So I’m reading in Wearing’s Essential Woodworker and happen across a mention of attaching a scrap block to a board with a paper joint to prevent spelching when planing end grain. I’d never heard of this joint, but found a good explanation. You just stick a piece of porus paper into the joint, allowing it to be split back apart when dry. A neat trick.
I’ve been uphappy with my laminated plywood bench for a while now, so I’ve decided to build a new bench. It’s based on a Nicholson design, featured by Chris Schwarz in his original tome on benches, with an angled leg vise and wide apron sides. Unlike his depiction, I’m going with a soft hardwood, poplar, for the bench material and I’m going with 12/4 stock (~2.75″) for the top. I’m also going to add a split in the top, closer to the back of the bench, for planing stops and such. I’m hoping to get away without installing a tail vise of any sort, but we’ll see.
Somehow, I lucked into one of the CR-48 Chrome netbooks that Google is giving away. In the interest of sharing what I’ve learned, I thought I’d put together a list of what I’ve run into and how to fix it or work around it.
I’ve had this thing for… a month? now and it has one major problem that makes it nearly worthless to me. For some reason, if you do something that takes a little time, like writing up a blog post, the next network operation tends to fail. The wireless indicator goes from having bars, to just a plain x, and then it’ll reacquire an IP and be ok again for a bit.
I put in a call to a Chrome Ninja, which was promptly returned with some suggestions. There’s apparently a known bug with wireless networks that use WPA-PSK-TKIP, an older standard for securing a wireless network. On their advice, I’m now forcing wireless clients to use WPA2-PSK-AES, where as before, the algorithm was decided on by the client. It seems to have helped; I’ve only had one dropout since switching over to the new security protocol last night. Previously I was seeing drops every five minutes or so.
Lucky me. I entered a drawing back when the Google TV was announced and found out last week that I’d won! This afternoon, a shiny new Logitech Revue (with Google TV) arrived on my doorstep. After the ChromeOS netbook that showed up last week, I’m suddenly on Google’s good side.
Impressions so far on the Revue:
More later as I play with this thing some more. So far, it’s pretty cool. The web browser alone makes it pretty awesome.
Not taken by me. Nice flight though.