Creuzer

This blog has moved

2010-04-21T17:21:00.004-05:00

This blog is now located at http://mike.creuzer.com/.
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buh-bye Blogger, Hello Wordpress!

2010-04-21T17:16:00.003-05:00

I am being forced to migrate my website off of blogger as they are discontinuing their FTP publishing which I use to have my twitter tweets show up on my blog.

The blog URL will continue to be mike.creuzer.com, but the site may go away for a short period during this period of time.

You may need to update bookmarks & links to the site. You may also need to re-subscribe to the RSS feed as it is being moved to feedburner.

The first post on the new system will be on my new baby, Bella! So stay tuned!

Paiute Deadfall Trap with a plastic tote and my cat

2010-04-14T19:42:00.002-05:00

I've been going to Primitive Skills Meetups for about a year now. I have a blast there, as it allows me to get away from the city for a while. I've learned how to make my own mead, make spoons with fire, forage for wild foods. All kinds of stuff.

This month, we are going to be doing a session on traps and snares. I am a presenter!

Like I said, I love this group!

I am going to be showing a few styles of traps and snares that I have either fiddled with, thought would be useful, or want to learn. Another presenter is going to do the traditional Figure 4 Deadfall, so I will demonstrate an alternate - an Asian Inverted Figure 4 dead-fall. I think this alternate is much easier to set and also easier to carve. I will also show a squirrel snare set, penny locks for traditional snares, and also a paiute deadfall.

So anyway, I needed to dust off some of my trap setting skills. The last time I had set any traps, it was to my (now) Father-in-Law's amusement as I was catching my kittens at the time. He hadn't seen anything like it and was having a blast watching me. It was a while ago. I was using a figure-4 made from some scrap wood from when I made my bedframe and a plastic tote.

I took an evening off from cleaning and packing and moving, and this time, I am trying the paiute dead fall using more of the same scrap wood from my bed frame that I've kept for 3 years now and moved from Florida to Illinois. (I am such a pack-rat - hence all the cleaning & packing & moving)

Brother (my cat) is such a good sport. He quickly wised up to the fact that indulging on his beloved kitty treats made a big blue tote try to fall over him. I never did get an unassisted clean capture of my feline friend, but, the above video has a few humorous spots anyhow.

Poor Brother!

Mini woodsman bucksaw out of a hacksaw blade

2010-04-09T23:18:00.001-05:00

Brother is inspecting my latest contraption, a mini bucksaw made out of a coping saw blade. It's an outdoor woodsman style made with a bit of 550 paracord to tighten it up with a twist-stick.

Here you can see the twist stick a little bit better. To tighten it, you simply put a few twists in the cord with the stick and let the stick catch in the cross beam to hold the whole thing together.

If you look closely, you can see where the left piece has started to break in the middle because I twisted it up too tight. I went with a through the hole style assembly, but that proved to weak with the light pieces of scrap wood I was using.

I used the starting-to-break saw to re-cut the saw notches in the ends of two new peices of wood. The blade slips into a slot in the end of the wood.

You can also see the mortices I cut into the wood with my pocket knife. This proved to be fairly week, so the new one simply has a triangle shaped notch that goes about 1/3 of the way into the wood.

Here you can see how small and compact the whole thing works out being. This is the boot knife I keep next to my bed. It's not large, but not small either.

I can make the whole thing from scratch with just the saw blade, a knife, and a bit of cord. I made this saw while watching a movie with the wife tonight. She's pretty lienent about me having fiddly fingers and movies.

Android

2010-04-05T23:02:00.003-05:00

My wife got me a new phone for our 1 year anniversary. She got me a Samsung Moment which is an Android Phone.

Let me say. I love this thing. It's basically a small computer that can make phone calls. Probably in that order of functionality too, as I have trouble answering calls.

It has a slide out keyboard, which is good as I get to use the whole screen to view instead of half of it being tied up with a touch screen key pad. There are two issues with the keyboard. The shift key is one key too high - it needs to be switched with the 'fn' key and there is no real tab key to tab through form fields. There is a little optical pointer thingy, but I've not figured that thing out yet. I am typing this post on my phone if that is any indication of the keyboard usefulness.

The phone syncs up with my google account. This is pretty good as I heavily use google services. I had my old phone contacts copied to my new phone. I had to merge a bunch of duplicates as the phone contacts synced into my email contacts. But know I have about everyone I've ever contacted in the last 3-4 years on my phone. (No jokes about making it into two digit numbers please)

The signal reception seems to be fairly poor. I think my old phone was a good reception phone, so I may notice the step down more than some.

Text messaging is a blast on this thing. Adding photos is a bit cumbersome, but I quickly adapted. I just installed Handsent SMS which made texting even nicer.

The web browser is quite good. About as good as I could expect. Flash doesn't work on it, but I've only been to one website where that's a problem rather than a good thing - breaking all the ads. A few big sites like facebook detect that I am on a touch screen phone and give me a different version of the site.

YouTube videos work great on this phone. I kinda feel a bit like Neo in the Matrix, being able to learn how to do anything on the fly. Heh, tonight our waitress was Turkish, so my wife and I looked up turkey on wikipedia.com right there in the restaurant.

The Android Market is quite functional. After an initial hiccup with it refusing to download apps that a phone reset and a few hours trolling some forums to find a fix, I haven't had a problem since. There are a ton of free and paid apps to be found. I've downloaded ssh and vnc clients which allow me to connect to my computers and run them from my phone. I have a couple of contraction timers - for when the baby is ready to come. There is a lot of sudoko games - a lot!

I think my favorite thing is ASE which allows me to program the phone right from the phone. My first script allows me to take a photo of a barcode on a book and look it up on LibraryThing.com and see if I have it already or add it to my library.

I think you can expect more posts about my new phone in the near future. Probably much to my wife's chagrin.

I made a baby!

2010-03-28T12:41:00.001-05:00

Most of you should know by now that my wife and I are expecting.

This is one of those things that is so exciting that I wasn't sure how to blog about it. I had thought about putting up a help wanted post and then a followup post stating 'job filled' & announce the baby. I just couldn't work it around so it came out right. Probably part of why my blogging's been slow. I've been procrastinating and didn't want to blog about lessor things while such an important post was sitting in draft.

2009-12-03 Sonogram

My little girl is due April 28 2010. The doctor expects her to be born before then though. I guess this is part of why doctors call what they do "Practice", they can be all vague and stuff.

There was a baby shower in Florida. I attended. I still think showers are a ladies endeavor. I hope everyone realized I was half teasing when I said "No Pink!". The baby's a girl, of course we are going to get pink stuff for her. Heh - I even bought her a pink outfit. It's much to big, and camo, but still. I just didn't wall ALL pink stuff. But, anyway, we got some seriously cool loot at the shower. I don't know what half of it is, and there is a drastic shortage of stuff that requires assembly. But I will cope.

My baby-mama and I are doing fine. Her probably more-so then me. I've heard horror stories of emotional roller-coasters and midnight craving runs. I guess I got lucky! I've only been sent out a couple of times for ice cream. The bulk of any conflicts have been differences in understanding and expectations. Basically meaning, I am wholly underestimating the impact this change will have on my life.

Our current apartment lease is up at the end of this month - a few short days away. We are trying to buy a house so we have more room for our expanding family. It's a 'short sale' which means the current owners are trying to sell it for less then what they owe on the house while paying it off 'short'. They really need to call this an 'obnoxiously slow' sale.

We are working on Baby Residence Plan B. This entails clearing out the spare bedroom (my 'junk room') of all my stuff, deep cleaning, and installing baby stuff. The trouble is, it is in severe need of some drastic cleaning. I basically trashed the room before my better half moved in. Rust stains on the carpet. Tomcat spray in the corners. You know, serious cleaning.

With all this said. I am super excited! I've bought her a tricycle at a thrift shop. One of those good, solid metal ones. Like I had growing up. It was $10 or something like that. I had to have it! No cheap plastic knock-off big wheels for my little one!

So, that's what I have been up to the last half a year or so.

I made a baby! **happy dance**

Conundrum

2010-03-09T18:31:00.002-05:00

I have a problem.
Blogger is halting publishing over FTP soon.

I publish this blogger blog over FTP so I have access to PHP in my template. This allows me to do a few things, like have my own static content, but most importantly, my interleaved twitter feed into the blog content on the main page.

I use a lot of google tools, such as picassa, google reader, etc. and they all have tight blogger integration. It makes things easy.

I tweet more then I blog now days, so having the unified tweet/blog timeline is the coolest feature of my blog right now. The little 'widget' on the side bar just doesn't cut it for me.

If I switch to hosted blogger, I will lose the ability to tweet to my blog. I suppose I could have the RSS feed of my tweets posted to my blog, but I am not sure I like that idea. I like being able to format my tweets they way I like to. I don't want them to appear as just another blog post.

I could switch to something like Wordpress, and write my own module that does the twitter tweets on the home page like how I want, but then I loose the easy of publishing using google tools.

I suppose I could possibly have a blogger blog set up and have the wordpress blog consume and publish off of the RSS feed. I would need to have a 'blank' template with a redirect to the wordpress blog then. I'd have to be careful not to get dinged by google for doing 'blackhat SEO' type stuff though.

So, I am stuck. I have a clock that's ticking, no time to actually DO anything about it, and no clue which path to take!

Any ideas, suggestions?

Leather Wrapped Travel Journal

2010-02-28T14:58:00.003-05:00

I have been wanting a leather wrapped travel journal for a long time now. I could never find one that I liked however.
Yesterday, I bit the bullet, and bought a leather journal, and some graph paper pads the same size. I then took my brand new journal apart, with a knife, and put it back together again with my modifications.

I forgot to take a photo of the journal before I attacked it with my knife. So, you get to see it tore apart. I cut the strings at the knots, after I had written down the order I thought they had sewn it in.

Here is a new pads on top of a pad that came with the journal.

I sewed it together with 35lb braided fishing line that I colored with a permanent marker. I just held the marker in my knees and ran the line back and forth twisting it so it got colored on all the sides. Be careful not to pull too hard, or you can cut the tip off of your marker. (I knew this, and was gentile, no damage done!)

I used a #1 Milliner needle to sew the book back together. I used the lighter as a thimble to push the needle through the paper and leather. It was also useful for heat-singing the ends of the line.

Here is the finished book! Looks pretty sharp, doesn't it? You can see the stitches on the spine. I didn't figure the stitching order right, as I missed a section on the outside in the back. I am guessing that few hundred years ago, anybody literate knew how to sew these together.

And the pages inside.

I think I may try to tool the cover somehow. Brian gave me a meat-brand so I can brand steaks, but I think I may use that to emboss my name on the cover. Not sure how branding the name will look?

When I do this again, I think I will get just get regular paper refills, cut, fold, punch, stitch and trim the pages my self. It will be much cheaper. But, having seen how these pads where assembled, it's a good to buy them once.

Hungry?

2010-02-23T19:34:00.000-05:00

I don't know what to say about this photo...

Sliding Glass Door Insulation

2010-01-14T07:46:00.000-05:00

I have a leaky sliding glass door. No, water doesn't poor in every time it rains, cold air comes in. I don't know why, by my apartment sucks - it pulls air in from the outside.

So, I decided to insulate my sliding glass door. I looked at the sliding glass door insulation kits for $13, but that renders the door useless. I thought about doing just the glass, but that doesn't really stop the leaks, just reduces the cold air falling off the window from being in contact with such a large, cold surface.

So, I build a double pain, plastic door.

Using my favorite stuff... Duct tape!

I used a bit of scrap lumber I had to build the frame. I had kept a bundle of edge that got trimmed of some one-by at some point in the past.

The joints are just duct taped together. This is a temporary structure, so it's fine by me.

I created a duct tape hinge by leaving a gap in the wood when I taped it together. This allows the joint to hinge. Clever, I think.

I have moved this messed up roll of double sided tape, foam weather stripping from WI, to FL, to IL. I am such a packrat. It is a sickness. I can make cool things by scrounging around in a closet. **grin**

Here, I have the whole set up installed. The window isn't usable for looking out anymore, but that's not a big deal, the drainage ditch in the yard and street aren't that grand of a vista anyhow.

I used some small hooks to hold my contraption to the wall. I just screw them down until I can twist them and they will hold the frame snug. I used the weather stripping for both sealing and also shimming the frame out so the hooks would hold it snuggly. I put these around the right hand half, including on top.

On the left hand side, by the slider, I put just a single hook. I use this as the 'latch' as I can give it a quick twist, and the frame can open up on my duct-tape hinges. I can now use the sliding glass door, even though it's covered in 2 layers of plastic sheeting.

How cool is that? (ugly as sin, too, isn't it?)

The blinds close to hide the whole thing, so it look just fine from the inside.

Finishing the TV antenna

2009-12-29T00:00:00.002-05:00

While I was at my parents, and making my cat annoyer, I also made the backplane to my Home made Digital TV antenna. This is just a reflector for the antenna to give it better gain.

It's actually a little short, but I didn't want to pay the $6 difference for the taller wire mesh.

It needs to all turn white or something, as it's visually kinda dominating the room.

It needs to be tipped away from the wall a little bit to get the right angle to point towards Chicago to get the towers. It does reject Rockford and DeKalb stations quite strongly though, but alas, that is it's design.

Cat Food Tray

2009-12-28T20:11:00.002-05:00

My cat, Brother, has a habit that drives my wife crazy. He scoops the food out of his feeder, onto the floor and eats it off the floor. Well, some of it.

So I made a cat food tray to put the feeder on top of. It will catch the food and allow us to pour it back into the feeder.

Not to bad for not taking any measurements. It's a tad long, but not too bad.

And he likes it. It's gonna frustrate him to no end, but he will eat off of it.

Extra weight for traction

2009-12-21T19:00:00.001-05:00

I saw this set up and thought it was clever. The city put concrete barricades into the back of the utility trucks for traction last week when it was so slippery.

marble chess aquarium decoration

2009-12-20T20:51:00.000-05:00

I was at a thrift store last weekend, and found this lousy marble chess set for $3.83. Square cut pieces, lots of chips and broken off bits, but it was all there.
I thought it would be perfect in one of my fish tanks.

What do you think?

The office at night.

2009-12-09T21:58:00.000-05:00

I wandered over to the office tonight, in the snow and cold. I took a photo. What do you think?

Pantry Pizza

2009-11-24T21:48:00.004-05:00

Tonight, I just felt in the mood for Pizza. It's raining out, my wife has the Trucklet, and I just felt like pizza.

I call tonight's creation Pantry Pizza, well, because, I got it out of the pantry. Kinda an odd place to keep a pizza I know, but, it is what it is.
Lot's of good stuff in this pizza! Whole wheat flour, olives, mushrooms, and... could it be... Secret Ingredient #3? Yes! Corned Beef! I coulda made BBQ Chicken Pantry Pizza, or Pepporoni Pantry Pizza, or Beef Summer Sausage Pantry Pizza or Genoa Salami Pantry Pizza or even Dried Beef Pantry Pizza (not doing Tuna Fish Pantry Pizza, sorry), but tonight I went with the Corned Beef. A most excellent choice!

I even had bell peppers on this pizza! I put some dehydrated bell peppers in a bowl of warm water to re-hydrate. I was quite impressed with them after I fried them up a little bit.

I sauteed most of the onions, putting some raw ones right in the sauce for a bit of variety. I love garlic, so it got browned a bit in my cast iron pan. (actually, it's the lid to my dutch oven, but don't tell it that, you would break it's little cast iron heart!)

Lots of good stuff in the sauce. It turned out very good, if a bit acidic. I added more sugar then this to it, but it ended up a tad sweet but acidic. Any suggestions on de-acidifying tomatoes from a can?

Hmm... Corned Beef! Mushrooms and bell peppers too!!!

The pizza crust looks yummy, doesn't it? The extra got tossed in the freezer for another day. The dough is half "white wheat" flour and half unbleached all purpose flour. I think I am a big fan of this white-wheat flour.

The toppings look all nice and tastey, don't they?

Don't let my wife tell you I make a mess in the kitchen, it is simply true! My cheese exploded all over the counter and floor. I think this was my penance for using something from the fridge and not the pantry. There aren't many pantry-stable cheeses I would want to eat. I do wish I had a good root cellar, or cheese aging cave, but that's for a different reality - one where I am not making pantry pizza, so it's kinda defeating the purpose anyhow.

That crust looks pretty good after being blind baked, doesn't it? I don't have a batch of blind baking beans (they ended up in a neck hot-pad), so it's kinda bubbly in the middle. I have a pizza stone I just leave in the oven all the time, so this got baked off on the stone.

That's some darn good looking sauce! The chunks make it a bit difficult to swirl around evenly, but the taste more then makes up for it!

Full toppings, ready for some cheese!

And the final product! 1 perfect pantry pizza! 2 out of 2 people said it's the best pizza they had all day. One person even said it's good pizza even though they don't like pizza.

Anybody want the leftovers? It's more then I can eat!

New Pen Zebra F-301 Compact

2009-11-19T20:01:00.000-05:00

I read about pens that are shorter then normal when closed. I wanted one. I found one at Walmart on Saterday - well, a 2 pack.

You can see how it's a little shorter then normal when closed (on the bottom in the photo) so it will fit in my pocket better.

Here, you can see how the pen cap is very long, and the pen goes deep into it.

I took the belt clip off, and wrapped the cap barrel with a length of duct tape. i love carrying duct tape with me every where I go. Handy stuff!

The tape doesn't interfere with writing.

New Flashlight - NEBO AT09J

2009-11-18T20:04:00.000-05:00

(FYI, I have a flashlight fetish, just so you know)

I've carried a little pen flashlight around in my pocket for a while now (on the right in the photo). I keep a few feet of duct tape wrapped around it.

I've been happy with it for what it is. A cheap LED flash-light that I always have on my person. It takes a AAA battery, which has lasted for a year now maybe?

It's good for a few feet - 5-10 feet. Great for finding stuff in the dark, making sure I don't trip and fall at night, etc. It won't reach across the warehouse at work though, so I can't make sure nobody is in there when I lock up at night if I am the last one there.

I found a new flashlight Sunday that looks pretty good. It was $10, so not cheap, but not expensive either. It's all metal construction with o-rings, so it should be pretty water resistant. It takes a AA battery, so it's easy to replace the battery.
It said it's 35 lumens, and it's MUCH brighter then my old one. It's shorter, but wider, so it will fit in my pocket a little better.

The power button is recessed in the end, which is good, it's less likely to get turned on while in my pocket. The button is glow in the dark, which is kinda funny, because it needs light to charge. Oh well.

The one thing with this light, is that it is too short for wrapping duct tape around it. The rubber middle can slide off, and that looks to be the same size as electrical tape, so I may wrap a few feet of electrical tape around it. It will work the same as the rubber grip, and be more useful.

Free Wifi

2009-11-17T20:34:00.000-05:00

When I was vacationing in Florida, I saw that the state is offering Free WiFi in it's rest areas.

They have these trailers that they pull in and park on the premises. They look pretty slick. Generator, satellite dish, telescoping antenna, etc.

I guess this is who makes the trailers.

it looks like the antenna can get cranked up 4-5 times higher then it currently is sitting.

My new knife: Buck Knives - Vantage™ - Select Small

2009-11-16T19:51:00.000-05:00

While on vacation in Florida, my "souvenir" of the trip was a new pocket knife. I had broke my old one months ago - this spring actually.

I picked a ~$30 Buck Knife even though the place had some really nice Benchmade knifes. I can stand loosing a $30 knife a lot more then a $130 knife.

I picked this one for several reasons even though it's really 1 finger short for my hand.

It can be opened with one hand. This one is cool because it can be done either with the notch cut in the back of the blade as well as the little knob that can be used to flick the knife open very fast.

The belt clip can be removed on this one as it's bolted on instead of riveted on.

I intentionally picked a shorter blade, only 2.5 inches long. I live in a Chicago Suburb. Chicago is a bit touched in the head.

I did make one small modification to the knife. I added a very small magent to the back of the knife. I put it on the belt clip with enough room to be able to remove the clip still if I needed to. I used a touch of JB weld to hold it on even though the magnet will hold itself on.

The magnet is strong enough to hold the knife up if placed on metal. The real reason I put it on though is to check to see if metals are magnetic or not. Dad and I where wanting to check to see if a painted metal was steel or not. I didn't have a magnet with at the time. I do now.

Burnt out florescent lamp

2009-11-16T19:38:00.000-05:00

The living room light burnt out last week. This weekend, I picked up a new 3-way bulb for it. When I went to take the old one out, look what I found.

It looks a we-bit shot. Broken. I wonder if this is a fire hazard?

Hey... I did their website!

2009-11-16T18:26:00.000-05:00

Wow! Talk about a blast from the past! What are the odds that I find a google adwords ad on my blog linking to a website I worked on about 5 years ago? I guess they liked my work, they are still using it.
That just made my day...

Beaver

2009-11-15T22:46:00.003-05:00

I can across a beaver pond today. It's pretty amazing how cleanly a rodent can cut down a tree and drag it away into a pond. The only signs of the beaver's activities are a few stumps, some shavings right around the stumps, and a remarkably small trail to the pond for the size of the trees it was dragging off.

I think this tree is going to be hauled off pretty soon. You can see the beaver already took another tree away in the background.

This was a BIG tree the beaver brought down. Looks to have been done a while ago, maybe a different beaver? The top of the tree had been cut afterwards with a chainsaw as the beaver had dropped this tree into the pond and was covering up a park path. I wonder how hard that fencepost was on the teeth?

The tree in the background is getting quite chewed up. Beavers eat the inner bark of the tree. I wonder if this one fell the wrong way, so it wasn't dragged to the pond?

I went for a walk today

2009-11-15T22:33:00.003-05:00

I went for a walk in a nearby park today. A lovely day for a walk! Mid 40s, slight wind. There where PILES of people out walking their dogs.

I came across this tree with a pipe through it. I wonder how long it took for the tree to grow around the pipe like that?

I like this time of year, with the milkweed plants opening up.

Milkweed puffs on the grass.

I kinda liked this tree.

Please Dry off before entering BLOG

2009-11-14T22:24:00.000-05:00

I saw this sign at the condo I was staying at in Florida a while ago. I found it quite humurous. I know they are shortening the word "building" but it sure does look like blog!

So, No reading this blog while still wet! Remember water and your computer probably don't mix.