May 2007

So it appears that my post about home-built speaker stands has been featured on Make Magazine’s blog. The sudden inrush of traffic was so dramatic that it overwhelmed my server before my monit alarms could even go off. Apache spawned a shit-ton of connections, MySQL was overwhelmed, and quite quickly my whole blog went down. My box hit a 1-minute load level of around 80-90 before it finally stopped responding to connections.

Fortunately through monit’s web interface I was eventually able to bring Apache down for long enough to get sshd back up. I managed to log onto my box and drop in wp-cache-2, an excellent Wordpress plugin that automatically caches your posts. 5 minutes later my blog was up and running and it’s now humming around at a much more reasonable level.

Update: Hello Makers! Sorry about the brief outage earlier. This post has been featured in Make Magazine’s blog and the temporary spike in traffic took my server out for a short period of time. But, with the power of wp-cache, things are back up and running quickly and they should be more stable.

I’ve recently been building out my home theater system. One thing that’s always difficult, especially in an apartment without a dedicated TV or home theater room, is where to place your speakers.

Traditionally you’ll wall-mount them or put them on speaker stands. But wall mounting isn’t a good option for me, since all the “good walls” are too far away or obscured by doors or bookshelves. And stands are out, because they’re prohibitively expensive ($40-100 each) and generally too short to stick up above the back of my couch. Plus I have an overactive cat who gets her thrills by bouncing off of and knocking over things, so normal speaker stands generally aren’t stable enough to withstand her abuse.

So I decided to build my own. What, I thought, is:

• Tall
• Black
• Stable
• And most importantly… cheap?

The answer came in the form of a pair of Walmart “torchiere lamps”, those tall, wide-based lamps that are pretty much ubiquitous in everybody’s first apartment. The results were quite impressive, given the materials I started with.

Read on for more details…

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