Stilts are poles, posts or pillars used to allow a person or structure to stand at a certain distance above the ground. Walking stilts are poles equipped with steps for the feet to stand on, or straps to attach them to the legs, for the purpose of walking while elevated above a normal height. Today, were going to build some standard, walking stilts.

What you need:

• A reasonably long 2×4 (8 ft. long)
• Some length of wood 2×2 (1×1?)
• Long wood screws
• Some assorted tools: screw driver, drill, square edge, tape rule, saw

Lets get to it!

I am not going to be too detailed on this one because all of the proportions and lengths vary person to person. You apply the concept to your own body and get it to work comfortably for you. Note: I am not responsible when you break your neck.

1. Get your tape rule and measure from your feet to arm pits… thats how long you want your main supports to be.
2. With your tape rule, mark the length of your previous measurement on your piece of 2×4. Using your saw, cut each piece so you end up with two pieces the same size.
3. Take your smaller piece of wood to be used for your stand-on ledges. Since we used a 2×4, and my foot is about 11”, take the size of your shoe and divide it in half. That is the length we need each stand-on ledge to be. Mine ended up 5.5 inches per piece. Take your saw and cut each stand-on (the 2×2) piece to your desired length.
4. Next, determine which side of your main supports you would like to use. Choose the one that is most flat and stable. With your tape rule, decide then measure the desired height you would like to be raised. I used a square edge to make a perfectly straight line. This line will be where you will mount your 2×2s underneath.
5. Now, take your drill and drill two holes in each 2×2 piece… one offset to the left of center, and one offset to the right of center.
6. Take each piece and with your screws, screw them into your main supports. You are now done with your stilts so start practicing!

Tips!

When walking, hold your stilts as parallel to your thighs as possible.

If you are having an extremely hard time balancing on your stilts, you may need to stack the 2×2 pieces of wood outward so you have more of a base to stand on.

If you haven’t been on top of your technolingo these days, VoIP is a fancy ‘acronym’ for Voice-over-IP. This is by far the best deal I could find on the net for free calls anywhere in the USA and Canada. If you are familiar with Skype, they used to offer their VoIP service for free. Earthcaller is a free VoIP service that requires no software installation at all. The only thing you have to do is download a simple ActiveX which lets your computer run the service.

Lets get dialing!

1. In your browser, navigate to www.earthcaller.com.
2. The ActiveX will ask permission to install, let it do its thing.
3. Once installed, enter in the phone number you wish to call.
   • If you are calling in the USA, just enter the 10-digit phone number
   • If you are calling Canada, get some friends in the USA. (I don’t know how to call Canada)
4. When you have your desired number entered in, click the “Dial Number” button.

A successful phone call will show this in the status box:

Registering to SIP Proxy.
Dialing…
Connecting…
Trying to register.
Registered successfully.
Response: Trying.
Response: Session Progress.
Success to connect.

Note: This service only works in Internet Explorer as far as I have tested. It does not work in Firefox. You will need a microphone to communicate with the phone call recipient. Earthcaller allows you to call anyone in the USA and Canada, landlines and mobile phones. Calls placed through Earthcaller have no time limit. You will not be billed over the internet through this service, it is completely free.

Happy calling!

I am almost positive iChat will be released to the iPhone but until then let the power of Web 2.0 power your chatting. Before I go on i highly recommend you do not just go out and try every web application on your iPhone. As there are a lot of bad ones which will steal your accounts. It may even be smart to create a separate account for your iphone to use on web apps. Anyways heres what you wanted, open up safari and browse to iphone.beejive.com login and your good! This is a very lightweight client(unlike meebo) which should load quickly and run smoothly on your iPhone.

Benefits

• Unlimited Instant Messaging, no need to pay that ridiculous SMS charge.
• Talk to people on the computer

Disadvantages

• Can’t send to cell phones unless you are on AIM and send an im to +(countrycode)(number), country code for the USA is 1 so an example would be +12223335555. This will give you unlimited messages but the standard text messaging fees will apply to the person on the other end.

Alternatives

• Mail app: 100% through apple can send email to phones or computers, and don’t need to worry about your account getting jacked. It is not “instant messaging” but it is still a quick way to relay messages.
• Meebo: More reputable but very slow page loads and its a bit had to navigate

So you want an iPhone, but just a few months ago you opt into a 12 month or 2 year contract with your carrier. If you dont want to pay that $175 early termination fee, or any kind of fee for that matter, check out Cellswapper. All you have to do is plug in your current details about what plan you have and what carrier, and hope that someone in another area is looking for something you have.

Apple products are stunning. Their shape, form, and color contrast just amaze everyone. Unfortunately, their products will eventually, and occasionally bug up. They too will freeze, break, and sometimes explode (related to iPod struck by lighting).

Tomorrow, when your iPod freezes all you need to remember is menu and center. Hold the menu and center button for a few seconds until your screen turns blank. Your iPod will reset itself and you will be back up and running!

There are a lot more people switching to a unix based operating system(mainly OS X or Ubuntu) and wonder why you would ever want to use the command line. The answer is simple working through the commandline can get simple tasks done much much quicker, this is mainly due to ‘|’ also known as pipe. Think of pipe as saying “do this”, also if you can get it done through the commandline you can just put the code you used and keep it for later use or maybe run it against all the machines you own. For each example I will be going to ‘cat’ the file ‘hostinfo.txt’ and run some pipes, all cat does is displays it. The hostinfo.txt file looks like…

Server1 192.168.1.1 00:0A:E6:B3:A5:A0
Server2 192.168.1.2 00:0A:E6:B3:A5:A1
Client1 192.168.1.10 00:0A:E6:B3:B5:C3
Client2 192.168.1.11 00:0A:E6:B3:A5:D1

grep

• “Search for and show me”
• cat hostinfo.txt | grep Server

  • Server1 192.168.1.1 00:0A:E6:B3:A5:A0
    Server2 192.168.1.2 00:0A:E6:B3:A5:A1

awk, gawk, or nawk

• “Show me this part”
• All three are virtually the same but you may not have all of them. So find the one you do have and look at the man page for it to make sure it uses the same syntax as the one your use to, I personally prefer gawk.
• cat hostinfo.txt | gawk ‘{print $2}’ … the Print $2 is saying get me the second arguement(similiar to word, easiest way to learn this is to play around with the print till it grabs what you want. You’ll get the hang of it quickly.

  • 192.168.1.1
    192.168.1.2
    192.168.1.10
    192.168.1.11

tee

• “Save what you showed me to this file.”
• Very usefull for those installers you want to look over what options you actually chose, or in conjunction with sed(to be shown later).
• cat hostinfo.txt | tee hostinfo.bak.
  • This will copy everything in hostinfo.txt word for word(since it wasn’t used with a nother pipe, very usefull to combine this with another pipe)

sed

• “Find this and replace it with this”
• You will want to read up on this one, it looks tricky but is very very simple.
• Can be used in vi
• Very usefull when combined with another pipe, I am even going to combine it with tee in my example!
• cat hostinfo.txt | sed s/192.168.1/10.10.10/g | tee hostinfo.new.txt … I had changed all the ip’s and wanted to update my file to show it.

  • Server1 10.10.10.1 00:0A:E6:B3:A5:A0
    Server2 10.10.10.2 00:0A:E6:B3:A5:A1
    Client1 10.10.10.10 00:0A:E6:B3:B5:C3
    Client2 10.10.10.11 00:0A:E6:B3:A5:D1

• This also saved it to hostinfo.new.txt

arg, xarg

• Do this
• cat hostinfo.txt | awk ‘{print $2}’ | xargs -n 1 ping -c 1 | grep Unreachable
  • This would send 1 ping request(due to xargs) to each of the IP’s(due to the gawk), and only show the ones that failed(due to grep).