YouTube is an incredible resource for learning a new hobby (or expanding the horizons of your current hobby.) Case in point: Matt Cremona. He doesn’t just go to the lumber yard to buy wood for his projects. He walks through the woods, cuts down a tree, slabs it with a chainsaw mill, lets it dry and then takes it into his shop to finish milling it for a project. While this isn’t something that I’ll probably ever get to do, it’s really fun to see how it works. Check out this video demonstrating his chainsaw mill:
Boat Auto Pilot
Trying to launch a boat by yourself is a tricky project. I don’t own a boat, but this product almost makes me want to buy one. Drop your boat in the water and the computer gizmo box drops the trolling motor to keep your boat in a holding pattern until you’re ready to have it come over to the dock. Brilliant!
Windows 10 Notification
If you’re running Windows 7 or Windows 8, you may be noticing a new notification down by your system clock. It gives you the option to update to Windows 10, reserve your copy, etc. What is that all about?
Windows 10 is going to be released on July 29. For the first year, it will be a free upgrade for existing Windows users and it sounds like this might be the “last version” of Windows 10. That probably means that they’re just going to keep updating Windows without having major version releases and it probably also means that the future updates will be free. I don’t know how firmly any of that is decided or announced though.
If you’re really interested, you can get it now. I’ve been running it on one of my extra machines at work and it’s just fine. However, even though they say they’re getting finished with the final production code, PLEASE remember that if you upgrade early, you’re potentially putting your sanity at risk. Personally, I won’t put pre-release software on any critical machine and for me that, that means my main home and work computers, my phone or anything that Tyla uses. The cons far outweigh the pros in my book, but you can decide for yourself. The odds are that it will work fine for you.
The Windows 10 update notification also gives you the option to “reserve” your copy of Windows 10. It appears that this just sets a flag to download Windows 10 in the background and then notify you once it’s ready later in July. I’ve done this on most of my machines and it’s probably a good idea unless you’re super paranoid. For example, I’m not doing this on our main file server. I’ll wait a month or two before upgrading that one.
The new features in Windows 10 are pretty nice. You can easily find articles about them on the web, but here are a few:
- The start button is back and it brings up a start menu that looks more like Windows 7. I think that on a tablet you might still get the full screen Windows 8 style start menu, but otherwise, it will look more like what you had before. (At least that’s the default, I think you can change it to Windows 8 style all the time if you love it.)
- Cortana is in your PC now. You can ask her questions straight from your desktop and get answers from your local computer, the web, etc. You can tell her to do things like “move my appointment from 4pm to 5pm” or “remind me in 20 minutes to check the oven.” It’s pretty convenient on the phone so hopefully it will translate well to the computer.
- There’s a new web browser called “Edge”. Internet Explorer will still be there but it won’t be the main browser. Edge is more comparable to Chrome and Firefox (in good ways) so expect a faster browsing experience and better security.
- There have been some cool announcements about plugging your phone into your computer and using your keyboard and mouse with the phone that is now displaying on the screen as well as some announcements about interactions with an Xbox. I haven’t dug too deeply but I’m interested.
To sum it up, everyone should update to Windows 10 but you can wait until later this summer to do it. Just make sure you do it before next summer or else you might have to pay for the privilege.
Card Catalogs
As a parent, I now spend a lot of time thinking about how differently my son will grow up than I did. For example, instead of a 30 minute car ride planned days in advance, Elijah can see his friends from his back yard. Instead of living in the woods, the woods are a place we visit.
But being a nerd, most of my thoughts center around his experiences with technology. My generation is the last one who ever wrote a school paper using both a card catalog and something online (or from the Encarta CD-ROMs.) It was completely valid to hear someone say they looked up a topic in the book because nobody had written about it on the internet yet. And I vividly remember a world with no internet at all. That’s going to sound like making fire with sticks to my kids, not to mention my grandkids.
I also wonder how much every parent feels this way. I feel like my generation was pretty lucky to have experienced the world with no internet, but still be young enough to quickly adopt it as it grew. What other generations have had experiences like this? Our grandparents rode horses and buggies when they were young but transitioned to cars. That’s probably comparable but it was stretched out over a much bigger chunk of their lives.
And as I wrote about a couple weeks ago, what really blows my mind is to think about what tech is going to be like in 30 more years. Remember, technology advances exponentially, not linearly. Think about tech 30 years ago and compare it to today. Now double or maybe event quadruple that difference and that’s what 30 years more will look like.
I wonder if I’ll still be blogging.
Instagram Photo Booth
When we visited Project Pie in San Diego and they had an iPad stuck to their wall. You can see it on the left side of the picture below. The iPad was running Instagram and they encouraged people to take their own picture and post it. This would be an awesome idea for a wedding or any other big gathering. If you’re doing it somewhere without Internet connectivity, you could just run a camera app that saves to the local storage. I wish we had thought of this for our wedding!
Loews Coronado Bay Review
Tyla and I stayed at the Loews Coronado Bay Resort when we went down to San Diego a couple weeks ago. Tyla had picked it out of a list of the best places for families with young kids. The resort is very nice and normally would be out of our price range, except since we were traveling with such a young child, we knew that we would spend a lot of time at the hotel. So we thought it made sense to devote more of our budget to the hotel.
When you arrive, you’re greeted by valets, bellhops, etc. Be ready to tip because you’ll feel the need to do it a lot during your stay. Tipping outside of a restaurant isn’t something I’m super familiar with so it always adds a little bit of stress for me. I just don’t encounter those situations a lot.
The website makes it sound like the resort is ready to provide you with everything your child needs to thoroughly enjoy their time. Thankfully, Tyla called the concierge desk ahead of time to figure out exactly what they had. While they do have beach toys (there’s a locked trailer that they park at the beach) and they had a nice crib for the room, there were other things on the list that just didn’t exist when we got there. And beyond those things, we didn’t see much difference in the kid-friendliness of the hotel. But to be fair, we were there in the off season and I think they have more kid programs that run in the summer months. Oh and make sure that your kids can’t get into the snack stash in the room or you’ll be shelling out $10 for a tiny bag of expired gummy bears and $8 for a bottle of water.
The location was nice. It’s on the east side of what is basically a sandbar so it was a little bit protected from the wind coming off the ocean. The resort is surrounded on three sides by water so there are lots of nice views. You can get to the beach with a quick golf cart ride from the valet or a 5-10 minute walk. The resort is about a 10 minute drive from Coronado which has shops, a grocery store and some restaurants. There’s an hourly shuttle from the hotel but we just used our rental car. Don’t forget to factor in parking when you’re budgeting out your trip. We paid $29/day to self-park! Valet parking adds a few bucks on top of that.
There are three pools, all of which are heated to 80 degrees. There’s a kid pool, a large family pool, and then an adults-only pool. We pretty much had them to ourselves since the hotel was mainly filled with conference attendees during the week.
Overall, the resort wasn’t bad, but it didn’t blow us away. The staff was nice enough, but they never went out of their way to help us out and regularly looked at us like “that’s not my job, go ask someone else.” Again, it’s not terrible, but it’s not stellar.
It was a nice place to stay and I’m glad we tried it. We do hope to go back to San Diego to visit Sea World, Legoland, and the zoo (again), but we’ll probably consider other hotel options next time.
Table Saw Rehab
While I’m thankful to Tim for the good deal he gave me on his old table saw, I was never a huge fan of it. But some changes I’ve made to it over the past 6 months have made it one of my favorite tools in my shop:
- The dust collection system that I built does a great job at trapping saw dust. Unfortunately since it sits far away from my shop vac, I rarely have it hooked up. When the box gets full, I have to pull one end off to suck all the dust out. I think I’m going to rebuild this to be just a box with a drawer that I can pull out. Still, this works way better than having nothing.
- I waxed the top of the table saw. After I was done, I was shocked at how much easier wood slid across the blade.
- I bought a new blade! I don’t know how old/dull that other one was. I probably could have had it sharpened but I decided to start fresh and then keep it maintained.
- I adjusted the measuring guage on the fence. It was always off by enough that I had to measure with a tape measure to make sure it was set properly. Now it’s EXACTLY right and I can skip the tape measure.
- I got a good set of push blocks for Christmas which make it a lot safer to use.
The saw is pretty much still the same as it always was, but these cheap tweaks have made a huge improvement in its usefulness.
Project Pie
As we looked up places to eat in San Diego, Tyla suggested pizza. Yelp suggested Project Pie. As I read about it, it sounded a LOT like Mod Pizza which is one of our Seattle favorites. Turns out, the founder of Project Pie is one of the same founders of Mod Pizza and another one called Pie-ology. I’m not sure if he starts these and sells them, but he’s got a good formula. If you’ve never had the pleasure of visiting one of these restaurants, think of Chipotle or Five Guys but for pizza. You pay one price and get whatever toppings you want.
We couldn’t tell a huge difference between Project Pie and Mod Pizza, but that’s good thing too because they’re both delicious. We probably failed in our quest to find something unique to San Diego, but we didn’t regret the choice… especially because it was near a Tollhouse store that sold cookies and ice cream.
Jewelry Box
Four years ago, I decided I was going to make Tyla a jewelry box, but after reading through the plans, I felt like it was way over my head. I got the bug again recently, found some plans, and this time I decided it would be a big stretch of my skills but probably within reach. (Turns out, I was looking at the same set of plans both times!)
There were so many first for me in this project: first time buying walnut, first time buying wood milled only on three sides, first time using a planer to thin the wood down, first time cutting dadoes and rabbets, etc etc etc. I started off with two hunks of walnut and ended up with a jewelry box that looks much better than I expected it to. All those “firsts” took a tool on the schedule though with the project taking 43 days from the time I picked up the wood until the time I finished though of course I wasn’t working on it even close to full time.
In the past I’ve always done bigger projects that went together with screws and nails. This one is held together with only glue and the cuts I made in the wood. It was really nice working this way because you can dry fit everything and have it stay assembled while you look at it. It was also a lot of fun to work with the walnut. When I work with pine, it’s so soft that it dents easily and it’s hard to get precise cuts. But with the walnut, I could get a piece that was exactly the right dimensions in all three axes.
The drawers and the backs of the door and the box are lined with velvet. There are 4 hooks on the inside of the door and four in the back of the box. There’s also a padded velvet ring bar at a 45 degree angle in the box. You can’t see it in the photos, but that ring bar has horizontal slits in it to hold rings in place.
I’m glad that I attempted this project and that it turned out so well, but I’m also happy that it’s over. I want to queue up a couple easy projects to relax a bit.
Limited Time
It’s well-worth a listen if you spend most of your day in front of the computer because there are seemingly infinite distractions. I feel my phone vibrate and need to look to see what it is. I see emails popping up in various email folders and feel the need to get that count back down to zero. People start email or IM conversations and impose their own expectations on my time. If I don’t respond right away, I’m being rude. All of these things mean that it’s easy to spend my entire day context switching between 30 second tasks when in reality, they are not all of equal priority.
There’s no easy answer but the podcast covers a lot of ideas in the area. In the past I’ve had great success with keeping my email closed and only looking at it during defined periods of time. This podcast encouraged me to start that process again and I also disabled a whole bunch of notifications on my phone. We’ll see how it goes.