Yesterday I was introduced to the TurboShear by Malco which is one of the greatest innovations I've seen in sheetmetal work. Instead of using a hand or electric shear for cutting the metal this devices chucks into your cordless drill and allows much more precise cutting (such as square corners) than electric shears and is much faster than hand shears. Shears also work well for cutting vinyl, steel mesh and other similar materials. Malco also makes a heavy duty and fiber cement board version of the product though for basic sheetmetal work such as HVAC ducting the standard TS1 seems to do the trick just fine.

I've written before about the various interesting applications for the Dallas 1-wire network such as HVAC control, access control, weather stations, etc. A few weeks ago I finally got around to ordering some 1-wire sensors to play with myself. I must say that I've had nothing but a good time with them. I'm currently running outdoor temperature and rainfall logging which you can see for yourself as the data is uploaded to a number of servers including Weather Underground and the National Weather Service (through the Citizen Weather Observer Program). In future postings I hope to discuss a bit more about how simple this was to get going and show off my own weather homepage (still in development).

For now I wanted to share the design for a 1-wire surge suppressor. As it turns out some people have had a problem, specifically with 1-wire weather equipment, with lightning inducting large currents into their 1-wire network and damaging the sensors and/or serial adapter. To combat this problem Philip Gladstone has posted some easy to build protection circuits for both 1-wire devices and the serial port adapter. While I haven't built them myself yet I hope to have some time to do so before storm season gets into full swing.

Those familiar with rapid prototyping (essentially 3D printers for computers) know that both machines and supplies can be extremely expensive. Now a group known as Fab@Home has published instructions and software for building your own rapid prototyping machine. The machine they propose is certainly not as durable or precise as the commercial offerings, but at a fraction of the cost it may serve your needs just fine. If all you're looking to do is a bit fo experimentation or introducing students to what a rapid prototyper can do a less expensive system such as this might be all you need. NewScientistTech also has a story on the Fab@Home project.

One of the changes in my recent server upgrade was moving from using Samba on Linux as a workgroup server to making it a primary domain controller and implementing a small domain. I'm still waiting for O'Reilly to publish their updated Samba book which comes out this month so in the meantime I turned to the internet for answers.

What I found was a jumble of things using a variety of different methods of configuration to accomplish this. Needless to say I spent quite a bit of time untangling all this different (and sometimes conflicting) information. Although my server runs Debian the singlemost useful resource was this howto from the Gentoo wiki. The domain is up and running but the jury is still out on whether this is actually useful enough to justify the extra setup time and headache for such a small (six client PCs) installation.

When I first started using Cisco 7960 phones with the open source Asterisk PBX I had to jump through a lot of hoops like getting SMARTNet contracts and CCO access to download SIP firmware (to replace the SCCP protocol based one) I could use on the phone. Since that time things have gotten much easier (much being a relative term). If you have a phone with very old SCCP or SIP firmware you may still need CCO access to download older SIP firmware and upgrade the firmware loader but if your phone has newer SCCP, MGCP or SIP firmware you can now download the SIP v8.2 firmware (without Cisco CallManager support) for free from the Cisco website. The two other catches are that the firmware isn't quite the newest (at writing the newest is v8.6) and that the links are quite difficult to find on the Cisco site.

Lucky for you I've located this page on the Cisco website which allows you to download v8.2 and the relase notes that go along with it for free. Of course, like most Cisco products, the 7960s are not designed for consumer use but to be managed in large numbers by trained IT staff. I think this is one reason that Cisco has been slow to make firmware available for free. If you look on various message boards and websites you'll see a lot of people who are unsuccessful in getting these phones to work. I hate to say it but most of the time this is because they have no idea what they're doing. The phones themselves are not faulty and there are specific reasons why things like TFTP configurations are recommended (easy central management in a large company) and there is poor configuration through the phone itself and no web configuration interface (saves image space). On the other hand, if you take the time to learn "the Cisco way" you'll find you have an excellnt phone that sounds and operates remarkably better than the consumer based options.