December 31st, 2008

Wood Hard Drive Case Mod Part Four

Posted by John Havlik in Reviews > Hardware

Now for the fourth set of images for this project. I finally found some stain that I liked, and hence went to town staining the wood case. The stain is a gell stain, which I’ve never worked with before. Since it was old (found it in a bunch of old wood working tools) I was surprised it was any good. It says to apply liberally and wipe off after 5 to 10 minutes. Due to it’s age, leaving it on that long would result in it drying too much, a very bad thing, but nothing a little water can’t take care of.

The case all fits together now, but the mounts for the hard drive are causing some problems that allow it to power up but Windows will not recognize it. What is happening is the little converter board that plugs into the hard drive gets tweaked and the data connector loses it’s connection. This will require redrilling mounting holes in the bottom aluminum plate, this time I’m going to use the drill press and hopefully that will be the end of the project.

-John Havlik

: Masking the status/power LED window.

: Testing the gell stain on the inside.

: After removal of gell stain.

: Applied gell stain to the outside.

: Another view of gell stain on the outside.

: First removal, nice color, but too light for this mod.

: Closeup of the one side, the color is nice, but not what I’m after.

: Another picture of the case with the lite stain.

: Overall view of the lighter color.

: Application of second layer of stain gell.

: After removal of the second layer of stain gell.

: Another view of the richer color.

: Soldering up the status LED.

: Closeup of the lead on the status LED.

: Status LED connected to board.

: Glueing the status LED into the window area.

: Using a bit of hot/thermal glue to adhear the status LEDs.

: Notice how tall that is, it didn’t fit so I had to redo the status LED.

: After a bit of clipping, the status LED now fits properly.

: Adding more glue.

: A better closeup of the new, shorter assembly.

: Nice rich color of the outside of the case.

: Overview of the stained case.

: Everything is put together now.

: Time for a little testing, the white LED is for power, blue for activity.

: Here you can see the white LED better.

December 30th, 2008

Pardon Our Progress

Posted by John Havlik in Weblogs.us

Right now Weblogs.us is in the progress of migrating select blogs to the new Apache server. This is one of those blogs. The new mtekk.weblogs.sc (temporary) is much, much faster than the old location. All blogs on the new server will be running WordPress 2.7 (we are doing a mandatory upgrade for all blogs).

-John Havlik

[end of transmission, stay tuned]

December 23rd, 2008

Looking Forward

Posted by John Havlik in General

December is almost past, and still little to show for it here. It’s not that one wanted it to be this way, but it just happened. Now into the first full week of “Winter Break” , one would think there would be time to do things that could not be done in the semester. However, thanks to some interesting projects one is part of, the free time will not show itself for yet another week or two. That brings us to January 2009.

There will be no Breadcrumb NavXT 3.0.3, no critical or minor bugs have been reported for 3.0.2, so this month’s release would be pointless. Comming January, Breadcrumb NavXT 3.1.0 will feature some changes in the way default settings are loaded. This may cause a change in the anchor templates, but will allow localized default settings. The Tabular plugin will be removed, and its usefull parts integrated into the Administrative interface.

Berry will be updated with the Build 100 Cran-Berry code. There will be a design refresh either in late January or in late March. No code names yet, but it will probably be a red color scheme again.

A new, previously unannounced navigation plugin will rear its head near the end of December to early January. It is dependent on theme setup, and has been tested to work with Berry and the WordPress Default theme. More on that next week.

The Weblogs.us transistion to its new apache server is suspended until later this week. We setup the new server. Now a process of testing, transfering, and opening up ports on the firewall must take place before things go live. Expect the transition to take place near the end of the year.

-John Havlik

[end of transmission, stay tuned]

December 17th, 2008

Server Upgrades

Posted by John Havlik in Weblogs.us

Weblogs.us will be migrating hosted blogs over to the new Apache and SQL servers beginning on Wednesday, December 17, 2008 at 4:00PM CST. This will continue through the end of the week. During this time availability of this blog and all others hosted by Weblogs.us may be sporadic. Once the migration is complete, speed and availability for hosted blogs should greatly increase.

-John Havlik

[end of transmission, stay tuned]

November 27th, 2008

Wood Hard Drive Case Mod Part Three

Posted by John Havlik in Reviews > Hardware

Onto the third set of pictures for the wooden external hard drive case. As of now all that really needs to be done is to stain the wood. Since I don’t have the stain I want to use at hand, that part is not complete yet. Since the last set, the attachment mechanism was figured out. Turns out wood glue works good for tapping wood for M3 screws. The activity and power LEDs were mounted together, and the polycarbonate window for them was placed in the case.

-John Havlik