After about 6 hours of work, we have completed Workbench 1.0! Here are a few pictures of the construction process: This was my biggest wood working project to date and overall, it went smoothly. The Melamine insert didn’t fit as flush as I would have hoped. we have determined that the concrete slabs in […]
Workbench 1.0
I started drafting up a design for a new workbench for my garage this evening. I didn’t want to half-ass it with a hand drawing and SWAG measurements, so I downloaded Google SketchUp. After a couple hours, I now have a 3D model of my new bench. While SketchUp is no Autodesk Inventor, it is […]
Laptop Fan Control
I was sitting on my couch, watching Arrested Development and coding, when I got distracted by the ridiculous heat that was being produced by my laptop. In the past I found some files deep in /proc that could give the current temperature and allow me to change the fan speed. As mentioned in “Nine Traits […]
Low Lying Fog Generator
Today Dale, David, Aaron and I got the our fog chiller working. Last year we simply had a fog machine that was triggered by our control system. We didn’t do any conditioning of the fog to affect its behavior. This year, we have constructed a fog chiller that will decrease the temperature of the fog […]
Gel Stain Banister and Hand Rail
It’s a new day and thus, something else needs fixing… Actually, that’s not true. Even if the day never changed, my list of things to do would be no shorter, but I digress… Our previous landlords introduced us to a very cool product called Gel Stain, by Minwax®. I don’t have a lot of experience […]
Installing Curtain Rods
It’s probably needless to say, but there are many tasks around our new house. Enough so, it can be easily overwhelming. The trick I use to pick a task, in this situation, is to find something relatively small and inexpensive. Pick something that is so easy you can finish it in just a few hours. […]
Home Ownership: Introduction
This is going to be a mini-series within Idle Engineers discussing projects around the house that home owners face. Why is this topic on a site about engineering projects? Well, my wife and I have just bought our first house and there are many things that need repaired or replaced – or just flat out […]
How I put Gentoo on a Seagate Dockstar
This is just the short version of what I did to put gentoo on a Seagate Dockstar. What does “short version” mean? It means that it just points to the relevant bits of the relevant guides that I followed to make it work. If I have time at some point I intend on posting a more full version so this […]
Fixing Mystique’s Login Widget for SSL Support
Had to edit wp-content/themes/mystique/lib/widgets.php, modifying lines 583-607, replacing < ?php bloginfo(‘wpurl’) ?> with https://www.idleengineers.com/wordpress
How Are We Doing?
Hey All, Using WordPress makes some things pretty easy, but at the same time we run into many walls trying to polish the UI. If you ever have any problems while browsing our site, please post a comment or e-mail us so we can fix the problem. Also, if you have any suggestions on how […]