Last weekend, I convinced my uncle to help me make a small set of Tetris-style shelves. The plans can be found at Instructables. Between my uncle and me we made the following modifications:

• Used biscuits on all the corners in addition to glue and nails. This makes the corners more stable and is particularly helpful on the unsupported concave corners of the L, S, and T pieces.
• Used 10″ clear (no knots) pine planks instead of the 8″ used by the author. I did this because I wanted to also store books and records that are deeper than the DVD/Game cases the author planned to store.

After sanding, we finished with Watco Danish Oil (Natural flavor). The can lied, though, and it was more than 8 hours until they were ready to use. It was closer to 36 before the surfaces stopped being oily and I was comfortable putting books on them.

I’m tremendously excited to have these finished, and I’m very grateful to my uncle for all his work on the project. Perhaps next year I’ll add a few more pieces to the collection!

One week from tomorrow, I’ll be awarded my MA from Digital Media Studies, and it’ll be time to strike out into the world to seek my fortune. This afternoon, I’m flying out for a job interview. They’re paying for everything, so I hope that’s a good sign. If this goes well, I’ll say a little more. If not, at least I get a free plane ride!

The Masters Project, incidentally, can be found here. It was one of my requirements for graduation. I plan to add Wii Opera compatibility this summer.

Since I’ve not seen this solution anywhere else (maybe because it’s crazy), I ought to put it out there.

The background of this workaround is that in my apartment, I am granted free internet usage by the University of Denver. This comes with the condition that I have to use Cisco’s lovely VPN client at all times to get a connection. This is on my Macs and PC’s, even those with built-in VPN capability. Since the VPN client must be running to get any internet connection at all, devices like the Nintendo Wii, Nintendo DS, Playstation Portable, and what have you, cannot get online on the University wireless.

At least, not without a little help.

My first thought was just to use Nintendo’s WFC dongle, essentially a Nintendo-only USB device that creates a local wireless network to connect to Nintendo’s servers. That was no good. Both the Nintendo WFC Connector and the Cisco VPN client require the sharing of a network connection on your machine. I’m not sure about Macs (WFC Connector is PC only), but on Windows you can only have one shared connection at a time. I had a crazy idea, though. And it worked.

My setup to get my Wii online now works as follows: On my PowerMac G5, I run Windows XP at absolute minimal settings in a Virtual PC. The Virtual PC leeches internet connectivity from the Mac, but the connection is NAT’d and the VPC believes it’s coming in on an ethernet card. The VPC is more than happy to share this connection with the Nintendo WFC Connector, which is plugged into a hub on top of the G5. This virtualized machine keeps my Nintendo equipment connected for a sliver of the G5′s 2 GB of RAM. It’s not great, but it works, and that’s good enough for me for the time being.

EDIT: After further testing, I’ve determined that this also works with WinXP running a second WinXP install under VMWare Workstation (with WFC software version 1.04 and VMWare Tools installed). I don’t see any reason why Linux couldn’t do the same with its version of VMWare. VirtualPC 2007 on Windows, however, can’t use this trick because it doesn’t support USB.