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Slicing Gauge

My first attempt at making my own tool was inspired by the Q&A section of Fine Woodworking #189. It was relatively easy but took some time to get the right fit between the head and the sliding bar. Since I am left handed I made it for me so it will probably appear backwards to most of you “rightys”. Here are the pictures.

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Photostack or Zenphoto?

I have been using photostack for my photos section and it has served me well up to a certain point. There have been a couple of things that have annoyed me about it but they were small enough that I let it go since the rest of it worked really well.
The version that I have been using is 2.17b which was released just about a year ago. Noel has finally released the next beta of photostack and I have been playing with it on another site. There are many great improvments but one that really stands out for me is on the user end. If a gallery has a large number of photos and therefore many pages of photos, when a user is pageing through the thumbnails and wants to see the larger view, they click on the thumbnail. Once they have viewed the photo if they would like to go back to the previous page of thumbnails they can now. In version 2.18b or less, if you click the “up a level” link to go back to the thumbnail view you will be taken back to the first page of thumbnails. That is most annoying.
I am really enjoying the new look and layout of the admin section. It uses AJAX for a lot of the editing and is really pretty slick. I do have one issue with the gallery creation section. The gallery folders are created using the script of course but as a result the owner of the gallery folders is apache. That is probably not an issue for anyone using apache without SAFE_MODE turned on, but my host uses SAFE_MODE. Because the gallery folders are owned by apache you cannot write to them i.e. upload photos. I don’t know if there is any way to fix this but I have my fingers crossed.
I have been looking into a couple of other products and one that I have found that is really enticing is Zenphoto. There is a bonus on this one in that it is also set up as a blog. While I like this feature I don’t know if this would draw more comment spam.
A couple of others that are interesting are Simple PHP Gallery and Plogger.
Whatever software I end up using it will take a little work because I will have to set up some kind of redirect in my main .htaccess file to redirect all of the links to photo-posts that are currently out there.