“Cortana, remind me on Saturday to ride the monorail.” I apparently use reminders on my phone so often that phrases like that come out of my three year old’s mouth. Whether you have iOS, Android, Windows Phone, or even Windows 10, you should get to know the reminder capabilities. On my phone I just hold down the search button, wait for Cortana to start listening and then tell her what I want to be reminded of. That reminder can be triggered at a specific time, a place (via GPS), or when I’m calling or texting someone. It took a little while to get used to using it, but now I’d have a hard time living without it. Our brains are terrible at remembering todo lists. Offload it to the computer in your pocket!
Truck Update
Back in January I ordered an F150. It’s now more than four months later and a common question is “Where’s your truck?” The short answer is that I’m still waiting. I ordered the heavy duty payload option and that requires some special parts that were flagged in the ordering system as “late availability.” I knew this going in and I was prepared to wait, but ugh, it’s hard to wait so long. I’m praying that any day now I’ll hear from the dealer that the build has started. At that point I think it takes about 10 weeks to get the truck.
So I still have a long wait ahead of me. I know that down the road I’ll be happy that I waited for this feature, but right now, I question when it is worth it. One positive is that the longer I wait, the cheaper the truck gets. Incentives from the factory increase as the model year goes on and I get whatever incentives are available when the truck arrives. Also, Tyla and I have been making “truck payments” to ourselves for a while so this wait just means we have a smaller amount left to finance.
I eagerly await the day when I can post a picture of myself standing next to my truck!
Prayer Box
Church asked if I’d be willing to make a “prayer box” for church. The idea is that people can write down prayer requests on pieces of paper, put them in the box, and then Pastor will remember them in his prayers. There were no design requirements so I chatted about some ideas, got a thumbs up and I was off and running to Crosscut Hardwoods to pick up a nice hunk of 5/4 cherry.
I wanted to play with my box joint jig again so I decided to do box joints. Unfortunately my first attempt failed because I didn’t clamp it well and the box wasn’t square when I was done. Instead of waste all that nice cherry wood, I sawed off the joints, cut some new box joints and then glued it together. So the box ended up smaller than I intended but I think it worked ok.
For the lid, I wanted to try a panel raising bit. I picked one up from Rockler and carefully cut the profile on the lid. It’s a huge router bit so it’s a little scary to use. I slowed the router way down and nibbled at the cut until it was the depth that I needed. I added a very thin layer of wood on the bottom of the lid that perfectly fits inside the box. So when you put the lid on, it is always centered and won’t slide off.
To make the box a little more special, I took it to the laser cutter and etched the church logo into the front of it. Dad was here when I did that so it was a good excuse to show him the laser cutter. Thankfully my testing was spot on and the logo ended up perfectly centered.
Instead of having people lift off the top to insert their cards, I wanted to put a slot in the top. But why just do a straight slot? I made it a cross. This was trickier than I had intended and I had trouble centering the cuts. Thankfully I had started with a very small slot so I switched to a wider slot and was able to cover up my mistake.
The final step was making a base for it. That was just a chunk of cherry and I used the router to remove the bottom half of the board except for the four feet on the corner.
For the finish I used an equal mixture of boiled linseed oil, mineral oil and wipe on poly. Four coats of that with a scrub from a synthetic pad in between coats completed the project.
Talus Rocks Hike
All this nice weather had me itching to get out for a hike so Saturday morning we piled in the car and headed for Tiger Mountain. Instead of attempting the peak with a ~25 pound kid in a backpack, we did the Talus Rocks trail (#8 from Beyond Mt Si).
Elijah did a fantastic job on the trip. He rode calmly in the backpack the whole time and talked nonstop. The most common topic was about which trees had fallen down and which ones were “good strong trees.” I think he’s slightly nervous because we’ve seen some trees falling (even on a car) so this was his way of working through it.
We made pretty good time on the hike with only one quick stop to shed some layers. The trail from the main West Tiger 3 trail over to the Nook Trail was pretty much covered in trees and we bushwacked a bit around some closed areas. Eventually the deer path or whatever we were following ended up back on the main trail and we continued along. The nice thing about Tiger Mountain is that as long as you understand the basic layout of the main trails or if you have a map handy on your phone, it’s pretty hard to get lost because there are so many well-travelled and well-marked trails.
We covered 3.3 miles and averaged 2.4 mph. Hopefully this was just the first of many hikes for the season!
Bainbridge Island Day Trip
Last weekend was our sixth anniversary so I planned a fun day trip. Actually, when you have a 2 year old who still needs a nap, day trips are more like “morning trips.”
Elijah has been on a ferry before but he was very young and didn’t remember we took a trip over to Bainbridge Island on the ferry. Walking onto the ferry is almost always more convnient than driving because you don’t have to worry about not fitting onto the next boat. We parked our car in Seattle and caught the 8:45am ferry to Bainbridge. Comicon was going on that weekend so we saw a lot of people that were dressed up, including a guy in a full Venom costume that Elijah really enjoyed. Elijah was so excited about it that when we stopped to say high to the police man, Elijah had to tell him all about it. The police man didn’t miss a beat and said, “Oh yeah, Spiderman is helping me out today.”
The Bainbridge ferry is very convenient for walkers. It’s only about a half mile into an area with lots of shops and food. We stopped for about an hour at a children’s museum and then walked to The Madison Diner. It’s an authentic train car style diner from the Philadelphia area. Elijah thought it was pretty cool to eat in a train car and Tyla and I both enjoyed the food. We enjoyed the ferry ride back and Elijah zonked out as soon as we got into the car.
It always feels like so much work to plan something like this with a two year old in tow, but in reality, it was all pretty simple. We should do more of this!
Azure IP Blocking
A few days ago I noticed that my website was getting a little sluggish. It wasn’t much but it wasn’t as snappy as usual. I checked out the website dashboard on Azure and noticed that the number of requests to my server were steadily rising. A quick scan of the logs revealed that a single IP was flooding my server with requests. It was trying to hit the URL where I used to serve up CascadeSkier data so I doubt it was an intentional DOS attack, but the effect was ramping up to be similar.
I wrote previously about blocking traffic to Azure websites, but new features are always getting added so I looked around again. Indeed they have added the ability to block specific IPs. Check out the final section of ScottGu’s blog post for more info.
It was a one line configuration file change and the results were immediately apparent. Even if you don’t understand any of the geek gibberish that I just wrote, I bet you can figure out when I implemented the change:
Ubiquiti WiFi
Our house is just big enough (or has just enough walls) that a single WiFi router has a hard time fully covering the whole thing. Early last year, I added a second router downstairs with the same SSID as upstairs. That helped a bit, but it still had a problem. Basically your device connects to the strongest signal and then as you walk around the house, it struggles to stay connected to that same signal. It won’t automatically hop to the strongest signal. That finally got annoying enough that I upgraded to some access points from Ubiquiti. Ubiquiti makes enterprise grade network gear at consumer prices.
I purchased two Ubiquiti Networks UniFi AC LR AP devices. There are a couple different ones available but this seemed to fit the bill for me. I was particularly excited about the “zero handoff” roaming feature. A program is always running on one of your computers to analyze your wireless clients and hand them off to the appropriate access point. It does it so smoothly that even time-critical traffic like VoIP calls work fine. Unfortunately, after I got everything installed, I realized that the zero handoff feature only exists in some of their more expensive models.
But all was not lost. My reading informed me that the feature really isn’t that important if you set up your network properly. The key is to not have your access points overlap too much, and, if necessary, you can tell the access points to intentional drop traffic once they reach a certain signal strength. These access points will let me fine tune all of that to get the correct behavior. Additonally they also support beam steering which means that I can tell devices to prefer the faster 5GHz network if they support it.
I took this opportunitiy to redo my SSIDs so if you come over to my house, you’ll need to redo the wireless settings for your phone/tablet/laptop. But hopefully once you do, you’ll have faster Internet access. These new access points support 802.11ac and will serve up bits to you at up to 867 Mbps!
Bandsaw Box
As soon as I unpacked my bandsaw last summer, I was eager to try some projects that really made use of it’s unique capabilities. While I’ve done quite a bit of resawing, I still wanted to try to make a bandsaw box. Bandsaw boxes are generally curvy and they have drawers that perfectly fit the shape of the curve. If you’re a woodworker, it makes you stop and think “Wait… how did they do that?”
I received David Picciuto’s bandsaw book for Christmas and dug in. There are a series of builds and I started off at the beginning. I learned a lot while making the box and I know my next one will be better, but I still thought this would make a good gift for Mom. The wood is a combination of walnut and plywood. The interior is covered with black flocking. Happy Birthday, Mom!
27″ Monitor
I got a shiny new upgrade at work that included a Dell U2715H 27″ monitor. My old setup was three 24″ monitors. I have the one on the right turned in portrait orientation for reading long documents. The 27″ monitor replaced the one in the middle. It actually doesn’t look that much physically bigger because the bezel is so much narrower.
I’m really happy with it. The text is incredibly clear and the extra resolution gives a nice amount of extra real estate. I still think that a 30″ 4K monitor could be the ultimate desktop display but it will be a while before the price on those comes down.
Tesla Model 3
The concern is whether or not Tesla can deliver. It seems like Elon Musk’s plan from the beginning was to learn about electric cars with the early expensive models. Now we’re seeing the full gamble play out. This is make or break time for the company. Tesla can currently make about 50,000 cars per year so at that rate, it will take them six years to fill the orders and they aren’t even going to start shipping them until late 2017. With that many orders lined up, Tesla can go to investors and request a lot of money to build out even more factories so they should be able to ramp up production.
That’s a huge number of electric vehicles. Estimates put the total number of electric cars in the US around 410,000. Tesla sold about 63,000 of those. It’s pretty easy for people to back out of their orders and get their $1000 back, but if even half of the people buy the car, it’s a very sizeable percentage of the total market.
They’ll have to really bring down their production costs too. Car companies generally include research and development costs in the cost of their car. That’s how the companies can stay afloat. Tesla does NOT include R&D in the cost of their cars and even then they aren’t making much money on each one sold. It may be a viable business strategy in the beginning but at some point they have to turn the corner and really be a profitable company.
I hope they succeed and given all of the amazing things Elon Musk has accomplished, it’s hard to bet against them. That being said, this is a huge undertaking. It will be fun to watch!