If my years at the Big Y! have taught me
anything, it’s that UNIX — speficially FreeBSD — rocks. It’s incredibly reliable (there are busy production servers at work answering more than 50 requests/second that haven’t been rebooted for three years), and extremely efficient.

Shortly after starting my job, I installed FreeBSD on a machine at home, and have been reliably serving this web site from it ever since.

Imagine my curiousity when Apple revealed a few years ago that its new operating
system, “OS X”, would be built using FreeBSD as a basis. Very interesting — Apple, known
for building high quality equipment with an emphasis on user interface was going to
release a UNIX based operating system. This could be cool.

Time passed. The OS was released. Folks that I work with and regard very highly
started to show up to work with Macs. They are uber-nerds, and they were using Macs.
I thought Macs were for kids in school. “No Way!”, they said, “there is a very powerful
kernel lurking under this awesome looking interface”.

But alas, Macs were expensive. The price of entry was a couple thousand dollars for
a machine that would work for me. More time passed.

Earlier this month at the MacWorld show in San Francisco, Steve Jobs unveiled two
products that would blow the bottom out of Apple’s pricing structure. The iPod “Shuffle”
– a $100 MP3 player the size of a pack of gum, and the Mac Mini — a 72 cubic inch hot rod
starting at $500. (The computers in my house occupy an average of
2,000 cubic inches each.)

There was my chance — $2000 was always too much money to “try” this technology. But $500,
now that’s a different story altogether! The Mac Mini has no keyboard,
mouse, or monitor. You have to supply those parts. But that’s fine –
the target consumer already has one or more PC’s, so they already have these
components. I guess I fit their target customer profile pretty well.

I went to Apple’s online store site several times after the product was announced and
configured a new system. That’s the great thing about online shopping — you can roam
around a store, dropping items in your shopping cart, but then walk out empty-handed leaving
the cart at the door, and nobody gives you funny looks. Fantasy-shopping.

Last week, I read an article that indicated that Apple’s retail locations would
begin selling Mac Minis on Saturday January 22 at 9AM, opening an hour earlier
than normal. This really got me thinking — I could replace the computer in
the living room that was running Windows XP and the computer in my office that
runs FreeBSD with this one tiny machine. No more big, clunky, noisy machines.
Just a slick little silver box.

It only took a little bit of spousal marketing to get Arti excited about the Mini too.
She has always been awesome at supporting my hobbies — camera equipment, new
power tools, stuff for the car, etc — but this seemed a little extravagant. After all, the computers we had were working flawlessly. But she
actually got excited about the tiny little computer.

I told her about how they were going to go on sale Saturday early AM, and I
wanted to be one of the first people to get one. My plan was to get to the
Valley Fair store an hour before the store opened. She was down with the plan
– she even wanted to wait in line with me. Alright! Budgetary committe approval!

We arrived at the Apple Store at 8AM. There were already 20 or so people
waiting in front of the store. That was good news for us — most of the people
wanted to get the $100 iPod Shuffle, so I was confident there would be enough
Minis to go around.

When the stoore opened at 9AM there were about 300 people waiting. The woman who was
first in line entered, then soon exited with a long face — she wanted to get a Shuffle, but
there were none to be had! This caused a bit of an uproar in the crowd. You would think
that the Apple Store employees would have made an announcement to the crowd prior to
the store opening. Suprisingly bad customer experience there.

As we approached the door, we were greeted at the door by a friendly employee who asked us if we were getting a
Mini. I smiled and said “oh yes.. the one with the faster CPU and bigger hard
drive.” “I’ll be right back with it” he said.

A couple minutes later, we were on our way back home with the lunchbox-sized
package. It took only a minute to set it up in the living room, hooking it up to
the TV.
I turned it on, and was pleasantly suprised that everything worked — even my Microsoft wireless
keyboard and mouse.

The setup process was fantastic, and over the next two days, I set up all my
photo and music apps (Live 4, Albino, Reason, CaptureOne, etc — they are all cross-platform applications), as well as
setting up apache, PHP, and MySQL.

I got an external firewire hard drive enclosure and pulled one of the drives
from the FreeBSD machine so that I could run daily backups of the Mini’s
internal disk. I also picked up a 512MB PC2700 DDR DIMM from href=http://www.centralcomputer.com/>Central Computer to bump up the Mini’s
internal RAM from its stock 256MB. Derek and I had fun getting the case opened
to upgrade the memory. Closing the case took some figuring, but we managed to
do the upgrade without breaking or scratching anything. The performace of the
system improved quite a bit with the additional RAM installed — well worth the low price of
the memory.

So far, so good. The OS X interface is fantastic. It does take some getting used to the
different keyboard shortcuts (the “windows” key on my keyboard gets the most use now).

All the applications I use are set up, and it’s now the official Nobot
Chatterbox web server. It’s awesome that so much performance and usability can
come from such a small box. Consider me switched!

If anyone from the Mac Mini product team is reading this — nice work!!! This is the start of something huge for Apple.

When I was in college, my dad worked for a company that had a
relationship with a mattress-maker. He was able to get products
from them at a good discount, so when I “officially” grew out of
my childhood twin-sized bed, he got me a Queen mattress. It was
awesome!

Fast-forward 10 years… Married for a couple of years, and still
sleeping on that same mattress. My back started to hurt a few
mornings per week; and with the sheets off, there was a noticable
dip in the middle of the mattress.

Time to to mattress shopping!

Both Arti and I immediately had three ideas: “Dux Bed”, “pillow
top”, and “memory foam”. So off to the web to do some shopping…

The nearest Dux store was a 45 minute drive from here, and their
beds were several thousand dollars. Too much effort at this
point. A good pillow-top mattress was at least a thousand
dollars, most are fifteen hundred. A “Tempur-Pedic” memory foam
mattress ran anywhere from two to three thousand dollars. I found
some knock-off memory foam mattresses, but those were a thousand
to fifteen hundred dollars.

Then I found it — an online store claiming to make a mattress
identical to the Tempur-Pedic “Celebrity” bed (their
top-of-the-line model), with a detailed diagram of the different
layers of foam, right down to the density and type of each one.

Oh yes … This got me thinking — maybe I could just make my own!
I had been to “Bob’s Foam Factory” in Fremont in high school to
get some padding for a watertight camera box (really a 50 caliber
U.S. Army ammo box), so I figured there’s gotta be some place to
get the right kinds of foam.

Bob’s Foam Factory didn’t carry
memory foam, so I couldn’t give them some more business. However,
some searching did come up with a few places that did carry it.

I settled on Foam
Factory Inc. / Foam Distributing / economyfoam.com (ya, all
three names are on the site in some place or another). They had
it all, and the prices were pretty good. They were running a free
shipping offer too, so there ya go.

Here’s what I ordered (from the top surface of the mattress to the
bottom layer):

• $95 MF4Q62
  Memory Foam 4.3LB - Queen - 60″x80″x 2″
• $182 MF5Q63
  Memory Foam 5.3LB - Queen - 60″x80″x 3″
• $34 LRFE82
  Lux Regular Foam - Eggcrate - 82″x76″x 2-1/2″
• $114 LHQFFS84
  Lux High Qual. Foam - Full Sheet - 82″x76″x 4″

Total price, shipped, was less than $450.

To ship the foam, they wrap it in plastic in some sort of vacuum
chamber. The big 4″ thick bottom piece came in a box only about 1.5
feet on a side. I opened the box, then rolled out this
plastic-wrapped ball of highly compressed foam. I poked it a bit
with an X-Acto knife, and this hissing and groaning sound filled
the house. It started to grow. After a minute or so, there was
this big ol’ rectangular piece of foam in the middle of the living
room.

The memory foam takes a lot longer to decompress — a couple hours
at least. Just make sure you have a place to set it (on the floor
where the bed will be, hmm?) so that it can expand unfettered.

Since only the memory foam pieces were cut to a Queen size, I
had to cut the others. I had a bunch of ideas, from carving at it with
an X-Acto knife to getting my Skil Saw out and making a mess of
it. I eventually compromised and used a serrated bread knife and
a long board as a straightedge. It worked fine.

So with all the layers cut to the right size, it was just a matter
of stacking them up on the bed platform. The foam is pretty
grippy, so it doesn’t need to be glued or attached to one another.

The cool thing about making your own mattress is that you can
really customize the density of the foam according to what you
like. I picked a medium density top layer for the “cozy factor”, and
a higher density second layer for support. The eggcrate provides
a breathing channel to help maintain a good temperature. The
bottom layer is just to prevent the mattress from “bottoming out”
in case you decide to do pushups on it or something (your fists
would fully compress the memory foam and touch the bed frame
without the thick, firm layer underneath).

The first night was awesome — the memory foam material is just
super comfortable — it holds you nicely, and it maintains a
pleasant temperature. I woke up the next morning with a happy
back — and it’s stayed back pain free for the 9 months since we put
the mattress together.

I’d like to make a slip cover for the whole thing, but a normal
mattress pad has been working just fine. Maybe one day…

So all in all, a good move. The foam should last at least as long
as a normal mattress (10+ years, 25 years for a couple of the
layers).

ZZZZZZZZzzzzzzzzzz………….

UPDATE May 12, 2008 — the top layer of memory foam (the lightweight one) has given up the ghost and lost its mind. The other layers of foam are still in great shape, so we’re rolling without the thin one. Comfortable once again!

I put the finishing touches on our
new bed
today. It was inspired by the href=http://www.dwr.com/productdetail.cfm?id=0874>Leggero Bed
from Design Within Reach. All in
all it was a fun project, with very little monotony or frustration
over the project.

This is a simple platform bed. The platform
is made from 1/2″ plywood, and has no heavy bracing to counteract flex
caused by a load (ahem — about those 20 lbs I’ve gained since
getting married…).

The secret of this bed is the bowing of the
“slats”. The slats aren’t pieces on their own — they are created
by cutting slices in the plywood sheets, starting 6″ in from one
edge, and stopping short 6″ from the other edge. So the net
result after cutting is still one piece of wood, just with some
parallel slices in it. A small block of wood is attached to the
middle of alternating slats to create a bow-up/down/up/down
pattern across the slats. This makes it nearly impossible for the
bed to sag along its length (I still think it’s magic).

This design is really neat, since there is a minimum amount of
materials used, and the result is extremely strong.
It’s a lot like an airplane in this regard, and thus increases the
cool factor a lot for me.

The platform is attached to two “runners” that run the length of
the bed. The runners each have two short legs attached. I can
lay in the middle of the bed, and there is no noticable flex in
the slats or the runners — this shows the strength of this
“bowed” construction.

I designed the headboard differently than the DWR Leggero bed.
While their headboard is a smooth piece, I thought the bowed
construction was too cool to hide under the mattress, so I worked
it into the headboard design. The headboard fits into a slot cut
in one of the platform sheets.

Another driving force in the design was to use the “end grain” of
the plywood as much as possible. 1/2″ Baltic Birch is made of 9
plies of birch, with no voids. Lovely stuff. There are some
pieces of the bed that are made from 4 layers of this plywood,
making for 36 glorious plies! I wanted to show this as much as I
could. The supports under the platform and the legs are built so
that you can see as much of this as possible.

Here are pictures of the bed.

(Nerdy wood shop stuff follows….)

Here are the materials I used to make the bed:

• 2.5 sheets of 1/2″ baltic birch plywood (beautiful stuff — 9
  plies and no voids. This is what skateboard decks are made from)

• 20 or so 1/4″ x 2″ machine screws with a countersink head
• 20 or so 1/4″ washers
• 20 or so 1/4″ nylock nuts
• 6 feet or so of 1″ x 1″ maple
• 3 cans of Jasco Black Walnut danish oil
• 1 tin of Howard’s Citrus Shield paste wax

Total materials cost was less than $400, with the plywood being
the biggest chunk of this at about $320. Pretty good deal,
considering DWR wants $1700 for the Leggero bed.

I had the guys at Southern
Lumber rough-cut the plywood according to a drawing I brought
in. They have the right tools to do this easily — cutting a 4×8
sheet of plywood is a clumsy and dangerous job for my tools at
home. They have a radial arm saw that can cut across the full 8
foot length of a piece of plywood. For $5, how could I argue?

I had them make the following pieces from the plywood sheets:

• (2) 66″x43″ pieces for the bed platform
• (1) 66″x27″ piece for the headboard
• (8) 96″x2″ strips to make the runners under the platform and
  the feet

The first thing I did when I got home was to glue up two stacks of
the 2″ strips for the runners. There were four strips in each stack.
The stacks really looked cool — 2″ square profile with 36 layers
of wood. I spread an even coat of glue between each piece, and
clamped ‘em up overnight. The next day, I ran each edge of the
laminated stacks through the table saw to clean up the edges, then
cut them to length on the sliding compound miter saw.

The next step was to build the headboard and platform pieces. I
contemplated how to do this — I would have to accurately position
the piece over the fully lowered saw blade, turn on the saw, then
raise the blade up through the plywood. I’d then have to push the
piece, making the cut. I’d have to stop the cut short of the end
of the piece accurately, lower the blade back into the saw body,
then turn off the saw.

To help make the cuts accurate, I built a
long (7 foot) extension for the saw fence, with pieces attached to
the ends of the extension to stop the plywood in the right places.
So the process was: position the fence, push the plywood against the
fence and against one end-stop, turn on the saw, raise the blade
up through the wood, push the wood to the other stop, lower the
blade, and turn the saw off.

Once I made the jig, it was pretty straightforward to cut all the
slots. I alternated between 2″ and 3″ slot widths on the platform
part. The 2″ pieces get “pushed down” by the spacer blocks.
Since they’re slimmer (weaker), they’ll be pushed down more than
the wider pieces are pushed up, making the surface the mattress
sits on flatter.

After this, it was a matter of positioning the platform pieces on
the runners (laminated pieces) and drilling holes and
countersinking for the screws, washers, and nuts.

After a bunch of sanding (see the href=http://nobot.2y.net/stories/?i=109>table article to review my love
of 3M’s “3X” 400 grit sandpaper), I applied the Danish Oil with a
paint roller, which made fast work of what could have been a
tedious job — well, getting the oil in the 3/16″ wide slat-slices
was kinda tedious.

Two coats of the oil, with liberal rubbing-in and rubbing-off of
the excess, and it was ready for the wax after a day of drying.

As I found with the table I finished last week, Danish Oil + Paste
wax is a great combo for a really nice finish. Both go on easily,
and both are extremely hard to screw up. Compared with
polyurethane (goes on tough, super easy to mess up) it’s a winner.
I think the only case where I’d look to polyurethane would be on a
table that saw lots of use and liquids (e.g. dining room table).

After two coats of wax and several hours of drying time, we moved
the new bed into the bedroom. It looks really nice with the wood
floor and the other stuff in there. With the mattress, sheets and
blankets on it looks like a real bed!

So all in all, a fun project — a unique design, very little
materials, and a cool bed that will hopefully last us a long time.

After months of sitting in the living room built, but
not finished, I finally did the final sanding and
finishing of this table.

It’s a smaller companion to the coffee table I made
about 4 months ago. The fun parts took about a day –
making the design (the funnest part), buying the wood,
then building the structure. I learned from the
coffee table that a table like this needs two kinds of
braces between each leg — the “shelf”, and a
crossmember that sits just below the table top. This
helps to hold the legs square, and makes assembly much
easier. With the coffee table, I relied on pegs
joining the top to the legs to maintain squareness.
This doesn’t work well.

The table is made from maple (legs and edging) and
3/4″ birch plywood (table top and shelf “middle”) with
some Honduran mahogany inlaid between the maple and
birch on top. I laminated some 4/4 maple to make the
legs, and tapered them on the table saw using my Incra
Miter 1000 as a jig.

The top and shelf are built with birch ply joined via
biscuits and glue with the mitered maple surround.
The shelf and crossmembers are joined to the legs with
glued mortise and tenon joints.

I’m really happy with how this one came out — I got a
small belt sander, and was able to get the top very
flat and smooth. A belt sander is the right tool for
this job — I had used a random orbital sander in the
past, and would get an uneven surface. The belt
sander produces a very flat surface.

Hours of sanding away glue on previous projects taught
me to be a little less crazy with using too much glue
– so there wasn’t much corner-sanding to do on this
project.

I did the final sanding with some 3M 400 grit “3x”
sandpaper. This is AWESOME sandpaper. I never
thought I would say that, but 3M’s sandpaper guys have
really come up with some innovative stuff. The “grit”
doesn’t get dull after 2 minutes like most paper,
also it doesn’t start falling off. The paaper backing
holds its integretiy for a LONG time. I used a single
piece of paper on my sanding block to do this whole
table, and used it to sand most of the bed frame I’m
working on now too. I replaced the paper after I
nicked it on a sharp corner on the table, and that led
to the paper tearing a little bit. But after about an
hour and a half of continuous use, the grit was still
biting, and was not “caked” with sawdust. It’s really
great technology and worth the extra money.
Anyhow….

I took a new direction finishing this piece. On other
things I’ve built, I’ve gone with several coats of
stain (waiting a couple hours between coats) then a
few coats of satin polyurethane (waiting several hours
and giving a light sanding between coats). This takes
FOREVER and the poly never comes out very smooth –
there are inevitably brush marks or drips in the
finish.

After seeing some woodwork a neighbor of my parents
had done, I decided to give Dutch Oil a shot. This is
basically linseed oil cut with mineral spirits,
optionally with a dye or pigment added. I chose
Deft’s “Black Walnut” for this table. It goes on
super easy — just wipe on (i used steel wool), wait
30 minutes, then wipe off. Wear Nitrile gloves (the
blue-green ones) so you don’t get that nasty toxic
stuff on your hands.

Repeat once, then wait a day for the oil to soak in to
the wood and dry. I gave it a good rubdown today,
then rubbed on a couple of coats of paste wax (I used
Johnson’s — but then picked up a tin of “Orange Power
Premium Carnuba Paste Wax” that I’ll be using in the
future. Johnson’s smells bad for a couple of days.
The orange stuff smells pretty nice, and seems to dry
harder and has a nicer sheen.)

All in all, very easy — and the finish is absolutely
GORGEOUS. The table surface is buttery smooth, and
has a very nice consistent satin sheen. The wood
grain has an amazing depth — the wood feels much
“closer” than if it was behind polyurethane. I’m very
happy with it.

I’m not sure if it would stand up to the abuse we give
the coffee table, which for the most part is our
dinner table, but this is how I’m going to finish
things from here on out.

So one table down, one bed to go. The bed frame is
essentially built and sanded. I ran some tests today
so we could decide what the best color for it would
be. I’ll post a followup article with photos later
this week when (hopefully) it’s finished.

Yeah, that sort of reminds me of the time when the nebischy Sasha Jacoby’s dad arrived abruptly at the playground during lunch back in 8th grade, demanding, in front of practically every student there, that his kid be accepted as “cool” by the rest of the school. Classy.

“We can’t take his insecure psychosis at home anymore!!!”

I wonder if poor old Sasha isn’t on a clock tower somewhere right now with a high powered rifle…yelling, “I was better than you all!!”

Have a great three day weekend all.

For my part, whatever anguish of spirit it may cost, I am willing to know the whole truth; to know the worst and provide for it.

- Patrick Henry

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