MachinistBlog.com

I feel like I have three full-time jobs. In addition to my day job and I’m working another 20 to 30 hours a week trying to get a nonprofit makerspace started in Rochester NY. My wife and I are also taking care of her father, a widower, whose needs constant care because of failing health. And we’re helping to take care of a daughter and her family. She’s just had surgery for the second time this year to repair a heart valve.

So I’m tired and stressed, but not nearly as much as my wife, who shoulders most of the burden of taking care of family members. I help too, but I mostly take care of our pets and our granddaughter. She is a genuine saint because but she has continued to be very supportive of the makerspace. She understands that I can’t stop working on it because many people are now counting on me to follow through with what I started.

I launched the website for the Rochester Makerspace in mid-May and we now have many supporters, seed money, tools and a dedicated group of volunteers. We still haven’t rented a space but we’re actively looking for the right one. I expect that our doors will be open within the next couple of months and maybe as soon as a few weeks.

I’ll be even busier for a while when that happens. Although I expect my workload to taper off as we figure out the best ways to manage the space. The health problems of my father-in-law and stepdaughter will also end.  So there’s a good chance you’ll see me regularly working on MachinistBlog again someday.

If you’re wondering, the CNC router I’ve been building for more than a year is still not finished, although I’m continuing to work on it. I obviously don’t have much spare time and when I do I’m usually so tired that I’m either unproductive or I make stupid mistakes.

But I’ll bet money that it’ll get finished because it’s going to have a home in the makerspace and there are others who will help me with it.

Thank you Mikey and Roger for answering the questions that Machinistblog’s visitors leave in the comments or on the forum.

I know I haven’t added much content to MachinistBlog lately. I haven’t lost interest or permanently abandoned my self-imposed goal of trying to add at least one new post to the front page each week (on average). It’s just that I’ve been really busy and I have to make this web site a lower priority for now.

I’d love it if you could help me keep it from getting stale by becoming a guest blogger. You can write about almost anything that is metalworking, tool, or workshop related as long as you’re not doing it to promote a product or service. And don’t worry if you’re not a great writer because Nate, our copy editor, just told me he needs more to do. You could also do a photo essay if you want.

I’ve been busy for a quite a few reasons. The biggest one is that I’ve become very passionate about getting a maker space started and I built a web site for one. RochesterMakerSpace.org still has a lot of rough edges and it needs some more meat on its bones. So I wasn’t planning on publicly rolling it out this week but that’s what I did when a discussion about maker and hacker spaces came up in a discussion group I run. And now, ready or not, I need to keep moving forward with the project until we either get something going or determine that there’s not enough interest right now.

I’ve also been busy working on my CNC router again. I neglected it for at least several months and I wasn’t happy with myself for letting that happen. So I’ve been trying, not always successfully, to get at least one small thing done on it each day.

On most days I only have enough spare time to work on either it, this web site or some other project. I usually choose the router because I want to be someone who does things and not someone who just talks about doing things. I’ve finished making nearly all the parts for it and pretty soon it’ll just a matter of putting them all together, like a kit. So you should at least see some pictures of it later this month.

I’ve also been trying to find 6 hours each week for exercise. I ran or biked regularly until about 2 years ago when I quit almost completely because I was too busy with other things. Well, in early December I realized that I felt like crap, looked like crap and was risking serious health issues because I wasn’t exercising.

So I started going to the YMCA 3 times a week and mostly just walked as fast as I could around an indoor track. But it made a big difference in how I felt and a few months ago I started running again.

I’ve been a runner almost all my life but I gave it up about 5 years ago and switched to bicycling because I was afraid running would eventually ruin my knees. I’d never had any problems or injuries but I’m very tall so I already had a poor power-to-weight ratio to begin with, and like most people I was getting heavier as I got older.

But bicycling didn’t do it for me and I really missed running, especially each Spring when the weather began to get warm. So I pre-registered for my favorite 10K and started training on treadmills and cinder tracks because they put less stress on your knees than pavement.

Five years ago I could go out for a long fast run and it wouldn’t affect me very much afterwards. But that’s not true any more because I’m still out of shape, still at least 10 pounds heavier than I used to be and of course I’m older. Now a hard run can ruin me for the rest of the day, tiring me out so much that I spend my evening goofing off instead of trying to accomplish something useful. Hopefully I’ll get into better shape soon and that won’t be as much of a problem.

And finally, the arrival of warm weather brought more opportunities to spend time with friends and family. And I’ve always made doing that a top priority.

I haven’t added much to this blog lately because I’ve spent an enormous amount of my spare time in the last two weeks researching, buying, setting up and tweaking a new netbook to replace my two-year old 11.6-inch Acer Aspire, which was really starting to annoy me with its slowness. If I’d known what I’m about to tell you I could have probably extended its life for another year or two by replacing its hard drive with an SSD.

Update 04/16. I spent some time on the phone with HP this morning. My new netbook won’t turn on and they think it has a defective motherboard. Stuff like that happens and electronic devices are most likely to fail when they’re new. So I’m not going to criticize them about it. 

They wanted me to send it to them for repair but I told them no. I specifically bought it from Amazon.com because I’d heard they make it very easy to return defective laptops or even ones you don’t like. That appears to be very true. It only took a few minutes to print out a UPS shipping label for free return shipping. I then went to order a replacement but found that in the last two weeks the price had gone up $35 to $410.

So I called Amazon. Actually, they called me in 5 minutes just like their web site said they would. They’re going to do an even exchange instead and they paid for overnight delivery so I get my replacement tomorrow. The call only took about 3 minutes and I obviously talked to someone located in the U.S. instead of India. Guess who made a very loyal friend today

I’m not as knowledgeable as I used to be, but I’m still a genuine computer geek and very picky when I buy a new laptop or build a new desk top computer.

My old Acer Aspire netbook was small and light so it was easy to keep it with me most of the time. And I didn’t feel embarrassed to pull it out in a diner and do some writing if inspiration came to me while I was having lunch. So I wanted to continue to own a small and light netbook.

I also wanted a very long battery life. I’d had a very bad experience with my first laptop, which I’d really struggled to buy when I was was young and poor. It was nearly useless because its battery lasted only 40 minutes even though it was advertised to last for 2 hours.

I’ve also been very bored while waiting in airports and on airplanes because I had a laptop with a dead or dying battery because I couldn’t an find an electrical outlet or they already had laptops plugged into them.

And lithium-ion batteries start losing their storage capacity from the very moment they’re manufactured. The amount varies but a good rule of thumb is they’ll lose at least 10% of their remaining capacity each year and it can be as much as 40%. The higher the temperature they’re used or stored at the faster they’ll lose it.

The battery in my old Acer was good for a solid 10 hours when it was new and after 2 years it will still last for at least 6. So I’ve never had to worry about finding an electrical outlet to plug it in to. Continue reading A New Netbook With An SSD