The Johnson Blog

Ramblings of a geek with a few hobbies…

Tag: projects

  • Ammo and… backups?

    OK, just a few more words about my data backups.

    Last week I ordered a few Army Surplus, 30 Caliber Ammo Cans, they arrived today.  What the heck are these for, you ask?

    Well I thought they could make a great way to transport and store the hard drives I’m going to be rotating off-site.  So tonight I got to work with a knife and some dense foam, to create what should be a pretty sturdy (and water-resistant!) hard drive case.

    And here it is, with a spare drive not quite halfway pushed in.  The foam cutting was crude, and it may not be pretty, but I like it.

    The cans are $4 apiece + shipping.

  • Hippo Comes to Life

    David has accumulated plenty of coats and jackets, the the point that it seems like they’re everywhere.  Last weekend I thought it would be fun to make something to hang them from.  Well, since David enjoys hippos….

    I started off drawing the little guy in PhotoShop Elements with my tablet…

    (wow, enough dust in there? sheesh)

    Printed, cut it out, traced it onto a piece of wood…

    A few minutes of jigsaw work and it’s ready for some paint!  Notice the wooden version lost a tail – it was just too thin for my skills and tools to be able to cut.  After the paint I’ll be putting it atop another piece of wood along with some coat hooks.

    It was fun and took just over an hour from drawing to cut-out.

     

  • Google SketchUp

    My next non-computer project is to design and build a toybox for David.  I’ve put off actually thinking about the plans because I didn’t feel like finding graph paper and a pencil, and I hadn’t really looked for software to assist in the design.

    But this afternoon was going a little slow and I ran across Google SketchUp again.  I say again, because I recall hearing about its initial release and trying it out.  I didn’t thing much of it at the time, and promptly forgot all about it.

    Little did I know cool and easy to use it is.  I watched a few short tutorial videos and I was up and running.  If you’ve got a need to make to-scale models, you should check it out (it’s free).

    Here are a couple initial views of the toybox I’m going to try building, stay tuned!