New keyboard at work

The other day at work my boss came to my office with a new keyboard for me. I had been using a big heavy beast of a keyboard for the past year, and it suited me just fine. It was one of those clicky-clacky keyboards with great tactile feedback, and it made a lot of noise, which I believe to be the primary reason my boss wanted me to use the new one.

My old keyboard (Dell Model #AT101W)

The new keyboard is sleek, compact and not nearly as heavy or sturdy as the old one. It’s almost completely silent, excpet for a bit of rattling in the space bar. I find I can type at a similar speed, but I don’t get the same finger workout as I did with the old keyboard.

My new keyboard (Dell Model #SK-8115)

I’m pretty rough on my keyboards, using a lot of force when I type. Sometimes, when I get into a groove, or I’m just plain mad, I’ll almost be pounding on the keys. This is especially true when I’m gearing up for a big Ctrl-V key sequence. In my mind, I’m all like, “ready, aim, paste!” and I punch those keys as if they looked at my girlfriend the wrong way.

I’m slowly getting used to this new fancy keyboard, but we’ll see how long it holds up under my daily typing assault…

Fixing a scratchy wah pedal

A number of years ago, I bought a Dunlop Crybaby Wah pedal second hand. It was a good deal, but the sound was never as good as I wanted it to be. Since I got it, there was a scratchy sound that I could never totally get rid of. I cleaned out the potentiometer (pot) with electronics cleaner a few times, and that definitely improved things, but it was never perfect.

Lately, I’ve been getting back into playing guitar, and I wanted to put this wah to use. I figured I would just replace the pot and everything would be fine. At first, I assumed I could just go to Radio Shack or whatever they’re called these days and get a replacement, but after doing some research online, I found that the potentiometer used in a wah-wah is not a simple linear pot, but is logarithmic.

Without wanting to figure all this stuff out on my own, I began looking for a simple drop-in replacement. Many companies sell replacement pots, often with the little gear already attached, which means installation is as simple as tightening a nut and soldering three wires. I got my Dunlop Hot Potz-II replacement from my local Long & McQuade music store. It cost me $30.50, which isn’t too bad considering a new pedal would cost me over $100. I could have ordered online, but most of the places were charging at least $20, plus shipping, so I avoided the hassle and bought locally.

Here’s some pictures:

These things are easy to open up by simply unscrewing the four feet on the bottom. No screwdriver required.

Here’s the replacement potentiometer. It even has decent instructions printed on the back:

You need a wrench to unscrew the old pot and then you just disconnect the wires. Drop the replacement into position, make sure the gear is engaged and then tighten the nut. Then just get out the trusty soldering iron and solder the three wires back into place.

And that’s it. It was pretty easy to do, and took less than 20 minutes. No more dirty scratchy sounds. The wah wah is good as new and sounds great.

Five Years of robmaeder.com

It was five years ago that I registered robmaeder.com and started up my own website. That was back when I was still in college and I originally planned to use it to showcase projects, post my resume and store some files.

Over time, I redesigned the site a few times, attempted regular updates, and added in some actual content.

Below is a brief rundown of robmaeder.com through the years. Click the screenshots to see how the page looked and acted back in its day. The archived copies of my site are available thanks to the Wayback Machine.

First off, the original look. It’s pretty plain and kinda not good. I created a simple php backend that allowed me to update the news section through an admin form.

The second edition of the site was pretty different, being very minimal and light.

This third version of robmaeder.com was quite good for my skills. I put a lot more work into it and it contained a lot of pages showing off some of my projects and experiences.

The site you’re looking at now is the fourth and latest version. I made the switch to WordPress a while back, and I really like how simple it is to add new content. I’m getting kinda bored of the design and the broken stuff, so I might mess around with it sometime. I also want to move a lot of the pages from my old site to this one, so I can consolidate everything in one place. I get a lot of obscure hits from Google searches that lead to my old site, and it would be nice if everything was in one spot.

There you have it. Solid proof I have been a nerd for at least five years.

Gas Pump BSOD

I was at an Esso station a while back, and the pump crashed. Actually, it wasn’t the pump itself, but the advertising system they have on top of each pump. When you start pumping gas, the LCD screen activates and you see commercials and public service announcements. I only wish I got out of the car to take a better picture.

WordPress 2.0

I finally got around to upgrading to WordPress 2.0, as suggested by my friend Chris. (WordPress is the software that runs this blog). For the past few months, I’ve been having some ongoing problems with blog spam, and WordPress 2.0 has some new features that seem to be doing extremely well in helping me combat this spam problem.

This upgraded version looks the same to anyone visiting robmaeder.com, but behind the scenes, there are some nice changes. The admin dashboard is revamped, giving it a much cooler look, and making it easier to use.

The best part about this new version is the integrated Akismet plugin which is a tool that checks blog comments and trackbacks and then filters out the spam from the legitimate entries. Since I host my blog on my own server and not on wordpress.com, I had to register with WordPress to get an API key in order to use Akismet. This was a simple process which took about two minutes. Then I went in to the admin dashboard and activated the Akismet plugin with my API key. Everything else was handled automatically, and so far it’s been working very well. Before upgrading to 2.0, I would receive anywhere from 1 to 50 blog comment spams per day, and I would have to manually go in and delete them all. With Akismet, it automatically flags the spam comments without any human intervention. Comments are held for 15 days so they can be reviewed, and after that they are deleted automatically.

I’d highly recommend upgrading to WordPress 2.0 if you are using a prior version. It’s been working well for me so far, so I have to give it two thumbs up.