Here is a High Gain HDTV Antenna to build

I just finished building a HDTV antenna and it works great! Being in a fringe area I needed something with high gain. This HDTV antenna is called a Bow Tie antenna because the elements look like a bow tie.

I am picking up about 35 HDTV channels from 70 miles away. Sure beats paying for cable!

So if you want to build an HTDV antenna, here are the plans.

– Mike

My son is playing at SXSW!

Yes, my son is with his friend Derek, at the SXSW movie and music festival this week. Not only are they there to hang out and enjoy some great music, but they are also playing there!

He went down to San Fransicso for a week before they went to the SXSW festival to practice. But before they left, my son had the opportunity to fulfuill a lifetime dream, when he “traveled to forest moon of Endor!”. I’m pretty sure mind altering substances weren’t involved, as it was in the  Muir Woods National Forest, where the Endor scenes for the film “Return of the Jedi” were filmed.

Then yesterday, they made it to Audtin, Texas for SXSW!

The band is called Perhapsy, and according to their myspace page, their music is Indie / Ambient / Experimental.

According to Derek’s blog, they will be playing at the following dates and times:

Friday, March 19th @ Casa De Gallo (2604 Diaz St.), 7 PM

Saturday, March 20th @ Canvas, 11 PM

Good luck boys!

Tune-o-matic Bridge installed? Check!

OK, I finished installing a Tune-o-matic bridge on the electric guitar I am building. Man was that scary! The reason being that if you are off the slightest bit on drilling the holes for the tune-o-matic bridge, you get to start over!

Well at least for me, because I wanted the mahogany wood of my electric guitar to have a natural finish, not painted. I suppose I could have painted the guitar body, but that isn’t what I wanted.

So if you are thinking of installing a Tune-o-matic bridge, you might want to see how I did it. I don’t know if its the best way, but this is what I came up with.

So here is a link on how I installed my tune-o-matic bridge in the electric guitar that I am building.

– Mike

Its been a while.. Sorry!

Yeah its been a while. Apparently I have been busy. So the other day at work we had a computer donated, but it was missing the hard drive because they were concerned about the data on it, which I understand, but there are ways to completely erase the data off of a hard drive so you can donate it to your favorite charity.

– Mike

So I Started Building an Electirc Guitar

Who knows why, but I have started building an electric guitar. So if you are interested in folling this project, here is my Electric Guitar Building website.

How to recover a wet cell phone.

The other day my son dropped his cell phone into a bucket of water. fortunately, he had the smarts to pull the battery as soon as he got a hold of it. This probably saved his cell phone from damage. So when he got home from work, and told me the news, we followed the directions on this site as to how to recover a wet cell phone.

The method describe is a bit scary, but it worked! And my son didn’t have to buy a new cell phone! Needless to say, he was happy about that!

– Mike

I was able to recover my bosses data after the computer crashed!

So the other day, my boss came to me and told me his computer won’t boot. Not only that, but that he had data on there that he needed. And no he didn’t put it on the server! So he was sweating bullets.

So I was able to pull his data off of the crashed hard drive using Ubuntu. So that was a close call, and I think he learned his lesson.

Let’s hope so!

– Mike

opening docx files in Microsoft Office

With Microsoft’s new Office 2007, Word now usese DOCX files, which can’t be read by earlier versions (Thanks Microsoft!)

Here is an article on how to be able to read docx files in Microsoft word.

– Mike

Adruino looks pretty awesome

I just fount this really cool thing. Its called Adruino. This is a mini/micro PC looks like it will fit the bill for small scale automated control and monitoring. What’s really cool is that its Open source Hardware, which is a reletave new idea with the same basic philosophy of the traditional Open source community.

The Adruino platform not only has digital and analog I/O, but it has these add-on “shields” as they are called, that allow Ethernet, bluetooth, and many other options and forms of communications. I will definitely be messing around with one of these guys this winter, and posting some articles on my other blog site.

– Mike

Just in case you are interested..

Just in case you are interested, here is my Myspace page

– Mike