My favorite game

Rings, or ringboard, is an old English pub dexterity game. The game consists of a series of 13 hooks arranged on a board, at which are thrown 6 rubber rings. First to a pre-set number (a nice round number between 50 and 500) wins. 

I've made about 4 of these boards now, and I really love this game. Unfortunately the rings have very few suppliers, but can be ordered from Masters Traditional Games in the UK. The board below I made for my dad last year, and since it was hard to wrap I just put a little bow on it.

A quick score board

"Daddy, who's winning?" I am. Well, usually I am, but when the kids are just barely too small to understand math, how do you really know? So I whipped up this quick 4 player bilingual counting board so they can always keep score on the rings board in the backyard.

Coffee table build, part II: the top

Oy, has it really been this long? Sorry folks, the holidays take their toll when everyone has birthdays too. So, surface planing the top:

Arranging boards:

All the clamps:

Next up: the apron!

Rage fixing a Stanley 21-399 rasp plane

So, the other day I was finally installing the trim around the windows, when the drywall rasp I was using slipped out of my hand and fell to the floor. For a construction-grade tool, this wouldn't have been a problem. However, for this particular sloppy chunk of yak dung, the plastic screw which holds the blade in snapped in half. While Stanley has a great warranty, I would in fact have been stuck with a shiny new piece of said dung, and that's just unacceptable. So, I rage-fixed it.

First, I grabbed a piece of scrap hardwood, a bolt, and a matching threaded insert.

Coffee Table build, Part I

My friend Cody got married recently, and asked to make him a rustic coffee table. Actually, at first he asked me to make a table from pallets. A request to which I promptly said no. Why? Pallets are gross. They're full of nails, they've been in the sun and the rain (which hardens them beyond reason), and they're full of grit. However, I can certainly make new wood, which is nice to my tools and psyche, look old. After putting together a couple of dimensions, I got started with some rough sawn cedar from the orange store:

 Here's a sample of the stain, iron acetate (aka steel wool soaked in vinegar), which literally ages the wood to that grey patina that you'd find in weathered boards, without the headache of cutting through nails and burning your motors out:

And the first boards off the plane:

Processes, multiplexers and scripts, oh my!

Processes

Now that we have an understanding of how to do some basic text editing on the command line, lets get down into some of the running processes of your system.

The best podcasts

Edit: Sadly, as of 9/12/2015, it seems that the Alton Browncast has podfaded. The old episodes are still there, and are certainly worth a listen, but no new episodes have come out since December 2014.

One of the hidden gems of the internet is a thing called podcasts: radio shows put on by guys and girls with nothing but a microphone and spare time. Over the years, it’s even become a mildly profitable venture, with many companies paying advertising money to spread their message to the listeners of these shows. There’s podcasts on everything, and they can be downloaded with any of a thousand apps on your desktop or mobile device. As someone who spends much of the day disconnected from the internet, it’s nice to have some rotating information which can be entertaining without having to be completely connected. Here are my favorites, culled from a list of my 63 regular podcast subscriptions.