Monthly Archives: January 2009

Sometimes the best innovations are so simple it’s a wonder that they aren’t everywhere.
This week, Mike Siemsen of Chisago City, Minn., sent me an e-mail about his new workbench
that opened my head like a can opener.

Siemsen, who runs Mike Siemsen’s School of Woodworking,
recently completed building a very close copy of Peter Nicholson’s workbench featured
in the early 19th-century classic: “The Mechanic’s Companion, Or, The Elements and
Practice of Carpentry,” which you can download
for free from Google.

Siemsen developed the workbench with the input of period woodworker Dean Jansa. (Remember this
marking gauge he built for Popular Woodworking? Let’s all encourage Dean
to write more.) The bench developed by Siemsen and Jansa looks a lot like Nicholson’s
– with one small upgrade that is amazingly useful.

The bench has a small gap between its two top boards. Look through the gap and you
can see the transverse bearers that support the top. This gap allows you to do some
really cool things with your planes and saws. By dropping a batten into the gap and
onto the transverse bearers you can plane across the grain of a board (called traversing).
Wedge the board against the planing stop plus a batten in the gap and you can work
diagonally. You also can use the batten as a bench hook for sawing. And you can use
the gap to store tools.

Is there precedence for this? Yes. George Ellis’s Planing Board (which I describe
here) uses wedges in the same manner. And a Nicholson-style workbench shown in
Audel’s “Carpenters Guide” shows a bench with a loose top. You could easily see how
the gap could have been exploited….

In any case, it works. Check it out here and on
his blog.

— Christopher Schwarz

Here you can see how you can use a batten in the gap to work across the grain.

Here the batten is used with the planing stop to work in a more diagonal fashion.

Here it’s a bench hook for sawing.

And here the gap is used for tool storage. Next week we’ll show how it makes julienne
fries.

Buried in the fine print of many cellphone contracts is a bit about how you can transfer your plan to someone else—and you can find that someone online.

The NY Times reports on Celltradeusa.com and Cellswapper.com, two web services who match up people who want out of their contracts with folks who want in.

Why exactly would you want someone else’s cellphone contract? Simple: you can get fairly new devices and accessories, often free, without having to swallow a two-year commitment or pay an activation fee of $35. This is especially useful to those who are waiting for a new device to hit the market but do not want to spring for a new phone in the meantime.

The two sites charge a service fee, but one that’s a lot less than the penalty for ending your contract prematurely. Anyone use either swap site to get out or into a cellphone contract? Let us know in the comments.

All-things-Apple weblog TUAW points out a simple Terminal trick to enable half-star ratings in iTunes for finer grained control over your iTunes rating system. The same functionality is available with the simple tick of a checkbox in previously mentioned OS X tweaker Secrets, but if you don’t want to install another preference pane for this simple hack, this Terminal tweak will do the job:

defaults write com.apple.iTunes allow-half-stars -bool TRUE

I did a little searching without any clear results, so if anyone knows how to enable half-stars on the Windows side of the fence, let’s hear it in the comments.

The ReadWriteWeb blog bemoans the lack of browser extension support in Google Chrome (so far), and offers a list of handy bookmarklets that can tide you over for now.

From Gmail This, to Dictionary, to Delicious ‘marklets, this collection looks a lot like our top 10 useful bookmarklets. Of course, bookmarklets don’t take up the memory or require installation like add-ons do, so these are worth dragging to your Firefox toolbar as well.