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Archives for 2011

RadioShack Deluxe Cable Stripper

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Radioshack Deluxe Cable StripperOn the heels of my post relating to grounding your CATV, I thought I’d do a brief review on this inexpensive, capable coax stripper. I’d been looking online and at local hardware stores for a good quality coax stripper, and any of the really good ones were at least $30. Which, I’d be happy to pay if that’s what it would cost for a good stripper, but on a whim, I looked at RadioShack’s site, and found this, which gets decent reviews, and at the local Radioshack, was only $15! In my few tests, it does a great job, and quickly. After reading in depth about coax the last few days, I’ve read that nicking the conductor of coax when stripping it is bad, which I’m sure I’ve done on some of my crimps. So, over the next few days, I plan to redo several of the terminations in my house to perhaps improve my signal quality to my cable modem (the local demarcation point for CATV is about 10 feet from my house, so all my TV signals look great. I just hope to slightly improve my cable modem signal).

All and all, if you’re going to be doing anymore than a one off coax termination (in which case you might be able to get a friend, or a friendly cable installer to do), I’d highly recommend this stripper. Much cheaper ones are almost as expensive (I have one), and do a MUCH worse job. This one performs as well as any $25-30 I’ve seen.

The old downside being getting replacement blades. The local Radioshack I bought this from didn’t seem to have them, but from reviews, the blades should last some time, and replacement blades can be purchased online here.

[xrr rating=4.75/5]

Ground your cable TV coax!

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Ungrounded CATV coax connections can cause some rather bad speaker hum (at 60hz here in the US), and horizontal lines in your picture. Grounding your coax connection can help alleviate these problems, though it may not fully solve your issues. To demonstrate, here’s some backstory.

We have a older CRT TV in the garage that we use to play DDR/Stepmania, as well as have a TV going when working in the garage. I recently hooked an old computer up to the TV for a permanent Stepmania machine. Right after hooking this computer up, I started getting a really bad ground hum on the TV, which could be quickly fixed by installing a ground lift (Cheater Plug) on the computer power connection, but this is generally a bad idea (computers like being grounded). After doing some research, I found out that an ungrounded CATV connection can cause ground hum. Checking it out, I removed the CATV connection from the TV, and viola, the hum was gone. Okay… so, now to actually FIX the problem.

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Employee Scheduling Software

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At a meeting this last week, a coworker expressed frustration over how labor intensive it is to schedule student employees. You have to ask them to give you a printout of their class schedule, and then manually wade through them all to figure out who can fill what shifts. Then create a “pretty” Excel document that shows the schedule for everyone.

So, during that meeting while everyone was talking about something else, I started looking around for a good solution to this issue. The first thing I came across was Employee Scheduler. Which after setting up and testing, seems pretty cool. Biggest things would be:
Pros:

  • LDAP access (though, doesn’t handle multiple LDAP uid’s correctly)
  • Allows students to set preferences (say, they CAN work at 8am, but it’s not preferred).
  • Self Hosted (php/mysql (AMP))
  • Designed for scheduling student employees

Cons:

  • Code hasn’t been touched since 2004
  • No Timeclock functionality

The second one I came across, that I didn’t bother installing, was Employee Scheduling System (ESS). I attempted to install this, but got errors on the .sql import that I didn’t really want to pursue due to, like the above: the code hasn’t been touched since 2005.

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