iMatt :: The Blog of Matt Clare

After a lot of planning, sawing, hammering and a little bit of screwing [up] it is finally ready. I think I had a good plan and I benefited from [grand]dad’s experience.

In the interest of practicing what I teach I modeled two walls worth of wainscotting in the tiny room via Google SketchUp. It helped to both visualize the plan and explain it to Lindsay and my dad. The SketchUp model also helped when it game to dividing space evenly and dealing with the irrational system the is the imperial measuring system.

If anyone else is interested in a simple wainscotting plan, here’s the Google SketchUp plans and the Home Depot suplies:

The raised parts are 3/4″ x 36″ 1/2″ Primed Fiberboard mounted on 1/4″x48″x96″ STD Hardboard. It was cutdown at Home Depot to 1/4″x 37″ x96″ – both to make it a good hight for the room, and to make it fit in the back of my car.

The hardest part, other than all the leveling was the joins. The room is ~126″ x ~111″ – and the STD Hardboard is only 96″ long each wall. There was a liberal use of wood filler to help join the two.

I’ll also get trim for the “chair rail” and quarter round for the bottom, but I didn’t add that to the drawing.

I’ve been looking for a modification for my new-to-me car to help make it my own. I searched around the forums that deal with the Acura CSX and the Honda Civic and quickly realized that the simple “bolt-on” modifications available for the Honda Civic don’t work with the CSX as it has a slightly larger engine that was borrowed from the Acura RSX.

I started to home in on the engine’s air intake as a good place to focus my efforts. An air intake that allows more air to pass into the engine can increase the power (a little bit), this is done by decreasing the amount of effort to draw air into the engine and ensure there’s always enough. Less restricted air intakes also tend to improve the sound of the engine by allowing more induction noise to be heard.

Some Acura CSX owners had tried applying other Honda Civic-intended air intakes, but they would tend to trip the Check Engine light. The solution a lot of owners were coming to was modifying the airbox top cover to fit a generic cone-type air filter. The modifications involved trimming away most of the cover’s plastic and attaching a standard 3′ flange cone-type air filter to the now exposed tube. This not only involves a better filter but allows air to be drawn from more locations than the restrictive tube that leads to the front of the car – this could be the cause of the cars not-so-great throttle response.

Many Acura/CSX forums detail this DIY process, CSX DRIVER (login required – probably the best how-to), Acura Forum and this YouTube video of an obnoxious kid.
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Running a mail server is hard work. This is largely because it puts you on the front line of the battle with the internet’s biggest scourge: spam. My recommendation: don’t do it.

When I setup a new web site and domain, or when I am helping another organization setup their Email etcetera my preference is to sign-up for Google Apps and Gmail Email.

What is now Google Apps started with “Gmail For Your Domain” and now includes Gmail, Docs (documents), Groups, Sites and Chat. The standard edition is free for 50 accounts or less, above that it’s $50 per user per year.

The best part is Google handles all the spam filtering, gives users a number of Gigs of storage (7Gigs the last time I checked) and handles all the redundancy, backup etc, but it is worth noticing their no enterprise-esh recovery options.

There is even a Canadian connection in that Lakehead University in Thunder Bay was one of the first major domains to migrate everyone’s E-Mail. Many of the faculty objected to their Email being routed through the united states, but at least they were able to setup their iPhones with their work Email on Christmas day.

The most compelling reasons is that you get your mail via the best web interface going, as well as POP, IMAP, and SMTP servers that are all encrypted. Plus I’m a big fan of Google calendar system — I’m a big fan of calendar’ing systems in general.

Google Docs can be a bit of “lifestyle” change, but if you are interested working on documents, spreadsheets, and presentations online it’s a great service, espcially if you want to either work with others collaboratively in a work-flow or for sharing with an audience.
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Gina Trapani of smarterware.org / lifehacker.com now has a new series of weekly videos and blog posts at FastCompany.com called “Work Smart”. If you’re STILL one of those people who feel positively overwhelmed by your E-Mail inbox, or you feel that your iPhone/BlackBerry has made you worse at acting on E-Mails, not better, Gina has some simple advice for you.

Here’s her actual article over at http://www.fastcompany.com/article/work-smart-conquering-your-e-mail-inbox

Here’s how you can add your “at messages” to your Mac Mail.app 10.5 or 10.6 (or Thunderbird or Outlook Pro, etc.) via Twitter search’s RSS feed.

I’ve become a twitter re-tweet junkie. To get my fix I added an RSS feed of twitter’s search results to Mail.app. Here’s how I do that:

1. Go to search.twitter.com and search for @your_twitter_handle (ie. @mattclare)
   
2. Grad the RSS feed URL found on the right of the results page.
   
3. In Mail.app’s bottom right (or in Thunderbirds’ or Outlook’s account preferences) add a new RSS feed.
   
4. Paste in the RSS URL. You may want to also check to have it appear in your RSS feed. and press “Add”.
   

That should be it! Now whenever your account gets re-tweeted, “replied to” or otherwise mentioned you should see it in your inbox. Sure our inboxs are all already too full, but at least these messages will be short.

Since I just went through the process of setting-up my own self-managed VPS (virtual private server) system I figured I’d share my experience in the hopes that it will help someone else with some basic command-line comfort looking to gain control of their web hosting or being the process of scaling up.

This is the start of what I hope will be a brief series of blog posts describing the process.

I went with a VPS system because of the considerable cost savings over a full dedicated system and the ability to scale-up from a low-power system to a high-powered system. In fact, I did just that when I initially opted for the 128mb system, but found that I need 256mb. My VPS (and previously shared host) is A2 Web Hosting and they’ve been pretty good to work with.

Here’s what mattclare.ca is currently running, I’ll go through each elements and how I’ve configured them:

• CentOS 5 Linux Operating System

  Including:

  • Installing the basic files and packages
  • Securing SSH and the rest of the server
  • The Apache web server
  • MySQL database
• Google/Gmail for mail (and calendaring, etc.)
• JungleDisk/Amazon Webservers for backup

I’m a big fan of news radio, especially the information programming of the CBC and BBC World Service. If you’ve been looking for this on the iPhone/iPod touch I’d recommend the application FStream.

There are a few paid options, but I’m a fan of free in ever sense of the word.

If you do choose to use FStream the latest version provides a director, but you may need to know the URLs for some of the better services ….. so here they are.

My job at Brock as an “Educational Technologies Support Specialist” not surprisingly involves a lot of support, primarily of faculty using the web as an educational tool. I do a lot of meetings and workshops, but here is a list of the tools that I’ve found invaluable in helping people use technology remotely or asynchronously:

1. The Wiki: A few year ago I created the WebCT Wiki to help document WebCT at Brock and some its idiosyncrasies. It proved to be a great resource to build an FAQ in and write up a few instructions for how to do a few things. The wiki format ensured it could be updated from anywhere by anyone.

   Though it was mainly me and my colleague who contributed to it the ability to post something to address an issue immediately and later refine it was very helpful. I’ve taken the approach that if I think I’ll have to explain something again it’s worth adding to the Wiki where I can either direct others to or simply copy and paste an answer from (the latter being my preference).

   Recently a I spearheaded a project to bring an academic wiki server to Brock that is just getting started: kumu.brocku.ca

   Google recently added their old Jot Spot acquisition to their Google Sites.

   OS: Web based, Cost: Free (open source) + web server
2. Jing: Jing is the best option for quickly recording a “screen cast” or taking screen shots. It’s a stripped-down tool that fills a niche below Tech Smith’s other product Camtasia.

   Screen casts (videos) of how to do something can quickly be recorded of the whole screen or just a section of it and posted to the web as a flash screen.

   Screen captures (images) can quickly be taken and annotated with text, arrows and shapes.
   
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   OS: Mac & PC, Cost: Free + web server

The Challenge

You may recall that in April I changed the rear rotors on my Acura 1.7 (“The Super Civic”). The Acura 1.7 EL and the American Civic Si are the only two version of this world Honda platform that use rear disc brakes over the not-so-sporty drumb brakes found in the regular Civic. The front disc brakes set up on all of these cars are the same. This summer my front left rotor started to warp as one would expect with its age and I figured that the front rotors need an improvement of quality for the vehicle to meet it’s ultimate potential — and now it does! The best news is if you read this article the whole way you can learn how your Civic 2.0 SI 2002-2003, Civic/EL 1.7 2001-2005, Civic 1.6/EL 1989-2000 or Del Sol VTEC can have the same part cheap!

I did some relatively extensive research on the best option. I wanted brakes that would give good feel, stop hard and look cool but at the same time be street-able and cost-effective. This ruled out bigger rotors, as I didn’t want to change the calibers that clamp down on the rotors. Additionally, I had purchased carbon pads for all of the calibers back in April , I wanted to re-use those. Ultimately this meant increasing the efficiency of the current rotor dimensions. The part I needed turned out to be Magnum Original Cross-Drilled Rotors.

The Solution

Magnum Cross-Drilled Rotors are Canadian made rotors that have holes in them that allow the gas created by the extreme heat of breaking to escape into the venting between the two surfaces of the rotor. This keeps the rotor cooler and prevents the “float” effect of gasses or water building up between the rotor and the pad. An other technology is slotting, which is an actual grove that pushes hot gasses away – that level of venting is really only needed for racing and not my street car.
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My Acura has it headlights pushed out the the top corners of the front end. Like many other cars with a similar design and price-point (the Ford Modeo/Contour comes to mind) the streams of dust and what not they are exposed to with all the highway travel my car sees have obscured the headlight bulbs with a foggy kind of scratching.

What follows is how I fixed this problem to my, ah…. adequate standards. It’s no show worthy solution, but its better than replacing the headlights at over $100 a piece.

Steps:

1. Clean the lens with Windex
2. Rub and kinda-and-kinda-buff the lens with Brasso. This should start to clear the lens up, but will not fix everything. There’s lots of guides out there on how to use Brasso to restore your iPod, I figured this was similar. Google Brasso and ipod to learn more
3. Buff the lens with some wax and a lot of effort — I used a polishing disk on a regular old drill (not a random orbit polisher – again not show quality). The wax I used was MIBRO’s high gloss metal polish. After a good 15 minutes of applying the wax in one direction, polishing, then applying in another, I finally was happy with the results and was almost ready to call it done.
4. The final step for me was applying and buffing with BlueMagic’s Liquid Metal Polish as it promised to remove scratches and leave protective finish (and was cheap)

That’s it.

You can see from the picture below from the overcast Saturday I did this on, the lens on the left is nice and clear and the one on the right has yet to be worked on and is all dull and “fogged”. I’ve since noticed an improvement in the headlights intensity at short distances (but no over-all increase in distance).
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