Kitchen cabinet pullouts...phase 2!

Well, last time I showed some pictures of the new cabinet pullout I made and installed in my kitchen. Well today, I built another and installed it in the same cabinet to make my first double decker pullout! We don't have it fully loaded yet, but we should be able to fit loads more stuff in that cabinet than we did before, and no more crawling inside to dig around for what we are looking for.

As you can see in the picture both are full extension drawers, which is great. In the picture they look short, but the cabinet is actually just wide--the drawers are a full 23 inches deep.

Even though I have now made several boxes with my dovetail jig, I still hit some snags this time. First I accidentally cut the wrong corners together, forcing me to recut the front of the drawer. After building the whole box, I realized I had cut the front and back half an inch too wide, so I had to cut an and off of each and run them through the jig again. Oh well, I guess this is why the jig says that with practice you will rarely make mistakes. I guess there just is no perfect with this thing!

3 years later...another cabinet drawer!

So those of you who have found it in your souls to travel to Texas to visit know that we have a couple pull-out drawers in our kitchen cabinets. The first one we installed was purchased from our cabinet manufacturer. I was disappointed with the 3/4 extension slides and otherwise junky quality of this product and decided to build my own. The second drawer in this picture is the drawer I build in December 2006, which utilizes the full depth of the cabinet and has full extension slides.

I built this drawer out of pre-finished baltic birch drawer sides I ordered from either Rockler or Woodcraft. Building this drawer involved some improvising and messy router work, since I didn't have a table saw to do the joints I wanted to do. You can see in this picture my makeshift joint, along with my makeshift extenders for the drawer's face frame bracket to allow it to clear the door hinge.

After making the first drawer, I ordered materials to outfit my whole kitchen with pull-out cabinet drawers. I also ordered a dovetail jig to improve upon the makeshift joints I used. Finally, after all the supplies sat in my garage for three years, I finally made another drawer. This time I didn't use face frame brackets, and just installed filler wood in my cabinets so that I could screw the drawer slides to the side.

In addition, I spent the time to learn to use my dovetail jig! It took a couple hours to figure out how to use it and get everything adjusted properly, but now using this drawer stock I can create half-blind dovetail joints for a drawer in about 5 minutes! For a small box I made the joints were tight enough that I didn't even need glue, but for this larger drawer (about 19 x 22 inches) I used a few dabs of wood glue in the joints.

So, I am pretty happy with the new drawer. As you can see it is a bit crowded, so I intend to add another drawer above this one to hold small pans, lids, etc... Let's just hope it doesn't take me another three years to get to that one!

For all you non-truck owners

Ok, so I know that almost everyone that reads this has a truck, but I don't. This can make things a bit hard when I need to do something like haul around bags of manure or pick up lots of free mulch from the city brush recycling center.

Well I just thought I'd tell you about a nifty item I found, probably in the back of Family Handyman magazine or something. It is called the InteraTARP, and it basically a tarp made into a big box shape to fit the interior of a SUV or van. With it I was able to cleanly haul about a yard of free mulch this morning, with very little effort and virtually no mess.

I'm sure you could do the same thing with a regular tarp, but it is handy to have one that is already shaped like the vehicle. I especially like the flap on the back that keeps the back of the van clean. I also found today that to unload I could just set the wheelbarrow next to the back of the van, place the flap in the wheelbarrow, then use my rake to pull a whole load of mulch into the wheelbarrow.

So, if you don't have a truck, and want to haul messy things, take a look!

Customer Service: HP vs Costco

I had a problem with my HP printer the other day. This was a new OfficeJet that we bought in February, because we wanted a wireless printer. Our previous HP had worked fine for years, so I didn't feel bad about buying another HP.

Boy did that change last week. About a week after replacing the print cartridge for the first time, it started complaining that an incompatible ink cartridge was installed. After running out of ideas from their website, I called HP technical support, who rather quickly decided to send me a new printer. This seemed crazy to me...how did they know it was the printer and not the cartridge? Oh well, I figured they knew what they were doing.

They didn't. After receiving the printer, I was required to install my old ink cartridge, after which the new printer gave me the same incompatible cartridge error. I called HP, thinking they would quickly send me out a new ink cartridge, and we would be done with it.

Once again, they didn't. They wanted me go through all the same troubleshooting steps I did the first time. When I refused on the basis that I had already done it all, they said they could do nothing to help me. I have to admit that I became the stereotypical furious consumer at that point. Through the course of the call I was put on hold for long periods of time, was told that I could not speak to a supervisor or manager, and was refused when I requested any way to identify the person I was speaking to (all he would tell me that his name was Richard). Finally while being put on hold, I went ahead and did the troubleshooting again just to get this call over with. After I told this to "Richard," I was placed on hold and he never came back...

Wow.

After this I was so mad I packed everything up and hauled it back to Costco--four months after my purchase. I no longer had the original packaging, just a ziploc bag with all the manuals and cables. After spending at least two hours on the phone with HP, Costco took about two minutes to refund all of my money for my printer and the open pack of ink I had purchased. This gave me almost the exact amount of money that I needed in order to buy a new Canon Pixma printer (from Costco, of course).

After comparing the HP OfficeJet J4680 I returned to the Canon Pixma MX860, there is no comparison between the two. Everything about the Canon build quality and feature set is superior to the HP. I don't feel like going into the details, but compared to the Canon, the HP just seems like something the HP "engineers" churned out as fast as possible without regard to quality.

Two things I learned from this:

1. Just because a company's products were once good, doesn't mean they will stay that way.

2. Costco's return policy rocks. After this experience I want to make all my major purchases Costco, even if it is a bit more expensive (which it usually is not).

Parental Guidance May Be Required

Ok, so I have had problems with the movie rating system for a long time. My major complaint has been that gratuitous sex and violence seem to earn a PG-13 rating, while anything related to a serious subject matter--such as war--seems to automatically be rated R. To me this says that since teenagers have no capacity to think, they should only be presented with mind-numbing humor and vulgarity--you've gotta love that logic!

So where am I going with this? I just read an article on CNN about a group which is recommending that movies which contain smoking should automatically be rated R. WHAT?!?! You have got to be kidding me! My neighbors smoke on their porches, people smoke while they drive all the time, and people smoke on the street--in clear view of our children! Like it or not, smoking is a part of our lives, and I don't really see how eliminating it from movies is going to miraculously cure underage smoking. I am not recommending that smoking be glamorized in film, but an R-rating? Come on. With all the filth in PG-13 movies, you are going to decide smoking is the worst of it?

Since the way to prevent our children from doing something is to make it earn an R rating, I would propose that the following items be removed from any so-called youth film:

• Sticking gum under tables
• Farting
• Earning less than an A- on any school assignment
• Walking on the grass
• Throwing a recyclable bottle in the trash
• Failing to carpool
• Driving an SUV
• Eating fast food
• Crossing the street without looking both ways

I am sure that I am forgetting many other things that are destroying our children's lives, but lets get real. We can't solve the world's problems by changing the movies people watch. Maybe it is a factor, but why don't we try something significant--like actually spending time with our kids instead of just telling them to watch movies all day.

Finally Fixed? Realtek Audio Stops Working After Standby

Ok, so my blog doesn't normally include technical items, but I haven't found this solution out there anywhere, so I wanted to post it SOMEWHERE on the off-chance that somebody else may find it and be helped by it.

Problem: After my recent computer upgrade, my Realtek HD Audio occasionally died, and I had to reboot the computer to fix it. I finally figured out that the problem related to returning from standby, and that I could force the failure by going to S3 standby while watching a video on Hulu.

Solution: I saw some other people in several old threads I found through my Google searching, who said that if they remove their wireless PCI card. WHAT!?!?! The wireless card makes the audio die? Anyway, I decided to upgrade my drivers and see what happened. My network card is a cheap AirLink101 board, and their latest driver is from 2006--so of course I already had the latest version.

Wait!!!

I looked in the device manager and decided to Google the PCI Vendor and Device IDs and found a long list of matching hardware. As it turned out, the AirLink101 uses a Ralink chipset, and different manufacturer's products are differentiated only by the subsystem ID.

On Ralinks website, I downloaded all of their PCI drivers, and then sifted through the INF files until I found the one which supported device ID 0302, which turned out to be the RT256x Driver. Wow, a 2009 date! Wouldn't it be nice if all the OEMs like AirLink101 would at least rerelease the reference drivers once every couple years? I downloaded this and did a driver-only install on my system.

Next hurdle...I try to update the driver in the Device Manager, and it says that there are no other drivers on the system. No problem, we just have to force it to use the right one. Examining the new INF file showed that Ralink includes a bunch of vendor's subsystem IDs in their file, but not the one for my AirLink101 board. I decided just to force the driver install and see what happened. From the INF, I learn that device 0302 is called the Ralink Wireless LAN Card V2. By choosing to select the driver from a list and browsing to this driver, I was able to force the installation--ignoring all the complaints that the world might end if my driver mismatches.

A few seconds later my computer reconnected to my wireless network, and I have since suspended and resumed repeatedly in the middle of Hulu videos with no problems whatsoever, hopefully this fix is permanent. Thanks Ralink!

One year older and wiser too...

So this week has been busy, largely because we were getting ready for our daughter's 5th birthday. Emily isn't very good about bragging about her cakes, so I thought I would do it for her. This was a cake she "threw together" for the party. Emily made all of the flowers and the bow out of fondant, and the rest is buttercream. It was filled with some sort of delicious chocolate pudding also.