Geekspace for Women

Posted by ubergeeke on July 6th, 2008 in blogpost

Time to put my money where my mouth is. Recently, I told you all that I was taking steps to not be a poser in the geek department. In the interest of full disclosure, here are some of the projects I’ll be tackling and then posting about here on .51:

1. Build and test an Elenco Electronics Motion Detector. I’m embarrassed to say how long this has been sitting on my workbench, so I won’t. All I can say is that it ain’t gonna be there for long because I’m going to finish it THIS MONTH.

2. Get the wax buildup off my throwing knife. I’ve got a knife collection (don’t ask) and used one of them to get some crud out of a large candle. Then I forgot I did it, and the wax dried on the blade. I want to get it off without scratching the blade. This is a minor project, but I’m using this as an excuse to get to know my rotary tool.

3. DesktopBSD 1.6 on my Sony VAIO. I’ve already talked about this quite a bit, so I won’t get into it here.

4. Fix the thermal problem on my IBM T40. This error just popped up this week, and instead of finding some workaround, I’m going to fix it. Period. To sum up: whenever I run a particular command (an ikiwiki recompile, to be precise), the system overheats and shuts down. It’s frakkin’ up my workflow, so it Must Be Gone.

5. Get mp3 audio working in my car. I’ve still got the stock radio in my car, and the cassette deck doesn’t work. That gives me the chance to rig it (with a little help from Car PC Hacks) so I can patch in my IPod Shuffle.

And bonus for extra credit in my own eyes: work through one of Dave Taylor’s scripts before OSCON. After pegging Taylor as being too esoteric because I didn’t grok some of his Linux Journal columns when I first read them, I decided to cruise through some back issues and take a second look. Imagine my surprise when I realized that, since I launched .51 and spent a little more time on Twitter, some of those scripts apply to my little piece of the internet more now than they did six months ago. I’ll work through some of those scripts and share my results. (Then I’ll tweet Dave Taylor and let him know how tasty crow is.)

Help keep me honest: prod me with emails if I don’t report on my progress often enough!