USB WiFi antenna

A friend was able to receive WiFi from their very gracious neighbor with a standard PCI wireless card in her PC, but a USB wireless dongle was unable to pickup any networks in range, even when standing outside the house! Primary differences being USB voltage/power and antenna capacities. Time to give this critter an upgrade. (blurry images, oops)

Step 1: Crack open your gutless USB wifi dongle.


Step 2: Find the gutless antenna; seen as the rectangular loop on the far left of this blurry image.



Step 3: Find some wire and construct a vague semblance of an appropriately turned antenna from random info you find on the web based on the wavelengths used in household wifi.



Step 4: Solder the antenna on. Hope you haven't destroyed anything in the process.



Step 5: Reassemble. Prevent pokey bits with something squishy.

This baby found two new networks not previously detected from my own home, and now my lucky friend has a solid connection to her gracious neighbor. Life is good.

Upholstery Happens: man-style.

Sewing Machine: check.
Manliness: check.
mad skillz: check.

Upholstery happens in the house of bachelor. You were warned.

Wonderflonium: Do not bounce

I bought these at the NQR store today...because of the sticker.

Highschool Coffee Table

A broken coffee table I built in highschool (exactly 20 years ago this year !!). Every join gave up the ghost to kids dancing on top of it. Dowel glue joins are great, but they just can't withstand the awesome might of 3yr olds dancing.


The original 9mm dowel joins were destroyed, so I had to bore them out and plug them with larger 20mm dowel


The top was initially screwed on with 4 wood screws, sunken through the entire width of this crosspiece.

Deep sunken holes for screws is not ideal. I'm not going to use these again. I'll use brackets or something instead.


Sash clamps to the rescue. You can see the pine strip I placed on the inside upper edge to screw the top onto. Much beefier. It'll get stain to make it invisible of course.


Dowels. Not my first choice of timber joinery...but invisible is the intention I guess.


Taking shape. More clamp action.


Hopefully I get another 20 years out of it. It has some deep dints and marks in the top from previous use, nicely sealed under the new coat of varnish. Looks pretty good. (can't really tell from this shot though) Junk on the top for scale reference.

Keyboard Well: more more

FINALLY finished the keyboard-well in my desk. The original rough-as-guts test was going to be for 2 weeks or so...ended up being 8 months. Shiny.

Still shiny.

Indoors. Varnished the monitor tray also. The larger shelf is in the shed so I can improve the height extensions, which were always an ad-hoc thing due to the ever increasing size of monitors over the years from my original 13'. So long ago.

Keyboard Well: more

A while back I cut a big dirty hole in my desk to drop the keyboard into. I'm happy with the functionality so it's time to finish up.

Nice clean cuts to house a pine timber frame.


Measure a few times, keep cutting till it sorta fits. That's how the saying goes right ?


Snug as a bug in a rug


Tray in place. Had plans for an elaborate adjustable base but abandoned it due to the steep parabolic curve of effort vs reward.


Redgum sawdust is perfect for making my own putty where dark-mahogany stain is used, the color is a nice match after it has the wet varnished look.


Redgum hardwood + glue = tough putty. This stuff needs power tools to sand down. Serious, don't bother hand sanding this mix.


For all you know I'm smearing poo all over my desk.


Dry stained pine embedded in varnished veneer. Looks awfull. Varnish has some pretty magical properties though :)


Varnish has a mild gooping/solvent effect like paint stripper, so it's fine to apply to old coats like this, the disparity between the currently uncoated, and coated sections won't show after the 3rd coat.

Will take another photo after it's done.

more chair 2

Three coats of varnish. New upholstery material chosen (draped over the old cushions). Shot with flash indoors. The timber has a much nicer deep red color with natural light on it, which won't really show in these shots.


Same shot, no flash. The old sofa timber showing next to it. Such a contrast. Can't believe this was being thrown out. Timber furniture is always repairable by anyone with no skills.


Closer shot shows the coarse-weave of the new upholstery. I don't own a sewing machine so this is gonna be a visit-to-a-friends job.


Side profile.

more chair

Stained Dark Mahogany. Kinda purpley. It'll look a lot better after it's varnished.



Low sun on a cold winter afternoon, about 10c. Not particularly good temps to start varnishing in, it kinda goes gooey instead of drying when temps get much below about ~7c. It's the first coat so I'm banking on the timber absorbtion sorting most of that problem out.

Chair Desk

The new 42' LCD represents the height of awesomeness for playing computer games. Decided I needed a command chair for some upcomming games. The current chair project has these awesome huge armwrests to support a giant tray. A large MDF board, and some vinyl should solve this problem

1.2m x 45cm MDF board. Round the edges with the belt sander, cut and tack some vinyl to suit.

Unfinished chair with the new gaming board on the armwrests. Feeding trough and drink glass in position to show the awesomeness.

Can't wait to finish the chair now :)

Ugly Sofa at the core

When I was stripping down the chair, there was evidence underneath of some alternate upholstery snagged on some staples. Most of the pillows are just raw foam inside, so I assumed the green covering was the original.



But today I was greeted by a horrific demon hidden beneath the evil green skin. The original skin, still intact thanks to its mumified protective coating. There is an ancient evil lurking in my sofa...

FINALLY finished sanding the chair. Think I'm gonna leave the armrests bare. You can see the old upholstered armrest on the couch in the background. Love to see timber.

Domino AND, OR, XOR gates demonstrated

Nice little visual representations of the base logic gates used in circuitry.

Ugliest Sofa set ever

Got a hold of the worlds ugliest Sofa set. A friend was throwing it out.

Avert your eyes.


Loved the heavy timberwork. The varnish and timber are heavily damaged though.


Throw away the upholstery, and apply a heavy dose of 3M stripping disc.


mMmmm, naked timber. Love it.


Varnish is easy to remove, but stain takes a LOT of sanding. I'd estimate a good 6+ hrs was spent stripping the chair down. Fortunately I only have one chair and one sofa.

I really like the color of unstained timber. Not even sure what kind of timber it is. The grain is very different to pine, and it's lighter and softer than pine. Dunno if I'll varnish this bare, or apply a dark-mahogany stain like the rest of the furniture I've done over the years.

Will take some more photos after I decide how to coat it. Then there's the upholstery challenge. The padding and covering will all have to be done from scratch, the existing goods are too horrible to reuse.

1.21 Gigawatts !!

About 18 months ago I went through the house and documented every 240volt device. I dug around on the net to find power consumption values for these items in their POWER-OFF or idle state. It accumulated to the 200 watt range. That's insane. 200W, 24/7, with everything in the house TURNED OFF. Design at its worst.

So I made these:


It's a $6 inline switch, wired into a 2 meter extension cord. I made 5 of these, and put them at the major device hubs around the house. Each PC Desk, the TV corner, etc. Each switch has a piece of velcro on the back, and is placed in a subtle but reachable location at each hub. It's connected to the quad-adapter, or whatever you've got back there. So I flick the switch (which is easily reached), and that whole corner shuts down, really off, not just idle-mode. One switch fully turns off the entire group of devices: The TV, VCR, DVD, Stereo is one block for instance.

I should note, that even if a device LOOKS OFF, it may not be the case. The washing machine has a low voltage touch panel that is always active, despite no lights. There is a 240v to 6volt transformer running 24/7 behind the scenes. This sucker needs to be turned off at the wall. Phone chargers, plug packs etc, these are all the same deal.

We ditched our LED clocks (mains power, traditionally found as bedside clocks) for LED battery clocks. There's now 3 battery powered clocks in the house. Each of a different type. 1 LCD, 1 desktop analogue, 1 wall analogue. Each uses 1xAA battery; 2500mAH rechargeable NiMHD. I know from the past, that the analogue desktop clock lasts 2 YEARS on this battery. Interestingly, rechargeable batteries have an inherant voltage decay over time in the range of 1 to 6 months to fall significantly below 1.3 volts. So this makes the power consumption on these battery devices even more impressive. They run by magic. The Wall clock is still running on the same battery after a year. The bedside LED is still going...who knows when that will run out.


This quarters useage. Awesome!! $140.aud bill for 3 months, 2 adults ,3 bedroom / 2 bathroom home. Previously the cost for this duration was in the range of ~$200-$320.

I had a bit of a dig around. The average single / double occupant household seems to use in the realm of 18 to 24 KwH per day. So the figures you see here are awesome. (I'm at ~6.9KwH / day)



I've been using the switches for close to 18months, and they're clearly working. In conjunction with turning devices like the microwave and washing machine off, the only thing that runs 24/7 is our refridgerator. There aren't even any compact flurescent bulbs in the house, which would see a drop in daily consumption even further.

edit: a couple average use indicators. Strangely I couldn't find local ones.
http://www.washingtonelectric.coop/pages/understand.htm Some smalltime power company in the States.

http://pinchthatpenny.savingadvice.com/2007/10/02/average-daily-electricty-usage_30740/ A penny pincher, single occupant, who's using in the realm of 3 times more than I am. Makes me feel good, plus there's heaps more I can do to further reduce use.

edit: Some answers to global climate change sceptics. I'm a little tired of their (sceptics) rubbish stories quite frankly. http://illconsidered.blogspot.com/2006/02/how-to-talk-to-global-warming-sceptic.html

The best graph in the Universe

This is the best graph in the Universe. Period.

Originally spotted this amongst the Manpollo project videos, but I'm sure it has an origin somewhere. Good stuff.

BBQ

I finally got my hands back on the first serious BBQ that our family ever owned. I'm pretty sure I would have been somewhere between the age of 14-16 when Dad originally bought this. That's 20 years ago!

Anyhow. It was badly rusted out, and the timber was in terrible condition. Years ago it was kinda refurbished with a few replacement timbers, but it's seen a lot of decay since.

So, the other week I completely stripped it down. Timber and metal. Wire brushed down all the steel and resprayed it with a gloss black Engine Enamel. (high temp paint) The timber felt the wrath of my belt sander, and then the goodness of 2 thirsty coats of decking furniture oil.

Unfortunately I don't have any 'before' or 'during' shots. Only 'after'.



The timber previously looked like the deck does now.




It came out great !!!

keyboard well

I decided I wasn't entirely happy with wrist discomfort after spending hours at my favorite place: my desk. Time to improve the quality of life.

Decided to make a small well for the keyboard to drop into, thereby eliminating the awkward wrist tilt while typing.

Create a whopping ugly hole:

Temporary sunken platform in place. I'll use it like this for a week or so to see if the hole is the right size and depth. Trim / sanding / varnish etc will be done in good time.