Cue the Dramatic Music

It was Lancaster PA, October something something 2011 and in a stunning turn of events that rocked my world to it's very foundation.... I didn't make the cut. Obviously I need quite a bit more training.

Pffftttt stop being so dramatic; let me spin you a yarn: In mid-August, I suffered some fairly debilitating muscle spasms that rendered my right arm mostly useless. By the end of September (6 weeks later), the pain had subsided to the point where I was finally able to drive a car.

Now, at about 8 weeks later, I can look in the mirror and see a noticeable lack of muscle mass in my right shoulder and arm. Apparently the muscles had atrophied from lack of use. Time to bring those muscles back!

The 3 Point Plan to be Hella Sick Rippin

Oh yea!!!!!!
To put my plan into action, I needed to cut up some ugly old shorts so that I could sort of make cubes of fabric. Once I had my basic pattern, I sewed that crap up into little bags and filled the bags with the filling from some diving weights.

The final product: three soft fabric bags that weight one pound each and are ugly eye-sores.

Put the Plan to Work

Since I have already typed the word "plan" a few times, you should now have the theme to the A-Team playing in your head. if you don't have the theme playing in your head, something is wrong with you.

The Training

1. Put on a sweet wizard cap (any hat with a feather in it: feathers make everything magical)
2. Take off your shoes
3. juggle while walking around Petaluma

How is this a 3 point plan? I'm glad you asked.

1. juggling improves my hand eye coordination
2. juggling 3 one pound bags for 10 minutes is quite a nice workout for my shoulder
3. walking around barefoot will toughen up my feet (Lancaster gave me blisters)

How exactly is this training for a Beard and Mustache championship? Hey! Just because it isn't related in any way, shape, or form, doesn't mean wuggling (walking and juggling) isn't an important aspect of training for a facial hair contest.... and most importantly, it is fun.

Now quit reading and go do something completely unrelated to anything you should be preparing for.

After re-purposing a larger case with more storage for the server on my home network and filling the server with my ripped DVDs, I figured it was about time to replace my media playback machine with a machine that was actually capable of decoding my rips without running the CPU at 100%.

Gather Some Components

The case for the new machine is box that was part of a Wild Turkey holiday gift set: a cheaply crafted piece of crap made of low grade wood, with a clear plastic cover.

The Electronics

• Dual core 1.8Ghz Atom processor on a mini-itx motherboard
• 2 x 2Gb RAM
• A far too powerful power supply
• 80Gb SATA laptop hard-drive that I pulled out of a busted laptop

Because this machine is going to be fanless, I decided to layout the components in a way that would maximize convection cooling. What this means, is that the component that generates the most heat needs to be closest to the exhaust and the most temperature sensitive component needs to be located by the air intake.

Cutting, Drilling, Bending, JB-Welding

First things first: the hinged lid needed to be removed so I could muck with the inside of the box more easily.

1. After aligning all of the internals, I traced where the metal port plate is supposed to go and then cut... not a bad fit.
2. A lot of small holes where drilled on both sided of the box. Technically, it was the top and bottom that were drilled ( the machine is going to be on end so as to provide the best convection airflow.
3. Those metal things with the points are my component stand offs and I bent the points down before using JB-weld to attach them to the inside of the box.

Fire Up the Soldering Iron

• That two pronged thing-a-ma-bobber is my power switch. Because it consists of two switches in series, both switches must be pressed in order to power the machine on and (most importantly) power off the machine. The last switch I put in/on a machine has a tendency to accidentally get pressed when I least expect it; like when I open my scanner.
• A red LED was soldered to some wire and wrapped with electrical tape. This is the Power On indicator and bit a sandpaper helped diffuse the light coming out of the LED.

Put It All Together

This is the mostly finished machine with the lid put back on. The locking clasp on the side had to be moved, but it still functions perfectly.

At this point, everything was going extremely well and the computer looked absolutely fantastic, so I figured something was terribly wrong. After connecting everything and pressing the power buttons .... nothing happened. Bummer.

Note to self: when powering up a computer, make sure it is plugged in properly.

After properly plugging in my power converter, the machine booted and I installed (Arch Linux)[http://www.archlinux.org/].

Installed

The final resting place for the machine is on the wall next to the TV.

• Don't be afraid of the dark
• Computers are just fancy clocks
• The two power switches are just barely visible on the right side of the machine.

Still to do: The audio out can use a smaller adapter and the current external USB wireless adapter needs to be replaced by an internal PCI-Express mini card. I need to either hack the XMBC to properly handle my NES controller, or I need to write my own software for browsing and playing media from my collection.

Due to the lack of a fan, this computer is silent; therefor, I have named it Wind.

Now quit reading, and think of wind related things.

like:

• What's next? A computer named Earth and a computer named Fire?
• Make 3 more, and Crom will laugh at them.

A few days ago on Google+, some friends posted pictures of the chili sauce they made. Not wanted to be left out of the awesome-sauce party, I asked for the recipe.

Although the directions for the chili sauce are in German, there are plenty of pictures on the page, and my web browser is configured to translate non-english webpages for me. Awesome!

Gather the ingredients

Since I didn't want my sauce to be very red in color, I used a mix of red and green chilis and diverted from the recipe slightly.

• 1 Red bell pepper
• 8 Green serrano chilis
• 4 cloves of garlic ( most things need more garlic )
• a bit of ginger
• 1 lil red bastard of a chili that my buddy grew ( it is the hottest of the bunch)
• 125 ml garlic red wine vinegar
• 1 cup of dextrose (priming sugar is the only sugar I have at home)
• 500 ml water

lost in translation

Step 3 is brutal.
German: Auch die Knoblauchzehen und die Chilis in grobe Stücke schneiden. Danach nicht vergessen, die Augen zu reiben und in der Nase zu bohren. Nur so kommt man zu der Vorfreude auf die spätere Schärfe der Sauce!!

English: Also, the garlic cloves and chillies cut into chunks. Then do not forget to rub your eyes and picking your nose. Only one comes to the anticipation of the later sharpness of the sauce!

Not wanting to veer to far from the original recipe, after I chopped the chilis and garlic, I immediately started to rub my eyes. Although the pain made me forget to pick my nose, I did manage to take what could arguably be the least becoming picture of Yours Truly ever taken.

the finished product

After blending and reducing my mixture, I had almost enough chili sauce to fill my 16oz jar.

The Taste

The various ingredients certainly give this sauce a distinct and excellent flavor. It starts with the sweet, which fades to a garlic/ginger flavor, and ends with the lingering heat of the hot chilis.

For future chili sauces, I plan to skip the sugar and use a variety of fruits and sweet vegetables, as well as different types of chilis.

Now quit reading, and go skip step 3.

On one of the forums I frequent, there was a discussion about using a QR Code as a forum avatar. And I thought "Damn, I should put a qr code that links to my website on a t-shirt".

The Code

First things first, get a QR Code that links to http://www.jezra.net
Simple enough. Now I just need to transfer this to a t-shirt.

The Stencil

The code is a grid of 21 squares by 21 squares. So I grabbed some butcher paper from Petaluma Market and drew a 21x21 grid on the paper. The grid spacing is half an inch per square. I really should have used the metric system.

Why butcher paper? one side of the butcher paper is lightly waxed and after cutting the stencil I will iron the stencil onto a t-shirt. This will give me nice crisp lines.

Is that a Dungeons & Dragons map?

The code is black on white, but since I was putting the code on a black shirt, I needed to mark the negative spaces that would need to be removed.

After a couple of screw ups, I think I have everything mapped out.

Laying It Out

With my trusty left-handed scissors, I cut out all of the pieces and arranged the pieces on the t-shirt in preparation for the iron.

White Fabric Paint

After using an iron to affix the paper to the t-shirt, I began slopping on fabric paint to create the white pattern of the QR Code.

Amazingly, all of the fabric paint went where I wanted it to go. That is to say, I didn't spill any paint or make a mess.

Showing It Off

1. Let the paint dry
2. Peel off the butcher paper
3. Use a hot iron to fix the paint to the fabric
4. Find a sexy model to show off the shirt

When I told my buddy about this project, he said "just have Kinko's print the image of the code onto transferable paper", to which I replied "no, this way will be more interesting". Yea, well this way was a pain. I probably should have listened to my buddy.

While I'm reminiscing, I might as well add that if I were to do it all over again, I would definitely use a t-shirt that actually fits me. Why the hell was there a plain black medium t-shirt at my place?

Now quit reading, and go listen to your buddy. Oh yea, now I need to find out if it works...

Due to an unfortunate series of events, Shemp ( my homemade banjo ) is out of commission. However, I recently purchased a used Sovereign banjo that needed a bit of work to get into a somewhat decent playing condition. One thing I really wanted for this banjo was a strap. You know, just in case I want to wander around the block while picking a tune.

For my banjo strap, I wanted something fairly easy to remove and very easy on the wallet. For two bucks spent at the thrift store, and bits of stuff lying around my home, I had a pretty sweet banjer strap in no time.

Four Bottle caps

Beer bottle caps, hot glue, and magnets make great bottle cap fridge magnets, but that's not what I'm making right now. From the bottle cap collection, I selected two Red Tails, a PBR, and a Highlife.

Gettin Hammered!

All four of the caps was hammered flat. The Red Tail caps flattened nice and clean, the other two.... well not so much. Notice that the PBR cap is a Jack of Diamonds? That was intentional.

Stuck Together

The flat caps where paired up and a hole what punched through their centers. To keep things neat and to cover any sharp edges, an eyelet was popped into the center of the stacked caps.

The actual "strap"

Two dollars at Sack's Thrift Avenue purchased a leather belt. Damn, I'm busting the bank on this one. A slit the length of the flat caps diameter was cut into each end of the belt and a small hole was punched for good measure.

Hold on

Some red leather cord was knotted at one end, fed through the cap eyelet, looped through the rim bolt and over the caps to secure the whole thing nicely. It's quite easy to remove and adjust. This was done twice.

Done

"Button" the caps through both ends of the belt, throw that baby over the shoulder and frail some Cripple Creek on the front porch!

It is really weird to play standing up, as I am so accustomed to easily seeing the strings and frets when sitting.

Now quit reading, and go parse the following with lilypond:

\version "2.12.2"
\header {
  title =   "~$ sudo modprobe" 
  composer =  "Fabian Scherschel & Dan Lynch"
  copyright = "Creative Commons Attribution-Share-Alike 3.0"
}
melody = \relative c' {
  \key e \minor
  \time 4/4
  \numericTimeSignature
  e4 d8 e4 d8 e[ fis] | % 1
  g2. b4 | % 2
  a2. r8 b8 ~ | % 3
  b8 a g a g a g fis | % 4
  e4 d8 e4 d8 e[ fis] | % 5
  g2. ~ g8 fis | % 6
  d1 ~ | % 7
  d2 r | % 8
  \bar "|."
}
\score {
  \transpose c' c
  \context TabStaff = "banjer" <<
    \set TabStaff.stringTunings = #banjo-open-g-tuning
    \set Staff.instrumentName = #"Banjo"
    \context TabVoice = "banjer" { \melody }
  >>
  \layout {}
}

...and thank you Dr. Kulp

My buddy is, amongst other things, quite an image fanatic. Aside from taking a lot of pictures, he also likes to do things with pictures, and one of the things he does with pictures is turn them into stickers.

Here is my picture, my buddy's scissors (they are not lefthanded), and my buddy's roll of double sided adhesive that will turn any image into a sticker with a peel off back.

A properly sized piece of double sided tape was applied to the back of my image

Having one big sticker is not the desired outcome, so using the righthanded bastard scissors, I cut out one of the duplicated images of my head.

Awesome Possum!

After this picture was taken, I went home and used proper scissors to cut out the other two Jezra images.

Why Yes; that is the Nokia N810 that I purchased on Ebay. Again, yes; the nokia is resting upon a torn black t-shirt and some ugly old shorts that no longer fit me.

The N810 has a wonderful screen that I fear will get scratched to hell if it stays in my pocket for too long. For portability reasons, I'm going to need a screen protector or, even better, a Nokia Coozie.

First things first, cut out a large strip of fabric from the t-shirt. Follow this by cutting a large strip of that ghastly fabric from the shorts.

Pin the pieces of fabric together and then sew the fabric together. This will make it easier to handle.

That's a lot of pins. Hopefully the screen will respond to bloodied fingers.

After wrapping the fabric around the N810, it is possible to determine where to sew the fabric in order to make the beginning shape of the coozie. After sewing and cutting off the excess fabric, things are starting to really take shape.

I left plenty of extra fabric on the length-wise measurement so that I would have some slack to make hemming easier.

Putting the N810 in the almost coozie, I marked where I needed to fold and hem the opening, and like Riker does after Picard says "Make it so", I made is sew.
Yes, I made a Star Trek sewing joke. Engage!

After hemming the coozie, half of the extra fabric was removed and the other half was shaped and sewn to make a flap that I could tuck into the coozie after the device.

Originally, I wanted to use velcro to hold the opening shut, but I would have had to either sew the velcro on very early in the process or sew it on by hand, which I am too lazy to do.

Finally.

Here is the coozie with the N810 inside and the flap tucked in. It may not be pretty but it is pretty damn useful and pretty damn ugly.

Sweet, I've got Linux in my pocket.

Oh man, how many times have you been in this situation?
There is a madman with a gun trying to kill you, and he keeps yelling "you're not carnival personnel" because, why trying to flee from the madman, you ran past a sign that clearly states "Carnival Personnel Only".
Damn, I hate when that happens.

What's with that sign? Don't they know that there is a madman after me? Perhaps running by that sign makes me a jerk, but I'll be damned if I'm going to stand around waiting for a madman to kill me. If only there was some way to alleviate the guilt associated with clearly violating the "carnival personnel only" rule.

A Ha I have the solution.....

For starters, I'm going to need a black t-shirt, some iron-on letters, an iron, and some sweet left-handed scissors. Some of the letters are missing because, for a toddler's birthday, I made a special birthday present tank-top that says "bullshit" on it.

Let's get crackin, shall we?
start by cutting out the letters needed for the shirt.

Carefully align the letters on the t-shirt. Since the letter on the paper are mirror images of what will show up on the shirt, special care is needed to make sure that the letters get placed right. This looks pretty good, so plug in the iron and move along to the next step.

( actually, this isn't that good, I'll explain later)

Make sure that the iron is dry. We don't want any steam to mess up our letters. With the iron set to "wool", press on the iron-ons for about 15 seconds. If you press too long, or use too high of a heat, you might burn the letters a bit; which is exactly what I did on the "bullshit" tank top.

Flip the tshirt over and iron the other side of the letters for about 5 seconds.

Hot Diggity! Problem solved.
Now, when the madman starts yelling "you're not carnival personnel", one can simply point to their shirt and say "Well actually, Yes I am".

The alignment issue: When I think of all of the issues that I've encountered while utilizing typography in a graphic, it amazes me that I didn't think about the kerning of the letters. The "V" and "A" in Carnival should be a lot closer together.

The best part: This isn't for me. This t-shirt is a gift for a friend. Hey buddy, when you read this give me a call, I have a gift for you.

• a hair thingy that holds hair in place


• orange, yellow, and white plastic flowers
  (do not use real flowers, no one wants rotting flowers in their hair.)


• some plastic leaves
  (a little bit of foliage goes a long way)


• orange ribbon
  (I like orange )