Your Comments

Computers & Mobile

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And we’re back with our third installment of Your Comments, the weekly feature where we share our favorite comments from Make: Online, our Facebook page, and Twitter. We hope you will find these little snippets informative, inspiring, and entertaining. So, without further ado… Your Comments!

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Over on Facebook, Jon Weseman shared some tips about finding sites similar to the one featured in Embracing decay at Sid’s Machine Shop:

Reminds me of a few dozen places I have seen in Mississippi, and an old general store I discovered rotting away in the weeds in White Springs, FL, just outside of Lake City; the place had been ransacked, but still had an amazing amount of gear and supplies left behind attesting to its history. Every time I see something like this, it always amazes me that something, somehow happened to make the former owner(s) drop everything, and then the places just fall through the cracks, forgotten by time and memory, and almost always protected by some local (like the woman in the article who called the police) who knows the true back story, but will never tell you, and then they and/or the place just disappear and die of entropy, lost forever to the elements.
Seriously folks, if you ever want to do some crazy exploring, go to the rural towns of North Central MS, and also I hear tell Alaska is good for ghost towns.

Also on Facebook, Jay Stanton Goldstein explained another way to Turn an old router into a repeater:

I just did something like this, but easier, no firmware changes required. if you have a cat5 run from your main/first/new wireless router to an area you want an additional hot spot, simply plug that in to one of the router cat5 ports–NOT the wan port. make sure DHCP is turned off on the second wireless router. voil… See Moreà, you have a wireless (and wired) hub, a new hot spot. for ease I set the SSID and securiy identical on both. now it looks at my house like I’m at a hotel with multiple hotspots with the same name, just pick the one with the strongest signal. I did this with NETGEAR routers but hear it works on others. please share here if so.

Excited about getting a mechanical leg up in billiards, TotalMonkey takes sides on the post Robot takes cue, learns to play pool:

Robot’s on my team! I got dibs. Called it in advance.

Twitter user and maker monkeysailor noted his favorite part about being featured on Make: Online:

There is something immensely satisfying about seeing my work in @make and @craft – Especially when people leave lovely comments at it!

The Father’s Day tool giveaway, sponsored by Leatherman brought out some excellent stories. Here are some of our favorites. Josh explained his father’s technique for keeping tools organized:

My father has tons of tools. In fact I think he is a compulsive tool hoarder. I half-jokingly recommend starting a tool rental business every time I ask to borrow one and he responds with “which one would you like.” Maybe being a farmer and vocational school carpentry instructor necessitates needing three air compressors or half-a-dozen circular saws. Better yet, my childhood habit of not putting things back where I found them forced him to invest in replicates. Screwdrivers were no exception. I was the “tool retriever” when the need arose. With explicit instructions to fetch a phillips head screwdriver, vise-grips or you name it. Thinking back, I’m convinced this was a three-part lesson 1) fetch so I can keep working, 2) learn the tools and 3) and make myself useful. During the return trip with screwdrivers in hand I learned I could throw these end-over-end and stick their business end into sod, trees and other things I dare not divulge. I tested the patience of my Dad for dawdling when I should have been hustling. Yeah, I threw screwdrivers as a kid. I got pretty good too although it’s not a talent worth boasting. Sadly, many screwdrivers never made it back to where I found them. Nowadays, my Dad will hand me rusty screwdrivers excavated from the garden or pulled from the center of a cinder block when I come to visit. Can you guess what he tells me to do with them? Yep, put them back where I found them, 25 years ago.

s1mp13m4n shared a story about learning to rebuild trucks:

Well I was born and raised around cars, trucks, tools, and drag racing. If my dad was in the garage working on something, I was right there too getting dirty and turning wrenches. I remember this one time when I was five years old. My dad was in the garage working on my grandfather’s 1966 two tone green and white Chevy C10 truck. It was a basic truck with a 283 cubic inch V-8 and a 3 speed on the column. The hood was up and my dad was at his work bench with this “device”. Being five tears old I did not know what it was. I said “daddy, what are you doing?” My dad replied “I am rebuilding the carburetor for Big Daddy’s truck”. I remember thinking to myself “no you’re not”. I said to my dad after looking at the truck “daddy, that’s not a carburetor, that’s a truckorator.” I remember after that my dad laughing, smiling and getting me a crate to stand on so I could help him rebuild that truckorator for Big Daddy’s truck.

Jerry Adlersfluegel recalled how his dad changed the laundry:

This isn’t a favorite tool story, but one of my earliest memories of my dad with a tool. I can remember the first time I saw him move the laundry. As soon as he opened the washing machine lid, he walked over to the toolbox and grabbed a long flat-head screwdriver. I knew the clothes got pressed pretty hard to the sides of the machine, but I never saw mom scrape them out with a tool; she just pulled them right out. What are you doing, dad!? Then he tightened the lid’s hinges, which made way more sense than what I thought he was going to do. Maybe he’s not the dumb one!

On twitter, darus67 showed concern for the creator of the How-Not-To: Be seen:

I kept expecting it to explode.

Our posting of the Hang me out to dry (Levi’s Care to Air design contest) stirred up some controversy on Facebook. Laura Mezoff Christy raised a good point about how this doesn’t make the company itself any greener:

How is it being “green” to tell the customer to act in an environmentally-friendly way? The real deal is when the company itself engages is sustainable & humane practices. Otherwise it’s just marketing. It would be more acceptable if the company said, “We’re doing X, Y, & Z to be green/responsible, and so we hope you’ll do your part by doing A, B, & C.”

Gareth Branwyn gave an explanation of why he thought the story was interesting:

Personally, I was more interested in the design contest and in seeing what people came up with for new air-drying designs. I like the idea of air-drying clothes, I love the smell of air-dried clothes, but I have no interest in taking the time to pin the whole family’s laundry to a clothesline (and take them down), so I think a reproducible design … See Morethat made this easier, more efficient would be a good and positive thing. And if the design of some contestant is useful and encourages a lot of people to air-dry their clothes, I don’t think that’s utterly negated because of other practices the sponsoring company may or may not be engaged in.

and Jon Oakes put things in perspective:

Remember kids; companies are market driven. Don’t smack Levi’s in the nose for suggesting a good idea. Let them know you like the idea (and as you have noted, are concerned about other practices). So, yay.. Good idea! I just put up a clothes line this past weekend but it hadn’t occured to me to ‘hack it’. That’s the gem… let’s build a better… See More clothes line!
But also, maybe I’ll send an email to Levi’s later saying ‘great idea.. now about those SE Asia sweatshops and polluting factories…

Like these comments? Be sure to sound off in the comments! You could be in next week’s column.

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