As the world’s premiere auto racing league, the cars that compete in Formula One are technological marvels. But watching what goes into racing vehicles from the turn of the century gives you a greater appreciation for what our ancestors had to deal with to quench their need for speed.
If you thought having to pay attention to the rearview mirror and the traffic ahead of your car was a lot, it’s nothing compared to the chaotic and constant gear-shifting and lever-pulling required to keep old-timey antiques like these rolling forward.
I’ve been using a standing desk for a few months now and I love it. It makes me feel more productive, keeps me active, and cost me next to nothing to set up. Still, I had some growing pains. If you’re thinking about setting up a standing desk, here’s what I learned so you don’t have to.
My setup is pretty basic, but it gets the job done. I have a plain desk/table that my roommate was going to get rid of, and on top of that I have an Oristand where my Apple Magic Keyboard, Logitech M510 wireless mouse, and Dell XPS 13 rest comfortably. The Oristand, which costs $25 plus shipping, is made out of thick cardboard and can easily fold up for travel. Beyond that, I have a small desk organizer, some writer’s juice, and a couple cigars that like to tease me all day.
Always Wear Shoes, and Invest in Foot and Knee-Saving Gear
After only a few days of standing, I noticed my feet really fucking hurt. I was working from the comfort and privacy of my home, and standing on cushy carpet, so I was barefoot. Why not? This is a huge mistake: No matter how soft your carpet is, you should always wear shoes, and preferably shoes that have some arch support in them.
I have a couple of footwear options for my standing desk. The first is a nice pair of running shoes, my New Balance Fresh Foam Vongos. They provide a ton of cushion for my feet and stability for my knees when I run in the city, and they’re great for long bouts of standing as well. If you have a decent pair of running shoes, go with those. Otherwise, make sure your shoes have decent cushion, support, and maybe a special insole. My other option is a pair of fuzzy house slippers my grandma never used. They’ve got nice foam insoles and I feel funky fresh wearing them—which is sometimes more important than being comfortable.
It’s also a good idea to increase the padding of your standing area. Even with shoes on, the softer you can make your standing zone the better. I use an extra-thick Spoga Exercise Yoga Mat with Comfort Foam ($25). It provides some padding and it’s nice for doing my workouts. Two birds? Meet this super-soft stone. Mark Sisson at Mark’s Daily Apple also recommends elevating one foot periodically while you stand. It can help keep your back from getting stiff and give your legs a little break. I use a small cardboard box for this (not pictured), but there are plenty of step stool options online if you want something that looks nicer.
Stretch and Move Regularly
Working at a standing desk fatigues you a lot faster than when you’re sitting, but it also does a number on your joints and muscles. While it’s good to take breaks from standing (more on that later) there are a few extra things you can do to keep your back, shoulders, arms, and legs from getting stiff and sore. The video above from the Focal Upright YouTube channel demonstrates some “standing desk yoga,” or simple stretches and exercises that will keep your back loose and help you avoid any chronic pain in your legs.
In this second video from the same channel, you’ll see some great stretches that specifically target your arms and shoulders. I do a selection of these regularly and they help a lot. I also try to incorporate exercise into my long days of standing. I’m a practitioner of “grease the groove” training, a concept developed by former Soviet Special Forces instructor Pavel Tsatsouline, where you get stronger by regularly doing strength exercises with lighter reps and weight, but do them more often than you would a regular workout. So I take a break to lift and exercise every hour or two. I also take a few minutes to practice my basketball skills or play guitar when I have a few minutes.
You may not be able to do all of those things, especially if you’re in an office, but taking a break to move around is the important part. Go for a walk around your office building, do some stretches, get a few push-ups or squats in, and whatever else it takes to keep your blood flowing.
Don’t Forget Basic Ergonomics
You may be standing while you work, but that doesn’t mean you don’t have to worry about your posture. In fact, it’s more important you practice good posture because you’re standing. Unless you’re a soldier or bionic man, you only know how to stand properly and comfortably for short time spans, and even then, you probably slouch like I do. In the video above, from the GuerillaZen Fitness YouTube channel, certified personal trainer Blake Bowman explains the basics of standing right.
Your feet should be about shoulder-width apart, but pay attention to how your positioning feels in your hips and go with whatever is the most comfortable. Once your feet are planted, do what Bowman calls “screwing your feet into the ground,” which involves slightly rotating your feet outward to give you better arch support for your feet. Now flex your abs as if you’re anticipating a punch, engage your glutes, give a little arch to your lower back, stick your sternum out slightly, and roll your shoulders back.
You should also have your keyboard comfortably in reach so your elbows make a 90 degree angle, and your computer screen should be up high enough that you can read it without tilting your neck at all—just like when you’re sitting. I had to stack a few boxes underneath my laptop to achieve this, but it’s worth it, even if it doesn’t look as nice.
Taking regular breaks to sit is essential to working at a standing desk. I tried to go full days standing at first, and it was a huge mistake. My feet, legs, and back would hurt up through the following morning, and I would lose interest in standing again. Part of that was building up my lazy muscles, but it was too much too fast, and I realized that if I didn’t break to sit down, I was going to burn out quick. You should go back and forth regularly so you’re not doing any damage to yourself either way. But for how long? A recent study in the British Journal of Sports Medicine suggests that around half your work day, or four hours, is the magic number. Use a timer on your phone, or even a web app like Standing Clock, keep switching back and forth.
In fact, while I’ve become a huge fan of working on my feet, I don’t recommend having only a standing desk. No matter where you stand (yep) on the health debate surrounding standing desks, standing for too long is just as bad as sitting for too long. And if you can’t easily convert your workspace back and forth, do what I do and have two desks, or use a kitchen table as your standing desk space (or your couch as your sitting desk space). It might seem redundant, but it keeps me fresh and productive.
When even your fridge is spewing data, someone needs to manage things. (credit: Ron Amadeo)
If you believe figures from the technology research firm Gartner, there will be 25 billion network-connected devices by 2020. The "Internet of Things" is embedding networked sensors in everyday objects all around us, from our refrigerators to our lights to our gas meters. These sensors collect "telemetry" and route out data to… whoever’s collecting it. "Precision agriculture," for instance, uses sensors (on kites or drones) that collect data on plant health based on an analysis of near-infrared light reflected by crops. Sensors can do things like measure soil moisture and chemistry and track micro-climate conditions over time to help farmers decide what, where, and when to plant.
Regardless of what they’re used for, IoT sensors produce a massive amount of data. This volume and variety of formats can often defy being corralled by standard relational databases. As such, a slew of nontraditional, NoSQL databases have popped up to help companies tackle that mountain of information.
This is by no means the first time relational databases have ever been used to handle sensor data. Quite the contrary—lots of companies start, and many never leave, the comfort of this familiar, structured world. Others, like Temetra, (which offers utility companies a way to collect and manage meter data) have found themselves pushed out of the world of relational database management systems (RDBMSes) because sensor data suddenly comes streaming at them like a school of piranha.
Sorry, I still have a Game of Thrones hangover, so when I watch this beautiful drone footage that gives sweeping views of castles across Europe, I see the map of Westeros in the opening credits come alive. Some of these castles are in ruins, some are near rivers, some are on islets, some are embedded on the mountain side but all are impressive strongholds that hold so much history.
There’s no magic in this world but you can kind of see (if you squint) where the fairy tales came from (okay, you have to squint really hard).
You’re not going to be a master locksmith after you watch this video showing you three ways to break open a lock, but you might stop putting your faith in cheap padlocks. That’s because a few bent paperclips could jimmy the thing open. Even just jamming a screwdriver into the keyhole can make it unlock. Or if you’re super experimental, you can trace a key using tape and then cut out its shape on a flimsy metal can.
That last one requires you access to the key itself but hey, it works!
There’s no storage in my bathroom, so last weekend’s DIY project was to build this simple shelf over the sink using scraps.
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The three walls of the nook are neither flat nor square. I had just one piece of scrap pine to use for the shelf, and needed to cut both ends at different angles to get it to fit properly. So I built this simple jig out of more scraps to "measure" the angles, then trace them onto the shelf:
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It worked okay. Then, the very next day I see this thing online:
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That is officially the most useful-looking tool with the worst-quality product video ever.
While it wouldn’t have been wide enough to measure both angles of my shelf in a single shot, I could’ve done one side at a time and gotten close results.
It’s called the Angle-izer and it goes for about $22 on Amazon.
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Do you guys and gals have any of your own DIY angle-transferring solutions? (Preferably the kind that don’t involve math….)
Our friends at Everyday Carry have compiled a collection of awesome knives that won’t break the bank. There are some great ones in the bunch, like the versatile Kershaw Shuffle II and the classic wood Opinel No8, and the funky little Boker Plus Nano.
It’s usually a good practice to have two columns called date_created and date_updated in every table. One can always use it in application and it helps in debugging too as to when a record was created and last updated in various circumstances and contexts.
This responsibility can be given to MySQL to automatically assign current time values to these columns. In MySQL 5.6 onwards, this can be done by setting the data type of the columns to be either date time or timestamp and creating date_created column with NOT NULL DEFAULT CURRENT_TIMESTAMP schema and date_updated column with NOT NULL DEFAULT ‘0000-00-00 00:00:00’ as schema with attribute ON UPDATE CURRENT_TIMESTAMP. Below is a sample schema of a table containing date_created and date_updated columns: CREATE TABLE `time_stamp` ( `id` int(10) unsigned NOT NULL AUTO_INCREMENT, `date_created` timestamp NOT NULL DEFAULT CURRENT_TIMESTAMP, `date_updated` timestamp NOT NULL DEFAULT ‘0000-00-00 00:00:00’ ON UPDATE CURRENT_TIMESTAMP, PRIMARY KEY (`id`) ) ENGINE=InnoDB DEFAULT CHARSET=utf8 But there is a catch here, since this is not applicable to all MySQL versions. Earlier to 5.6 version, MySQL allows a table to have only one TIMESTAMP column with an automatic TIMESTAMP value, that is you can either have date_created or date_updated auto updated to CURRENT_TIMESTAMP not both. Related to this the MySQL documentation has some very good info at this page: http://ift.tt/1wimyw9 Excerpt: "By default, TIMESTAMP columns are NOT NULL, cannot contain NULL values, and assigning NULL assigns the current timestamp." So the workaround this is to have date_created column with timestamp NOT NULL DEFAULT ‘0000-00-00 00:00:00’ schema and date_updated column with timestamp NOT NULL DEFAULT ‘0000-00-00 00:00:00’ ON UPDATE CURRENT_TIMESTAMP schema. With above, the date_updated field is correctly updated by MySQL automatically when there is an update and to update date_created field with current timestamp value, we have to explicitly pass NULL value to date_created field which will then store the CURRENT_TIMESTAMP value in the field. Below is a sample schema for above changes: CREATE TABLE `time_stamp` ( `id` int(10) unsigned NOT NULL AUTO_INCREMENT, `date_created` timestamp NOT NULL DEFAULT ‘0000-00-00 00:00:00’, `date_updated` timestamp NOT NULL DEFAULT ‘0000-00-00 00:00:00’ ON UPDATE CURRENT_TIMESTAMP, PRIMARY KEY (`id`) ) ENGINE=InnoDB DEFAULT CHARSET=utf8 So for a structure as above the insert query would be as below: INSERT INTO `test`.`time_stamp` (`id`, `date_created`) VALUES (NULL, NULL); For update the query would be: UPDATE `test`.`time_stamp` SET `id` = ‘4’ WHERE `time_stamp`.`id` = 1; Above will just update the date_updated with the CURRENT_TIMESTAMP and the date_created value will remain same as earlier. Caution needs to be taken while updating records so as not update date_created field with NULL value. One could also say that instead of MySQL automatically updating the date_updated field, I would like the date_created field to be updated automatically by it. Yes, it is just a reverse case and can be used, in which case while updating the record one has to pass NULL value to date_updated field. But the thing is that since there will be many updates and only a one time insert so passing a NULL while a one time insert reduces the overhead on us of passing a NULL for every subsequent update and let MySQL handle it for us. But yes this is debatable and there are cases where this reverse structure can be used. Another workaround this is to have date_created field updated with current timestamp value using a trigger when a record is inserted. Hope this helps 🙂
There’s a reason that Hickok45’s son is sitting in a chair with the camera towering above him for this rant. The man is taller than the tall tales anti-gunners tell to justify their crusade for civilian disarmament. One of the more popular counters thrown back at them: guns don’t kill people, people kill people!
The extravagantly bearded gun guy thinks that’s a dumb argument. No one — well hardly anyone — thinks a gun will kill someone of its own volition. Methinks he’s missing the point.
The expression reminds antis — and The People of the Gun — to focus on the killer, not the means. I don’t like it as much as “when guns are outlawed, only outlaws will have guns,” but low information voters need easily understood slogans. I say GDKP, PKP stays. You?
We noted the Pioneer Airbow’s introduction when it was announced before SHOT. Crossman calls it a PCP (pre-charged pneumatic) airbow but its bullpup-like design makes it compact and easily maneuverable (though at seven pounds, it runs a little heavier than your average AR). I wouldn’t want to be a hog or a doe on the receiving end of one.
I had a chance to fire the thing last week in Montana.
RF may not have been a fan of its aesthetics, but this thing is two tons o’ fun to shoot. It’s also dead-on-balls accurate. I was shooting at 30 yards or so. The Pioneer packs 3000 PSI which gets you 8-10 full-power shots at a whopping 450 feet per second, giving it more range and making it a lot easier to charge than a crossbow.
At about $850, each one ships with three arrows, a standard 6×40 scope, sling and quiver. If you get a chance to try one, take it.
