Yesterday’s post covered a couple good magazines, but YouTube has lots of excellent free content. Here are the series I follow every week:
- I Like To Make Stuff – This series generally has very quick projects and sometimes incorporates electronics.
- Jay Bates – He works out of his garage and builds a lot of things for his home. He puts a lot of effort into video editing and has a lot of it synced up to the beat of the music. Jay also posts videos of his design work using the free SketchUp tool. I’ve tried with limited success to use it to plan projects in the past, but by watching him work, I think I’ll get a lot more use out of Sketchup.
- The Wood Whisperer – Marc is the godfather of woodworking podcasts. He was the first and his podcast has a lot of polish. He has a very high end shop, but some of the projects he does are still within the more casual woodworker.
- Frank Howarth – I only recently started watching this. Frank has a nice shop and does lots of lathe work. I don’t have a lathe but I like his style and I still learn some things watching his projects. His montage scenes often have fun little timelapses where the wood pieces seem to move themselves around.
- Woodworking for Mere Mortals – This is the other new one in my list. He has a sense of humor to his videos, and, as the title suggests, he makes projects that most of us can relate to.
A lot of these videos have plans posted either for free or for purchase. It’s incredibly helpful to have a video to go along with the plans if you decide to build one of them. And even though I have yet to build anything that I’ve seen on these videos, I’ve learned a ton just by watching them work. It’s an excellent free education by osmosis. It’s hard to watch and not get inspired to go out and start building something.
The monsoon season is upon us which means it’s time to retreat inside from the yardwork and RC planes. I’ve been busy making sawdust lately so I thought I’d devote a whole week to woodworking posts (except Wednesday which is the fantasy football update.)
Ok, maybe I need to clarify this for the Seahawks. Last week I said they needed to play the first half of the game like they have been playing the second half. They played the first half quite well this week including a bunch of takeaways, but then seemed to almost give the game away in the second half. So here’s my new request: play a solid 60 minutes.
After a spectacular summer, October has been WET. You might scoff and say that Seattle is always we this time of year. That’s sort of true. It’s usually wet but it’s rare that we get much total precipitation. Coupled with a very rainy February, we are already at our normal average rainfall for the full year. 
There’s a new tool in my workshop and it has already been extremely useful. It’s a bench-sized combination belt and disc sander. There are a LOT of companies that sell the exact same product (with their own color scheme and logo), but I got a 
Last year about this time, some of the guys came over and 
If your computer is acting weird, slow or you suspect a virus, Windows 8 has two great new features that will help you get back to normal again.
The Seahawks finally won, but their first half still looked pretty bad. They picked it up towards the end of the game, but it was almost too late at that point. A win is a win. If they win the next 2-3 then I’ll start to feel a little better about their chances. The big concern for me right now is their turnover ratio. Last year they led the league with +22. This year they are a mediocre +4 and they are almost halfway through their schedule. That’s a huge change.
Verizon and AT&T Are Selling Your Data
Here are a few places where you can read more:
This is pretty disgusting. Although they say you can opt out, it doesn’t do much good because they still add that tag to all your traffic. They just don’t have your permission to sell the data about you. But even a unique identifier across all of your traffic is pretty ugly.
The only way to really avoid this is to only browse to secure websites (https) because that traffic is encrypted. Or of course you can only use wifi instead of your cellular data, but the point of a smartphone is that you can connect everywhere. The best solution is to let your carrier hear what you think of this policy.
To test whether your carrier is doing this to you, open the following link on your cell phone. Make sure that wifi is turned off so that you’re using your cellular data plan: http://lessonslearned.org/sniff