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Last year, Amazon gave a boost to its Prime members when it launched a free, unlimited photo storage for them on Cloud Drive. Today, the company is expanding that service as a paid offering to cover other kinds of content, and to users outside of its loyalty program. Unlimited Cloud Storage will let users get either unlimited photo storage or “unlimited everything” —… Read More
via TechCrunch
Amazon Goes After Dropbox, Google, Microsoft With Unlimited Cloud Drive Storage
You know the book. A kid winds up in the forest with nothing but a small hand axe and figures out how to survive. A hatchet is one of the most versatile tools you can take with you in the outdoors, this is how you use one and how you’ll manage to keep all your fingers and toes when you do.
Different tools for different jobs. A big ol’ axe will chop wood more efficiently, but a big ol’ axe is also heavy and large. A hatchet is just an axe scaled down for single-handed use, which makes it lighter, more compact and easier to carry as a result.
You can still do all of the same stuff with a hatchet, it’ll just take a little longer and require a little more energy. But still likely less time and less energy than it’d take with an even more easily-carried knife.
Believe it or not, but they’re not all created equal. Pick up a cheap Coleman and it’s going to be dull out of the box, difficult to sharpen, the head will be made with a poor heat treat that means it won’t hold an edge and the metal handle will transfer the impact from every chop right into your hand and arms.
But, just like with knives, you can follow the quality rabbit hole a bit too far down. $50-60 should get you a nice, heirloom-quality tool that will do its job without complaint as long as you need it to.
I prefer a hatchet with a wooden handle, that material’s ability to absorb vibration and impacts and to resist damage from multiple angles is simply unrivaled by steel or fiberglass. Wood also offers an element of repairability should your head become loose over time. I also like a head with a straight line across its top, a pronounced hammer to the rear and a tomahawk-style blade that drops bellow the body of the head. Unlike knives, you often won’t find the type of steel hatchets are made from listed, but if you’re spending more than $60, that’s definitely something you should look for. A harder steel like D2 or 1055 is a good fit for a heavy use hatchet. You don’t need the flexibility of lower-carbon steel in a big, stiff hatchet head. And it’s a tool, not a cabinet queen, so you don’t need stainless. Any surface rust that appears will wear off with use. Rusty hatchet? Use it more.
Try and few and find a length that suits your use, style and body. I find a 24" handle with a 1.5 to 1.75lbs head to be the perfect mix between power and portability.
Ticking all those boxes is the Snow and Nelley Hudson Bay Axe. As with most commercially available hatchets in the sub-$100 price range, expect to spend some time with a file and sand paper to achieve a good edge once you’ve received it. If you want a higher quality, non-Chinese hatchet, the Gransfors Bruks Small Forest Axe is appreciably nicer, but also over twice the price. You won’t need to invest so much time on its edge before using it though.
Older hatchets are also a good purchase. My friend Andy has a little side business restoring axes and hatchets up in Seattle. They make a great gift for manly men and women.
With sheaths, I like a classic leather sheath that covers the cutting edge and connects with a strap around the handle, thereby leaving the back of the head free to hammer stuff with in safety.
Most hatchets come with a rounded, bevel edge (or face, in axeman speak). This is what you need for chopping. If you want a hatchet for a specific job like carving, you may prefer a narrower edge profile. For chopping and use outdoors, you also want an axe where the cutting edge is a little rounded from top to bottom, when viewed from the side
Photo: Robert S. Donovan
A longer axe (or hatchet) is a safer axe (or hatchet). When you swing it downwards, a longer hatchet will be more likely to hit the ground before impacting your foot or leg.
A sharper hatchet (or any edged tool) is also a safer hatchet, requiring you to exert less force in using it and therefore retaining more control.
If you’re chopping with a hatchet, always do so from a kneeling position. This way an errant swing stops at the ground, not your leg.
Never try to hold a pice of wood that you’re splitting or chopping with your spare hand anywhere in the vicinity of a swinging axe. We’ll show you how to chop and split safely below.
If you’re using a block, place the piece of wood being chopped towards its rear edge. That way, if you miss, you’ll strike the block and not your leg.
Never store a hatchet by just walking it into a piece of wood. This creates a tripping hazard, one with a sharp surprise at its end. A hatchet should always be stored in its sheath, out of the way and, if possible, hanging up.
Be particularly careful swinging anything sharp around other people or your dog. You should have an area around you that’s clear to at least twice the handle length of your tool, in all directions.
Photo: Richard Cocks
You can use a grinder to remove large nicks or to reprofile a blade, but the metal can easily be over-heated and lose its temper as a result. You’re better off using a hand file for big work like that; it’ll take a little longer but won’t damage your axe head. When using a file, keep the whole face of the edge in even contact with the abrasive material.
Most maintenance of the edge will be done with an axe sharpening stone like this one. That has two sides — fine and coarse. Wet the stone with a little bit of oil (to carry away the bits of metal you’re gonna take off), then rub it in a circular motion up and down both sides of the blade with even pressure and duration. When you’ve achieve a good, clean edge with the coarse side, switch to the fine and do the same until it’s good and sharp.
You can refine a hatchet’s edge even further by stropping it on a leather belt. Pull the hatched down the leather away from its blade to do that.
I test sharpness by running a blade down by forearm, perpendicularly, feeling its ability to cut my arm hair. Some people feel this is dangerous, for obvious reasons. If you’re one of those people, cut up a piece of paper with the blade to get a feel for its edge.
To protect an axe head from the elements, you can give it a fine coating of beeswax or just wipe it down with a little WD40 here and there; that’s what I do.
Most (nice) hatchet handles are made from strong, flexible hickory wood. To care for them, give them an occasional wipe down with linseed oil, being careful to remove any excess.
As with all leather, a sheath needs to be oiled as well. There’s many different types of leather treatments out there, but I just use Pecard’s Motorcycle Leather Dressing for everything, it’s simpler that way.
If the head of your hatchet ever becomes loose, please don’t soak it in water. When the wood dries out, the problem will just be worse. You need to re-wedge a handle to fix a loose head. Does your hatchet already have a wedge? Remove it, measure it and fit a slightly larger one. No wedge? Put one in. Your local hardware store can likely help with this.
Photo: New Mexico Forestry Camp
Split Wood: You need to break down limbs and logs to expose the dry wood inside in bad weather and to feed a fire progressively larger fuel. This is the main use for a hatchet (or a large survival knife) outdoors. First, find a good log or stump to use as a chopping block. It doesn’t need to have a flat top if you want to use our first, easiest method.
If you’re splitting uneven, smaller branches, you can simply lay one against the hatchet’s edge and parallel to the handle. Hold the branch in one hand in the hatchet in another, with the hatchet on top. Now bang all that against a log, branch-down; it’ll split. This is the safest way to split wood.
If you’ve got a nice, flat-ended log and a nice, flat chopping block, you can split the way you’re probably thinking, where you swing the hatchet like the big tough guy that you are and hit the top of the log with it. The trick here isn’t necessary force, but more finesse. If you can tweak the blade to the side as you strike, it will pull the wood apart without a huge amount of pressure. Practice makes perfect.
Chop Down A Tree: Pretty much every tree leans in one direction. Get underneath that lean and chop into the tree both from an upward and downwards angle to make a wedge through it. When you’re about halfway through, switch to the opposite side and make the center of your wedge a little higher up the tree. When it’s ready to fall, stand back, the tail can kick up and to the side as it falls. Your hatchet can then be used to trim the branches.
Snap Off Dry Branches: A big ol’ tree doesn’t make the best firewood for camping. They just take too much labor to get them down to useably-sized wood. A much better source is dead, dry branches and the hammer on your hatchet can likely knock those right off a tree with a single blow. Just whack them from the top, near the trunk.
Hammer Stuff: Need to drive in a tent stake or a make-shift center pole for a shelter? Well, it turns out that hammer on your hatchet really is a real hammer and you use it just like one. Make sure the blade is sheathed when you do so, catching your face with an upward swing and with a sharp edge would ruin your day.
Sharpen it with a stick: Find a nice, green branch and use your hatchet to cut it off a tree and trim it to a couple feet long. Next use your hatchet to skin its bark. Now dip it in water and rub it in sand with plenty of pressure. Yeah, you should carry your sharpening stone with you, but one of these will get the job done in a pinch.
Process game: Killed yourself an elk, deer, pig or another big animal? A hatchet is going to separate its joints and quarters much more easily than your little skinning knife ever will.
Throw it: Doing this is dangerous and trying it for the first time when you’re drunk, high or both is a bad idea. If you insist on doing so, don’t come blaming me when you lose an eye. Find or make yourself a good backstop with said hatchet, then follow the instructions here. Throwing a hatchet or a tomahawk is never going to be useful, but it sure is fun.
Top photo: Ida Myrvold
via Gizmodo
All The Neat Stuff You Can Do With A Hatchet, Safely
NeverWet is a water-repellent spray that can basically keep anything dry. It’s cool, if not the most practical thing in the world. But apply it to a sidewalk, let it rain, and magical things start to happen.
The project is the work of Seattle-based artist Peregrine Church, whose (entirely laudable) mission was to "make people’s rainy a little bit better". To do that, he sprayed NeverWet through a stencil onto the sidewalk, making select parts of the sidewalk completely waterproof.
The result, as you can see above, is games and illustrations that appear when it starts raining: : the dry bits of sidewalk carrying the message stands out from the wet. You’ve got everything from hopscotch to inspirational messages — basically, anything you can stencil onto a sidewalk.
The art installations are in Seattle (which makes sense, given the climate), but anyone armed with a $20 bottle of spray and some cardboard can go make their own. Just add water. [YouTube via Colossal]
Contact the author at chris@gizmodo.com.
We’ve heard lots in recent years about Big Data and the alternative models of data management and processing, like Hadoop and NoSQL. But truth be told, relational databases are still the workhorses of most of today’s small and medium sized businesses. Relational DBs date back over 40 years and SQL skills are fairly common, and they’re known to be highly secure.
MySQL is the world’s second most popular relational database management system (RDMS) and is the most popular open-source version of the database. It’s easily accessible and is often known to be part of the LAMP web development stack, standing for the ‘M’ in the acronym of popular tools, along with Linux, Apache, and PHP/Perl/Python. The fact that MySQL is free, easy to setup and scales fast are some of the main reasons why it’s the best match for many SMBs.
But as with any relational database, MySQL can be a beast when it doesn’t work right, causing your applications to slow down or stop performing and putting your business in jeopardy. That’s why you want to pay close attention to MySQL performance and do everything possible to keep things moving along. In the following we’ve accumulated 7 quick MySQL performance tips that will help keep your environment running smoothly and effectively, and your business applications running at their peak.
1. Understand the 4 fundamentals
In order to function correctly a database needs four essential components – CPU, memory, disk, and network. If any of these aren’t working properly, or are erratic, then the database server will also perform poorly. The key here is to balance these four areas properly. For example, don’t have your servers running with fast CPU and disk space, but then become short on memory allocation. Keeping an eye on these four focus areas will address the majority of your performance issues and help keep your applications running optimally and at scale.
2. Partition your tables
As your database scales up from a few thousand rows to hundreds of thousands of rows, performance lags behind and the queries take longer to process. That’s why it’s important to use partitions. The principle of partitions is about breaking the database information into smaller, more manageable chunks to provide quicker processing times. For instance, say you decide to separate all rows where the column zipcode has a value between 70000 and 79999. You would use the RANGE command to partition this segment of data. In other words, PARTITION BY RANGE (zipcode).
According to one expert, indexing is the most misunderstood part of database management, but if properly implement the key to highest returns on performance. He goes on to point out 3 primary points to remember when it comes to indexing. We summarize these elements here:
* It’s much more efficient for a database to find groups of rows rather than churning through individual rows, which leads to random disk operations. Keep things simple by setting your operations to find groups of adjacent rows rather than single rows.
* Indexing should allow the database to read rows in their desired order rather than sorting, which ultimately proves to be costly.
* Use “covering indexes” when possible, which contains all and possibly more than the columns you need for your query. By using SELECT * FROM tablename WHERE criteria, this kind of index will usually will use indexes to speed up the resolution of which rows to retrieve using criteria, but then it will go to the full table to retrieve the rows.
4. Pay attention to your storage engine
MySQL supports two main storage engine types called InnoDB or MyISAM. There’s a lot of discussion about the differences and which engine is best for which set of circumstances. The best advice on the matter seems to be that for beginners and novices MyISAM is the best bet, while InnoDB tends to be a little more complicated and is more difficult for some to use and navigate.
5. Don’t overly-focus on configurations
One site has this to say about the matter of MySQL configuration settings, which is worth quoting here:
The defaults that ship with MySQL are one-size-fits-none and badly outdated, but you don’t need to configure everything. It’s better to get the fundamentals right and change other settings only if needed. In most cases, you can get 95 percent of the server’s peak performance by setting about 10 options correctly. The few situations where this doesn’t apply are going to be edge cases unique to your circumstances.
6. Draw upon the expertise of your peers
Fortunately, it helps that MySQL has been around for 20 years there’s a ton of industry experience. Don’t go it alone, but rather leverage the knowledge of your peers to solve questions and to optimize your environment. Aside from the standard forums, blogs, and Q&A sites, there are a good number of outlets for gaining insights and knowledge on topics whenever you’re in need of serious expertise. Conferences, trade shows, and local user group events can be a great way to get quick and informative answers to the most pressing issues within your MySQL environment.
7. Leverage Monitis MySQL Monitoring
If you’re looking for best-in-class web monitoring and performance tracking then you need to head over to Monitis. With its industry-leading global service, Monitis lets businesses monitor their network anytime and from anywhere, including website uptime monitoring, full page load and transaction monitoring, and web load testing. The benefits and takeaways here are peace of mind and less stress. Last November the company introduced a new MySQL Monitoring feature to help administrators more effectively monitor their MySQL environment and make sure applications run at the speed and at the quality that customers require today. By checking active queries, identifying which ones are being sent or received, and locating potential hangups and problems from the slowest-running queries, Monitis MySQL Monitoring can display all of your information in easy and intuitive to read graphs. By keeping your applications running smoothly and more effectively, Monitis alleviates the stress and helps you focus on running your business.
via Planet MySQL
7 quick MySQL performance tips for the small business
The freshest eggs have the best flavor and will last longer. Here’s an insider tip on picking the freshest carton of eggs at the grocery store: look at the three-digit code printed on the carton, not the sell-by date.
Food52 explains:
Because the sell-by date for eggs in a supermarket (with U.S.D.A. inspection) can be up to 45 days after the packing date, [The Eastman Egg Company] has a quick and easy way to check for freshness: the Julian date. Every egg carton has a code printed on its side, and the last 3 digits of this code are called the Julian date. The code uses a number from 001 to 365 to correspond to a day of the year and indicate when they were packaged. For example, 001 is January 1st and 365 is December 31st. To find the freshest eggs, select the highest number you can find (keeping in mind the numbers wrap around in January).
Who knew?
Head over to Food52 for more tips from the Eastman Egg Company, particularly when it comes to building the perfect egg sandwich.
How to Make the Best Egg Sandwich Without a Recipe | Food52
via Lifehacker
Pick the Carton with the Freshest Eggs by Looking for This Number
Watch this. Now. TIE Fighter is a short animation by Paul Johnson that shows a bit of Star Wars from the perspective of the Empire. It’s done in the style of anime from the 80’s and shows an aerial fight scene between TIE fighters and X-wings and is pretty much so awesome that Disney should make this an entire movie.
I so want to root for the bad guys.
Here’s the movie poster:
And here’s some background on the art, you can find more about the story and the characters in PDF here:
via Gizmodo
Awesome short film shows Star Wars from the Empire’s perspective
If you’re excited about the forthcoming cinematic universe Disney appears to be planning around Star Wars, then this amazing seven-and-a-half-minute short created by a fan over four years should do a lot to help tide you over. The animated film was created by Paul Michael Johnson, and animated in the style of epic 80s anime series’ like Mobile Suit Gundam, Patlabor and many… Read More
via TechCrunch
Watch This Amazing Fan-Made Star Wars TIE Fighter Short Film
On Thursday I’ll be hosting a webinar explaining how you can get the best from the NoSQL world while still getting all of the benefits of a proven RDBMS. As always the webinar is free but please register here.
Even if you can’t join the live webinar, it’s worth registering as you’ll be emailed a link to the replay as soon as it’s available.
Abstract
There’s a lot of excitement about NoSQL data stores, with the promise of simple access patterns, flexible schemas, scalability, and high availability. The downside comes in the form of losing ACID transactions, consistency, flexible queries, and data integrity checks. What if you could have the best of both worlds? Join this webinar to learn how MySQL Cluster provides simultaneous SQL and native NoSQL access to your data—whether it’s in a simple key-value API (memcached) or REST, JavaScript, Java, or C++. You will hear how the MySQL Cluster architecture delivers in-memory real-time performance; 99.999 percent availability; online maintenance; and linear, horizontal scalability through transparent autosharding.
When
Thu, Mar 26: 09:00 Pacific time (America)
Thu, Mar 26: 10:00 Mountain time (America)
Thu, Mar 26: 11:00 Central time (America)
Thu, Mar 26: 12:00 Eastern time (America)
Thu, Mar 26: 13:00 São Paulo time
Thu, Mar 26: 16:00 UTC
Thu, Mar 26: 16:00 Western European time
Thu, Mar 26: 17:00 Central European time
Thu, Mar 26: 18:00 Eastern European time
Thu, Mar 26: 21:30 India, Sri Lanka
Fri, Mar 27: 00:00 Singapore/Malaysia/Philippines time
Fri, Mar 27: 00:00 China time
Fri, Mar 27: 01:00 日本
Fri, Mar 27: 03:00 NSW, ACT, Victoria, Tasmania (Australia)
via Planet MySQL
Upcoming webinar – SQL & NoSQL – the best of both worlds
There are times when I think the stuff being produced by fans is better than the stuff coming out of major Hollywood studios. Case in point is TIE Fighter. This short film was a labor of…
via MightyMega
TIE Fighter: A Star Wars Fan Anime