Back around Thanksgiving, I hit up a sale at Home Depot and bought myself a 4 piece Ryobi One+ combo kit¹. After Christmas I went back to Home Depot and picked up the Ryobi Tool Bag. The tool bag came loaded with a nice assortment of drill bits and a racheting screwdriver with a vast collection of interchangable bits (phillips, flat-head, sqare and torx). The bag was just the right size to hold my drill, flashlight and radio. Since then the tools have sat around mostly gathering dust.

Today while out doing some shopping, we found a nice set of bathroom hangers (e.g. for towels & toiletpaper) on clearance for less than $20. The set has a brushed nickel finish which we really like and installing it helped me avoid cleaning out our guest room². The set installed very easily and I really got to try out my tools.

Things I liked:

• The magnetic strip on the base of the drill is fantastic for holding different drill bits, screws, whatever I need.
• The ratcheting screwdriver makes it quick and easy to install/remove screws.
• That tool bag really holds everything I need for most home improvement projects. The way it’s designed feels like somebody at Ryobi was sitting around their house wishing they had a bag to hold all the bits they’d ever be likely to need for a screwdriver and a drill.

Things I didn’t like:

• The keyless chuck on the drill poorly grips the bits.
• After 10+ years of apartment living, I’m out of practing with using a drill. Especially using a drill as an electric screwdriver and so I kind of stripped a couple screwheads. Ooops.
• The metal splinter I got in my thumb after stripping a couple of screwheads.
• The drill is heavier than I really like.³

¹ Mine was a slightly different kit as it came with a radio rather than the Corner Cat Finish Sander.
² I’m sooo going to be in trouble when my wife reads this.
³ My version of the kit uses the NiCd batteries which contributes the vast majority of the weight of the tool. At some point I’ll buy the 18v Lithium Upgrade Kit which should solve this complaint.

A Bit of Home Improvement with Ryobi Tools © Mark McKibben, Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 United States.

I carry a Leatherman Squirt P4 and once in a while, I take out of my pocket and set it on my desk. Either because it’s poking my leg or I’m using it for some reason or another. Today I had it sitting out and was concentrating on our current big project, headphones on and oblivious to my surroundings.

When I suddenly noticed two of my co-workers leaning over my cube wall, looking at me. One of them noticed the Squirt sitting on my desk and started talking about how cool it was. Then our supervisor walked over and mentioned how I was popular today. The other of my co-workers piped up with “We were just admiring his tool” and all of us got the giggles. We thought about all the various ways she could have said that…

• “Admiring his pocket tool”
• “Admiring his Leatherman”
• “Admiring his Squirt”

And decided there was no way we were not going to laugh at the comment.

Admiring My Tool © Mark McKibben, Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 United States.

Another thing I like is Magnatune. This is a website that allows you to listen to MP3s of all the albums they offer for sale as CDs, plus they let you podcast with their music without paying for some ridiculous license. They’ve got a wide selection of music (e.g. blues, ambient, rock, medieval, etc…) and when I’m looking for something new to listen to; they’re the first place I go.

In fact tonight, I started poking around their site for some new music when I ran across this post on their founder’s blog:

A few months ago, the developers of amaroK (the amazingly gorgeous music player for Linux and Unix, that really does give iTunes a run for its money) asked me about Magnatune cooperating on their new release of their version 1.3. Their idea was to make a self-booting linux image, that boots into a linux desktop, with amaroK running and some Magnatune music included.

It’s like Reese’s Peanut Butter cups, they’re getting peanut butter (Magnatunes) mixed in with my chocolate (amaroK)! Nice move people! :D

amaroK & Magnatune © Mark McKibben, Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 United States.

I thought about it for a minute, but I knew there’d be more chances for Pampered Chef parties and I doubted I’d have any better chance of getting to see Mr. Campbell in person. So after a quick shower¹, Bryon and I hopped into the car and drove into Iowa City. We got to the site about 40 minutes prior to the event began. We waited around and it turned out one of my co-workers was also there². Then about 10 minutes before Mr. Campbell was scheduled to begin speaking; they opened one set of the doors into the auditorium and let everybody in. And naturally, it wasn’t the door we’d had been waiting at. *sigh*

Eventually, everybody was inside and mostly seated but then the organizers explained how the signing procedure was supposed to work and said the new book was for sale at the back of the auditorium. So we ended up giving up our fairly good seats to go get in another line. It took a while to get through the line, but it was good that we both went to the line as Laura³ showed up looking for us. Apparently, she decided the party wasn’t her cup of tea. While we were waiting in line; she kindly thanked me for “being so god-damn tall”.

There was a considerable amount of waiting in line to get the book, but eventually we all got our copies and headed back to find new seats (the good seats we’d had were long gone). A bit after that Mr. Campbell started taking questions. It turns out he’s a very charismatic speaker. There were a number of questions about him working with Sam Raimi, but the only one that really stuck in my mind was:

Questioner: When working on Spiderman, did you hang out with Tobey Maguire?
Bruce Campbell: Why would I?

*grin*

After far too little time had passed, Mr. Campbell stopped taking questions and then made a short speech promoting B-movies as the only place that is still creative in Hollywood.

…getting bitten by a radioactive spider is a b-movie!

After the speech, they started having people come up to get their books signed. Bryon & I had relatively low numbers but when we were going up they weren’t actually checking peoples numbers. Eventually I got up there and had Mr. Campbell sign my book; but I felt like a complete twit, the entire time I was there. I mean I have enjoyed all of his movies that I’ve seen and what I read of the book while I was in line was very amusing but I didn’t really have anything to say to him. He was very polite to me, but it was a rather uncomfortable moment for me. Signed memorabilia is nice to have I suppose, but it doesn’t do much for me. To tell the truth, I’m not entirely sure why I went up to have him sign the book. Other than I’d waited in line to get the sticker saying I could do so. *shrug* Life, go figure.

After that, we took off and headed off to meet up with some other friends for some RPGing. When we got there they were still finishing up with the Pampered Chef party and I got to munch down some of the leftovers⁴. Then it was game time and afterwards off to Old Chicago for dinner. All in all, a very pleasant Sunday. :)

¹ Bryon arrived before we were expecting anybody. And yes, I’m extra-specially lazy on the weekend; so if I’m not expecting company I will hang around the apartment without getting myself up and ready for the day.
² That would be Quincy for those that are curious.
³ Another friend of ours. One who was supposed to be at the Pampered Chef party.
⁴ Ah, breakfast at 3pm.…

What A Day © Mark McKibben, Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 United States.

Have you been using Firefox for several months? And during that time noticed that it’s taking longer & longer for the Save File dialog box to come up? Then likely, you’ve got the same problem that I’ve had. Fortunately, there’s an easy (but slow) fix for this.

Instructions:

1. Open Firefox.
2. Go into Tools -> Options (or Edit -> Preferences).
3. Click on the Privacy icon in the left-hand pane.
4. In the right-hand pane, click on Download Manager History.
5. Click the Clear button. At this point, Firefox may appear to have crashed but in reality it should be going through and clearing out all of the items from your download history. On my home machine, this took several minutes to complete but I’ve been running Firefox since v0.9 and have never cleared the download history before.
6. Optionally, you may wish to change the “Remove files from the Download Manager:” from “Manually” to “When Firefox exits”. To help prevent this slow down from happening again.

This fix works on both the Linux & Windows versions of Firefox. I would presume it also works for the OS X version, but I (sadly enough) do not have a Mac to try it out on.

Firefox Tip © Mark McKibben, Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 United States.

Not from Pukka
• Howto: Digital Black and White
• My BlogPulse Neighborhood

Pukka’s Links of the Week © Mark McKibben, Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 United States.

Earlier this week the first episode of the new Doctor Who series, by the BBC, was leaked onto the internet. I was able to obtain a copy and give it a quick whirl¹. I have to say that I’ve not enjoyed watched the Doctor so much since Tom Baker played him and while I still miss that massive scarf; the new Doctor’s look suits very well. At least from what one can tell in a ~40 minute episode, Mr. Eccleston seems to have captured that playfully annoying essence which is so esstenial to portraying the Doctor properly. I look forward to seeing more of this new season and hope that it will be quickly released to DVD (to make it easier to get here in the States).

¹ Actually, it wasn’t all that quick as I was trying to figure a way to make the AVI file into a SVCD. I came really close with Tovid but the quality wasn’t all that great to begin with and the video was totally corrupted towards the end. Still, I did get a lot closer with Tovid’s CLI tools than with Tovid GUI, so maybe with some more work I can figure this out. That’d be great as I’d really like to burn some quick&dirty SVCDs using CD-RWs to watch various downloads on my real TV rather than my PC. What can I say, the futon is way more comfortable than my desk chair.

Doctor.… who? © Mark McKibben, Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 United States.

Web application of the year

We asked forumgoers to choose the best web application or development framework of the year.

Web-based applications provide interaction for all users regardless of platform or location. If you can connect to the web, you can use it. Forums, blogs, administration tools, collaboration frameworks; there were many excellent options to choose from in 2004.

Winner: WordPress

Let’s face it. Blogs are in fashion, and why not? Vanity knows no bounds, and there are some people who actually do something productive with theirs. From the influence of blogs on the coverage of the US presidential elections to every random teenager who has problems with their partner/parent/teacher/cat, blogs are out there allowing your most intimate feelings to be shared with random people at wifi hotspots. WordPress is the most prominent rising star of weblog software, completely free and with a large and active community. Styles, plugins and hacks are readily available, with problems such as comment spamming being addressed far more rapidly than competing applications.

WordPress is Web application of the year! © Mark McKibben, Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 United States.

On Fritz¹, I’ve used APT to load all sorts of extra/newer programs and am running KDE 3.3.1. It’s pretty and comes with lots of eye candy. Alphonse² isn’t as beefy as Fritz is; so I figured something with a tad less eye-candy would be easier on its aging CPU. I decided I’d still run SuSE Linux 9.0 Pro but would use GNOME. SuSE 9.0 doesn’t integrate their tools into GNOME as well as they do into KDE but after I got APT up and running on it, that wasn’t much of a problem anymore. After that it was simply a matter of updating everything on the system and then setting up the Apache/MySQL/PHP correctly. Unfortunately, I’d screwed that up when initially installing Linux on the box and had to remove all of Apache & reinstall it to correct the problem. RPM made it fairly simple but I’m not convinced that I’ve completely fixed the problem. *shrug* It does seem to be working fine for what I want though, which is a portal webserver with Bluefish & GiMP installed so I can do web design while away from my home PC. Being able to do that will allow me to work on redesigns for CB.net and projects for some of my friends when I get stuck going out to my company’s home office for meetings and what not.

And you know what, I feeling pretty darn proud of myself & my shiny, new OS on Alphonse. That feeling lasted for all of about half a day when I saw people at work who’d bought new laptops on Black Friday. *sigh* Gadget envy³ is an evil thing.

Oh yeah, the observant ones amoung my 3 readers will notice that there are a couple of posts entered by Ariesna. That’s my fiance and she’ll be posting the occassional recipie on the site. As far as I know, she’ll only post recipies that we’ve already tried out but you’ll have to read those entries to know for sure.

¹ Fritz is the name of my home-built desktop PC. Why are you looking at me like that? What do you mean normal people don’t name their computers?
² That would be my laptop naturally. Named after the younger Elric brother in Full Metal Alchemist but it’s also a tribute to Patlabor. :)
³ AWelkin: Envy was my top sin when taking that 7 deadly sins quiz from your journal. Gee, can’t say I didn’t see that one coming.

Bah © Mark McKibben, Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 United States.

WordPress Comment Preview © Mark McKibben, Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 United States.