DIY guitar pedal board

Submitted by Dan on Wed, 01/21/2015 - 00:54

DIY effect pedal board for stomp boxes, homemade from a suitcaseWhat do you do with an old suitcase and a pile of stomp boxes and patch cables? Turn it into a pedal board! This was a really fun project, one that doesn't require a whole lot of planing and can be made with things laying around the house. Here's how I made it.

Evaluating Old Honda Twins - Six Easy Steps

Submitted by Dan on Thu, 01/15/2015 - 12:27

I am reposting this gem of information for HondaTwins.net. The origintal article is here - http://www.hondatwins.net/.../evaluating-old-honda-twins-six-easy-steps.html - but as you can see is has been removed. It was an invaluable piece of information for me as a beginner, so it is my hope that other beginners will find this and get the help they need. Below is the transcribed article, all credit goes to someone by the name of Bill (who, I believe, was badly injured in a wreck and he deleted his account, very sad.)

Using Javascript/jQuery to check if offsite file exists with given URL

Submitted by Dan on Thu, 10/09/2014 - 15:30

So I needed to see if an MP3 was successfully uploaded to our streaming server, and display the status on our website where our user's access the upload form. However, I ran into some issues with Access-Control-Allow-Origin access headers and with just how to acquire the status code. It always fails, whether or not the file does exists, because the browser doesn't allow XMLHttpRequest from a different domain to try and prevent cross-site-scripting. The solution? Using the JSONP datatype, a sort of consensual cross-site scripting hack!

How to add Google Web Fonts directly to your stylesheet

Submitted by Dan on Mon, 05/19/2014 - 12:15

If you're using a CMS such as Drupal or Wordpress, it's not possible to add the link tag for the css file that google provides you&ndash; i.e. <link href='http://fonts.googleapis.com/css?family=Oswald:400,700,300' rel='stylesheet' type='text/css'>&ndash;without installing a module that would allow it (and who wants another module to maintain?). Here's a quick workaround I discovered that makes it really easy to simply add the css code you need directly to your stylesheet.

Mind: blown. Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance book review

Submitted by Dan on Tue, 05/06/2014 - 14:42

Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance is not one of the books where you say "Well, that was a good book.." after finishing it. No, it's the type of book that you hold for a little while after finishing the last page as your mind is racing to comprehend the magnitude of what has just been delivered to it. Followed by flipping through the pages to find a note in the margins or an unread prologue or afterword that could possibly add some explanation. Followed by more thinking.

Photoshop Tutorial: Foggy Stage Lights

Submitted by Dan on Thu, 04/24/2014 - 12:00

I set off to create a background image for a website I'm making for a friend who wants to host his pod casts about the band Nine Inch Nails. I came up with a good idea, after finding some inspiration, but I needed to create it myself pixel-by-pixel to get the resolution I needed. What fallowed was an experiment with fog and light effects, and the end result came out pretty good!

Inspect and save apache request headers

Submitted by Dan on Tue, 04/22/2014 - 13:07

I wrote this function because one of our web apps that was communicating with our web server suddenly began receiving Error 406: Not Acceptable (The requested resource is only capable of generating content not acceptable according to the Accept headers sent in the request). So I inserted this bit of code to capture exactly what that accept header was and see if we could fix the problem. It writes the output to a file on the webserver.

Product Review: Nikon J1 with Nikon AI-S manual focus lenses

Submitted by Dan on Thu, 03/27/2014 - 19:56

I bought a Nikon J1 mirror-less camera to use with my old manual focus lenses. This review will focus on the camera's ability to use old manual focus lenses. I'll explain how well the camera body pairs up with lenses, and if they're easy to use with it. Long story short: they're not. And here's why...

Vintage Scrambler Build, part 1

Submitted by Dan on Sun, 02/09/2014 - 19:21

I love my 1974 Honda CL200, but some features are just... dorky. And what they're doing in Japan with old Hondas and Yamahas inspired me to do the same with mine. So what started off as a mild, stock-ish restoration project, began to steer in the direction of darkness when I decided to add some bratstyle/tracker styling cues. One thing led to another, and the next thing I find myself doing is bobbing the rear fender.

Motorcycle Side Cover Repair

Submitted by Dan on Sun, 02/09/2014 - 14:57

I'm no expert in automotive body repair, just an amateur with a camera and a desire to do things my way. Sure, I could take it to a pro, but I like the idea of learning how to do things myself, which provides me with confidence and gusto. Or I could try to find one on ebay, but they're so rare these days that it will cost a gigabuck and it's likely to be just a cracked, brittle, and broken. What fallows is my attempt at repairing them with a few supplies from the hardware store and willingness to learn and take risks.