Pomegranate Shandy
Photo Challenge: Tour Guide
While scrolling through the camera roll on my phone I realized I don’t take a lot of photos near home, so playing a tour guide for this week’s challenge wasn’t easy.
While I really hate winter, living in Michigan I’ve been able to experience the 4 seasons throughout my life. These next two photos are from my yard.
Dryer Cures the Chills
I was cold all day. When I grabbed the laundry, I got the idea to throw my workout clothes in the dryer for 10 minutes before changing and heading to the gym. Why didn’t I think of this years ago?
WordPress Date Change Redirects
WordPress has properly redirected posts when you change the slug for a long time. For example, earlier this month I published a post a day earlier than planned. I forgot to change the date I was using in the post’s title though, so the original URL was:
nick.blog/2018/01/04/link-dump-2018-01-05/
Notice link-dump-2018-01-05 there, but the publish date was 2018/01/04. When I corrected the post’s title and updated the post slug, WordPress saved the info and properly redirected that URL to the new one:
nick.blog/2018/01/04/link-dump-2018-01-04/
Now imagine the date a post is published is important to your site though or some scenario where you change the date of a post after it’s already out there on the Internet. My example above is a little confusing for this since I’m also using a date in the post title. Continuing with it though, what if I really wanted the post to be associated with January 5th as the publish date (and I had left the title the same as it was originally)? The post’s new URL would be:
nick.blog/2018/01/05/link-dump-2018-01-05/
Which is fine right? Not quite. All of the links already pointing to the original URL that had /2018/01/04/ would be broken and 404. There was a WordPress bug ticket opened about this 7 years ago! Well, as of yesterday, with the WordPress 4.9.3 Maintenance Release, this issue finally has a fix. When you change the date of a published post, WordPress will save meta data so it can properly redirect the old date’s URL to the new one. 💥💥
Big thanks to Gary for helping me with this fix. It’s been years since I received props in a WordPress release and I need to make sure the next isn’t so far away.
Aluminum Branding Iron
If you watched the video about the bandsaw box, you may have noticed that I burned my initials in to the bottom of the box. I got the idea to leave my “stamp” on anything I make out of wood and of course a branding iron is the natural choice.
I’d set aside an old metal bracket with the original idea of writing my name and the year and then carving it in with a Dremel.
I quickly realized it was going to take forever with such hard metal, especially with so much detail. So I shifted gears with the plans of making a simple one with my initials and 18 for the year.
I stopped at Menards hoping to find some solid brass or aluminum. In the welding section the thickest piece of aluminum they had was a half-inch square in 3 foot long pieces. I grabbed one for about $12.
It was hard to write out the 4 characters (NM & 18) in such a small space, but I gave it a try.
I screwed up when I chopped off 1/4 of the 8; it was just too small of an area for so many details. So I cut that chunk off and started over with just NM.
Turned out pretty good and it was easy without the letters having any round edges or inside spaces.
I found out heating with a blow torch sucks and got the idea to use my old soldering iron as the heating element. I had to do a ton of filing to get the stem down to size, but it snugly fits into the soldering iron, which is nice so I didn’t have to drill a hole for a bolt or set screw of some kind and I can still use this as a soldering iron as intended if I need to.
Instead of a branding iron should this be called a branding aluminum?
3-way Switch Wiring
I get confused every time I work on a 3-way switch. After I remember to make a diagram to lay out all of the wires I have it makes sense. This was for a Wi-Fi connected switch and “remote” pairing I installed yesterday.
Unboxing & Assembly of HackerBox #0027: Cypherpunk
Here’s the full list of the box contents from the Instructable.
- HackerBoxes #0027 Collectable Reference Card
- Black Pill STM32F103C8T6 Module
- STLink V2 USB Programmer
- Full-Color 2.4 inch TFT Display – 240×320 Pixels
- 4×4 Matrix Keypad
- 830 Point Solderless Breadboard
- 140 Piece Wire Jumper Kit
- 2 U2F Zero Soldering Challenge Kits
- Large 9×15 cm Green Prototying PCB
- Exclusive Vinyl GawkStop Spy Blockers
- Exclusive Aluminum Magnetic Swivel Webcam Cover
- Exclusive EFF Patch
- Privacy Badger Decal
- Tor Decal
I haven’t done an assembly video on a HackerBox in months. I have received some comments that they are really helpful for beginners, so I’m going to try to do one each month, which will also push me to complete the kits sooner. With all of the surface mount components this is a really good box to start with.
Walnut Bandsaw Box
My buddy Kevin told me about a local shop that sells woodworking tools, supplies, and wood so we took a ride out to Barn Door Lumber Company a few weeks ago. While looking through their scrap pile, this butcher block cutoff caught my eye. It was roughly 1.5 x 6 x 23 inches.
I had bought a 10″ bandsaw (RIKON 10-305) not too long before and hadn’t used it yet.
I thought it would be a fun project to chop up this piece on the table saw, glue it into a large block, and then create a bandsaw box. That’s when you create a box out of a block of wood by only making cuts with a bandsaw. Seemed like a good project to get my feet wet. My sister’s birthday was coming up so it would also make a good gift.
The first thing I did was square up the edge.
Then I sliced 5 pieces. I’m still learning a lot and forgot to set a stop block on my sled, which would have helped with getting pieces that were exactly the same size. The order of operations and remembering little tricks like that are what I’m struggling with the most on this woodworking adventure.
I glued each piece.
Quickly realized I only needed glue on 4 pieces. I told myself the last two pieces would just get a really good bond. Then I clamped everything together.
Of course I forgot to flip that last piece around so that 2 glued sides were facing each other. The glue side ended up facing out and I put 3 clamps in place before remembering. So I backed off the clamps and added a piece of parchment paper.
After squaring up an edge on the table saw I was ready for some work on the bandsaw. Or so I thought…
After another trip to the table saw I finally had my block of wood. I was ready for the bandsaw!
I quickly found out the blade that came with the saw wasn’t up for the job because it couldn’t make the turns I wanted. I got everything cut but there were several mistakes. Learned a lot though and had fun with the project.
Scraper Restoration
Picked this old paint scraper at an estate sale for $1 with the plan to use it for scraping wood glue.
