Oaken Gearbox

This month our smartphone using, Netflix-streaming family of four wrapped up a yearlong experiment in cable cutting. Mainly it was just my wife and I, since all our toddlers had to give up was the PBS-Kids streaming app. With our hotspot enabled smart phones and their 8GB of data, we weren’t exactly off the grid, but it was certainly an adjustment. My wife and I are pretty typical Millennials when it comes to internet use. We were both early adopters of smartphones, and pretty invested in an all-digital, paper free lifestyle. We don’t have a checkbook, because we pay all our bills online. We don’t own a printer, because we never print anything besides baseball tickets. We also went two years without a DVD player, because, who needs one with Netflix and Hulu? Despite all this, when our monthy Comcast bill hit $65, it was just too much and we told them to turn it off, we would just get by using hotspots from our LTE smartphones (4GB each, plus unlimited music streaming). The...

I noticed earlier this summer that my 5.5hp Briggs & Stratton powered push mower was constantly revving up to a fevered pitch, and then dropping to an idle and nearly stalling. Over and over again every 10 to 15 seconds. Quick Diagnosis (so you can get back outside and enjoy the summer weather): The air-fuel mixture was off. In my case, due to a plugged air filter. It was gross. I can't believe the engine ran as well as it did. A dirty carburetor could also cause these symptoms. That should look like a sponge... Explanation (for those of you who have to know why): A lot of newer lawnmowers use a governor to control engine speed (rather than the classic "Rabbit-Turtle" throttle lever). If the carb cannot achieve an efficient air-fuel mixture, the system just fluctuates between over-revving and almost stalling. After washing my filter out with degreaser and warm soapy water the mower runs just like new. Moral of the story: always try the simple stuff ...

I recently spent a night at Wild River State park with my brother and my two year old son. I found it to be an enjoyable park to visit, although I still prefer Afton for a quick get-away close to the Twin Cities. Check out my Flickr page for a few photos of the campsites and trails. We opted to staying the backpacking sites, rather than the car camping park, so I'll speak only to those. Although they call them backpacking sites, they are treated more as car camping park; you pay and select your site at the office and they give you a tag to hang at a post in front of your site. That being said its only a couple mile walk, so changing sites would be a simple matter. The actual trails are cross country ski trails--mowed in the summer--that pass through new growth forest as well as prairie. Although winter camping is permitted, no hiking or snow shoing is allowed on the groomed trails, so you would have to ski in with your gear. The trails were full of short steep hills. I've be...

There are likely many ways to complete this task. The method below uses GIMP 2.8.8, an opensource (and free) competitor to Adobe's Photoshop and a pretty generic Cannon Scanner. Scan your artwork in Black and White (not greyscale) at twice your intended resolution (I chose 600dpi, the highest offered by my scanner software) and save to a format of your choice. I used .tif because there is no quality loss, but it's not really very important for this application. Don't be alarmed if the result has ugly, jagged edges and extraneous stray pixels. We'll take care of that later. Your scan will look something like this Open the saved file in GIMP. Rotate if needed. Note GIMP's "Select by color" feature didn't seem to work if I didn't first rotate the image (presumably a bug?). Crop out the unwanted margins. Select Image>Mode>RGB Color Go to Image Size and set the resolution to half of what it was before. This will eliminate a lot of ...

The simplest way to buy new tires or wheels that fit your car is to look up the current ones and buy ones the exact same size. If you don't want to do that for whatever reason, you found a deal on craigslist on similar sized ones, for example, or you want to up-size your wheels for looks, it starts to get more complicated. I'll start by explaining the different important dimensions on wheels, and then move to tires. Wheels: Wheels have five important measurements: Image cortesy of sizeitup.com Diameter. This is the one you're probably most familiar with. It is measured in inches and is usually somewhere between 14"  and 19". Width. Pretty self explanatory. This is also measured in inches. Bolt Pattern. This is measured by the number of lugs and the diameter on which they are drilled. It can be measured in either inches or millimeters. This is both important and difficult to measure. The easiest way, if possible, is to find out what car the wheels ca...

 I was recently given a 1st Gen Nook Simple Touch by  Barnes & Noble. Since used books are relatively cheap and I only read 3 or 4 a year, I've never seen the need to own an eReader. That being said I love a good gadget, and the NST is simple, easy to customize, and surprisingly capable given its age and limited intent. Essentially, the NST is a very simple tablet running Android 1.2.1. Although many apps in the Play Store are not compatible with such an old version of Android, many still work and often old .apks can be found and side-loaded to your Nook (including the Kindle App, where ebooks are generally cheaper that from B&N). Below are various steps I took to set up my Nook. 1. Connect to my home WiFi network. Oddly enough this took longer than anything else I did. Due to its older hardware, the Nook Simple Touch is not compatible with Wireless N at 5GHz. When I first tried to connect, it showed my network, allowed me to type in my password, even connect...

Although conventional wisdom (or at least a window salesman) would say that replacing will always save you money, that isn't necessarily true, and depends on a lot of factors, including the condition of your windows,  the cost and type of fuel available in your area,  and not least your climate. Read on for the actual results I've gotten from both new windows and rebuilt origin My suburban Minneapolis story and a half, like many thousands of others that popped up during the post WWII baby boom was built with the traditional double-hung, single pane windows and removable wood-framed screens and storms, each one custom fit and labeled in neat black sharpie for its parent window, NE Bedroom, for example, or Kitchen Sink. Although it is well documented that low-e glass, double pane windows allow less heat to escape your home and don't require the screens and storms to be swapped every spring and fall, that doesn't necessarily mean they are the best energy invest...