lesson 2. I am apparently not the only freak who doesn't watch the superbowl because the $15 worth of stuff I picked up required a 15 minute wait at the checkout.

Ok, so a few days later, I decide to start calling around. 4 phone calls locates 2 coolers like what I am looking for, or at least that is what my poor spanish and the dude on the other side of the phone poor english skills determine. So into the car I go. I get to Walmart, and look, and look, and look. No cooler, no blue Walmart vests. I finally find a cooler, EUREKA, it's even the one I am looking for. The box is open, but a quick rummage reveals that everything is still there, so it must have been a superbowl "rentee". Off to the checkout counter, 30 minutes later, I lug the thing into my car and drive home.

I get home, and dump it out of the box, I fiddle around and go to plug it in, but something is wrong. The online information said that to swtich between warm and cool, you flip the plug around on the cord as it plugs into the cooler. On MY unit, the cord goes straight into the cooler. Just my luck.

So, I decide to "fix" it. An hour on the internet reveals no significant information as to whether I can run the pelteir junction backwards without any damage, but one can deduce, that every OTHER cooler you can, as they allow you to do it. This warrents further investigation, so I dismantle my brand new cooler.

The picture shows the business end of a Thermo-Electric cooler. The small end on the right is what is inside the cooler, and the large end on the left is outside. You can see a thermal disconnect strapped to the outside heatsink. There is no thermal monitoring on the inside. This means that I could really have some fun, melting my new cooler.

Short term plan, get a double pole, double throw switch, and install it so that I can switch the peltier unit to heat/cool. This I think is a great improvement on how the other cooler/warmers work in that the fans will always run in the more effecient direction. I just need to remember not to leave the unit on heat overnight or I may do some serious meltage damage to my brand new cooler.

Long term plan, install my own thermal regulater on the inside of the cooler. Now I COULD go out and get one like what is already installed for about $3.00. That just isn't any fun. Being a out-of-practice electronics hobbiest, I am going to install an embedded microcontroller to control my fancy cooler. The one I have at hand happens to be eithernet enabled. So I think I am going to have the only Internet Cooler in existance.

I am thinking that I am going to install a total of 4 temperture probes (simple thermisters) to monitor ambient outside temperature, outer heatsink temperature, inner temperature, and inner heatsink temperature. I will log these temps at 15 minute intervals, and create graphs. A batter backup for the controller means that I can continue to log temperature even when the cooler is unplugged/without power, whatever. I will then be able to log into my cooler, and get the current stats on whether my milk has gone bad or not because the temp is too high.

I think I am also going to install a digital temp readout on the outside of the cooler so that I know what temp it is without having to go online (handy during a hurricane when the internet is down).

The switch will be repurposed into telling the microcontroller whether it should heat or cool. I think this is a wise move, as some of my "friends" may try to hack my cooler and switch it from cool to heat and spoil my milk. The hardware switch saves me the expense of mailing said spoiled milk to my "friend" and having him deal with the stench he created.

What do you think?