James Rathbun

Incinerator behind the house at Caruther's Canyon Road

In April 23, 2012, my wife and I woke up early and packed the family into our jeep for a day of back country exploring in the Mojave desert.  On this day, our destination was the middle leg of the historic Old Mojave Road.

The Old Mojave Road was originally a series of trails used by the Native Americans of the Mojave desert to connect the Colorado River with the Pacific coast.  Native Americans developed the trail over time, which was later used by Spanish Missionary’s, U. S. Army, and stage operators.  The Mojave Road fell into disuse when the railroads came into the area in the 1880′s.  Dennis Casebier, and his Friends of the Mojave Road, ‘rediscovered’, mapped and documented the Mojave Road.  Our trip on this day, is possible due to their hard work and dedication, which follows centuries of history.

As we left Las Vegas early Sunday morning we drove past Primm, Nevada and continued into California we watched the temperature climb from 75 to 85 degrees.  We exited interstate at Nipton Road and drove East into the southern California desert.  A quick right turn at Ivanpah Road and we were on our way into the Mojave National Preserve.

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Painted and completed, with the Jeep behind it.

I finally complete the chuck box or camp kitchen. Constructed from 3/8 inch plywood, the chuck box is 17″ x 27″ x 22.5″.  All of the joints are “glued and screwed” using butt joints.  The entire construction is filled, sanded, and painted with a desert camouflage color scheme.

The top of the chuck box is hinged with a shelf, to allow the cook to get access to the stove.  The top shelf has four holes for the stove legs to securely hold the stove in place during transport and use.  There are two large hand holds cut out near the top to easily allow someone to carry it.  The hand holds also allow the propane connector to pass through and attach to the stove, so someone could use the stove in place.

The front is hinged and folds down to provide a work surface.  The front may be placed in the upright position and held in place with magnets to hold it out of the way as needed.

Inside, the chuck box has a large storage capacity.  The top section stores the stove, and all the supplies required for the stove, in addition to some marshmallow roasting sticks.  The middle section stores cooking utensils, serving utensils, plates, cups and bowls.

The expanded check box stores a lot of cooking gear.

The huge bottom section can carry a 8 quart dutch oven, nested 12″ frying pans, two pots, coffee pots, and washing bins.  In addition, we can store paper towels, cooking oil, soap and still have room for extra supplies.

The chuck box fits perfectly in the back of our jeep wrangler, along with a 6 gallon water bottle, ice chest, and food box.  The only issue, is that when the chuck box is filled up with gear and supplies, it can be rather heavy.  With the weight, comes strength, and the jeep does have heavy duty springs to carry the load.

Since the I started documenting some of my projects on my website, I think it important to give an overview of everything done so far, and try to describe how my thoughts and priorities are changing based on the results of my experience so far.

Website

Traffic to the website is light, but gaining ground steadily.  I am hopeful that as I continue to write more, traffic will increase as people of like interests discover the website.   In what free time I have, I am studying WordPress as much as possible.  There are a lot of great articles written on the subject, but my greatest like and dislike of the software is the “WordPressyness” of it.  More on that later…

ChuckBox (Camp Kitchen)

It meats my goals in the short-term and I look forward to taking it on a camping trip in the near future.

Phone Server

This is mostly done, but not yet complete. This is sad for me as the Nevada Presidential caucuses are just around the corner and is not deployed in time for all the robo calls telling me for whom to vote or caucus.  The only remaining task is to record the voicemail setup.

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As a network administrator I have the opportunities to work with a lot of networking equipment.  Long ago I lost track of all the firewalls and routers that I configured.  The list would read as a laundry list of equipment and include Cisco, Sonicwall, custom-built Linux servers and IPCop.  The cost of this hardware can be intimidating, especially for the home user.

For my home network, for years I would buy a reasonably priced wireless routers which could be purchased and Fry’s, Best Buy or any of the retail stores in the area.  I don’t recall ever purchasing a router online as typically you need it to replace the previous router which just failed.

I would buy ”all in one” wireless routers which would be highly recommend by friends or coworkers.  Once installed, they would work great for about 6 months and then fail.  I would RMA the routers, and when the replacement arrived I would give it away, simply because I can’t do my job without my internet connection.   The last router I purchased was a dual channel wireless N router, and sure enough, after about 6 months, it again failed.   I noticed on this failure, that they way it failed was the key to my problem.

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As part of my home PBX server project , I needed the ability to connect my existing home phone infrastructure into my Asterisk PBX server.  In addition to regular phones, I have a DVR and home alarm system and poor cell phone coverage.  The solution to connecting a regular phone to a modern PBX Server is a VoIP adapter such as the Linksys SPA-3102.  The great news is that this product is only about $80 if you shop around for it.  This may seem like more than it should cost, but when you consider the price of phones these days, and the monthly cost of phone server in the home, this cost is covered in just a few months of savings.

The Linksys SPA-3102 is a VoIP media gateway which allows you to connect your regular phone using an RJ-11 phone jack, and convert audio signal into a SIP compliant TCP/IP signal.  The original configuration for this device is that it replaces your home router.  Currently, my home router of choice is a Netgear Prosafe VPN Firewall FVS318v3.  I am very pleased with the reliability and performance of this router, is it succeeds where many other routers failed.  This fact alone forced me to set up my Linksys VoIP gateway a bit differently.

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