With a modern, fast Xeon processor under the hood of my Mac, one would expect a simple thing such as box selecting some icons on the desktop to be quick. However, I recently found out that between the time I click and I finished the box selection, the initial click did not register. In other words, imagine clicking top right somewhere on your desktop and immediately dragging the mouse to the bottom right to complete a box selection. I found that I had no selection box!

Only if I clicked, waited about 4 seconds then dragged the mouse did it box select properly. What was going on here? My desktop was pretty clean... Only about one column of icons on a 4k display. Or was that true?

Turns out, I had 720 files on my Desktop, but they were all hidden from common sight via the nifty Apple feature called stacks - whereby files are grouped by kind and collapsed into stacks to clean up the Desktop. I absolutely love that feature as I use the Desktop as a working area, however I now realized the cost of doing so. Only 720 items on the desktop, yet it caused a 4 second delay in mouse click response when selecting things. I moved all those files out to a subfolder, and my response times for box selection is back to near instant. So keep an eye on the depth of your stacks - it will kill your performance if left unchecked.

I have wanted a magnetic knife stand for my Japanese and European knifes for a while now, and although there are many to purchase, they all had one problem: They had to be mounted to a wall or cabinet. Since I am renting, I can not make holes in the walls so those blocks are a no-go.

So I decided to come up with my own design for a magnetic block, but self supported. I made two stands, a large one from Teak (thanks West Wind Hardwood) and another smaller one from Oak. They each have four mortise/tenon joints, and some shaping that I have done with a spokeshave. The main block contains 29 neodymium magnets (rare earth metal alloy Nd₂Fe₁₄B) in a staggered pattern consisting of two rows, and the smaller stand has 16 magnets in a grid like pattern across two rows. The magnets are strong enough to hold a large Wa-Deba but not too strong to cause issues with a small pairing knife. I finished them off with Urethane.

This project is an identical replica of Paul Seller's Eco Bin project. I used Oak and plywood from West Wind Hardwoods and once again only used non-electrical hand tools (except for the bandsaw which I used to re-saw some pieces, and a cordless drill for some pilot holes).

This piece is unique as it has 42 mortise and tenon joints, and chopping these by hand takes quite a lot of time. Also, the plywood presented particular problems being about 5.9mm thick, and therefore thinner than the closest chisel I had which was 6.3mm. I had to adjust the chisel to make it closer to 6mm for the joints to be tight.