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Instant Glue (Cyanoacrylate) tips and tricks

Although I prefer to use solder, hot glue, duct tape and, more recently, plastic filler to bound two parts together. The instant glue has some great uses, here are some techniques used by me for some time.

As usual, before gluing, sand the surface to make it rough and make sure to clean it from any oil or oxidation.

Baking Soda

Pour some instant glue drops on the surface and sprinkle baking soda over it, then pour instant glue again.
Useful as a quick fix for a guitar nut, as a filling when repairing wood cracks or to help gluing some metals or plastics.

HDPE Plastic

My guitar pickup screw hole stripped. To fix I poured some drops of glue and a little of ground HDPE plastic(from bottle caps). After the cure I just drilled a new hole. Still working for over a year, even taking out the pickguard two times.

Removing from a surface or skin

Rub acetone or nail polish remover. Don’t use that on wood furniture.

Improve useful life

Put the instant glue bottle inside an air-tight container with silica gel, calcium chloride or even rice. Low temperature helps too.

Prevent and treat blisters

Can be used as a protection to prevent or to seal a popped blister caused when playing instruments, running or doing any hard work.

 

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Attempting NaNoWriMo 2016 – Week 1

*sigh*

So… Tuesday was the first day of NaNoWriMo. I started at 12:00 midnight without any theme or genre or idea. I decided to start writing an original cyberpunk novel, but in a setting similar to Neuromancer.

While I was writing I tried to avoid cliches and anything resembling Blade Runner, Sprawl or Matrix. After 600 words I ended up with a crap story that didn’t arouse interest in me.

The next day, still under the 24-hours of the Day 1, I wrote again. I gotten something around 1080 words and stopped. Shame, I wasn’t able to keep moving forward.

shameFriday I tried to improve some of the existing dialogue and characters. It helped to increase my word count a bit, but the novel was still unexciting and way far from the goal. That killed the rest of my motivation.

 

I will keep writing and keeping track of my word count, but I will not crave to win the challenge this year. Maybe my first try was too hard as I was writing in a fictional setting with a bunch of made up gadgets.

Here are my top mistakes:

  • Too much distractions.
  • Not schedule a strict writing time.
  • No planning (Setting, characters, and any other background information).
  • Decide the theme on short notice.

 

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Setting up a half-assed PHP development environment on Windows

I, personally, don’t like to develop on Windows, but sometimes I am sitting at my desktop computer(that I use mainly for gaming) and need to code or fix something. Here I will present the setup that I use.

Cygwin64

Have you ever wondered to use git, gcc, make and even emacs on Windows? Cygwin is the easy way to achieve that. Download and run the Cygwin installer. The base package works fine, but make sure to install net/openssh and devel/git packages are selected.

Now just set your system’s PATH environment variable including the cygwin /bin/ folder path.

ConEmu

conemuThis step is not entirely necessary, but I don’t regret using it. Download and install ConEmu. Open the Settings (Super+Alt+P), select the Startup entry from the tree menu and select Specified named task to Cygwin Bash.

 

Vagrant and Scotch Box

I used to roll my Vagrant boxes using PuPHPet. Recently on Windows I had some issues with shared folders settings, I am now using the preconfigured box from Scotch Box.

First download and install VirtualBox and Vagrant. Then clone and setup with vagrant, the first time will take a while since Vagrant need to download the image.

git clone https://github.com/scotch-io/scotch-box.git scotchbox
cd scotchbox
vagrant up

Before shutting down your computer, you should suspend your box.

vagrant suspend

You can ssh into your box using the following command:

vagrant ssh

Visit http://192.168.33.10/ to access your box.
This setup is far from perfect, but it works for me. A while ago I used JetBrains PhpStorm as IDE to develop, recently I changed to Atom simply because it loads faster and I don’t use all the features of PhpStorm.