Archive for the 'Projects' Category

Skillet handle holder

Sunday, October 27th, 2024

I cook with a couple of cast iron skillets—a 6-inch one and a 10-inch one—and, after each cooking session is complete, I wash the skillet so the fats and food bits left behind don’t set. In order to do this, I need to hold onto the handle—but by that point, the handle is very hot. Even with cast iron’s notoriously slow internal distribution of heat, the handle will still be 200°F or more.

My kitchen towel is often wet from hand-washing by that point, so I can’t very well use that as an insulator—the water will conduct the heat very efficiently. And I’m not stocking the kitchen with half a dozen towels at a time.

Pot-holders work, but it’s easy for a pot-holder to get misaligned and me to end up touching hot metal anyway. What I need is something I can slip onto the handle for that final cleaning step.

I’ve been using the Ove Glove, but wanted something easier to wash.*

Lodge sells silicone pot handle covers, but I’d rather not spend $10 a pop for more plastic.

What I realized is that I can modify a pot-holder by folding it over and sewing it closed. So I bought a two-pack of black all-cotton pot-holders from Dollar Tree and got started.

An unmodified black square pot-holder, with a loop for hanging at the middle of one edge, and a care label sewn in at the middle of another edge.

The first step was to seam-rip all of the original bias tape away from the edge, exposing the edges of the pot-holder body. This binding also includes the loop that can be used to hang the pot-holder, and secures the label with the care instructions. I want to keep both of these in the new design.

I cut the original bias tape (from the end opposite the loop) to a length that I could put back on one edge, including both adjacent corners. This edge becomes the perimeter of the opening.

The pot-holder with its original bias tape removed, exposing the edge of the cotton batting inside. A length of the original bias tape has been clipped back onto one edge of the pot-holder, while another length of the bias tape lay alongside to show its one-inch width.

Then I made some fresh bias tape from black cotton quilting fabric. I measured the length around one and a half sides of the pot-holder, which is the length of binding that will run from the open end down one side and along the closed end. The width is three inches, producing 1½-inch (36 mm) bias tape.

I don’t have a bias tape maker in that width (my widest one is 24 mm), so I had to apply the folds manually using pins and my ironing board. All-metal tailoring pins are helpful here because you can iron directly over them.

The inch-and-a-half black bias tape. One end of it is shown here against a small green cutting mat.
I cut off the diagonal ends to leave a right-angle end before sewing.

The reason for the jumbo bias tape is that twice the thickness of the pot-holder is _thick_. I used a 100-diameter denim needle and reduced my presser foot pressure by two full turns, and my Singer Heavy Duty machine still struggled at times. And you can really tell where the cotton batting is being compressed by the lockstitch.

I decided to put the care label at the closed end. One thing I’d do differently: I think I’d prefer the label on the underside. The side I put the label on ends up facing up and tickling my palm when I’m holding the skillet with my left hand.

The loop also goes at the closed end, at the very end of the new bias tape. I cut it off from the original bias tape and stuck one end in under the new bias tape on each side.

The finished holder, shot at an oblique angle to show the opening in the foreground. At the far end is the care label and the loop.

The finished product is very much a universal skillet handle holder, longer than either of my skillets’ handles; theoretically I could have trimmed it down to fit one of my skillets more exactly, and done the same with the other pot-holder to make one tailored for the other skillet. But I’m happy with this for now.

Holding my ten-inch skillet by the handle, which is encased in the cotton holder.

* I had misremembered the Ove Glove as not being machine-washable, but I just looked up the care instructions and it is. Then I checked on the care label for the pot-holders and apparently those, despite being all-cotton, are “hand wash only”. Oops. (Neither can be tumble-dried.) When the time comes, I’ll probably machine-wash the pot-holder handle holder anyway and see what happens.

G4 Cube mods

Sunday, November 2nd, 2014

As some of you are aware, I own a Power Mac G4 Cube.

The G4 Cube was an impressive little machine from 2001. It was a Power Mac G4, minus any PCI slots, packed into an 8-inch by 8-inch by 8-inch (plus a few inches’ clearance underneath) cube. And it had no fan—it was cooled entirely by convection through the mostly-empty center column.

It’s also really fun to upgrade.

I’ve upgraded my Cube in three ways:

RAM

One of the old stand-bys, along with upgrading the processor and video card (both of which remain stock in my Cube).

RAM for a Cube is dirt cheap now, so I bought 1 GB. The theoretical maximum is 1.5 GB, but I’m only running Mac OS 9 on my Cube (all my personal OS X usage happens on my MacBook Air), so 1 GB should already be overkill.

SSD

The Cube, of course, came with a spinning-disk drive (a.k.a. “hard disk drive” or HDD), connected via ATA.

Replacing an HDD with an SSD is straightforward in most newer computers, but the Cube presents special challenges.

For one thing, it’s a desktop computer with a 3.5-inch drive bay, and SSDs are typically 2.5-inch (the “laptop” form factor). This would not be a problem if it were the only one, because adapter brackets exist, but it’s not the only problem.

Problem #2 is that the Cube uses ATA (now known as “parallel ATA” or PATA), whereas SSDs use serial ATA (a.k.a. SATA). Again, adapters exist, but that brings us to problem #3:

Space.

Not disk space, but physical space.

As I mentioned, the Cube is a lot of electronics packed into a small volume. The drive bay does not have free space on any side of it; it is exactly as big as needed to fit a 3.5-inch ATA hard disk drive.

This makes it difficult to impossible to fit a 2.5-inch drive, a PATA-to-SATA adapter, and an adapter bracket.

OWC sells SSDs with integrated adapters for pretty much exactly this purpose, but I cheaped out and went the DIY route.

  • I bought an 80 GB SSD off Woot.
  • I bought an adapter board at Fry’s. I think it was this one, but it was months ago and I’m not about to open up my Cube again to find out.
  • I bought an adapter bracket, I think from Amazon, but didn’t end up using it because of the aforementioned space constraints.

With a HDD, leaving everything flopping around inside the computer would be just asking for a problem, because the HDD has a motor, which will cause it and everything connected to it to vibrate. Sooner or later, the HDD could come unplugged (especially if it’s a 2.5-inch HDD), and then you just have bits pouring out all over whatever the Cube is sitting on.

But this isn’t an HDD; it’s an SSD. A Solid-State Drive.

It has no moving parts.

That’s what’s cool about having an SSD in a Cube:

No moving parts at all.

The Cube has no fan. The video card has no fan. The SSD has no motor. Thus, the entire set-up is completely silent.

The one downside is that since this drive is so large (by 2001 standards), the Mac takes awhile to validate that it is actually properly formatted. It actually shows the blinking question mark for a minute or two before it finally boots.

HDMI

The stock video card in my Cube is a Rage 128 with ADC and VGA outputs.

I used to use my Cube on a contemporary Apple Studio Display that I could plug into the ADC port, but I don’t want to set up a second monitor specifically for that computer.

For sound, the Cube didn’t have a built-in speaker (no space) or audio jacks (presumably no space even for that). Instead, it came with a custom Apple speaker set-up consisting of a central DAC box with hard-wired USB and speaker connections on one side and a headphone jack on the other.

Mine’s in somewhat shabby shape, and I don’t want to use it anyway.

I have a Yamaha AV receiver, Monoprice 5.1 speakers, and an Optoma 1080p projector. The receiver and the projector both support HDMI. What I really want is to be able to route the Cube’s audio and video together into one of the receiver’s HDMI ports, so that the Cube can be alongside my PS3, my iPad, and my MacBook Air as possible external sources to be presented through the receiver’s speakers and the projector.

And that’s what I have.

This adapter takes video input over VGA and audio input over USB, and outputs HDMI.

It’s an HDMI port for the G4 Cube.

Yes, the ideal solution would use digital video from the ADC port, but nobody’s going to make such an adapter for ADC today. A DVI one could exist, but would probably be way more expensive, and require also purchasing an ADC-to-DVI adapter cable.

The VGA output looks fine. The Cube can output up to 1600×1200, and it looks great on my wall.

The only real drawback is that Mac OS 9 (or maybe the video card) never heard of 1920×1080, so I can’t actually output the native resolution of my projector.

My wonderful Cube

My G4 Cube has 1 GB of RAM, an SSD with more free space than I know what to do with, and an HDMI port, to which I’ve connected a 1080p projector and 5.1 speakers.

And it’s completely silent. (Although admittedly the projector ruins that.)

It’s a cool little machine.