John McCain is expected to announce Sarah Palin as his running mate in a few minutes. I’d never heard of her, so I’ve been googling her for about 15 minutes. My initial impression is that I really like her as a politician… she supports drilling ANWR, she is fighting the fed govt for stupidly putting the polar bear on the endangered species list when they are growing in record numbers, and… oh by the way… she’s pretty hot!

Future Veep?

UBUNTU on Dell Inspiron 5000

So my kid wants a PC of his own, I have this old dell laptop that is too slow and doesn’t have the memory or hard drive capacity to make it in the windows world. hmmm

I wondered if there was an open source OS that was easy to use, did soem searching and found UBUNTU - it’s FREE and it’s a version of Linux with no root access, so it’s kindof like the mac in that each user can’t mess with the core. I downloaded the ISO image and used the free version of deep burner to create the boot CD. When the Inspiron boots, press F2 to go into setup mode and change the boot order to boot off the CD before the hard drive.

UBUNTU’s CD is really cool in that you can run it off the CD only to make sure it will work with your hardware. All was fine and I had backed up everything I wanted from the Dell’s hard disk, so I rebooted again and did a full install wiping out the disk.

So far it works great; although I have to find a wifi pcmcia card that will work with it and UBUNTU to get it on the web.

What about Chad Pennington?

A colonial style bed I made for my son out of pine and poplar…

Headboard:

headboard

and Footboard (with rails):

footboard

It’s been since February since I updated this blog - probably nobody even looking or caring, but just in case, I spent the weekend making a bed for my son and cutting out templates for future Adirondack Chairs. Pictures to follow soon. Felt great to be in the shop again!

Just purchased a Grizzly G0505 12.5” portable “Lean & mean” planer. Here’s a video of the setup and the first couple passes over some pretty hard sycamore.

Found a great arts & crafts clock project on LumberJocks: http://lumberjocks.com/projects/1113

Got me thinking…

Here’s a clock face I just drew in CorelDraw that I’m thinking of building a mission style clock around this weekend…

Here’s my e-x-t-e-n-d-e-d video review of the WorkSharp WS2000.

Here are two much better reviews on the WS3000 and the Veritas alternatives:
http://lumberjocks.com/jocks/WayneC/blog/1113
http://lumberjocks.com/jocks/mot/blog/1149

Thanks to all of you who are bearing with my videos as I learn while I go! I apologize for the length of the video - I just want to sharpen everything in my shop! I keep calling it “WorkShop” in the video - I mean “WorkSharp” - I keep saying stropping, although I’m not sure it’s a word and I’m tired of hearing myself saying it. I also keep saying “shavings” when I mean “filings” — again thanks for your patience.

High-resolution version here.

I’m uploading video right now of a review of my newest tool: the WorkSharp WS2000 sharpening system. Here’s a link to the tool at Rockler:

Work Sharp WS2000 Tool Sharpener

Adding dust collection to my bandsaw required that I extend the DC hose under my workbench. Also installed modular static control.

Enjoy!