MetalGeek : Code, Metal and Cleverness
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And occasional moments of complete stupidity.en-us2014-07-11T14:14:22-06:00Selling the Farm
http://www.metalgeek.com/archives/2014/07/11/000130.php
greatoaksvineyard.com and the realtor's listing is here.
And here's a flyover video of the property:
]]>Hal Eckhart2014-07-11T14:14:22-06:00Dangerous Tools
http://www.metalgeek.com/archives/2014/06/01/000129.php
Here are a couple of tools I made or modified for picking up firewood. I got the idea after watching this clever video which shows how to build a stable, circular pile of wood that will dry thoroughly without any external support. The guy uses a stick with a sharp spike in it to pick up and fling the wood around, which seemed like a great idea. I don't have his strength at my age, but repeatedly stooping down to pick up cut or split logs makes me sore and cranky. Or more sore and cranky than normal, which isn't good.
The old Estwing framing hammer had been laying around unused and unloved in a dark machine shed for years, so I didn't feel too bad about hacking it up for this experiment. It works pretty well, but after a few hours of use, my tendonitis is screaming louder than my chain saw.
To get a better grip with less damage to my inflamed joints, I made the little bailing hook. It works fine on wet wood that's not too dense, but sometimes it takes a good hard swing to make it stick. Which can lead to unpleasantness, like sticking it into my knee after about 2 hours of use. Luckily, it bounced off a bone and barely left a mark. And I'm barely limping anymore. It probably needs more weight to sink into the wood better. Or I need some armored leggings.
]]>Dangerous ToolsHal Eckhart2014-06-01T19:04:53-06:00Now it all makes sense
http://www.metalgeek.com/archives/2013/02/09/000128.php
]]>WTFHal Eckhart2013-02-09T15:51:24-06:00Traffic Bump
http://www.metalgeek.com/archives/2013/02/08/000127.php
recent link from Reddit, I have no idea what's going on.
]]>WTFHal Eckhart2013-02-08T09:51:38-06:00Handy Magazine
http://www.metalgeek.com/archives/2012/11/20/000126.php
bending tube by hand, and I ended up in Handy Magazine.
]]>MetalHal Eckhart2012-11-20T15:57:03-06:00Multiple radius bend on 2" 16 ga. square tube
http://www.metalgeek.com/archives/2012/01/20/000125.php
The other trick here is that the radii were variable; from 150" to 18". I was only able to get it down to about 34", but I was able to cheat the design a bit to make it look good enough.
I followed the same process I use to bend a large ellipse. This involves breaking the curve down into arcs, and then transferring the drawing to a full scale pattern. I used the old theater trick of a brown paper grid and charcoal. Having a full scale pattern is essential, because this always involves a fair amount of tweaking to get it to look right. Besides getting the overall shape correct, you have to make sure there isn't a sudden shift in the radius that would make it look lumpy. Progressing from the longest radii to the shortest seems to prevent this issue.
It was a lot of work, but they ended up looking pretty darn good. No kinks, no welds and no blood spilled. I keep remembering my physical therapist's wise words "your body is not a machine". Well, sometimes it is. At least I didn't break it this time around.
For a more comprehensive article on hand bending, see this.
the jig setup
2 foot long, 1/4" thick steel jig
inner wall distortion
outer wall distortion
the finished bends and a test piece
]]>MetalHal Eckhart2012-01-20T09:53:09-06:00The other problem with fracking
http://www.metalgeek.com/archives/2012/01/03/000124.php
Fracking is a nightmare for the environment and the future. But it's not likely to stop anytime soon unless more people realize it's not just a free magic money faucet, and instead more like playing russian roulette with 5 bullets. And an Uzi.
But the danger to the small villages and towns along the upper Mississippi is a little less obvious. I don't know of any fracking happening nearby, but it requires high quality silica sand, and the extraction of that sand has its own health, environmental, and economic risks.
Jim Tittle is making a documentary about the price we pay for the sand taken from these river bluffs. Here are a few of my friends and neighbors talking about it.
]]>Hal Eckhart2012-01-03T21:06:10-06:00Bird Nest Bed
http://www.metalgeek.com/archives/2011/09/03/000123.php
wreath above the garage at our old house.
]]>MetalHal Eckhart2011-09-03T08:31:36-06:00Suitcase Fusion launch failure - fm core has been stopped
http://www.metalgeek.com/archives/2011/04/21/000122.php
Extensis Suitcase Fusion 2, and of course QuarkXPress; the essential Mac layout program from hell, made by people who think that anyone dissatisfied with Quark's Mac commitment should "switch to something else." In this case it wasn't a Quark bug, but apparently sloppy code somewhere by Extensis. Something in the cache gets corrupted, and poor Suitcase can't launch itself. It will tell you to start it manually from System Preferences, which also won't work.
The most straightforward way to fix this problem is to clean your caches, which can easily be done by installing the shareware program Snow Leopard Cache Cleaner and just run it. I selected all users and "light cleaning" which did the trick. Thanks Northern Softworks! You've proved that some people in Alaska are actually not insane.
]]>CodeHal Eckhart2011-04-21T16:51:34-06:00Hand bending 1" square 18 gauge steel tubing to a 4-1/2" radius
http://www.metalgeek.com/archives/2011/04/08/000121.php
If you look closely, you might notice that the straight part of the tube that I'm bending from ends up slightly curved also. If this is a problem, you can overbend the material slightly, and then carefully unbend the side that you used as a lever. But if it has to be perfect, then go buy a big expensive machine.
Oh, and doing this sort of thing is why I now have arthritis. And on that topic, the suggested youtube keywords to add are "rage against your hands".
]]>MetalHal Eckhart2011-04-08T23:12:39-06:00Big aluminum walls
http://www.metalgeek.com/archives/2011/03/03/000120.php
tube-bending post from a long time back, and a few extra words of wisdom (hah!) from me. Nice job Jack!
]]>MetalHal Eckhart2011-03-03T22:24:44-06:00I bet you can't guess what I have in my hand
http://www.metalgeek.com/archives/2011/02/28/000119.php
I'm still mostly clueless about what's wrong with me. Eleven days ago, my left wrist started swelling up and hurting like hell. It's been like that ever since. Six trips to the doctor, blood tests, a sonogram, an MRI, and nobody can identify a specific problem besides the fact that I'm old and worn out. Among the many things that have been investigated and ruled out are Blood Clot, Lyme Disease, Lupus, Cellulitis, Rheumatoid arthritis, and Gout. Steroids and antibiotics haven't changed a thing, and neither oxycodone nor Aleve can lay a glove on the pain. My wrists have endured a lot of wear and tear over the years, so I'm familiar with pain. But this pain is beyond anything I can remember.
One of the many weird things about this is the pain cycle. If I can sleep a little, the pain is almost nonexistent in the morning when I get up. It starts during the afternoon or early evening, and it's usually pretty bad by bedtime. If I can sleep a couple of hours, I'm usually awakened by the pain by midnight to 1 AM and then in agony for a couple of hours. Sometime around 3, I usually doze off. By 7 AM the pain isn't so bad, and I start to think I'm getting better. Then by late afternoon it starts all over again.
The nearest thing to a reason for all this is that my body just got fed up with the abuse and overreacted with a great big generalized inflammation. Time will tell.
I just today got a custom splint made and started using a TENS device. I have high hopes that I will finally start to heal.
]]>painHal Eckhart2011-02-28T22:42:47-06:00How to set up a LaserWriter 8500 for Mac OS X Snow Leopard
http://www.metalgeek.com/archives/2011/01/13/000118.php
LaserWriter 8500 was a hell of a workhorse printer for desktop publishing about 12 years ago. Ours cost a couple of grand or so, and even generic toner isn't cheap, but one cartridge will print 14,000 pages. And it prints up to A3 paper (11.7 in x 16.5 in). Ours has well over 50,000 pages on it, and it's in fine shape despite the cat hair and fur balls inside every nook and cranny.
But it no longer functions in the latest version of OS X, as they've finally got rid of AppleTalk. So it will require a bit of elbow grease to get it up and running.
What I did to get it going worked for me, but it was enough trouble that it seemed that it might be helpful to document the process. Several parts of this ordeal worked unexpectedly, and the manual is both extremely out of date and some of the wording is ambiguous.
One word of warning is that you won't be able to set some of the less critical defaults (like turning off the rather useless startup page) unless you're able to connect an OS 9 computer to the printer and run the printer setup utility. Yes, you heard right. OS freaking 9. If you have an old G4 and an OS 9 install CD that came with it, you can just boot off the CD and do what you need without installing the OS. It's hard to believe how quaint and fugly the Mac world was back then. Remember Conflict Catcher?
Anyway, here's what worked for me.
To make this work, you'll need 3 bits of information to start. The MAC (machine) address, the IP address, and the printer name that was assigned when it was set up a long time ago. If you don't remember (like me) and you turned off the startup page, you'll have to return it to its default state. You do this by popping out the communication switch, turning printer off, turning it back on (wait for it to print the page) and then pop the switch back in. Unless you want to do this all again.
On the printed page, you'll see the MAC address (mine is 00:0E:3B:00:2A:1B). The IP address will be 0.0.0.0 which doesn't do anyone any good, so it will have to be changed. And the name still needs to be set to get it to work under Snow Leopard.
Now you need to determine a permanent IP address for the printer; one that's accessible on your network, but one that won't be overwritten by your router or server or whatever that controls DHCP for your network. I chose 192.168.1.145 because it's far enough away (on this home network) from everything else that there's no chance it will conflict with another IP.
Make up a name for your printer. Don't use spaces or funky characters to play it safe. I thought lw_8500 was a nice plain vanilla printer name.
Add these two items to your /etc/hosts file in the form of
IP_address (space) printer_name
like this:
192.168.1.145 lw_8500
hosts is owned by root, so edit it something like this in a terminal window:
sudo nano /etc/hosts
and then enter your password when it asks for it.
Nano is a little funky if you're not used to terminal appications, but take your time and it will be fine.
Scroll down to the bottom of the text.
Enter
192.168.1.145 lw_8500
(or whatever you've come up with) on a new line.
Press ctrl-o to write write the file.
Enter to save.
ctrl-x to quit.
The next step is to type this into a terminal window to force an entry into your system’s arp table (whatever the hell that means):
arp -s hostname printer_Ethernet_address
such as:
sudo arp -s 192.168.1.145 08:00:07:64:d1:a4
(enter Mac user password)
Then, to assign the IP address to the printer, you simply ping the printer name:
ping printer_IP_name
like this:
ping lw_8500
(after it successfully pings the printer, press ctrl-c to end)
You can set a few preferences by telnetting in to the printer like this:
telnet lw_8500
and then enter your password (or set one).
That's it for the terminal stuff. Of course, the printer won't be recognized like a normal modern device. That would be too damn easy! So try this:
Go to the Print & Fax preference pane, and click the plus button.
Go to the IP tab.
Select Line Printer Deamon - LPD.
Enter 192.168.1.145 in the address field.
Enter lpd://lw_8500/ in the location field.
For driver, select Apple LaserWriter 8500 v3010.103
And add.
Happy Printing!
* Postscript:
The 8500 is still working, but there seems to be a battery somewhere that's dead or a loose connection, so it keeps losing the configuration data and has to be reprogrammed every week or two. This means that I have to run through all the steps from pinging the printer and down. I'll update this if I figure that out.
]]>CodeHal Eckhart2011-01-13T17:52:21-06:00Lazarus Video
http://www.metalgeek.com/archives/2011/01/01/000117.php
My beloved but infrequently used and ancient Flip Mino video camera quit functioning after sitting dormant for several months. The white charging light kept flashing, but it wouldn't turn on or even mount the drive so that I could access the videos stored on it. I tried resetting it numerous times, and charged it on several different USB connections for over 2 weeks, but still no joy in Mudville.
Flip's tech support was beyond useless. They didn't even actually read my questions, but instead gave me several bizarre and increasingly complicated reset instructions, none of which worked. Oh well, time to pull out my spudger.
iFixit has some Flip repair guides and teardowns posted, but none of them were exactly my model. However, after reading someone else's comment and following this teardown for a MinoHD, the fix was surprisingly simple. All I really had to do was open the case, loosen and get behind the logic board, unplug and replug the board and then put it back together. It then booted up fine and the battery was even charged!
Thanks, iFixit!
]]>ClevernessHal Eckhart2011-01-01T18:19:53-06:00How to make a functional Amazon Associates link from generated "link to this page" code that will actually validate
http://www.metalgeek.com/archives/2010/11/30/000116.php
W3C Validator. It catches a few errors and typos that may cause trouble down the line. But some auto-generated code can cause the validator to throw so many errors that it's difficult to see what I need to fix. Amazon Associates' link generator is something that has frustrated me plenty for the few times I've used it. Just inserting one link on a previously valid page will throw 10 errors and 15 warnings. But I think I've found a solution.
First, I want to make a couple of things perfectly clear. (A) I'm only posting this because I've figured it out twice, and couldn't find the answer on the internets when I forgot what I learned the first time and (B) yes, I realize it's only a cheatey little hack that just tricks the validator, but I don't care. Amazon will do what they do, and I don't really feel like wasting time researching the issue when Amazon obviously doesn't care about clean code. Plus, I want to make sure I make a little money when someone buys stuff because I made a well reasoned and insightful argument as to why they should.
The following assumes that you know something about both Amazon Associates and html. If not, go learn about them and come back later.
In brief, the answer to this dilemma is to use TinyURL. That's it, problem solved. For details, keep reading.
When I signed up for the Amazon Associates program a couple of years ago, I was encouraged to install their little toolbar in my browser. This toolbar has a purportedly helpful button that allows you to create a link to whatever Amazon page you are currently on. This link has your id code attached to it, so you'll get paid if someone visits the link and then buys the merchandise on the page.
The only problem with this method is that the rather ugly generated code will cause so many errors in the validator that it becomes a huge mess to sort out. I tried for a while to get the code to validate, but I couldn't get both the validator and Amazon's link checker to both work at the same time. However, both are happy if I just replace the target url with the TinyURL equivalent. In other words, translate the contents of the url within the first set of quotation marks after <a href= and you're good to go.
Let me know if you don't follow my reasoning here. It wouldn't be the first time I've been a bit obtuse.