The Evil Eyebrow

Category: Home Project

Running the gamut between fixing the computer and installing a toilet.

  • Weekend Goal: New Closet Accoutrements

    Today’s and tomorrow’s job will be to replace the closet shelves that were so helpfully destroyed by Apollo.

    20130202-095803.jpg
    There used to be a number of shelves, hanging clothes, sweaters, etc. in that empty space. The closet shelves were probably a bit over their intended mass capacity when this large feline…

    20130202-100430.jpg

    …decided to leap from the top shelf, imparting enough of an impulse to cause structural failure.

    I can only imagine how surprised the cat was when everything came tumbling down (we were not home). Alas, he hasn’t taken the lesson to heart and is still climbing on top of everything.

    20130202-100726.jpg

    So today we fix the closet. I’ll do my best to make it only one trip to Home Depot.

  • Minty Boost

    I ran into a bit of an issue at Dragon*Con; my phone refused to survive long enough for any useful activity.

    I have an HTC Evo 4G, with a notoriously short battery life. I purchased it a little over a year before Dragon*Con. In other words, I had it with me at the Con in 2010 and noticed no significant problem. In 2011, however, I was lucky if it survived two hours from full charge to death knell. This was a problem because I was the coordinator for a group of people at the Con and texting is almost the only real way to keep up with what’s going on with a set of friends at Dragon*Con (it’s huge). So, I spent a lot of time worrying about charge, or letting people know who I was going to be with so they could text that person, instead of me.

    I resolved not to deal with this situation again, and I’m fixing it in two ways!

    One: Buy a new battery. I have done that and it’s amazing what happens when your phone lasts for 8 whole hours, not 3.

    HTC Evo 4G Replacement Battery

    Two: Build a Minty Boost!

    Minty Boost

    The Minty Boost is an electronics kit that you assemble by soldering according to the directions and then you have the ability to charge pretty much anything that takes power from a USB jack. Things like phones or iPods or whatever.

    I have all the pieces, now I just need to put it together. When I get to soldering time, I’ll take some project pictures and post them here.

  • Dead Electronics

    Our CD player is dead. Long live the digital media player.

    400 CD Changer

    Our 400 disc changer seems to have given up the ghost this evening. I pushed PLAY on random when I got home because I was too lazy to go get my iPod and, hey, it’s there after all, filled with music.

    “Tick. Tick tick. CHUNK,” it said.

    “Shit,” I said.

    So, it looks like I’ll be enacting the CD storage plan ((I had 10 50-count jewel cases marked “1-50”, “51-100”, etc. ready and waiting for the next time we had to move the CD player. Number 401-450 is already about half full and 451-500 may never get touched because I haven’t bought an actual CD in a long while)) I’ve had in place for a while and decommissioning another piece of electronic equipment. I’m having a hard time feeling bad about this one. We’ve had it since 2001 or 2002 and it’s got a lot of moving parts. It survived a long time. Plus, we hardly use it anymore, relying on our iPods to carry our music around. For the price of getting this thing fixed or replaced, I could probably purchase a last-generation iPod touch and load our entire collection of music onto it, plus videos, plus podcasts.

    I think we’ll be ok.

    But, shed a tear with me tonight for another glorious piece of hardware that has served its time in battle.

  • Sewing Machine Problem

    We have a problem. Our problem is this:

    Singer Model 347

    This is a Singer Model 347, built in the sixties (it looks like) and it seems to be a sewing machine that can do what we need. However, it has exactly three speeds:

    1. Off
    2. ON!
    3. Manual

    The ON! is the problem, in the sense that there are times when you don’t want the sewing machine to go full blast through your project; sometimes delicacy and slowness is required.

    Here is the root of the problem:

    Singer Model 347 Foot Switch

    You can see in the image, to the right, the switch which is actuated by the foot pedal itself. This pulls the contacts from the left to the right, bridging the gap and completing the circuit. Here’s a pic with some annotations.

    Annotated Foot Switch

    I do not see how, if no parts are missing, this switch was ever intended as a graduated speed foot switch for a sewing machine. There are only two cables. I’m assuming one is hot and one is return and therefore this translates to an on, off switch writ large. Where the gap is bridged and the copper contacts touch, there’s no room for “play” in the touching or not of the contacts. I screwed around with this by hand and while, yes, there was a tiny bit of speed control just at the interface of contact, it was so minuscule and twitchy that I don’t see how it would be useful to a sewing task.

    Possibilities:

    • I have no idea what I’m talking about with respect to circuits. Quite possible true
    • There’s a part missing which does the speed control. Doesn’t seem likely, there’s no obvious room for something that isn’t there anymore
    • The foot switch is just so old and used that the functionality I’m looking for has given up the ghost. Well, yes, but then I should be able to fix it. This seems a really simple device

    Any advice is appreciated.

  • Weekend Project

    I had a very brief weekend project which I finally took care of, because I happened to be going to Home Depot and could pick up the wood. I built THIS!
    Quick and Dirty 30 Minute Monitor Shelf

    I’m no carpenter, but my father did teach me a few things about putting pieces of wood together. I know the basics, and I know what I don’t know (which is the first step to wisdom, I hear). I don’t have all the right tools for making “furniture” but I can make an approximation good enough for what is needed. For example, my main goal was to replace the big green box that was holding up my second monitor, shown in this image.

    Office Mess

    It works quite well, and is easy to push around on the desk and was measured so I can shove the laptop underneath the frame to get the computer out of the way. Also, if you compare the two pictures, you’ll note that the BigGreenBox put the second monitor way up high. Now it’s less neck-cracking.

    And I have some desk space back!

    Quick and Dirty 30 Minute Monitor Shelf

  • Network Storage

    Network Storage

    The conversion to Network Storage and automatic data duplication continues. For a while now, Jenn and I have been (manually) backing up our computers to an external hard drive using a movable SATA plug in. Two of these HDDs have been our playground with one being kept in an off-site location for security against fires or water damage. The downsides to that was that it requires us to do it; it’s not an automatic solution. Therefore, the network drive.

    My plan: automatic backups over the network to the network drives. These will not be used for storage per se1 but merely as a duplicate receptacle for what’s on our computers. Then I will weekly do a drive image of the network drives, which will be our “backups”2. Anything truly critical will be occasionally burned to DVD which will also be kept off site.

    Why are we going through all this effort? Well, we’ve got a lot of data that would be impossible to replace. Jenn is an academic and has been writing papers and gathering information since 1997. I’m an amateur photographer and podcaster so I’ve got a bunch of irreplaceable images and audio files. Plus 18 years of accumulated writing and legacy data. Can’t say I’d miss everything if I lost it, but there have been things I’ve gone looking for (and found), making my life easier. This is also a step toward doing away with the majority of my filing cabinet once I get a reliable scanner for monthly bills and other such paper documents that arrive via snailmail.3

    1: I’m toying with the idea of putting our music and videos and whatnot on the network drive so we can access it from all computers and eventually a centralized entertainment system. Haven’t decided to take that plunge yet.
    2: It’s not a backup by the strict definitions of “backup” because if the computer hdd gets corrupted, it will write the corrupted file to the backup drive. However, I’m not going to go in for the time and money investment to have continuous running tape backups.
    3: “Aha!” I hear you say, “Why don’t you get all your bills electronically delivered?” I’ve tried that. It’s not effective for my workflow. I depend on having a spot that all the bills and receipts and crap accumulate in and no matter how many bills I can get through email, there will always be some I can’t, therefore I’ll just stick with the paper system for now.

  • Fun Holiday Weekend!

    In case it hasn’t been explicitly published, Jenn and I are putting our house on the market. Reasons are various but the main one is that we want to live closer in to town. We’re thinking Decatur, Oakbrook, Kirkwood, East Atlanta, Grant Park, something like that. We don’t plan to start looking very hard until we get a contract on our existing house, which brings us to the meat of this posting.

    Fun is being had preparing the house for sale. The objective, of course, is to repair any little issues and present the home in an appealing manner. Right now, the guest bathroom is in a [ahem] state of disarray as we are working on pulling off wallpaper and putting a nice new surface on them. This became more challenging than we thought when we began. Probably we’ll end up having a professional resurface the drywall before we paint. Hopefully that will be done in about a week.

    This weekend I spent a great deal of time spiccing and spanning the living room and kitchen. I cleaned everything and packed away 5.5 years of accumulated stuff in order to show them off to better advantage. As the week goes by, I will be attacking rooms individually to get things cleaned up. Then I have a few tasks out in the yard before we can say that the house is “ready”.

    We have a goal for sale (which i won’t tell you) but we’re not planning on pricing ourselves out of the market in order to make some crazy profit. We want to move, and sooner would be better than later, although I guess you could say there would be…entertainment…if we were moving right around the time that Jenn was finishing up her Tenure dossier.

    So, wish us luck. If nothing else, we’ll be keeping the house clean for the foreseeable future.

    I’d include pictures but my camera is currently visiting a friend’s place in Decatur, alas

  • Ridding House of Crap, Part XXIV

    I’ve had some computers and associated peripherals lying around for a long time. One of these computers has moved from NY to TX to TX to GA to GA and will never again be moved unless that move is to an electronics disposal center or a person who wants spare parts.

    During this time, as computers have come and gone, I pull their hard drives in order to assure I keep control of the data.

    9 year of hard drives: '92 - '01
    click through for some notes and labels

    Sunday night I disemboweled the three computers that have been living in boxes down in the basement for way too long. Those drives are the second and third from left, plus the rightmost one. The other two drives have been sitting on a shelf in my office for years. Sometime this week they all have a date with tools that will free them of their magnets and then destroy their platters. Nobody is getting my data, dammit.

    This is all part of my plan to have less crap when we move out of this house, eventually. Not necessarily less stuff, but I insist on less crap.

    So far so good.

  • Tradition!

    It’s a tradition when you’ve done it twice, right?

    In this case, my new tradition is to count, stack, and wrap the coins that have accumulated in my presence.

    My Favorite Coin

    The last time I did this was when we had just moved to Lubbock and I was in the middle of six months of unemployment. Now that I’m unemployed again (temporarily) I decided to count up and deposit all the change that has piled up since 1999. The pictures I took are over at my flickr set, but the one here is my favorite. I just love the Washington Quarter. All the special state quarters are nice, but this one retains my devotion.

    How much was wrapped up in all that change? Well, let’s just say that I don’t need to worry about next month’s natural gas bill.

  • Well Begun, Half Done

    DebrisSomething must have happened today while I was at work because this is the view outside my window.

    As I mentioned on twitter, it rained hard today, so I’m surprised they found time to do any work at all. At least they managed to get the rest of the shingles off and do half of the house with the new architectural stuff.

    Half Done

    We’ve also got a nice new chimney cap to go along with everything else. You can see it all shiny and covered with equipment in that picture. You can’t see the drip edge which will be keeping our evil squirrels out, but that’s ok because I can’t see it either. I’m not sure they’ve installed it yet.