Friday, August 12, 2011

Drilling a Larger Hole in Door for Larger Dead Bolt

I recently purchased a Schlage Camelot Keypad Deadbolt (BE365VCAM716) to replace my existing deadbolt. This deadbolt allows unlocking via a digital keypad. I decided to go this route versus a traditional deadbolt, a remote key fob, or biometric scanner for several reasons:
  • I can gain access to my house without a key, as well as provide others with access such as dogsitters
  • I don't have to provide a physical device (key, wireless key fob) to people to let them gain access, which is very handy if I'm stuck somewhere and need someone to access my house
  • I no longer have to worry about who has a key to my house as I can change out user codes very easily
However, I ran into a dilemma - the hole in my metal door for my old deadbolt was smaller than the new one. The Schlage deadbolt requires a 2 1/8" hole, and mine was probably 1 3/4", or whatever the smaller standard size is. Drilling out a metal door with a hole saw bit is easy if it hasn't been drilled out before, but that wasn't my case. Thus, I had to figure out a way to get this larger hole drilled. My solution was to use the same hole saw bit to drill a hole through a piece of scrap wood, and then use that as a guide so that the hole saw bit does not run all over the place. This worked out perfectly and allowed me to cut through the door quickly. I had previously tried using styrofoam as a guide and just applying pressure to keep it there, but the bit was walking all over the place. Anyway, hopefully this helps someone out!

Friday, October 9, 2009

Best Temperature and Time for Grilling Juicy Chicken Breasts

I have been experimenting with cooking temperatures and times on my gas grill, and the best temperature and time combination for grilling chicken breasts (sans bones) is 450-475F for 6 minutes on each side. Not only does it come out super juicy, but the higher temperature makes much nicer grill marks. I would also suggest tenderizing your chicken breast with a mallot and/or a fork to even out the meat thickness so it cooks more evenly and to soften the meat.

When it comes time to grilling, make sure that when you throw your chicken breasts on the grill that you do it very quickly so that too much of the heat does not escape and that your grill can rebound from a small temperature drop instead of a very large drop. Leaving it open for as little as 30 seconds drop the temperature down as much as 150F, and that changes the grilling equation.

Let me know if you have luck with my recommended temperature and time for chicken breast!

Friday, June 19, 2009

AWStats and GeoIP Error

Are you receiving the following error even after installing GeoIP while trying to run AWStats with GeoIP enabled?:

Error: Plugin load for plugin 'geoipfree' failed with return code: Error: Can't locate Geo/IPfree.pm in @INC (@INC contains: c:/perl/site/lib c:/perl/lib . ./lib ./plugins ./plugins) at (eval 3) line 1.

Make sure that you're enabling the proper module within your AWStats config file. Once I commented out

LoadPlugin="geoipfree GeoIP.dat"

and then uncommented

LoadPlugin="geoip GEOIP_STANDARD GeoIP.dat"

it started properly working.

Friday, May 8, 2009

Joanna from Millionaire Matchmaker

Joanna from Millionaire Matchmaker - if you ever want to go on a date, let me know.

Wednesday, April 29, 2009

Windows Vista 64-bit, Realtek, and (apparently) more than 4GB of RAM have issues

Today I received an additional 4GB of RAM for my 64-bit installation of Vista. I shut down my system, installed the RAM, and while booting up I decided to go into BIOS and play with settings related to WOL because I've been trying to save more energy at my house and figured not having my computer on all day would be a good idea, but having WOL capabilities would be nice. I committed the changes, and when I started up Vista with my 8GB of RAM, the network wouldn't connect. I couldn't ping my gateway address or anything.

Long story short, apparently *something* within my Realtek RLT8168B NIC drivers did not like the additional memory, or most likely the fact that there was now more than 4GB. After installing the latest drivers, I was able to gain connectivity again. If you need the latest drivers, check out the Realtek website. Hopefully you've found this article short in your journey and this saves you the headache. I must have spent a solid two hours on this problem!

Monday, April 20, 2009

Automating logins with KeePass's Auto-Type scripting and Firefox

First off, if you haven't been using a password database tool, I highly recommend using one. This forces you to stop using the same password for each account you have out on the Internet, and lets you keep the list centralized in an encrypted file. I highly recommend KeePass, as it is open-source and free.

I have enjoyed using KeePass to store my account information, but for logging into web pages I wanted it to be a more automated process, having it login for me instead of copying the URL, username, and password into the appropriate fields. I started playing with the Auto-Type feature within KeyPass, and after some tinkering I was able to login to my credit card company's interface. The way it works is you tell it which application to gain focus on, which URL to go to, and lastly to type in the username and password. An example Auto-Login script that logs me into my bank looks like this:

Note before proceeding: You must be have Firefox as your last focused window, otherwise your data will spill into another window.

In my example below, Auto-Type opens a new tab (^t) in Firefox, types in the URL ({URL}), hits enter ({ENTER}), gives the page some time to load ({DELAY 4000}), types in the username ({USERNAME}), tabs over to the password field ({TAB}), and lastly types in the password ({PASSWORD}).

Auto-Type: ^t{URL}{ENTER}{DELAY 4000}{USERNAME}{TAB}{PASSWORD}

Warning: If you do not have Firefox your last focused window, KeyPass will not know which window to gain focus on and most likely spill your details to your friend you're chatting with (or whatever window has focus). For this reason, I have left out having Auto-Type hit {ENTER} after my password, just for safety reasons. You've been warned!

For more information about Auto-Type, check out the KeyPass Auto-Type documentation.

Friday, April 17, 2009

You receive "The RPC Server is Unavailable" when trying to add IPs via netsh

If you receive an error when attempting to add IPs with netsh on Windows Server 2008 (this may apply to earlier versions as well), if you do not have the DHCP Client service enabled, you will receive the error:

"The RPC Server is Unavailable."

This unfortunately took many hours, including many hours from Microsoft (which were unsuccessful), to figure out. Hopefully someone finds this post and helps them out.