MikeyP.com

Life for a Derelict Blog

2012-01-17T05:22:00Z

I managed to post just a single entry to this blog last year. And ironically, it was a link to previous posts.

I suppose "micro-blogging" via Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, Foursquare, and now Path has been my main outlet for communication. I'm clearly not alone, as most of the individual blogs I follow have migrated to Twitter. But that's not true for everyone. Some bloggers have remained prolific, others have reduced their posting frequency but continue to publish high quality stuff, and others have moved to Tumblr (and Posterous) for lighter communication and easy reposts with stronger communities.

I originally intended for this site to be a hybrid blog/wiki, where I could log stuff like code settings and what-not that might be useful for others besides me. But these days, I find it easier to keep everything in Evernote.

So what's next for MikeyP.com? Should I retire the blog and put up a new static site? Should I try to get back in the habit of posting something interesting, maybe at least once a month? Focus the site on a single topic, like game design? Slim the site down, and archive all of the old stuff except for the most interesting posts? Should I redirect over to Tumblr, or convert the site to a "lifestream" that reposts my content from Twitter, Instagram, etc?

Or perhaps I should continue to let it sit derelict, like a time capsule from a previous internet age...

Blast From the Past Link Day

2011-01-22T20:34:00Z

Okay, I'm two days late on this, but I love the idea. Shawn Blanc (via Marco Arment) proposes that every January 20th, bloggers post five links to previous posts they've written.

Since I haven't had time to write new posts recently, I love this idea! I'll just keep linking to old stuff. Genius!

So without further ado, here are five, fun, "blast from the past" posts on MikeyP.com:

Six Years of (sorta) Blogging

2010-11-09T06:52:00Z

I can't believe I've kept this blog alive for six years. I wish I was posting more often, and I hope I can get back in that routine again soon.

I still spend occasional time tinkering with the blog software and performance. Let's call it a hobby. I've done a few things recently that have had a fairly major impact behind the scenes.

I updated my meta-robots tag to force Google to re-index the whole site. It was indexing the pages by date, which by default was returning an entire year's worth of posts for many searches. That's not a big deal for recent years, but older posts would cause ugly search results. Google now indexes article links directly. It was interesting to watch the search queries on the Google Webmaster Tools site plummet over the course of 8 weeks (!) while Google performed the indexing.

I noticed that several searches were for the Sony Qualia. I have a picture of the Qualia 005 in an older post. I didn't think much of it at the time, but I posted the raw JPG from my camera, which was a 1.2MB file. I've since scaled it down, but it turns out that some Qualia enthusiast sites were leeching the image and embedding it in their own pages while still being served from this site. So I updated the .htaccess settings in my images path to load a tiny GIF if the referrer isn't my site or the feedburner feed.

Also while fixing the Google search results, I noticed that the site was loading a lot slower than I expected. I discovered that the "moreentries" blosxom plugin was a major bottleneck. I used it to limit the number of posts per page and show a "previous/next" button. I never bothered to take a look at the code before, and I now I can't believe I had it in the pipeline for this long. I yanked it and replaced it with the much faster (and 1/10th smaller) paginate_simple plugin.

While I use Disqus for new comments, the older "writeback" comments are still available to read. However, they were a bit hidden, so now older posts with writeback comments have a "2 writebacks and 1 comment" link below the article.

Finally, I took some inspiration from Brian Cantoni's site optimization post and sped up the basic delivery of the site. It turned out that I was only GZIPing the article text but nothing else. Now everything is compressed by default thanks to mod_deflate, including all CSS and JavaScript. I also forced the Cache-Control max-age to be 10 days for all images, CSS, and JavaScript. The only thing that really slows the site down now is the Disqus comment system. Maybe I'll code a native plugin for it some day, but I'm fine with it for now.

Added iPhone Stylesheet

2010-10-04T05:03:00Z

I added an iPhone stylesheet to the site this weekend. I'm using the proper "meta viewport" tags to implement it, so it should work fine on any device supporting that tag. I tested it with Safari and Opera Mini on an iPhone 4. Safari looks great, but Opera Mini seems to want to make the page a little wider than the viewport. I have no idea why, but it might be related to one of the "widgets" I have on the page (Google Reader, Twitter, Delicious, LibraryThing).

Let me know if this blog looks fine or wonky on your device.

Deprecated RSS Feed, use Atom Feed Instead

2010-10-01T05:15:00Z

I finally deprecated the old RSS 0.91 feed for this blog, and redirected it to the Feedburner Atom feed. I don't think that'll cause problems for anyone, but if it does, just head back to MikeyP.com and re-subscribe using the "Subscribe" button. Alternatively, just use the feed icon in your browser.

The direct feedburner URL is http://feeds2.feedburner.com/mikeyp

Polishing Frets on a Howard Roberts

2010-09-20T06:02:00Z

I hit upon a lucky eBay find, and managed to acquire a mid-1990's Korean-made Epiphone Howard Roberts for a great price. It's a terrific jazz box, and is really fun to play.

As with many older guitars, the frets were tarnished and dull, so I decided to polish them using the Dremel technique from the Project Guitar.com site. I wrote about this technique before, so rather than rehash the instructions, here are some pictures of the process and results.

Psuedo Tansu

2010-08-24T04:44:00Z

I built a custom Tansu-style TV stand for my Pioneer Kuro plasma and PMC LB1 center channel speaker. The speaker is so large I had almost no choice but to make a custom stand. I also used this as an opportunity to teach myself some woodworking skills.

This is not a real Tansu, and I'm sure a real Tansu creator would cringe at the design and (lack of) craftsmanship. Up close, you can see a ton of mistakes I made (poor cuts, plywood tear-out, glue squeeze-out, etc), but at the casual TV viewing distance, I can live with it. For now.

The whole stand is made from a single sheet of cheap birch plywood, the "macaroni and cheese of woodworking." It's finished with four coats of Tung Oil, but the birch isn't that pretty, so I'll likely make it darker at some point.

Side note: AOL shut down their member homepages a couple of years ago. So where can I find the invaluable "Allan's Wood Miser's Workshop" site now besides on archive.org?

De-rattling an Intelli Guitar Tuner

2010-08-09T02:40:00Z

Soon after buying my Breedlove acoustic guitar, I decided to buy a clip-on tuner. There are many clip-on tuners available at all price ranges, and they all basically work the same way. They pick up the vibration of the strings through the guitar body and neck, and display the current pitch in a way that shows you the current tuning.

I opted for a cheap tuner, the Intelli IMT500 . While it worked reasonably well, I noticed that the display would occasionally swing wildly to inaccurate values.

I also noticed that I could hear a slight buzzing sound when playing some notes on the guitar. At first I assumed this was an intonation issue, but after setting up the guitar and trying several types of strings, I ruled out intonation as a cause. Then it hit me: I removed the clip-on tuner, and the buzzing stopped.

If I shook the tuner a little in my hand, I could hear a slight rattling from inside the device. It struck me that this was the cause of the buzzing while I played. And I realized that this must also affect the accuracy of the tuner. If the tuner relies on vibrations to show the pitch, extra vibrations from the device itself would explain the wild swings I saw on the display.

This was easy to fix.

The tuner is held together with just two screws, and inside, the small circuit board is held in place with two more screws. There is some “play” where the edge of the board touches the housing, and that’s what causes the buzzing and extra vibrations. I grabbed a small bit of foam and cut it into bits that I wedged in between the circuit board and the housing. I reassembled the tuner, and that was that – no more buzzing, and much better tuning accuracy.

Intelli IMT500 Clip-on Guitar Tuner

Dust Control in the Garage Workshop

2010-08-01T03:24:00Z

After years of sweeping and dusting and dozens of disposable air filter masks, I’m finally taking dust control seriously in my garage workshop.

Dust control starts at the tool with a vacuum system, but it ends in the air. No matter how well I gathered chips and dust while working on a piece of wood, I would inevitably find a film of dust on everything in the garage by the end of the day.

No more.

I bought and installed a Jet Air Filtration System in the garage, and my days of pervasive dust are history. There are several air filter systems available. I picked the Jet because of a good review in Fine Woodworking and a good price plus “free” Prime shipping on Amazon.com.

You simply turn it on via a remote control, set the speed, set the number of hours it should run, and forget about it. It works like a home furnace, with a reasonably quiet impeller that cycles air through two sets of filters. The results are quickly noticeable.

$300 is cheap insurance against emphysema and lung cancer, eh?

(Why yes, I did in fact mount this sucker to the ceiling joists all by myself. Not recommended…)

Jet Air Filtration System

Not the Gnome You're Looking For

2010-05-31T17:49:00Z

There are many tales of garden gnomes who have mysteriously traveled the world.

But there are far fewer tales of gnomes that have traveled from a galaxy far, far away.