Steven Reimer

I have always been a fan of DIY projects, but never so good at carrying them out to fruition. Well, here is one that I have indeed managed to see through to at least the proof of concept.

I have always complained about my HP Pavilion's noisy CPU fan. So in an effort to keep my laptop cooler with less interference from the CPU fan I build my own laptop cooler. The use of hoses was inspired by another DIY laptop stand I had seen on the net. Add 2 Princess Auto 5v fans, a USB cable and minimal solder and you get this:

I intend to tidy up the wires a bit and maybe attach the 2 hoses with telescoping rods for maximum adjustability and in an effort to keep everything together. The fans are not the quietest either, so there is the option of switching to 12v fans and since they will be underpowered they would spin slower. But at least it seems to work somewhat.

There was some excitement in Bow Island last night. There were a lot of people standing around watching this house fire. We got there a bit late so my pictures aren't as impressive as some people got earlier. The whole front of the house had been one big wall of flame.

You can see an old VW Bug in the garage. It's always sad to see an old car destroyed.

Dan, this one is for you.

You know that outline on href's you see when you click the link? I used to get rid of that with an "onclick=blur()". Well, I just found a way easier method.

a { outline: none; }

And I call myself a web developer. How did I not know this?

Finally. I have succeeded after much reading and trial and error to create my own custom firewall and more importantly QoS script. I have revisited QoS several times since I lost my Shorewall config to a hard-drive crash at work. I endeavored this time to build a QoS script from the ground up with no 3rd party software. This proved a little more difficult and time consuming than anticipated.

The very high level break down of how it works is this, IPTables is used to assign port, destination or source based traffic arbitrary marks. These marked packets are then read by traffic control (tc) and put into designated Hierachical Token Buckets (HTB) which have assigned rates and priorities. That's the gist of it.

It all sounds quite boring and simple but I assure you it wasn't that simple and boring is a subjective label. It's exciting for me because it is the final piece to the SNAP (one of my pet projects) puzzle.

If anyone is interested in these scripts, let me know and I'll make them available.