Just a quick note that as of midnight EST on 1/18/2012, I will be taking down and blacking out the website in protest of SOPA (H.R. 3261) and PIP (S.968) legislation.  ….not that I get a lot of traffic around here, just doing my part.  This will remain in effect for 24 hours, with the exception of the IP address ranges I have defined of known spammers.  You will still get redirected to the specified shock sites I have defined, you dirty so and so’s.

I agree with opponents of the bill.  it violates the First Amendment, is Internet censorship, will cripple the Internet, and will threaten whistle-blowing and other free speech actions.

More info can be found on Wikipedia, which, by the way, will also be blacked out:
SOPA: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stop_Online_Piracy_Act
PIP: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PROTECT_IP_Act

If you agree with me, feel free to contact your relevant Representative and Senators that represent you in Congress.  Don’t know who that is?  Find out here: http://www.congressmerge.com/onlinedb/

Thanks for your support.

Recently, I started designing a piece of hardware (more on that in a future post), and decided to release it as open source.  In Eagle, I began looking for available symbols and silkscreen images to make it a little easier on myself.  My search initially led me to a post over at MightyOhm, where Jeff talked about a ULP available for creating the logo on your board, written by Bill Westfield and available here.  Also feel free to read the initial thread on the Open Hardware Summit website.  The ULP actually does a fantastic job of drawing the logo and allows you to specify the scale and other things without too much trouble. (more…)

Although I don’t really participate in “The Wood Whisperer Guild” as an active building member, mainly because of time, I do retain a membership for the great content.  Recently, they became associated with Livestrong, and last year, Woodworkers Fighting Cancer managed to raise a donation of $10,000 dollars (USD) for the American Cancer Society.  This year, they are donating 5% of all proceeds from guild memberships to Livestrong.  If you have relatives and friends that are battling cancer (let’s face it, ALL of us do), this is something that probably relates to you.  If you’re a woodworker, use your talents to help the cause!  I’m proud to be adding my support for Woodworkers Fighting Cancer as a permanent fixture to this website.

My first Op/Ed piece……

You may have noticed that I have added a “Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License” to the website.  Some of you may also have noticed that this is the strictest license available, and I would like to address that.

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I spent a while today replacing a mailbox.  Actually, it took longer to make the signs……

I have no idea why I haven’t written about this until now, since the video have been together for almost a year now, but enjoy.  Here’s build highlights from a 1960’s DeWalt Powershop that I put back into good working condition after I inherited it from my father-in-law.

If you linked here directly, feel free to go back and read part 1 for background on this project, located here.  If you’re still with us from Part 1, Thanks!

Recently, I filled a 4 foot rolling rack with equipment.  A 4 core IBM eSeries server with 2 TB of SCSI storage running ESXi is one of the main components.  I always like to keep the server online for various sundry items, but it usually sits largely idle, even with two Red Hat Linux instances running on it while I am studying.  This is somewhat of a waste in my opinion because the server is sitting idle with spinning fans while not doing much of anything.  A wonderful solution to this is have ESXi run a guest, specifically for the folding application.  If set up correctly, you can even have ESXi dedicate as much of the machine’s resources for CPU and memory as possible during downtime, and have it throttle it back when other applications are working on mission critical things.  I’m looking at you, small business and enterprise owners.

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Around this time last year, I made a post about helping the environment through a service called “Earth911″ (See that post here).  This post isn’t about the environment, nor is it about woodworking, electronics, weather, or any of the other weird stuff you’ve come to expect from my writings.  This is about helping the thing we all hold most dear in this life: ourselves.  Readers in my audience who are on the techie side of things will likely have already known about this for years, but I also know I have others in my audience who are not.

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Hey Everyone, thanks for visiting my site! If you linked here from “The Daily Matt” (I’m noticing A LOT of referrer traffic in my logs), let me be the first to welcome you on your arrival!  I have taken the liberty of organizing all of the hand planer restoration articles into one concise source.  Again, thanks for visiting, and I hope you enjoy the restoration articles!

Refurbishing Old Hand Planes Part 1: Flattening the Sole
Refurbishing Old Hand Planes Part 2: Truing the Frog
Refurbishing Old Hand Planes Part 3: Modifying the throat and chip breaker
Refurbishing Old Hand Planes Part 4: Sharpening the iron

I’ve got some things that were from past projects that are up for sale.  Take a look at my sale page to see if any of it catches your fancy!

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