The flip top mittens will remain free until the end of March then will be for sale for $2.00 US so get them while you can. Please feel free to let me know your experiences or link back so I can see what you have made! And now, the patterns!

Thick & Quick Mittens – Free!!- PDF Download or Ravelry Download

Thick & Quick Flip Top Mittens – Free until March 31, 2010- PDF Download or Ravelry Download

These patterns are released under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License.

This dishcloth has the hidden pattern of a Dalek and is based on the Exfoliate Dalek Cloth by Penwiper who has given permission to publish this pattern and modifications (thank you!!). It is best knit on smaller needles than your yarn recommends to keep the pattern tight and visible. The color changes are easily carried up the side of the cloth and I recommend using contrasting colors so that the hidden image shows clearly.

Click here to download the free chart or grab it here on Ravelry.

If you enjoy illusion knitting, these sites have even more great free patterns and information:

Wooly Thoughts – Illusion knitting patterns for many popular themes as well as a Mona Lisa!

Freshisle Fibers - Illusion/shadow knitting pattern links

Knitted Tassel Hat

Materials:
One skein of Hobby Lobby Yarn Bee Fleece Lite
Size 13 needles.
Yarn needle for sewing up hat and weaving in ends.
Crochet hook to assist the attachment of the tassels.

Hat:
Cast on 44 stitches.
Knit in a 2×2 ribbing (knit, knit, purl, purl) for 2 inches.
Switch to garter stitch (knit both sides of your work) and knit for approximately 6 more inches or until hat is a total of 8 inches long.
Bind off.
Sew up side seam then sew up top to close.
Weave in ends.

This image shows how the top seam should close as well as the tassel placement at each top corner.

Tassels:
To make tassels cut 6 strands of yarn approximately 12 inches long. Fold three in half and pull the fold through the stitches of your knitting and back out on the top corner of the hat. The crochet hook can help you poke them through your knitting. Take the loops off the hook and slip the tassel ends through the loop and pull tight to complete the tassel. Repeat for the other corner. I recommend making a small knot in the yarn at the bottom of each tassel to stop it from fraying.

This is an open source pattern and is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 Unported License. To view a copy of this license, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/3.0/ You are free to use the pattern, build upon the pattern, and make the object the pattern provides instructions for for non-commercial purposes only (personal use and charity crafting is allowed). You are required under this license to give credit to me (a link to my blog, my email address, or the pattern is sufficient) for any content you post which contains this work and if you make changes you are required to release the pattern under the same license with credit to original author. Pattern created by Christa Casebeer, web: http://linuxchic.net , email: linuxchic@linuxchic.net , Ravelry: http://www.ravelry.com/people/linuxchic

PDF version available for download & printing here. This pattern is also available as a project on Ravelry.

The approximate finished size should be about 7 inches around at the top by the knuckles and 6 1/2 inches at the bottom after the wrist decreases. There is little stretch at the starting chain (near the knuckles) but quite a bit of stretch throughout the rest of the wrist warmer (about an inch or little more in stretch). The finished length is 8 inches.

Supplies:
Size F (3.75 mm) crochet hook
Sock Yarn – Approx. 200 yards give or take a little. The yarn in the picture is Hobby Lobby Yarn Bee Walk Away in the Footsy colorway.
Sewing needle for weaving in ends if you don’t want to crochet them in.

Special Stitches & Abbreviations:
BPDC: back post double crochet – Dc worked around the back post of the stitch. Yarn over, insert hook from the back side of the work right to left around the post of the indicated stitch on a previous row;
yo and pull up a loop (3 loops on hook), yo and draw through two loops (2 loops on hook), yo and draw through two loops (1 loop on hk)
FPDC: front post double crochet – Dc worked around the front post of the stitch. Yarn over, insert hook from the front side of the work right to left around the post of the indicated stitch on a previous row;
yo and pull up a loop (3 loops on hook), yo and draw through two loops (2 loops on hook), yo and draw through two loops (1 loop on hook)
DC Decrease: double crochet decrease – Work a dc in the next stitch without completing the very last step (2 loops on hook), then dc in the next stitch without completing the last step (3 loops on hook), yarn over and draw through all the loops. Decrease made.
Sl. st.: slip stitch
Ch: chain
Dc: double crochet
Yo: Yarn over

Hand:
Ch 30 loosely. Making sure not to twist the chain, slip stitch chain together.
Row 1: Ch3. Dc in each chain. Sl. st. to previous ch3 to close the round. Ch2.
Row 2: Ribbing: BPDC in first DC, FPDC in next DC then BPDC in the following repeating from to the end of the round. Sl. to previous ch2 to close the round. Chain 2.
Row 3: Dc in each dc to end of row. Sl. st. to previous ch2 to close the round. Ch 2.
Row 4-6: Repeat row 3.

Thumb Hole:
Row 7: Turn work rather than continuing in round and dc across to next to last stitch (leaving one stitch in previous round unworked). Ch2. Turn.
Row 8-9: Dc in each dc. Ch2 turn.
Row 10: Dc in each dc. Chain 1. Sl. st. across skipped stitches to first dc and join. Ch2.
Row 11: Return working in the round. DC in each dc then across ch1 joining the round with a sl. st. to top of previous ch2. Ch2.
Row 12-16: Dc in each dc. Sl. st. in top of previous ch2. Ch2.

Wrist Decreases:
Row 17-19: Dc in each dc making 3 dc decreases throughout round joining each round with a sl. st. to top of ch2.

Arm:
Row 20-24: Dc in each dc joining the round with a sl. to top of ch2. Repeat this row for as long as you want your warmers to be. (I didn’t add any more rows to the ones I made in the pictures.)
Row 25: Dc in each dc joining the round with a sl. to top of ch 2. Cut thread and weave in ends.

Now make another one!

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There were also suggestions for console tools or installable tools which you can read in the responses above. I was specifically looking for tools I could access via the web so I won’t go into those in this post. Thanks to all of the replies. I found some of my neglected favorites in there as well as some great new links to add to my tool box.

I used the owl stencil from Craftzine’s Blog for the design. Wonder Under is fabulous. It turns regular old fabric into an iron on applique – and in this case – a patch. I only needed a needle and thread for sewing on the eyes (aka buttons).

By making a decorative patch for my pants, I am still able to wear them to work and I saved $35 that would have been spent to buy another pair of Levis. Yay!

Akismet and other comment watching plugins can help monitor for spam, but a quick way to cut back on spam trackbacks and comments is to close old posts. This is especially important if you are running a large blog or one that has been online for a long time. My favorite way to do this used to be with the plugin  simply called Close Old Posts however, this feature has now been integrated into WordPress. Just how do you close old posts?

Within the admin interface navigate down to Settings and then Discussion from the menu on the left (click the image below for a larger version).

Here you will find a checkbox that you can select to close posts. The default time is 14 days but you can change this to whatever number suits you best. I have found that 30 days tends to be the best, less if you update a lot. That gives visitors plenty of time to leave a comment but keeps the conversation from getting stale. Some bloggers and commenters prefer to keep comments on their relevant posts, but if someone just read an article I posted a year ago, I would just prefer them to leave a comment on my most recent post if they don’t feel like shooting me an email.

Since this is a built in WordPress feature you can impliment this in self-hosted WordPress installs as well as on WordPress.com blogs.

Stacks of Waffles from bcmom at Flickr

When I am left with too many eggs or bread on the brink of stale then it is time to whip out massive quantities of french toast. The kids love to mix up their breakfast with frozen convenience foods like waffles, pancakes, and french toast sticks and for pennies I can provide the same kind of easy hot breakfast as the more expensive store bought versions.

After the french toast has been cooled I pack it in small freezer bags or Press and Seal wrap (to keep the frost out) in groups of twos (I do the same with pancakes & waffles) and toss them in the freezer. When the kids get a hankering for something hot for breakfast before school all they have to do is open a pack of two and put them on a plate and zap them until hot in the microwave. I have found that by freezing them in two packs they don’t get wasted or accidentally left open in the freezer. If your kids are always begging for the fancy french toast sticks, just cut each slice of french toast into four strips before freezing. It’s a great way to save money on quick breakfast foods and I think homemade tastes better anyway.

Check out what other’s are doing for Frugal Friday at Biblical Womanhood.

WordPress 101

This guide explains how you can install Apple’s Safari browser on Ubuntu 7.10. As there is no Linux version of Safari, we will run it under Wine. We will use a tool called PlayOnLinux to install Safari under Wine. With PlayOnLinux you can install lots of Windows games and some Windows applications (such as Office 2003, IE6, MS Money, etc.) on Linux. Installing Safari on Linux is good for people such as web designers who have switched to Linux but still need to test their web sites in other browsers.

Installing Apple’s Safari Browser On Ubuntu 7.10 With PlayOnLinux

MyTunesRSS is an application for making your music library available in your local network (LAN) or even the internet. You setup a server with user accounts and access your library through a comfortable web interface.

MyTunesRSS is free for the basic/standard version (with a GUI) which allows you three user accounts on the server. What is even more awesome about it is the application itself is platform independent. They have download binaries for Mac, Windows, or their listed “platform independent” jars which started right up in Debian etch with minimal dependencies. I tested MyTunesRSS on all three platforms and it was pie (I don’t like cake much) to get running on all of them.

Let’s start the how-to for debian. This how-to is written from the command line perspective. I have my music and files and such running on a headless server with no gui. I tested this on my Debian desktop as well with the GUI but I want to keep the server on the same box as the music. To be able to run the system without the GUI you need a license. Headless is NOT available in the free version but if you want to try it before you buy it you can get a 20 day evaluation license from the Codewave Software product site.

The only requirement to run MyTunesRSS is that you have Java runtime 1.5 or better installed on your system. Install java runtime in your favorite way, most simply:

apt-get install sun-java5-jre

Sun recommends you update the alternatives system to have Sun’s tools as the default:

update-java-alternatives -s java-1.5.0-sun

Download the MyTunesRSS platform independent package from Codewave Software. This should be all one line but I have broken it up to fit on the blog better.

wget http://www.codewave.de/products/mytunesrss/
?download_file=mytunesrss-3.1-RC-3-system-independent.zip

Unzip this fancy little thing and stick it where you want it to run from.

unzip mytunesrss-3.1-RC-3-system-independent.zip

Once you have your MyTunesRSS key you need to save it from your email, create .MyTunesRSS in your home directory, name it MyTunesRSS.key and put it in ~/.MyTunesRSS.

Configure an external database with MySQL

My music library has a lot of files. Codewave suggests that if you have more than 10,000 files or even just want a faster & more reliable database, to use an external database rather than the one built into MyTunesRSS. I prefer MySQL if for no other reason than habit so this how-to will use it to continue the MyTunesRSS setup. MyTunesRSS supports both MySQL and PostgreSQL so you can use the later if you are so inclined.

To setup the MySQL database:

apt-get install mysql-server mysql-client mysql-common

The dependencies should be grabbed automagically for you. If not there are lots of really awesome docs on how to setup mysql on your machine. I am not going any further than needed in this doc but if you need help, feel free to email me (contact page on this site provides plenty of ways to get a hold of me).

After all that is done you need to set a root password for it by executing:

mysqladmin -u root password ‘passwordyouwant’

Now login to MSQL and enter the password it prompts you for that you just set. It’s time to setup a database and user for MyTunesRSS to use (you can substitute these values as you wish, just don’t forget what you set them to:

mysql -u root -p

Now create a database called “mytunesrss” and a user called “mytunesrss” with the password “secret” and grant all permission on the new database to that user.

create database mytunesrss character set utf8;

create user mytunesrss identified by ‘secret’;

grant all privileges on mytunesrss.* to mytunesrss;

exit

That’s all we need to do here so we can exit MySQL and go back to working on getting MyTunesRSS configured and working.
First we need to get the java MySQL connector. Go to http://dev.mysql.com/downloads/connector/j/5.0.html and pick a download mirror and get it. Once you have it uncompress it because we only need one file. Create a directory called lib in ~/.MyTunesRSS/ and put the file named mysql-connector-java-5.0.8-bin.jar into the directory you just created.

Now. we need to create a system preferences file to tell MyTunesRSS to connect to the database. go to ~/.MyTunesRSS and use an editor to create a file called system.properties & put the following information into it (making any needed modifications if you changed the information when you first created the database earlier):

database.type=mysql
database.driver=com.mysql.jdbc.Driver
database.connection=jdbc:mysql://localhost/mytunesrss
database.user=mytunesrss
database.password=secret

Save it.

Ok, if you are running this as a headless system there is more to be done before we can start it up. If you are running it as a GUI you can startup MyTunesRSS now by putting this in on the command line which will kick up the GUI for you to change settings and such (I will add how-tos for the GUI at a later time) NOTE that the following is all one line and you need to be in the mytunesrss-3.1-RC-3 directory (again this is all one line, I just broke it up to make it fit here better):

java -Xms32m -Xmx128m -Xbootclasspath/p:lib/codewave-zis.jar
-Djavax.xml.parsers.SAXParserFactory=
org.apache.xerces.jaxp.SAXParserFactoryImpl -jar mytunesrss.jar

For those running a headless system, lets continue on…

The JMX console is a way to manage java applications through a simple interface. This is useful either in headless mode or if you want remote configuration via a web browser. it is activated only when starting up MyTunesRSS in registered mode for configuring the app without using the normal interface. You reach it at http://127.0.0.1:8500 by default.

System properties are:

jmx.host
jmx.port
jmx.username
jmx.password
com.sun.management.jmxremote
com.sun.management.jmxremote.port

We need to put these into the ~/.MyTunesRSS/system.properties file and make some modifications to the settings. Open the file in an editor and add the following to the top of the file:

jmx.host=127.0.0.1
jmx.port=8500
jmx.username=admin
jmx.password=secret
com.sun.management.jmxremote
com.sun.management.jmxremote.port=9876

Modify the first four to your liking and save the file. Now, cd to mytunesrss-3.1-RC-3 and start the badboy up (once again this is all one line):

java -Xms32m -Xmx128m -Xbootclasspath/p:lib/codewave-zis.jar
-Djavax.xml.parsers.SAXParserFactory=
org.apache.xerces.jaxp.SAXParserFactoryImpl -jar mytunesrss.jar – headless

Use a browser to go to the ip that you started MyTunesRSS up on and the port you specified in the jmx settings (port 8500 by default). There are two settings you have to set at a minimum to get MyTunesRSS running

1) You have to specify the directory your music is in
2) You have to specify at least one user account and set a password for that user.

Right now you should be sitting at a screen that looks something like this one:

Add Music Directories:

Under Domain:MyTunesRSS click on the Link titled MyTunesRSS:type=config.name=Directories

Under the Operations heading the first setting is AddDirectories. In the text box type in the full path to your music (top level directory if you have a subdirectories to organize your music) and click the Invoke button. You can set how your directories are organized below (ie Artist/Album/Track/ ….)

Add User(s):

Go back to the main screen and click the link for MyTunesRSS:type=config.name=Users

Under the Operations heading go to the addUser section, under the description for Username type a username in the text box and click Invoke. Go back to the previous screen and type in a password under the description for password and click Invoke.

If you want to change the permissions and settings for the user you just created there will now be a MyTunesRSS:type=user,name=(username you just created) link on the main page where you can go in and change the defaults.

I tend to add music at times so I want the database to update while the server is running and see changes automagically. You can set this under MyTunesRSS:type=config.name=Database by changing “Update the database automatically while server is running” to true.

I wanted MyTunesRSS to run on port 80 in this machine since it doesn’t have a webserver running anything else and it won’t be accessible from the outside of my home network. To change the port go to MyTunesRSS:type=config.name=Server and change the default from port 8080 to 80 and click set. I also set the automatic start to true.

Once you have everything set the way you want it, click the Invoke button by the start server on the MyTunesRSS:type=config.name=Server details page.

Assuming there weren’t any errors thrown you should now be able to get to you music through a web browser by specifying the ip/port combo where you just setup MyTunesRSS.

If you want to use it as a jukebox and allow streaming and all you can specify the codecs and libraries to use in MyTunesRSS:type=config.name=Streaming and setup the permissions for the users to allow it.

If you are interested in using this on your PSP other than just browsing to it (ie subscribe to the RSS) then head over to Skatter Tech and follow the instructions on the bottom of the doc for the PSP Setup Procedure.