A Penetrating Quandry:

As your friendly neighborhood IT Guy I often find myself in charge of doing away with old hard drives. These are drives that might be bad or that are too old and small to use anymore or what have you. Since your hard drive contains traces of everything you do (even after some software methods of erasing them) it makes sense to me to physically damage drives before recycling them. This helps to ensure no prying eyes go snooping around your data for juicy identity-thefty tidbits.

If you are really very concerned about your data I suggest you software-wipe your drive first with something like Boot&Nuke or any of dozens of similar drive formatting jobbies BEFORE physically trashing the thing for disposal... Well I guess you could try doing that after destroying the drive if you really wanted to. Let me know how that works out for you.

Anyway, to accomplish this sort of mindless physical destruction of computer hardware in a safe and tidy way I decided I would need to create a device. Such a device basically appeared to me in a daydream one day and I got to work as soon as time permitted. The device which may or may not be named The Hard Drive Penetrator is constructed out of the following basic ingredients:

- half of a broken punch (sharpened)
- a hydraulic bottle jack (about $9 on sale at Princess Auto)
- some old steel bed frame rails (pick these up for free at roadside on recycling day or cleanup day.
- a couple hours of cutting and welding

In another stroke of workshop luck I'm fairly pleased with the way my drive killer turned out. It's quiet, clean, easy to use, and does a real number on a hard drive. For your info-tainment please enjoy my video about this thing:

Happy Whacking Day!

Howdy,

Here's the deal: I busted the flywheel key off in my weedwhacker. Not sure how, but I did. I'll admit it. For those of you not in the know of small engines the flywheel key is what keeps all the inner gubbins synergizing correctly. Without the key the engine will do undesirable things such as: not start, remove skin from your knuckles, and create anger.

This leads to yet another DIY repair by the workshop nutjob himself, me. Naturally the weedwhacker in question was dredged from the garbage and repaired initially... and the spare parts engine was also garbage-picked so this was a no-cost endeavor. No-cost is the best cost.

I'm not going to walk you all through the repair in detail because I suspect most of you don't care and just read my blog by mistake or to humour me. The crux of it is basically that you remove the driveshaft side of the plastic housings to expose the flywheel and then swap it out. This requires the removal of roughly 400 screws for which I definitely lost the proper driver bit some time ago. In the included video I'll show some of the finer points of the swap out as well as say stupid things and make unnecessarily loud noises. Let's go!

Garbage Air: how sweet the smell!

Hey,
I see a lot of useful stuff getting thrown out. Maybe it isn't useful to the original owner anymore but I find use in some of this stuff. One such happenstance occurred the day I found an 8gal. sized air compressor tank with a busted wheel and missing compressor. The tank itself was solid and undamaged (important for a pressure vessel) so I took it home hoping to make a portable air tank out of it one day. Months passed... no progress. Such is life. Then I found a second smaller discarded compressor thing that had some more interesting parts on it so I took that home as well and the brain-gears started turning.

I had to drop about $3 at the hardware store for threaded pipe fittings and $5 for some tacticool looking flat OD green spraypaint so I did end up spending a little money on the project but it's still pretty low budget.

Long story still long I sanded and painted the tank, pulled the (busted)wheels off it and added the 4 rubber feet off the smaller tank. Then I cut and welded the handle at a more jaunty angle(towards the centre of gravity) to aid in balancing the tank by the handle. I used some teflon thread tape, my hardware store threaded pipe bits, and my straight-out-of-the trash gauges and bits to plug the holes in the tank and add... well... functionality.

I'm pleased with the result. I now have enough portable air to do a little air-nailing, inflate some stuff, even air-out a computer fan or something without busting my hump trying to drag my big compressor around.

I have included a video for my own enjoyment... but you're welcome to have a look as well:

Beer: not just for breakfast anymore!

Hey,
I've got a confession to make. I like beer. I like it a lot. I'm not much of a drunkard, however, because I like the tastes and textures of beer more than the alcoholic content. I'd rather nurse a good beer or two over an evening than pound back watery pissbeers one after another all night. For whatever reasons I've settled on liking dark beers and have taken to comparing them mentally for ages. Just recently I've decided I should review them out loud just in case anyone else wonders what I think the beer is like. This more public approach to beer reviewing is made simple with this new fangled invention called "the internet". I don't know if this internet thing is going to catch on or not but I rather like it.

Annnnnnnnnyway, the beer in question this time around is Alexander Keith's Dark Ale. As far back as I can recall this is Keith's first foray into dark beers. I think it's great that these big breweries like Keith's and Rickards are getting into the dark beer scene. That should help drive competition in that segment and perhaps lower prices or bring more products to market. All I know is that I want to try them out and I'll let you know what I think of them as I do.

I've decided to take a sort of disgruntled/violent IT Guy approach to the beer video making. Mostly because I get a kick out of it. I hope you do as well. If you haven't already seen it, you should check out my Rickards Dark review in my YouTube videos. Without further futzing about here's the Keith's Dark video:

Zapping a cordless drill battery into submission!

First and foremost, a disclaimer: NOBODY DO THIS. There that should cover that.

Okay, Here's the backstory: My cordless drill was great for a few years till the batteries tanked out and it turned into an ugly paperweight. After spending my usual too much time on the internet reading about such things I decided I'd juice the crap out of my battery packs with my mig welder to see if that helped.

Initially I did one pack months ago and was so pleased with the result that I saved the other pack to share the experience with you fine folks of the intertubes. You should feel honoured. Or at least less offended than I usually make you.

According to my limited understanding of how the guts of batteries work here is why nicad cells stop working: think of the cell as a bucket of chemical juices with two chunks of metal suspended in it (these connect to the positive and negative terminals). The chemical juices react with the metal chunks and give off magic... or electricity or something. The reason I think they crap out sometimes is because after a lot of this chemical reaction happening a buildup of some byproduct bridges the gap between the metal bits and shorts the sucker out.

Now... that being probably mostly kinda true, here's why the welder helps: My welder on high outputs a little over 30v DC but massive amperage or current. This huge wallop of current blows apart those bridges of crap built up between the internal battery parts and allows the normal chemical reaction to resume in a more appropriate manner. I'm sure there are more qualified people to give proper explanations of this but that's my story and I'm sticking to it.

After seeing a few writings about how to do this trick it seemed like a handful of short, evenly paced zaps was the agreed on methodology so as you'll see in the video I zap the battery in that manner. I arbitrarily decided to zap it 10 or 12 times because that "seemed about right".

Long term testing: As I mentioned before I repaired my other drill pack months ago and it works really well. Not as good as brand new, no, but very usable and much better than doling out the green for new stuff. So that's your lesson in DIY for today.

And now for the sure-to-be award-winning video of the battery zapping event:

This weather is bullcrap!

That's what I think, anyway. Oh well. it can't stay this cold much longer. Luckily it was about 25 degrees warmer last weekend(not even joking) and I got outside to do some mixing of hobbies. I recommend combining some hobbies thusly:

1 garbage-parts rebuilt mountain bike
1 home built bike trailer made mostly of garbage-parts
1 bag of R/C tools, battery packs, etc
and finally
1 stonking big R/C F150 4x4 model.

Through the miracle of the internet I've got one here to show you that I had prepared earlier:


At this point you could probably take a picture, send it to all of your friends, and then unload the gear and go inside for a beer. That's basically cheating though... mostly because I didn't think of it earlier.

My next step was to bike my lardass and my trailer full of gear a few km down the road to the part of the local recreation trail that is all torn up for rebuilding. That tear-upedness is what makes it great for R/C trail driving. Note all of the logs, uneven ground, stumps, etc:


I had a great time moving my camera around my adjustable outrigger mount thing and taking different angled footage of roughly the same path through the terrain over and over. Sadly my uber-cheap chinese knock-off video camera's battery didn't last a terribly long time. I suspect it needs longer charging than I think it does. Before it quit, though, I managed to get a few good runs in and had enough footage to slop together the following bit of video. WARNING: this is not very stable video on account of the camera and my mount. If you get motion sick really easy or you're generally a wimp you might want to go easy on watching this. For everyone else: Don't worry it's only just over a minute long :)

First Person Awesome

G'day faithful reader(s?),

Once in a while I get the itch to impulse-buy some kinda gadgety thing. This is completely counter to my usual tendency of being tighter than two coats of paint with my money. Thankfully the good people of China seem to churn out bajillions of electronic devices at next to zero cost and sell them on eBay. I recently decided to try a mini digital video camera on a whim and found this little gem for about $19cad shipped to my door:



I think the camera I got is actually a knock-off of the pictured "md80" one but we're not here to judge... especially at a price of $19.

Anyway I wanted this camera to do on-board/FPV video with my R/C trucks and things so today with the help of my buddy, Christian, I took a few R/C truck video clips and I did a little super-amateur video editing to slap them together into this:



Hope you like it. I actually really enjoyed both the making of and the watching of this little movie. I think it shows great potential in the area of cheap on-board video making. I shall pursue this more in the future.

Until next time, Keep yer feet warm and yer beers cold.