Kids Picnic Table

At one point growing up if you asked me what I wanted to do my answer was that I wanted to be a carpenter.  I liked building things, I still do.  Of course, as I got older I realized that being a construction worker was probably going to be hard work so my tune changed.  That and my fascination with computers resulted in me being a software developer.  I still do like to build things.

The other weekend Jenn suggested that I build a picnic table for our daughter Alison.  It seemed like a neat father/daughter project.  Jenn dug up some plans from the internet and we built one.

Other than an electric drill, you can do this all with hand tools.  If you’re hard core – you can use a manual drill (I’ve actually got one!) and do without power tools.  Of course, as we’re cutting wood here you can get into power saws etc, but as I wanted to let my 3 year old participate it seemed like the fewer power tools involved the better.

Total cost was about $40.  I used white cedar from Lanark Cedar and weatherproof deck screws that I got at the local hardware store.  It took a couple of hours, but if your more organized and need fewer juice breaks you can probably get it built pretty quick.

I originally thought that the 1×3 and 1×6 wood called for by the plans would be pretty skimpy, but as a whole the table is pretty solid.  The table top is about 19″ off the ground, making it impractical for an adult to sit at it.  Thus, if you’re the right size to sit at the table – it will hold your weight.  We actually made the table / seats about 6 inches longer than the plans called for.  Overall it was a very satisfying weekend project.

CoolMax 3.5″ IDE Enclosure Review

A year or two ago, it was cheaper to pair together a USB enclosure and a drive than to buy a pre-built external drive.  Now with 1TB external drives around the $200 price point – if you want external storage, just buy a pre-built unit.

Of course, you might be like myself and have a stack of hard drives sitting on your desk.  I had a 60G drive looking for a home, and a 40G just sitting here gathering dust along with a handful of sub 10G drives pulled from older machines.  The 60G came out of an old server and it was a pretty loud drive, thus the reason I don’t have it sitting in my desktop machine which has a nice quiet drive in it.

In order to tinker with the NSLU2, I needed an external USB drive.  Instead of laying out a few hundred bucks, I figured the $21 CoolMax from ShopRBC would work until I needed more than 60G of storage.

I didn’t expect very much for the price, but the box was pretty sturdy.  Reviews on the net seemed to be pretty mixed, with a number of people having real problems with it.  I had no intention of using the one touch backup facility, or installing any of the supplied windows software – so that wasn’t a factor in the purchase.  Even for normal users, there is no reason to use the supplied software if you just want to use it as a drive – the USB enclosure should be detected and work without any problems without drivers on most modern (XP, Vista, Mac or Linux) systems.

Included in the box (working top to bottom, left to right): Power adapter, screw driver, usb cable, power cord (I got 2!), a CD with drivers, plastic stand, drive rails, manual, and the enclosure itself.

The screwdriver deserves special mention, its actually not junk.  The black plastic rails are designed to fit into the screw holes in your drive and slide into the enclosure.  Hooking things up is pretty obvious, but things are a bit of a tight fit.  Generally it feels fairly well designed.

Of course – it turns out my 1st unit was DOA which sent me back to the store for a new unit, this took a few days but the folks at ShopRBC made it pretty much hassle free.  The 2nd unit was another brand new unit, the only difference was this box didn’t have a bonus 2nd power cord – oh, and it works flawlessly.

The enclosure doesn’t provide any ventilation, and it does warm up to the touch – but no more so than the drive would running in a PC.  The power cord is a bit short, but again this isn’t the end of the world.  There are power and drive activity lights on the box.  Overall it does exactly what I’m looking for, at a very reasonable price.

If you’ve got an old drive around consider picking up an enclosure, just be aware there are IDE and Sata enclosures and you need to get the right type.

Reverse DNS

My previous ISP supported static IPs, but I never bothered to chase after them to provide a reverse DNS mapping for my domain.  Now that I’m using NCF DSL, the admins there are able to accommodate my request for a reverse DNS mapping.

Having a proper PTR record isn’t critical.  For years, even prior to having a static IP, I was hosting a webserver using dynamic DNS.  Once I had a static IP, I was able to reliably host my own email – however there were a few friends who’s ISPs were pretty aggressive about tagging email from my domain as spam.  While my static IP wasn’t on any blacklists, it didn’t pass the Forward Confirmed Reverse DNS test (FCrDNS).

As of this weekend, lowtek.ca will pass a FCrDNS test – which in theory will help email flow more smoothly.

Most of my friends have opted for much simpler configurations.  Using either a hosting company to provide their domain services, or in at least one case using the free version of Google Apps For Your Domain to handle email.  Certainly much simpler – but from my point of view, not nearly as much fun.