Tuesday, April 22, 2008

Playground equipment in the home for children and grandchildren

Are your a parent, meaning you have children, or are your a grandparent with grandchildren? Well, I am both, well, at least a grandfather of one with another on the way. I use to have swing sets in my garden. That was once upon a time a long time ago. They are now all grown up and in fact one of them have become a parent herself and another one will be a parent soon. Where have the swing sets gone, I do not know. But my grandson will soon grow up together with the one on the way, and when they are big enough, I will probably want a swing set in my home for them to enjoy just like their parents when they were children. However, this time, I will probably go for a tire swing as I am environmentally conscious and believe in reduce, REUSE and recycle and there are lots and lots of used tyres waiting to be REUSED.

However, for the moment, they are not big enough to be able to sit on a swing, and I would probably have to think of something more suitable like other playground equipment that they would actually be able to enjoy. Then perhaps I will get more frequent visits from my first grandson and my soon to be born second grandson.

Thursday, April 10, 2008

ShopWiki, Wikipedia or Google of online shopping

Practically every surfer on earth knows about Wikipedia, the online free encyclopedia which humbled the mighty Encyclopedia Britannica. The latest is online shopping Wikipedia for home and garden.

ShopWiki for Home and Garden

What exactly is this Shopwiki.com? According to the website, it looks like a revolutionary Wikipedia, or more accurately the Google of online shopping for home and garden knick knacks and other stuff. Most general online shopping wait passively or semi-actively for products to be included in their website or perhaps actively canvass for paid insertions in their websites. Not so for ShopWiki, says the owner of ShopWiki. ShopWiki is proactive. They don't sit on their butts and wait for merchandisers to come to them. They say they have spiders to crawl the Web for products, just like the search engines. Not only that, ShopWiki will place everything a shopper might need irrespective of whether they earn anything from the insertions. In this way, they say, they can have a pretty comprehensive range of products available for purchase online. Don't know about you, but to me, that sounds pretty revolutionary.

Now I used to make pretty delicious turbo-broiled chicken for myself and my family using my own invented and unconventional recipe (I am an unconventional man). What I did was to use a juice extractor to extract the juice out of peeled garlic. Use the garlic juice extract together with seasoning like honey, tom yam paste, oyster sauce, etc., together with the garlic pulp (I try my best to use everything, throw nothing away), for marinating the chicken for a few hours, then turbo-broil it in the turbo-broiler. Note that garlic is a very powerful natural antibiotic and I am confident that I can marinate for a long time without any problems. With this unconventional method, a recipe you will find nowhere else, not only will we have healthier chicken to eat as quite a lot of the chicken fan would have dripped to the bottom of the pan, we also ended up with an aromatic and very tasty chicken which my whole family loved. Don't know about you. I love the smell of garlic.

Only problem is, both the turbo-broiler plus the juice extractor are no longer with us. That makes me itching to look for replacement. Look for replacement. Perhaps Shopwiki.com has the perfect solution. There is a search box in that site. Let us give it a trial. I typed "turbo broiler" into the search box and searched. Result? turbo broiler search result from ShopWiki.

How about juice extractor? They have that too. A search revealed fruit extractor ShopWiki search result which turned up 237 results, a pretty impressive figure.

Friday, April 04, 2008

Epoxy floor coatings for the home

What is epoxy?

I got familiar with epoxy when I had to teach "Adhesive and Adhesion before I retired as an associate professor. Epoxy is a very versatile thermosetting polymer which is not only used as a very good adhesive, but is also used in coatings, paints, making various types of composites which when reinforced with fibers like fiberglass, are then used for things like industrial tooling, molds, marine applications, aerospace even including outer space.

Epoxy floor coatings

Epoxy resins can be used for high performance flooring which include heavy duty industrial flooring as well as domestic decorative flooring. Epoxy may be combined with marble or colored chips to make terrazzo flooring or colored aggregate flooring. For existing floors, the versatile polymer may be used as an epoxy floor coating. If you are a handyman prepared to get your hands dirty and save some money, perhaps diy epoxy floor may be in their consideration.

I used to make homemade CNC machines, but those were desktop mills and lathes which I even play with in my bedroom. It is extremely fascinating to be able to type a few lines of codes into the computer and watch the machine do exactly what you commanded. However, with desktop CNC machines, you can only fabricate tiny items. There are many I know who bought used heavy duty mills like the one you see in the photo below:

heavy duty 3 axis mill
Photo of 3 axis milling machine belong to Bill Ohl


buy stepper or servo motors, fabricate their own motor controller (actually even the same one I made for my desktop 3 axis mill can be used), convert the manual 3 axis milling machine to CNC (Computer Numeric Computer) and machine all kinds of very respectable size stuff.

There is no way I can put that monster into my bedroom, not even the living, dining or kitchen. If I ever get such a monstrous machine, the only place I can put it will be in the garage. And when you are doing machining, you will be moving lots of heavy stuff around. For such purposes, applying garage floor epoxy would be a great idea.