A “cookie” is a little bit of text that a website can store in your browser. For example, an ad company can store a bit of text saying where you saw an ad and when. When you see another web page with an ad by the same company, they can read the cookie they left and say “Hmm, this person likes news websites.”

Regularly clearing your cookies is always a useful practice.

However, there’s a new kid in town.

FLASH COOKIES are exactly the same, except they are not stored by your browser, they are part of Flash (a program that helps you see movies and other animated content on the web). The DO NOT GET CLEARED when you clear cookies in your browser. They are NEVER cleared. Some companies use Flash cookies to rebuild a normal cookie, even if you clear them. This can be bad.

This website is the control panel for clearing your flash cookies. Look at the huge list of flash cookies that are likely already on your PC, even if you are paranoid about cookies and cache and all of that stuff. Scary, innit? You can clear them using that web page.

Now, let’s be fair. Cookies can be useful. Staying logged in so that whenever you open your browser, GMail is there and you don’t have to enter your name and password? That’s a good use of cookies. Cookies can be used for good things.

I just like having control over what’s stored about me, and I like knowing that it’s there.

It was a sad day.

A great silicone scraper broke. All the Pages loved this scraper. It worked well and it was easy to clean. What a sad little scraper.

I slipped out of the mourning crowd and entered the workshop. I knew a handle had to be both strong and water resistant. Finally, I had a use for that block of lignum vitae! It’s the hardest wood known to man, and it was used in olden days for propeller bearings on ships, and for block and tackle. Carpenters often have mallets made out of a single piece (handle and all) of lignum vitae. A year or so ago, I got a 16″ x 4″ x 1″ block for $10 at a clearance sale at that greatest of all stores, Lee Valley, and I’ve been looking for something to do with it. I checked on the ‘net and found that it’s nontoxic and is often used for spoons and other cooking utensils, so I was confident I could do something for our poor scraper. I took a small section off of one end or the block and set to work with band saw, newly acquired scroll saw, and copious amounts of sandpaper.

I’m pretty happy with how it turned out. Lignum vitae is incredible to work with. Its sap is actually waxy, so it cuts rather easily and it sands and polishes up like nothing else I’ve ever seen. I stopped at a fairly course 400 grit sandpaper, but I’m sure that if I moved up to 1000 or so this handle would shine like glass with no finish on it at all. The finished product works beautifully and I think it will outlast any of the other wooden spoons (and hopefully most of the plastic ones) that we own.

Now I have all sorts of dreams about other things to make with the rest of my block of lignum vitae, and I’m pretty sure MrsPages does too.

Two years ago I put a skating rink in our backyard and it didn’t go so well. This year I decided to follow my own advice, use a plastic liner and try again.

The plan: Use 2×6′s to make a frame. Wait for cold weather. Lay the plastic liner in the frame and fill it up. Skate.

The execution:

In October, I laid out the 2×6′s in the size I wanted and used 1×2 stakes to hold them up. Here’s the helpful assistant screwing the 2×6′s to the stakes:

Then we waited for cold weather. Being in Manitoba meant that this wasn’t a long wait.

I waited too long to make the plastic liner outdoors, so I laid it out in the basement. The plastic I got was only 48 inches wide, so I had to put 5 strips of it together to make the liner wide enough. I overlapped the pieces 12 inches, put a bead of acoustic caulk down and taped both sides.

As it turns out, this is a pretty poor way to do it. Cheap duct tape loses adhesion in cold weather. Also, one of the joints I made a different way (before going with the simple overlap method) held a lot of air and floated, making it very hard to cover with water. Luckily it was right along one edge of the rink, so I just piled snow on it and made the ice surface about 20 inches narrower than planned.

When the weather got cold enough I went out to clear the snow from inside the rink, but found that the kids’ games of Fox and Goose had packed the snow into heavy, hard to shovel piles. Hooray for Mr. Doug from down the street who spent a half hour on a -30C on a Sunday morning to help me out!

Once the snow was mostly gone, the rest was stomped smooth and level.

Next came laying out the liner and stapling it around the outside of the boards.

The outside tap will freeze and crack if we use it in the winter, so I hook the hose up to the kitchen tap and run it out the window. I got the adapter to hook the hose the the faucet for $2.49 at the hardware store.

Here is another able assistant holding the hose to start the initial filling.

At this point it becomes a waiting game. The initial fill took about 10 hours. I found that the boards weren’t as level as I thought. The water is within 2 inches of the top of one side and 6 inches from the top at the other. My yard is not level (for drainage purposes) so it took a lot of water to fill one side of the rink deep enough to get water over to the other side.

Even using cold water, filling the rink at night at -30C makes for some neat steam.

In this picture you can see that the far side is full and smooth while this side doesn’t even have any water in it yet. The snow close to the camera is my early attempt to hold the floating liner down, before I gave up on that entirely.

Once the rink was filled, I let it sit for a few days to make sure it was completely solid.

Lessons I learned:

1. Make the boards more level. This will make filling easier.
2. Don’t wait until it’s very cold to fill the rink. At -30C the water freezes before it has a chance to flow nice and level, so there are some ridges in the ice. The perfectionist in me wants to try to create some sort of mini-zamboni to fix it, but even that wouldn’t work at -30, I suspect.
3. Buy a one-piece rink liner rather than piecing plastic together.

The plastic I sealed together has a leak somewhere, because the water seeped out into the surrounding snow before it froze (though MrsPages is confident that the seams didn’t leak but there’s a hole in the plastic somewhere) :

Finally the day came:

And there was much rejoicing.

A little bit of keyboard trivia has improved my life more than I care to admit.

Did you know that if you type something into the URL bar of your browser, you can hit CTRL-ENTER and it will add “.com” and go to the site?

It’s true!

Just type “cnn” into the URL bar, and hit CTRL-ENTER and you go straight to “http://cnn.com”.

If you use Firefox you can make it even easier by hitting CTRL-L to go to the URL bar, then type your word and hit CTRL-ENTER. You don’t even have to move your hand to click the mouse! This has saved me at least 50 calories a day worth of energy expenditure, I’m sure.

Places like Lifehacker (that’s CTRL-L, lifehacker, CTRL-ENTER) are always touting the benefits of keyboard shortcuts for commonly used things, but I really haven’t caught on much. For some weird reason, though, this one has made me very happy.

Yes, a keyboard shortcut gives me a little bit of glee every time I use it.

Hi. I’m MrPages. I’m a geek.

Anyone have any other little-known favorite keyboard shortcuts?

Here’s how to replace a guitar string so it won’t slip and also won’t have a huge ball of extra string wrapped around the tuning peg.

I play guitar with a pretty heavy hand, so I’ve replaced an awful lot of strings. Over time, I’ve found a method that consistently works for me. I hate having 20 winds of string around the tuning pegs, but having only a few winds means that they can slip when you are getting the string up to tension. So, without further ado, How To Replace a Guitar String, as demonstrated on my Ovation 6 and 12-Strings.

First, an important basic: The tuners on the top of the headstock turn counterclockwise to tighten the string, and the tuners on the bottom wind it up clockwise. The strings all run together between the two rows of tuners. This is important. If you wind the strings the wrong way, they will have to bend around the other tuners to get where they are going, and you’ll break them easily, and have tuning problems.

(Click any image to go to a larger version)

<a href="http://www.smugmug.com/gallery/2727067_pD5gz/1#292398181_nMpB2"

So, lets string the guitar. First, cut off the old strings. Use wire cutters and cut them just above the bridge. Sliding the whole string out through the hole in the bridge wears things down, takes longer, and sounds terrible. If your guitar uses white plastic pins to keep the strings in the bridge, cutting the strings lets you reach into the sound hole to help remove the pins. Unwind the strings from the tuning pegs, coil them and discard them. Do that now, because if you forget you’ll poke yourself with them later.

I always start with the bass strings. Insert the string through the bridge. Pull it through gently until the ball end sits neatly. I always line up the ball ends so it looks pretty, but I’m retentive that way.

Turn the hole in the tuning peg until you can place the string straight through it. Insert the end of the string through the tuning peg and tug it straight, but not tight. Check that the ball end is still sitting properly in the bridge and that the string is sitting in the correct slot in the nut.

Trick number one: Tug the string straight, place your finger on the string at the nut, then slide your finger back to the first fret. This should pull the string back enough to give you some slack over the body.

This is just the right amount of slack to wind around the tuning peg a couple of times. Experiment, the bass strings need one fret, the higher strings sometimes need one and a half, it’s entirely up to your preferences once you see how this works. It’s important that you hold the string at the first fret during the next couple of steps to keep the string going where it’s supposed to.

Next, turn the tuning knob so that the tuning peg makes about a quarter turn, like this:

This quarter turn helps make sure you see which way to do the next step. It doesn’t work right if you wind the string the wrong way around the post.

Trick number two: The lock. It might make more sense for you to just do it and see what’s happening than it will when you read it. Bear with me, it’s quite a simple concept when you see it.

Loop the string backwards around the tuning peg and under the string. This is the OPPOSITE direction that the string winds up to be tightened. (That’s why the quarter turn helps, you can easily see which way the string winds).

Tug the string end fairly tight and bend it upwards under the string going down the fretboard. This bent-upwards piece will be held tightly in place by the string once it gets wound a little tighter, which prevents the string from slipping. Even if you only have a half turn of string around the tuning peg, it grabs itself and won’t pull out.

Still holding the string slightly taut against the fretboard, turn the tuning knob to tighten the string.

Keep tightening until it is near the correct pitch. It should look something like this:

Using your handy wire cutters, trim off the extra string as close as you can to the tuning peg. It’s okay if your wire cutters don’t have grinder marks on them like mine do.

And voila! You can see in this picture how the string grabs and holds itself.

That’s all there is to it. Lather rinse and repeat 5 more times (or 11 more times if you have a 12 string, or 3 more times if you have a bass) and you’re done!

Let me know in the comments if you’d like anything clarified.