Simple Raised Bed Gardens

It's already pretty late in the growing season here in Colorado, and if you're going to put in a garden you've probably already done it, but I just wanted to share these tips about building a raised bed for flowers or vegetables.

Colorado's Front Range soil is almost universally poor - mostly bentonite clay which, is virtually impossible to dig when it's dry and doesn't allow proper drainage - and makes gardening an act of will.  Raised beds offer a relatively easy solution for small scale backyard gardens because you add in the soil of your choice instead of trying to till amendments into the existing ground to make it usable.

There are a ton of different how-tos on the internet on building a raised bed, but these are the ones that stood out to me.  Below I have elaborated on the instructions that I thought were most helpful.

This Sunset Magazine one is pretty good, but it's a little over the top (How to Build a Raised Garden - Sunset.com).  It's 4ft by 8ft and uses 4x4 posts at the corners that are set into the ground to keep it in place, which is probably not necessary for most small beds.

The Better Homes and Gardens instructions are for a 4ft by 4ft bed that be taken apart (Raised Bed Gardening - How to Build a Raised Bed Garden - BHG.com).  The instructions are a little vague, but it's a cool design and would be great for someone who is renting and would like to take it with them when they move.

This video from Lowes (How To Build A Raised Flower Or Garden Bed - YouTube) is probably the simplest and is explained really well.  This one is 3ft by 5ft, which is also a nice size for a starter garden.

Basically, all of these instructions involve attaching some longer two-by-somethings to some short 4x4 posts, leveling the ground, setting the frame inside, and filling it with dirt.  In the dry Colorado climate you can use plain, untreated lumber instead of treated "green" wood (which you can't grow veggies in because it's poisonous) or expensive, but rot resistant, cedar or redwood.  Most people will loose interest in this little raised bed before it rots out in a few years anyway, so you may as well save a few bucks.  All of these instructions also enable you to start with readily available 8ft pieces of lumber and not have any waste, which is nice.  Depending on your level of handiness or ability to enlist a friend's help and power tools, I would have everything pre-cut at Lowes or Home Depot (or your local lumber yard) to the sizes you want and then follow the instructions in the Lowes video to pre-drill the planks and assemble the box.

Here are the materials you would need to build the 3ft by 5ft raised bed from the video:

• (6) 8ft 2x4s, each cut into 3ft and 5ft lengths at the store
• (4) 10-1/2" lengths of 4x4 post, cut from whatever 4x4 lumber is cheapest (2x4s are not actually 2" by 4" anymore, they're about 1-1/2" by 3-1/2", hence the 10-1/2" posts)
• (1) 1 pound box of 3" deck screws - you'll need at least 48 screws, plus the ones that get messed up in the process 
• 6ft of weed barrier cloth
• Aprox. 15 cubic feet (5/8 cubic yard) of garden soil - the bagged stuff is about the actual size it says on the bag, the loose stuff tends to settle down, so you may need a little more; also, you don't need to use all potting soil, just whatever is easy to get

Here are the tools you will probably need:

• Shovel to cut away the grass / sod (or just lay the weed barrier right on top if you've got a dead spot that's already level
• Drill driver (corded or cordless) with a 5/32" drill bit (to drill the pilot holes) and at least one #2 Phillips driver bit (to drive the screws)
• Level
• Tape measure (to make sure the box is square, measure the diagonals when attaching the sides and make sure they are the same) 

There are no limits on the ways you can modify, expand, or customize your new raised garden, including adding hoops for a makeshift greenhouse or bird netting or attaching it to anchors to keep it from being bumped by the lawnmower.  

I hope you enjoy your new garden, and don't trip over it in the winter snow!  Maybe next time I'll elaborate on the slightly more complicated one that my family built this spring.  

Extend Your WiFi Network!

In the process of getting settled into the girlfriend's apartment here in Shanghai it became painfully obvious that while the "premium" Huawei router included in the internet package may be good at reporting my internet activity to Chinese officials, it does a terrible job of getting WiFi through the ridiculously thick concrete interior walls.

I can take care of the former issue with a good VPN subscription that encrypts and then routes all of my internet traffic through California.  The latter issue wasn't a problem while sitting on the couch in the living room, three feet from the router, but when we decided to set up an office in one of the spare bedrooms on the other end of the apartment, the lack of a reliable internet connection became problematic.

Luckily, I brought along my old Linksys WRT54GL wireless router when I came to China, so I hoped that I could bridge the two routers onto the same network and therefore have a strong network connection in the office.  After a bit of searching, it turns out that I had my jargon wrong, and that by connecting one router to another with a cable to extend the range of the network, I was actually cascading the routers, and this is incredibly easy to set up.  Best of all, you don't have to mess with the original, primary router, which is good, because it's all in Chinese and I don't know the admin password.

All you need to do is follow the instructions on this Cisco Knowledge Base article, but here's the basic rundown with my commentary:

• Disconnect your computer from your existing network.  
• Plug the secondary (new) router into your computer via one of the LAN connections (not the WAN, we're not going to use that one).  
• Connect to the secondary router by typing its address into your web browser (probably 192.168.1.1).  
• Change fourth octet of the router's own IP address to something different than the existing router's, because it is probably 192.168.1.1 also, and that will cause a conflict.  I chose 192.168.1.250, but you can use anything between 1 and 253.  
• Disable DHCP so the new router doesn't try to assign IP addresses to the devices that are connecting to it.  The original router will still do that and they will just get passed through.  
• Make sure the SSID (name of the wireless network) and the wireless security settings are exactly the same as the original router.  This way your laptop / phone / etc will pass from one router to the other totally seamlessly.  
• Optionally (not noted in the Cisco post, but mentioned in a couple other post I read), change the default broadcast channel so there's no overlap between the two routers.  I have no idea if this is actually needed or helpful, but the original one seemed to be set to channel 5, so I changed the new one to channel 11.  If you, like me, can't access the original router, you can use something like WiFi Analyzer on your Android phone to check it out.  
• Make sure you save everything at each step, or else you're going to have to redo it all.  
• Disconnect your computer from the new router and unplug the power from it, too.  
• Get a really long ethernet cable, plug one end of it into one of the available LAN ports on the original router, and dangerously string it from one end of your house to the other.  Or run it in some less exciting way, like under the carpet or through the walls, but in this rented apartment with concrete walls and wood floors, I'm going to stick it to the wall with 3M Command hooks and call it good.  (Those things are great, btw.)  
• Move the new router to its new home and plug in the power cable and plug the ethernet cable into one of its LAN ports (again, not the WAN, the original router is still taking care of that).  

That's it!  It's actually easier than my lengthy commentary makes it look.  You now have two routers broadcasting the same wireless network that you can move between without issue.  Setting it up this way also allows you to keep sharing network resources (drives, printers, etc), because your still on the same segment of the network (third octet of the IP address).  At some point in time you should also have changed the default password to access your router from "admin" to something a little harder to guess.

Now, to actually bridge two wireless networks together (no cable in between the routers), you need different equipment than I have.

If you're having this problem, too, I hope this helps!  One of these days I'll follow up with pictures of the office and its awesome view.

I was on TWiT's AAA! ...Kinda

Yesterday I was featured on All About Android #22, the TWiT network's weekly show about, well, the Android smartphone ecosystem!  Okay, not me in the flesh, but my question was read and answered on the air, and it was one of the best nerd moments of my life.  And of course, because it's TWiT, it's on video.

Let me set this up for you.  I've had my first Android phone, a LG p999 Optimus X2 / G2x on T-Mobile, for about four months now (since May '11), and I really dig it.  But lately I've been getting pretty annoyed by some of its quirks and decided to root it so I could get full control of and do a good backup in preparation for a change of some sort.  Having not gotten the OTA update to Gingerbread from T-Mobile, I was all ready to load the CyanogenMod ROM, but then I got a little freaked out by a warning about my phone being unrecoverable if something went wrong.

So, after reading the XDA forums for way too long, I decided to write to the all-star crew of All About Android and see what they had to say about it.  I remembered that Leo had a G2x (and apparently still does), and hoped that they could help me out.

What I got was way more than I could have hoped for.  A three minute walk through of exactly what to do for my situation, from the man, Leo himself.

(If you want to see Eileen read my slightly wordy question, start here.  And of course, watch the whole episode from the beginning for some really good stuff.)  

So there you have it.  I'm saved by the TWiT AAA team and Leo Laporte and now I've got a plan on how to attack my phone and put a sweet aftermarket ROM on it.

Of course, now I hear that you can force the update to 2.3.3 from T-Mobile, but I have a feeling that would undo my root, and at this point, I'm feeling pretty confident about just jumping right into CyanogenMod.

Blog = Domain (Finally!)

As you may or may not have noticed, I finally got my ol' blog moved over to my own domain!  Phew, what a struggle that was.

The process of transforming my "Steaming Pile" blog at http://mnthomp.blogspot.com into "Matt's Maunderings" at www.mnthomp.com is mostly complete.  I need to make some changes to the theme / CSS - pull the title a little closer to the top of the page, move stuff around on the side bar - and add some content - the "about me" page, my photos, feeds, resume, etc. - but it's coming along nicely.  Steaming Pile still may have been a more appropriate name for what I post here, but it doesn't sound very professional or adult.  Although, when you think that I started this whole thing in 2005, it isn't so weird.

***

...So, I thought the process of transferring your Blogspot blog to a domain that I bought through Google and have Apps for Your Domain running on would be easy, quick, and simple.  I was wrong.  Turns out (obviously, in hindsight), that if you have the "Sites" service running on your Apps account, then you can't publish another site on top of it, because sites.mnthomp.com and www.mnthomp.com both point to the same place.  Duh.

Luckily, after a bit of digging (not simple) and some poking around with the domain management setting of my domain host (not easy), it all falls into place.  As soon as the DNS records update (not quick).  These two webpages were invaluable in helping me sort it all out: The Blogger help page "create a subdomain through eNom" (since "www" is actually a subdomain) and the post "Another blog is already hosted at this address" at The Real Blogger Status blog.

This still leaves me with a small question in the back of my mind.  My Apps account and my Blogger account are not the same.  How did Google let me put a Blogger blog attached to account A on a domain that is attached to account B?  I mean, I did have to change some of the domain settings that you shouldn't be able to do without access to both accounts, but they were not major changes.  So could I just start entering random domains into the custom hosting box and see of one takes?  Not sure how that would turn out, but I'm not gonna find out, either.  I'm leaving well enough alone!

Wordle Word Cloud From Your Twitter Stream

Apparently I went about getting my previously mentioned Wordle word cloud of my Twitter stream in a extremely roundabout way and didn't realize that it isn't as simple as I thought.

From what I can tell, Wordle will create a word cloud from any url that supports an RSS feed. To find the RSS feed of your (or anyone's) Twitter updates, go to http://twitter.com/username (replace username with the one you want) and click on the "RSS feed of ___'s tweets" button on the lower right-hand side. This will give you the RSS page address that Wordle needs to create a word cloud. Copy the url from the location bar and paste it into the appropriate box at www.wordle.net/create and hit Submit.

Unfortunately, there are only 20 updates included in Twitter's RSS feed at a time, and I'm not sure exactly how many of those Wordle decides to use. It's not very many, so you end up with a really crappy looking word cloud with a lot of @s, usernames, and tinyurl links. Not very entertaining.

The way I stumbled upon my really cool looking word cloud was pretty convoluted. I started out at the TweetStats site graphing my tweet timeline, tweet density, and some other cool aggregated statistics about my tweets. (Which, incidentally, you can check out here.) There is some really nifty info there, and if you click on the little "Tweet Cloud" button near the top, you get their version of a word cloud made from you tweets.
Kinda near the middle-right of that page there's a little blurb that says "Don't like the TweetCloud? Well then, go make a Wordle! (no @'s)" Click on the link (I like the no @'s version) and it takes you to a Wordle page with all the hard work done already. Then you just mess around with the colors, layout, etc, and take a screen shot of what you like. Bam!

There's also a "save to gallery" button, but I wouldn't waste your time there, since the gallery is chronological and cannot be searched, therefore rendering it basically useless to find your creation in the future.

I have to assume that there is some RSS-foo going on in the background of TweetStat to get a better sampling of data than I was able to find using the RSS button on Twitter. I also assume that if I spent long enough messing around with the public API, I might be able to figure it out, but since someone has already done it, I'm not gonna waste my time.

Also, I'm pretty sure that your updates cannot be protected for all of this to work, but since mine are public, I can't tell you for sure.
Happy graphing / clouding!

Coolest thing I've seen about Linux yet!

So, I've been using Ubuntu (first 8.10 and now pre-release 9.04) on my IBM laptop (thanks Lana!) for the past several months, and in general, I have been very impressed with its usability, capabilities, and function.

First of all, Ubuntu, like most Linux distributions is free (as in beer and speech), so that instantly gives it a leg-up on Windows for the computer tinkerer who occationally messes up their system beyond help and needs to reinstall. It also has a great update manager that keeps your system up to date without hitting you over the head with "genuine" versions and involuntary reboots. The out of the box folder organization leaves a little to be desired for users who are not used to Linux, but that's a pretty minor point of contention.

To further my uber geeky experiments, I recently setup a headless (no monitor or keyboard) file server to share, um, "data" between a small group using Ubuntu Server Edition 8.04. The setup was mostly smooth and the updates and installation of the pertinent programs was very straight forward, but using a text-only Comand Line Interface really left something to be desired when it came to renaming and moving files around. It's a long adventure of typing in the full path of the file you want to move and then the full path of where you want it moved to. Not really my idea of fun.

This brings me to my point of the coolest thing I've seen about Linux yet. While I was Googling around to figure out how to use SSH to access my server from off-site, I found this gem:

Re: How to use sshd

---

You can also do:

sftp://username@IP.add.re.ss

in nautilus or konqueror and it will allow you to do drag'n drop file moving.

How friggin' awesome is that? Not only does it get me a secure connection from any computer running Linux back to my server at home, it gives me a graphical environment to manipulate files and folders! Rock on!

Now, there's probably a Windows version of this, but it probably isn't free and definitely requires more work than I just invested in figuring this out.

Bringing OCD to the Desktop

So, maybe I need to sit in front of the computer less. Maybe I should geek out a little less. Or maybe I just need to not worry about exactly how much processor time and RAM my computer is using this very second. Or maybe I need a prescription.

In any event, if you, like me, need to know precisely what your computer is doing at all times, let me be your guide.

First, you'll want to download Sysinternals' Process Explorer to replace the lousy Windows Task Manager that doesn't really tell you much. It's currently in version 11.11, so it looks like I'd better upgrade! Download the .exe and plunk it down in your c:\windows\system32 folder. Ctrl-Shift-Escape to launch it, then click on View and Select Columns. Then in the Process Memory tab, check Working Set Size and hit OK. Mess around with it a little. It's pretty spiffy, and now you're just a key combo away from knowing what's running, killing stubborn processes, and restarting the ones that actually need to be there.

Secondly, since you may actually need to get something done, and that involves not watching the Process Explorer non stop, you'll want to download Serious Samurize so you can embed some of that info (and tons more) right on your desktop.
All my configuration currently does is display the date, processor and memory use, and the current Winamp track in a little box in the lower right corner of my screen. Now I don't even have to open Process Explorer to constantly glance at my computer's resource use. (Which seams unreasonably high, but that's just another thing for me to fret about!)

I was going to try to include the configuration file so you could be exactly as cool as me, but I can't figure out how to host anything other than pictures and videos here.

Anyways, that's my little obsessive compulsive computing tip for today. Do with it what you will, but if you find yourself constantly looking at how much processor it takes just to open a new tab in Firefox, don't say I didn't warn you!

My Maps by Google

Google has recently introduced a new feature with it's already powerful and popular Google Maps service called My Maps. It's pretty sweet. Just go to maps.google.com and click on "My Maps" in the upper left-ish part of the screen to give it a try. You can add a location anywhere, add your own descriptions, draw lines and shapes, and still get directions. Plus, you can make your map public and link to it like I've done below, or you can keep it private.

Map for the 4th Annual Colorado Intercollegiate Swing Battle.

Don't Pay For 411!

I never call directory assistance from my mobile phone. Not because I'm too stubborn to ask, [okay, maybe I'm too stubborn] but because it costs $1 each time you use it! That's just ludicrous. And ridiculous. It's Ludiculous!

But the days of wishing I had the phone number to the pizza place and just going hungry or driving around because I'm not willing to pay for the phone number are over. Today I learned about a service called Free 411. I know, it sounds kinda like a scam, but I did a little bit of research [at Snopes, where else?] and it turns out it is for real. All you've gotta do is point your phone to 1-800-FREE-411 and an automated / voice activated directory service helps you out. You do have to go through about 15 seconds of advertisement, but I'd do that to save a buck.

Although i have yet to try it, I more than likely will the next time that need arises. I don't want my money to go into the $8,000,000,000 that Americans spend on mobile phone directory service every year.