The date: October 29, 1969.

The place: UCLA

The attempt: to send a message from one computer to another for the first time ever.   A test of the newly developed DARPAnet.

The message sent: “L O G”.

The message received: “L O ” and then the network connection crashed.

The article doesn’t say, but I imagine this happened next.

The outcome: They sat on hold waiting for a representative from the cable company to answer their call because the call was important to the cable company.  After 45 minutes, someone finally came on and in a bored sounding voice asked them to turn the router off and on again.

CR4 – Blog Entry: October 29, 1969: “Lo”: The First Computer-to-Computer Message.

(Thanks BoingBoing)

As I wrote about in this post, I used these great bin hangers to organize the shed.

Well, one year later, I took them all down and made shelves to replace them. They don’t work worth a darn.

This is how they are supposed to look:

This is how they actually look when they’re in use:

They don’t fit the bins well at all, and with any weight in them the bins pull off the pins on the hanger easily. The few pins that remain in the lip of the bin soon get white and stressed. The hangers simply don’t work as advertised. They bins ended up on the floor underneath the brackets because it was too much of a pain to wrestle with them to stay on the wall.

I thought perhaps I was using the wrong kind of bin (even though the Lee Valley magazine ad shows this type being used). So I tried recycling bins. Nope:

And I tried a grocery “green box”. Nope:

So, I emptied the shed again, pulled all the hangers off the wall and put up some simple, effective plywood shelves like I probably should have done in the first place.

Sigh. I’m a sucker for gadgets. Maybe I’ll learn someday.

Oh, who am I kidding? Lee Valley, I can’t stay mad at you…

I think it’s been a week of work since we started redoing the ensuite. Yeah, about 7 days worth, that seems right.

Of course, those 7 days have been spread over about 8 months…

Today I got the flooring installed. It’s a great pattern in FiberFloor from Tarkett, called “Green Pazazz“.

We put this flooring in the front entryway too, but we’re not too impressed with it there. It looks fantastic (just enough “quirky” to fit our personalities) but the light colour shows the dirt very easily. In the main entryway to the house, that’s not a great feature.

For the ensuite, though, it was perfect. I love how this looks.

The big square hole goes down straight into the laundry room. The sink cabinet has a matching hole cut in the bottom of it, so we just have to open the cupboard under the sink and toss clothes down. The best solution for not having main floor laundry.

We’ve decided that we really like green. Everything we’ve chosen in various rooms and pictures that we like seems to be green-based.

Here’s a “myspace angle” shot of the walls, where you can see the new custom inset shelving in the side and back wall and the tongue and groove dropped ceiling to cover up the poor job the original owners did pulling out a wall to put this ensuite in.

The big mirror is the original, I just put it back up last week. I has a few nicks and chips (some as new as last week) but it’s nice to have such a large mirror.

All I need is trim and then cabinets and toilet. Hurrah! Hopefully it will only be another three or four months before that’s done.

We have all of our music stored on a NASLite server in the basement, so any computer in the house can play any MP3 we own. The only problem with this is that you need a computer to access it. We used to have a computer in the living/dining room when the basement was (more) unusable than it is now, and we’d play music on it through those little crummy speakers. Then Jenn got a laptop and all the PCs moved downstairs. Suddenly we didn’t have anything to play music with on the whole upper floor. We have an iPod touch and a couple of Creative MP3 players that we keep loaded with MP3s, and I have a small iPod dock, but it wasn’t loud enough to play music for more than one room.

We needed a solution for playing music for the main floor. Sure, I could have bought a more expensive and powerful iPod dock, but where’s the fun in that? Instead, I built this:

I got a set of Logitech X530 70-watt speakers dirt cheap. I specifically chose these speakers because the controls are all mounted on a separate wired remote rather than built into one of the speakers. This allowed me to crack open open the remote and rewire it. I removed the major controls from the circuit board and put them on longer wires, which let me mount the knobs and buttons in another location, arranged differently than they were on the small remote.

I loved the design of a Shaker-style lingerie chest that I saw a photo of on the internet (why the Shakers would build a lingerie chest, I have no idea). I decided to design my own based on this cabinet. Here’s a screenshot of the Google Sketchup model I built:

The white parts of the drawers were to be cut out and filled with speaker cloth. The top drawer was real, the others were just false fronts covering the speakers.

I built the cabinet and mounted the speakers in it, then added a power supply and tidied up the cabling.

The top drawer opens to reveal an audio plug to insert into the MP3 player output jack, and charging cables for both micro-USB (our Creative Zen MP3 players) and iPod devices (our iPod touch). There are knobs for master volume and bass and a switch for master power, which doesn’t affect device charging.

Voila: an MP3 cabinet that gives us music in the living room and kitchen. Sure, 70 watt computer speakers aren’t audiophile stuff, but it sounds great to me. The bass kicker is more than enough to vibrate the floor, and we get nice clean high end.

I wanted to put perforated individual drawers down the front as per the design, but I have too many other projects on the go right now and I really needed this out of the shop. It’s been hanging around for a year in various unfinished states and I just wanted it done. I might come back and do that later, the speaker cloth I put on is easily removed.

A few years ago I had a big beautiful old console radio cabinet that I wanted to do this to, but never did. I got rid of it, and I regret that a little now. Some day I’ll pick up another one and do this to it. In the meantime, we’ll be rocking away during dinner chores.

The bed of my table saw isn’t that large, so if I have to crosscut anything more than about 10 inches wide the miter gauge is pushed off the front of the table, making it very awkward to cut properly. I don’t expect that it’s very safe, either. I’m left-handed so I like to hold the work to left of the blade, and that’s the best direction for large stock to extend in my shop. (It goes out the door if it’s over about 5 feet long…)

A crosscut sled seemed to be the perfect solution.

I’ve been looking for a good crosscut sled to make myself, but everything that I found was quite large and cumbersome. As you’ve seen before, I have a reasonably small shop so moving and storing a large sled just wasn’t going to work for me.

I had never heard of a front-stopped crosscut sled until I saw this plan, and I knew that it was perfect for my needs.

I started out with a piece of 1/2″ MDF that I cut to 20″ x 20″. I figured I’d make it a bit larger than I needed and trim it later, but that size seems perfect as it is. I lined it up where I wanted the sled to sit on the table saw, with about 1/2 inch extending to the right of the blade. I then marked where the miter slot in the table was, and mounted a piece of UHMW (ultra-high molecular weight) plastic as a guide. UHMW plastic is that slightly greasy feeling dense plastic they make hockey rink boards out of. It’s very stable and easy to cut and drill with normal tools. Lee Valley sells lengths of it that are perfectly sized to the standard miter slot, so I don’t have to make my own runners out of hardwood.

I like the runner to stick out about a half inch or so from the front on the sled, so it’s easier to put it on the table properly because you can aim the runner into the miter slot.

Once the runner was mounted, I put the runner in the miter slot, raised the saw blade and trimmed that extra 1/2″ off. Now I have a sled that slides beautifully in the miter slot, and that has one edge that is exactly in line with the edge of the saw blade.

I inserted threaded T-Nuts into the bottom of the sled along the front edge to attach the fence, and found out that they don’t sit flush, so I used a forstner bit to make a small recess. I don’t want the metal t-nuts sliding on the surface of my saw.

From the top:

I used a scrap piece of red oak for the fence. Once I trimmed it straight, I drilled 3 holes along the length to match the T-Nuts in the sled. The holes were slightly larger than the T-Nuts so there is about 1/16″ play in the fence when it’s not tightened down. I can loosen the bolts and easily adjust the fence to be square. I know my own skills well enough that if I tried to make the fence permanent, it would never be quite square and the whole sled would be useless. Planning for these type of adjustments has saved me a lot of grief.

A large fender washer and a 1/4-20 sized jig handle threaded into each T-Nut keep the fence nice and snug. I bought a large assorted box of jig handles and parts, including the T-Nuts, from Lee Valley. (Most of my birthday and Christmas presents are Lee Valley gift cards nowadays… ) I already have plans for most of the rest of that box.

The fence also has a pair of DeStaCo low-profile vertical clamps (guess where I bought them?) that keep whatever I’m cutting from creeping during the cut. I have them adjusted to keep 3/4 stock tight, as that’s 90% of what I cut.

The only thing that remained was to round the bottom corners, cut some holes through the near side to make it easier to hold, and to add some holes on the sides to hang it up out of the way. Voila.

Here are some pictures of it with wood clamped in, before and after cutting.

And it hangs perfectly on the wall when I’m not using it.

I was unsure about how the front-stopped sled would work, but I really love it. It’s different than the usual back-stopped miter gauge, but I already prefer it hands-down. Wider work is far easier to cut. The fact that the edge of the sled is exactly on the saw cutting line makes setup far more accurate and far simpler; Put the desired cut line at the edge of the sled and it’s perfectly lined up. The clamps make it a breeze. No more slightly angled cuts due to slipping.

Because there’s no support for the back of the work, I found I get some minor tearout if I don’t put something behind it. I have some long 1×1 pieces of scrap that I put on the sled behind the work hanging over the cut line, and when they get too short I toss them. Finally, a use for my scraps box.

I also need to make a 1/2 inch thick piece that sits on the right side of the blade to support the cut-off, because it hangs over nothing and can splinter if it’s long enough. I will just use the rest of the MDF that I cut the sled from, and put a ledge on the front like a bench-hook so it won’t slide with the wood.

The only downside that I’ve seen is that because the cutting takes place a half-inch above the table top, the under-table dust collection doesn’t work, and the sawdust all sprays back towards me. Not serious, just messy. Perhaps when I get the cut-off support made I’ll try to fit some dust collection in it, or perhaps if the cut-off support is tight to the blade on the right side the dust collection will work better. I’ll let you know.

I’ve had it for a week, and I’ve used it every single time I’ve been in the shop. This crosscut sled has made my life in the shop a million times easier, for one afternoon’s worth of work. If you’re still using a metal miter gauge, I can’t recommend strongly enough that you try this.