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I had some spare sheet metal, so I thought I’d make some driveway decorations.

In theory, you could make these out of cardboard or plastic sheeting or whatever.

I made a set of 3, because that’s how many Mario Kart gives you at a time. Here is what they look like in progress – one finished, one mostly painted, and one not painted.

Please ignore the ugly welds.

The goal was to make them “life-size” if you were to have Mario Kart items in real life. They could be a little larger, but I went with this size because the 10-inch width of each strip was what a bunch of my sections of sheet metal were.

Here is the end result:

I have not tried it, but I doubt they would make you spin out like they do in the game. At best they would scratch the paint or scuff the tire.

In case you do want to try this at home, here is how I made them.

What is the point of checking in online before you get to the airport? The point of checking in, in general, is to confirm you are there. It shouldn’t be possible to check in, in absentia.

Maybe if they’d have picked a different term for it, it would make more sense to me. Use RSVP or something.

The companies that are getting it right are the grocery stores, when you order for pickup. When they send us the notice that the order is ready, we can click a button to let them know we are on our way. Then, once we are there, we can click a button to check in and let them know we are physically there.

We tried once to check-in as we were getting close to the store. But it actually declined us, because they noticed the pickup spots were empty. They must have had some cameras.

And most of the stores nowadays make you indicate which parking spot you are in. You can’t check in without being there, because you don’t know which spots are going to be open.

Anyway, I dislike the airlines use the term “check-in” for “let us know you’re still planning on flying with us soon”. Maybe RSVP isn’t a good term either, because it really is just “print your boarding pass now” or if you’re going with Southwest it’s “is your trigger finger faster than the rest of the people on this flight”.

I took some photos of a small waterfall up at Dead River Falls last summer. Not even a waterfall, just a slight elevation change. But here it is, for your viewing pleasure.

It was a set of 10 photos taken in burst mode, I just strung them together into a GIF.

When I had to do some engine work on the minivan, I was able to get a tool to lock the camshaft gears/sprockets/phasers in place so that everything would stay at top-dead center while I unbolted things.

Like this:

That’s for the Dodge 3.6L engine, which was in a bunch of vehicles for a long time, so it has good support from a variety of sources.

But now I’m doing a bunch of work on my car with a Chrysler 2.4L engine, from the early 2000s, used in Neons and PT Cruisers and some other things. It also uses the same cam sprockets (simple gears, no phasers) as the 2.0L, so this would work for that too.

Anyway, I was looking for a similar tool to hold the camshafts in place so I could do things like unbolt the crankshaft pulley and unbolt the camshafts themselves without rotating the engine.

But unlike the many options for the 3.6L tool, I found nothing for the 2.4/2.0 engine. There were some references to a prybar-type tool which is supposed to be the official way of holding the car gear in place, but I didn’t find a source to buy one. And even if I did, my guess is it would have been more than I wanted to pay.

I wanted a simple insert with teeth, like the 3.6 thingy. And it just so happens that my son got a 3D printer last month. So I decided to make my own.

It took a couple of iterations on paper, plus one really thin 3D-printed sample, but I did make my own and it works. Here it is in action:

And, in case you want to print your own, here is the STL file.

STL file for 3D printing a cam gear holding tool for Chrysler or Dodge 2.0 and 2.4 L engines

Note that it is a very tight fit, so don’t expect it to slide right into the gears. The goal is no gear movement at all, so it needs to be as flush as possible. Be prepared to coerce it into place.

Also note it is about 2 inches deep. The pictures show it only halfway in. Afterwards, I pushed it until it contacted the backstop, and it stuck out just a little bit, enough to still be able to grab the sides.

We were driving home from some event, and the topic of conversation turned to blood pressure. One of the kids asked what the two numbers were, and I couldn’t remember the term, so I just said the top one was “apostolic”.

The funny thing was that it sounded close enough so that people just went with it.

I then admitted what happened and the kids were throwing out other options, just about anything that ended in -olic (but not -holic).

• apostolic
• anabolic
• diabolic

Those are the terms I could remember. Feel free to use any of those next time you’re discussing blood pressure.

I traveled to Maine to visit family. Here’s a short recap of some of the events.

We stayed in a small house overlooking Union Bay. Here’s the view from inside the house.

And here’s the view from the backyard.

Our first Maine activity was hiking around Jordan Pond. Everything associated with it had the prefix “Jordan Pond”, so that became a short-lived running joke. To get there, you drive up Jordan Pond Drive. You know you’re there when you see the house, which is named Jordan Pond House. Etc, etc.

It was cold in Maine, but since everything there is ocean salt water, we mostly saw liquid water. Jordan Pond was the first place where a body of water was actually frozen. And it was a good frozen too – several inches thick, we could see a few layers. Other people were running and skating about, so we ventured onto the ice.

We went there not to slide on the ice, but to hike the trail around Jordan Pond. It was called, of course, Jordan Pond Trail. We started going north along the east side. It was a scenic trail, fairly well maintained, like this:

About the halfway point, there was a bridge, I’m guessing to cross over the Jordan Pond river that feeds it.

After that, the trail became less of a trail and more of a suggestion. It was just a bunch of rocks piled along the shore, and you had to guess where to go next, mostly judging by the shoreline.

The amount of effort to scramble over snow-covered rocks was more than we anticipated for our group, so we made up a plan B – just walk across the water.

It was the shortest distance between two points. The snow-covered sections were ok, but the bare ice was polished smooth by the winds, so that was pretty slippery.

When we got just past the point of land that jut out, we could see that the shoreline was no longer rocky and there was a path we could walk again. So we decided to abandon plan B and go back to plan A of hiking the trail. The trail for most of the rest of the time consisted of a boardwalk.

The boardwalk ended right near a bridge for the carriage road. There are a few carriage houses and various old bridges leftover from the Rockefeller days, before it became Acadia National Park.

We also visited Bar Harbor quickly. There is not much to do there in the winter. And a swing by the LL Bean outlet. Trying to fit in a bunch of typical Maine experiences. Including buying food at Shaw’s and perusing Marden’s for whatever we can find.

It’s not band books week, but there was a news story – or whatever substitutes for one in these social media days – about some people getting upset at certain schools for banning some books.

And I got to thinking that they’re overreacting.

Sure, the schools aren’t allowing some books in the school, but how is that different from any other category?

Our schools in the area have a dress code. Certain types of outfits are not allowed at school. Are groups protesting the fact that the school has banned those?

Our schools in the area also have a movie policy. Teachers are not allowed to show anything over PG-13 (or PG for the lower grades). It’s the same for the charter buses used for long field trips. So certain types of movies are not allowed at school. Are groups protesting the fact that the school has banned those?

The people who are mad at the schools for “banning books” are approaching it from the wrong angle. The angle should be that the content of any media is restricted to what’s appropriate for the age.

Part of the problem is that there is not a rating system for books like there is for movies. If there were, then it would be easy for the school to have a policy of “School library books are to be rated PG-13 or lower” or something like that.

The other part of the problem is that books are synonymous with knowledge, so the people opposed to restricting books are decrying that as banning knowledge. On one hand, I suppose you could learn a lesson from just about any books, but on the other hand some books are meant just for entertainment. Not all books are equal when it comes to their educational merits, and thus their place in school.