After seeing many a house with a nice metal boot-scraping grate inserted into the deck, we decided it was time to pull the trigger. I called Fred Spencer of the Mountview Inn and asked him the various questions about grates, installation, steel vs. aluminum, etc.

I measured out possibilities in front of our door and decided that 3 or 4 board depth and width of the entire door was the way to go. The joists come out perpendicular to the door, 16″ on center, so i figured 32″ wide would fit perfectly at the entryway.

Fred actually had a piece of aluminum 17″ deep left over from another larger job which would fit right in place of 3 deck boards. He had to band the outside with a piece of aluminum, but called me the next day saying it was ready to go. The 1″ thick aluminum grate 17″ wide (deep?) by 32″ wide was $196.10. Not bad for something that would not only knock the mess off the bottom of our boots BEFORE entering the house, but would also probably outlive the stained boards on the deck without rusting.

First i placed the grate on the deck and penciled out the width as well as marked the existing screws.

Setting the grate, i used my handy-dandy DeWalt impact gun to remove each original screw.

A few heads were stripped, so i left them to be pried out later with the claw hammer.

I measured the decking thickness at a heavy 15/16″, so i set my skilsaw depth accordingly and cut the ends of the three deck boards in the middle of the joists.

Some careful prying and wiggling, as well as some precision chiseling where the round of the blade couldn’t go far enough without cutting into keeper decking and i had a nice clean rectangle to fit my grate into. Sadie looked on, probably wondering why i was ruining her rug launch pad to the outside world.

I cleaned around the straight edges with my chisel, blew off the saw dust and test fit the grate into the hole – perfect the first time! Measure twice, cut one.

I figured that since the whole was open and it would soon be getting more than its fair share of ice, salt, water, dirt, etc – i might as well seal up the wood all the way around with some Sikkens Cetol SRD.

 Once the Sikkens was thoroughly applied, i shoveled in a mess of gravel from the driveway (the finishing touches) and laid the grate back in place.

Whamo! A sweet need Fred Grate ready to take on whatever Vermont cares to dole out.

One day from ‘ordering’ to pickup, $1 worth of Sikkens and screws, and $196.10 later – who could ask for anything more. Thanks Fred! If you’re interested in getting a steel or aluminum grate of your own, or need some other metal welding work done, give him a call at (802) 496-2426. And if you head to the compound on Vickery Hill this winter, no need to take your boots off outside…just scrape them off and come on in.

Apparently, the producers of the new Hawaii Five-O got as many of the original musicians from the 1968-1980 TV series with Jack Lord – and re-recorded the theme song for CBS’s new series.

I searched all over online for the Hawaii Five-O theme song and found nothing – so i tried to make it myself.

After recording an episode, I turned the Waitsfield Cable supplied DVR aroundout and hooked an 1/8″ mini stereo jack to dual RCA up to the output port to peel the new Hawaii Five-O (or is it 0) them song from the new TV show.

I used the free software Audacity on my Windows Vista laptop and plugged the 1/8″ mini into the microphone plug. Choosing the onboard microphone port in Audacity as the input allowed me to play the taped (recorded?) audio from the opening scene of Hawaii Five-o straight into Audacity after hitting the record button.

Once the theme song ended, i had a raw copy of 35 seconds including some extraneous front and back end audio. I saved it to the raw file and then used Audacity to delete a few seconds from the beginning and a second off the end.

Then i highlighted 1/4 second on the beginning, chose Effects menu, Fade In and it creates a zero to full volume fade in.

Next, i highlight the last 1/4 second and choose Effects, Fade out to create the fade to silence on the end. I saved the project file so i had an original proof and then use FILE menu, Export as WAV and save it to a folder.

Now it’s off to iTunes to get the Ringtone converted and in so i can use it on my iPhone.
First i add the WAV file to my library:

I converted a copy to AAC by right-clicking on the WAV file and “Create AAC version”

Now that there is an AAC version of the audio, i need to find the file and rename it to make it a ringtone (from .m4a to .m4r). I use iTunes Get Info to find the location of the AAC file:

which shows me where the audio file is located

I make sure my Windows Explorer is going to show me file extensions by going to Control Panels, Folder Options and using

Using Windows Explorer, we change the file extension from .m4a to .m4r

- and bing bang boom, you have a ringtone file!

Or, you can download the New Hawaii Five-O ringtone i made and just import it into your iTunes.

Enjoy!
Steve Butcher

P.S. I also made a >futuristic Nokia ringtone from the Star Trek 11 audio when the young James T. Kirk jacked his step-dad’s ’66 Corvette off a cliff.

Welcome to the new world. This weekend I purchased AT&T’s 3G MicroCell. It’s actually a Cisco femotocell tower (Model# DPH151-AT) branded for AT&T. The simple idea behind this product is to give you cell phone service where NONE exists via your existing broadband Internet. This is not a signal booster, it is an actual mini 3G cell tower that translates all communication from your 3G device (data, text, voice) over the Internet. I think it should be called MOIP (Mobile over IP) communication.

• Outright for $150. No strings attached. Hook it up to your Internet connection and the minutes/text msgs you use on your phones get deducted from your plan’s total as if you were driving down the road

• Buy it for $150 and fill out the $100 rebated (costing you, in effect, $50) and get the required $19.99/month plan that gives any device using this cell unlimited voice, data and text.

1. Our company, VickeryHill, has 6 iPhones and all of our offices have Wi-Fi, so they devices rarely use data on 3G
2. Our AT&T group plan has enough minutes that we have yet to go over in 2 years (so I don’t need the unlimited $20 MicroCell plan)

I must say, it is a weird enough thing to be a technologist and live semi-disconnected up in the Green Mountains of Warren, Vermont — then all of a sudden to have your your cell phone ring while on the coffee table is beyond strange. A few hours later, a text message shows up. BEEP, BLEEP! ‘Unsettling’ may be a better word. It is another form of connectivity that didn’t exist before – all thanks to the 3G MicroCell. Time will tell whether it is a social plus or a personal life negative.

Note: I want to make sure and explain: we have 2 x Async DSL connections in our office. Connection A is our primary and used for all email (Exchange Server), web traffic, FTPing, etc. Connection B is only used as an emergency backup and hosts our Bomgar B-100 remote control box. I placed the 3G MicroCell on connection B. I would bet that if 2 or more devices were using their 3G for voice calls on our primary Internet that either audio quality would suffer or our download speeds would be reduced significantly!

• Product knowledge from Shane at the AT&T store in Montpelier was excellent.
• Customer service was excellent.
• Driving to the store to buy it was a piece of cake.
• Activating was not the magical ‘plug and play’ they claimed. I had to call AT&T customer service and explain outright what i was trying to do – 20 minutes on the phone and the rep finally got it and demonstrated where i could see it was actually activated.

Actual use is easy and straight forward – you can add up to 10 x 3G devices that are ‘allowed’ to connect to the MicroCell.

A long weekend on the river in North Carolina with friends and kids was a ball in many ways.

And how could we ever forget the awesome hammock full-o-kids

Remove a weekly fossil fuel burner from your life?
After looking high and low (and even demoing a friends DR Neuton), i finally took the plung and bought an electric walk-behind (push) mower.i had $51 worth of credit at Home Depot, so i strolled in last night and found a nice Ryobi RY14110 Self-Propelled 48V electric lawn mower. I triple checked all the details that have kept me from converting for years:

• Battery capacity
• Weight
• Ease of use
• Warranty
• Design
• Blade
• Discharge
• Body material

Well, this morning I did the nearly unthinkable.
I spent 45 minutes clicking my browser’s refresh button every 30 seconds or so as Apple updated their storefront to pre-sell the iPad. While often an early adopter of technology over the last 3 decades (Commodore 128, Apple Mac SE, Cisco 17xx series routers, Satellite pager, original Blackberry, VW New Beetle, etc), this has been by far the most exciting early adoption ever.

As soon as I first tested out the iPhone in October of 2008, my brain said “boy, if this was 4x the size and had a real keyboard, I would barely need a PC except to run work software on.” Then, merely 18 months later, uncle Steve Jobs announces the iPad…and I was smitten.

Having just bought my wife, Carrie, an iPod Touch for Christmas, I spent the last few months recognizing the diminishing need for desktop software in our home. Recipes, newspaper, paying bills online, credit card statements, mortgage and investment information – these can all be accessed using a simple web browser now. I don’t think she’s opened Microsoft Word for months. It’s all Outlook for email, contacts and calendars – and Internet Explorer or Safari on Windows for everything else. So why be tied down to the power hungry Dell Dimension tower and flat screen….humming every night while I try to sleep.

Oh, and let’s not forget about the Apps! From C25K for her jogging interests to USAToday and the New York Times, as well as a few games….the App Store doesn’t have it all – but it may very soon. And if there is something I am missing…well I am on Chapter 3 of “SAMS iPhone Application Development in 24 Hours”….i’ll make it myself!

So, at 5:33am PST, Apple Order#W68718696 was placed by yours truly. I am positive she will love it. For all the things mentioned and so many more: driving to Tennessee each winter, air travel, rainy Sundays in the spring, wedding photos, emailing friends, trying new recipes and even listening to music or watching a movie…I may sound like a mad dork run amok, but I am pretty confident this thing is not only a building block on the existing iPhone OS and very successful App Store….but also the next step in human-information-technology interfaces.

Hello future – I can see you.

Rico – you will be missed – especially by Sadie, your girlfriend from up north.

Sadie relaxes in the sun with a cool autumnal breeze blowing