Hawk's Babble-Log

Yes, I am kinda addicted to milling and metalworking. No, that’s not what this article is about.

This article is about my new kick-ass Sherline milling vice and rotating base! Check it out!

These little guys are awsome. The rotating base is easy to set down onto the milling table, easy to lock into place, and it’s easy to rotate to virtually any angle. Both items are highly accurate and very well made.

In this view, the vice is mounted directly to the mill table. I do not recommend this setup because the milling vice is not firmly fixed to the table. When used with the rotating base, however, it is much more firmly fixed and has virtually zero chance of movement. It doesn’t wiggle at all.

I tried cutting an aluminum bar with just the vice fixed to the mill table. This worked okay, but the angle was a little bit off. See how messy my mill is? This is because my kick-ass 4-inch carbide-tipped saw blade really rips through aluminum like it were wood. Even though I’ve got the vacuum positioned right behind the saw blade, it still manages to throw little bits of aluminum all over the table.

Here, the milling vice is mounted to the rotating base, and the base is fixed firmly to the mill table. This setup works very well for cutting aluminum bars down to size. I’ve also got the vacuum positioned about as close as I can to help catch the aluminum flecks.

This is just a slightly different angle on the same setup.

This is a close-up of the saw blade doing it’s magic on that small aluminum bar.

The mill vise with rotating base:
http://www.sherlinedirect.com/…Product_ID=74

Just the mill vise:
http://www.sherlinedirect.com/…Product_ID=71

Just the rotating base:
http://www.sherlinedirect.com/…Product_ID=73

By the way, it costs less to get ‘em both together than it would to buy ‘em separately.

In summary: I’m very impressed with these two items. I have confidence that I can cut and drill virtually anything small enough to fit within the vice jaws.

Here is a company trying to rip you off by posing as your domain host. The site is domainrenewal-online.com, and I’m purposefully not linking to them, as they are _not_ your domain host.

I got an email from “Domain Renewal <no-reply@domainrenewal-online.com>”. The subject had one of my domains in it. This was my first clue; all proper emails from my domain host have the name of my domain host, not a generic “Domain Renewal”.

The email didn’t render properly. This was my second clue. The header and footer graphics were broken.

The email contained all generic info, including when my domain would expire (in 90 days) and contained a link to renew my domain. Their website looks like this:

Along the right side is standard public WHOIS info about my domain. This almost makes the site seem authoritative. All those logos along the bottom also probably make the site seem more authoritative.

The majority of the page is set up to receive my credit card info. There was no login screen, no authentication to prove who I was or that I owned the domain. The link I clicked on to reach this page contained my domain name within the link, meaning that it would be possible to insert _any_ domain name into the link and you would get the same page. They just want your money.

This is a scam, plain and simple. They’re charging over $50 to attempt to steal my domain and “renew” it for one year. My domains are locked and cannot be transferred anyway, but I would bet that they would still take my money!

If I were a lawyer, I might even consider getting a class-action lawsuit going against these guys. Don’t fall for their bullshit.

My roommate is awsome! He got us primo tix for Transformers at the ARCLight, front row of the balcony! Woo hoo!

I saw this small, solar-powered flashlight on ThinkGeek and thought I’d try it out.

When I first got it, it didn’t work at all. It was completely dead. I put it on my dresser, solar-panel side up for a day, but it did not have direct sunlight and so it didn’t charge sufficiently. I took it to work and placed it up on a wall which had a perfect, unobstructed view of direct sunlight. I left it there until lunchtime, which was about three and a half hours. By the time I got through with lunch, it was fully charged and it was bright! It surprised people at work.

In this picture, I have placed a clamp on the switch. You see, the switch is not a toggle. If you push it, the light is on; but once you let go, the light goes off. So I used this clamp to keep it on while I did some computer work here at home. It ran for a while, but it got dim after about half an hour. The flashlight has small capacitors, so don’t expect a long runtime. The nice thing is that you can charge it anywhere you have direct sunlight. This little guy is definately going into my emergency bag.

Direct ThinkGeek link to the Solar Powered Flashlight

I picked up a nice little internal HP DVD burner (dvd1080i) from BestBuy a few days ago. I’ve only made two discs and so far, this little sucker rocks!

I made a double layer disc for a recent backup file I had. The file was a 7.2G tarball on my linux machine. I didn’t have enough storage on my windoze machine to copy the thing over first, so I burned it straight from my shared samba drive to the DVD. I didn’t touch either computer for the entire process. It took over an hour to burn both layers, and then another hour to verify. I turned off the verify flag after that.

The disc works great! I took it to my roommate’s computer and his drive read it fine. I think this disc is a re-writable, but I’m not sure yet because it’s a double layer. I’ll update after more experimentation.

Yesterday I made a re-writable disc with a 2.4G movie file on it. I took it to work and it plays great. So far, so good!

This drive seems to do everything! I can burn virtually any format, even LightScribe, which I haven’t tried yet, but I’ll get to it this week some time. And the drive was cheap; the media cost more than the drive! And I only got a few double-layer discs, a few re-writable discs, and a few LightScribe discs.

More to come.