The Season of Taking

Now that the Season of Giving is more or less over (marked by the end of free shipping at Lee Valley...), we resume our regularly scheduled Season of Taking.  d'oh!

After typing that, I did a quick pass to the shop to make sure everything was locked up, again.  It's an annoying if healthy paranoia.

Before my day-job company closed between Christmas and New Years, we had a small pizza party and lots of conversation about anything but software.  One discussion stuck in my head: our president had his garage broken into and several custom bikes stolen (as in $1,700 wheels custom).  How they did it, and I'll discuss that below, is strikingly easy to do.  The interesting part is that of the 12 of us there, 4 had this exact same technique used to steal from their garages.  I knew of the technique because two of my neighbors were robbed the exact same way.

Likely your garage right now could be raided with this low-tech technique.

For fun, a few photos...

What you see here is my, er, somebody's shop.  Someone driving by can easily see there's at least $20 of tools in there.  Here's another view:

this is what the would-be thief would see after I close up for the day.

Now that we've seen the obvious, let's list what else these two photos show:

• the shop completely fills the two-car bay; there will never be a car in there (even if I get a girlfriend... it's a pre-existing condition!)
• the car is parked in front of the one-car bay.  It's likely the only car otherwise to use the car in the bay, you have to back out the first car to get at the garaged car.  Though the windows on the one-car bay are covered, this reasoning is pretty sound.
• the guy might be silly enough to have a garage door opener in the car for when he comes back with another sheet of exotic MDF and doesn't want to have to go through the house to open the door.  Someone might find it easier to pop the car door to take the remote, although the tactic I'm gonna describe later is much easier than breaking into a car while owners are home.
• windows.  The garage door has windows.

Next photo:

this photo tells us:

• the car is gone.
• as the car is likely the only car, nobody is home.

How does this ultra-easy break-in happen?  Someone pushes in one of the middle windows (they are held by metal clips; a baseball bat will make a loud noise when it pushes it open, but the 'glass' won't break; it's Lexan).  Nobody needs to crawl in... just reach for this:

Normally there's a pull-cord on the part connecting the door to the top rail.  Pop a middle window and you can easily grab the cord, pull, and you've released the door; lift at your convenience.  I removed the cord as a minimal deterrent; I routinely pop that release with a long clamp head when I install the red-neck A/C unit under the door.

Once inside the garage, they can close the door and watch through the window.  Grab some quick-sale stuff and go.  Worse... how many of you lock the door from the garage to the house?  I dunno if I have that key anymore!

Normally you can lock the garage door from the outside.  Mine could only be locked from outside so it was a major pain to do, plus the "locks" engaged these:

The steel cord went to the lock handle; when you twisted it to unlock the door, it pulled the spring-loaded latch out of the slot in the piece to the right that was attached to the house.  Problem is that if the door wasn't exactly lined up with the slot when you locked it, the tab never fell in the hole.  Silly.  I bet more modern houses have better systems, but a key here is that even if the locking part is better, most still use a steel cord to unlock; if someone pushes in a window, they might be able to use a simple hook to catch the cord, pull up, and unlock the door.  Worth considering even if you don't think you have lots of money in the garage; it isn't what you think the garage contents' value is, it's what the thief thinks.

Better deterrents, besides the obvious of keeping a half-starved Anaconda in your garage include:

Replace the door locks with latches and don't connect them to some goofy-ass knob on the outside of the door (i.e., no steel cords).  This is what I moved to:

I operate it by hand.  Push the rod into the door track to lock, press one of the releases to release the lock.  Someone would have to know that I have this latch and would have to stealthily reach from the window to move the bottom release to the side; not an easy trick.

That's one deterrent and it is quick to lock/unlock.  I also use a padlock in the track:

Uhm, I lock it usually :)  I keep the key very close by so for me to open it from the inside is very convenient.  If you have these locks, you don't need the latch I showed you earlier.  You also only need these on one of the two tracks for the door.

I also have one of these in the shop:

it's just a webcam connected directly to a computer on the second floor.  I haven't yet found something I like yet, but there are many security camera software applications out there.  Since the camera is there anyway for when I stream with woodworker friends ("shop at a distance" :) then I may as well have it record all day long.  It uses a roll-over buffer so I have the past 24 hours recorded at a slower frame rate to conserve disk space.  The monitoring software increases the frame rate when it detects motion.  Some applications allow you to set motion thresholds when it will send you a text message; when you get one, you can remotely access the camera with any browser and see what's going on.  When I find some software I like, I'll write up a post here with some configuration information.

It also wouldn't be a bad idea to occasionally take the video camera and walk the shop; open all the drawers, pan slowly, save the SD chip somewhere.  Makes a claim much easier.

Keeping your iMac 27" cool

My I7 iMac 27" computer had some issues a couple weeks ago; my local Apple Store, while very helpful, was unable to repair it within their usual window.  So they offered me a replacement.  That was unexpected and appreciated!  Thing is, the new 2011 models are faster so my 2010 I7 was going to be replaced with a 2011 I5.  True the performance numbers of that I5 are better than my 2010 I7, but I wanted the I7; I do a lot of processor-intensive and memory-intensive work on this box.  Easy, I could pay the difference between the I5 and I7.  I think my credit card was out before I uttered 'yes'.  This is a pretty good way to handle a repair that went too long.  Likely the ultimate problem with repairing my old 2010 model was availability of a replacement part.

The replacement only had a 1T drive while my old unit had a 2T upgrade.  They gave me my old drive with the idea of putting it in an external enclosure -wink-.  I swapped the internal 1T for the 2T and was up and running just fine.  For the record, that doesn't go fine if the difference in hardware is significant between the boxes (in the Mac or Windows world).  For me, it involved getting a Thunderbolt driver upgrade.  I didn't care as I was still on Snow Leopard and was waiting to upgrade to Lion until my project was over.  So much for procrastination!

Because I swapped the hard drive, I downloaded a couple diagnostic applications to make sure things were working correctly internally.  Let me assure you there isn't much room for fingers, hands, tools, or even that hard disk in a stylish iMac shell!  Because I was watching the temperature of things and fan speeds, I started checking around.

There's a fantastic free tool called smcFanControl that lets you change the minimum speed of the fans.  Normally OSX throttles the speed according to the temperature of the device it cools.  There are 3 fans: CPU, hard disk, and one for the optical drive.  The normal hysteresis OSX uses works fine, but you can keep a few things cooler with no ambient noise impact.

For me, when I edit video, the GPU (graphics processor) gets hot.  That's pretty normal for those things.  There isn't a fan for the GPU, but the optical drive's fan is positioned in the chasis in such a way that the air flows over the GPU.  Normally the optical drive's fan runs at a minimum 1,000 rpm speed, but I bumped mine up to 1,400 rpm minimum and the GPU routinely runs 10-12ºC cooler.  Cooler is always better!  I couldn't hear the difference between 1,000 and 1,400 rpm so no worries about a prop-plane landing on your desk.

A note about smcFanControl. You can choose which fan's speed you want displayed in the menu bar.  You'd assume the temperature shown is of that fan's target (CPU, HD, or optical), but it is always the CPU.  Just an FYI.

Another indispensable widget for monitoring things is iStat Pro.  A well done widget.

Camera Setup for Videos

While my camera setup isn't terribly impressive (not a pro camera, no gaffer, no grip, and no blonde behind the controls...), I've had some questions about it.  Above my profile in the sidebar is a section with special pages and I added one about The Camera Setup.

What I'll say is that you can do pretty well with any camera (including that decade old DVC) if you light things correctly.  That's my current big hurdle until I make some light-box equivalents.  While I've gotten better on review and project videos, sometimes you frame a shot and say "good enough" as there's a lot of effort in recording and -- moreso -- editing.

If you ever decide to undertake making videos, realize that for a 15 minute clip, you'll likely record 30 minutes between extra material "on the cutting room floor" or retakes.  Whatever you record (30 minutes in this case), count on 3-5 times that in editing time; so 2-2.5 hours in this example.  It isn't that editing is difficult, but the import time, assessment of the clips, editing, and invariably editing out those 20 seconds that put your video over the YouTube 15-minute limit is what makes it long.

As an example, the 4-video series on the MFT totals 55 minutes.  As it had an overhead camera, everything was filmed twice and imported twice.  That 55 minutes was approximately 90 of recording (on each camera).  The editing took very close to 8 hours, which was complicated by merging two camera streams.  Not rocket science, but the double video load slows down editing both in processing and in more complicated work for the user.

Well, They're Honest At Least...

While searching for a free video converter to convert FLV files to DivX, I ran across "VideoConverter" (clever, no?) that states it can convert most anything.  Freeware, too.  So I download it.  I'm weird in that I read license agreements since some people use those to have you okay all kinds of nasty stuff.

This one in particular has some clauses stating it installs an automatic update service.  Okay, everybody does these days (much to the chagrin of my resource load).  Further, it states it will use the updater to update the application, and download other applications to your machine, and that these applications will make peer-to-peer connections over your Internet connection (i.e., your cost), consume disk space, and make 'certain' files available for others to download.

That's a pretty hefty "continue" button to press.  Of course, I canceled it.  I will say, though, unlike a freeware program repackaged by hackers with a trojan horse in them, this is on the up-n-up... if you click it, you approved it.

Be wary... if you are curious to look, here's the link as a text link you'll have to copy/paste to view: http://apps.zangovideo.com/vdcnvr/