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Lessons Learned
I’ve made tons of mistakes in putting in the footings. Here are a few of the lessons I learned.
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Back Stairs
The back stairs on my house when I bought it were made of wood. Over the years, the wood has rotted and they were starting to fall apart. The best picture I could find of them were from 2020 and is below.
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Welding Practice
I have wanted to learn to weld for a crazy long time. It just seems to be both a cool and useful skill. I bought a cheap welder years ago and have been playing around with it off and on. I finally decided that in order to really learn to weld, I need a project. And my project is going to be rebuilding my back stairs. I am on vacation from work and have finally gotten started working on them. I spent days digging holes for footings, buying bags of concrete, mixing the concrete and trying to make the forms, etc. Today was a very rainy day. I couldn’t really mix and pour concrete to make my second footing. Instead, I decided to take some time to practice welding so that when the time comes, I’m a bit more comfortable with it. I have some metal tube cutoffs that I could play with, so I did.
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HP Color LaserJet 5525dn Broken Network Port
At work, we have an HP Color LaserJet CP5225dn printer, which I love. Last year, our network card stopped working. I bought an external print server that sort of worked. For computers where the printer had already been set up, it worked ok. But new windows printers couldn’t add it properly because it couldn’t reach the printer to get the settings. As an example, it would say it was a black and white printer instead of color. And there was no way to override these settings.
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Hello 2024!
Life is good! I want to remember this all the time. I really have no complaints and feel very lucky.
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Here's to 2023!
Wow! 2023 is ending. Another pretty good year…especially as I feel like the pandemic is fading. I got a covid booster last month, along with my flu shot. It feels like this is going to be a regular thing, but I’ll let the doctors and scientists who study these things exclusively to recommend what I should do. In general, I trust the experts.
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Apache Redirects
I should have done this years ago, but I finally set up an automatic redirect from all http websites to https. If the https stuff is already configured correctly, just need to add the following. I put it in my vhosts file.
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Happy 2023!
2023 has begun. I just finished a nine-mile bike ride because it’s only 40 degrees out and it seemed like a good way to start the year. Plus, I always want to bike more. That’s a given resolution. I also just put a hold down on a novel at the library because I want to read more books this year. If I could do one novel per month, I’d be happy. On a recommendation from my friend Shadla, I’m starting the year with Miss Benson’s Beetle. I can say that I have no idea what this is about, except that it’s a work of fiction. Hopefully, it’ll be good.
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Goodbye 2022
In general I’m pretty happy with life these days, so 2022 was a good year. Looking at my resolutions for last year, I see that I had no overall plan or theme for the year. I think I’m just finally accepted the new normal of life now that the pandemic seems to be a bit more under control. Personally, I’ve gotten all the vaccine updates and the last one (which I got a few weeks before Thanksgiving) didn’t even make me sick. So while I don’t want to get covid and I still do wear a mask when I go in stores and other crowded indoor places, I’m not that worried about it. Because if I do catch it, I think it’ll be something where I just need to stay home for a while, like any other illness. I know a number of people who had it lately and none of them had to go to the hospital. They weren’t happy they got it and they felt awful, but it was manageable.
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Planer chip collector
We’ve been using the planer quite a bit. The one we have has a powerful motor to eject the chips. They’d go everywhere if you didn’t put something on the output port. We had a very long hose that we ran outside the back door to at least blow the chips outside. But they all usually just stayed right by the door, so we’d still have to go outside and sweep them up. I wanted something to collect the chips better and I found this site. Unfortunately, the cyclone separator that I bought was a little different than the one in the post. But I managed to make it work by simply screwing it to a piece of plywood that I had around. Then I just used tie downs to attach it to a garbage can. The tie downs are easy to take off, so it should be easy to change the bag when it gets full.
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Ruby Openssl Version
There is a problem if I use a version of ruby with a newer version of openssl than what is on the server. Here’s the command to find out what version of openssl that ruby is using.
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Learning DragonRuby
I was on vacation this week. So I had some time to do anything I wanted. For a while now, I’ve wanted to try to create a simple game. I’ve also wanted to learn how to use DragonRuby, which I purchased last year. Then, I found these videos. The guy made a basic tetris clone in a couple of hours. I figured I’d give it a try and see what I could do. Needless to say, it took me a bit over two hours…more like five or six over a couple of days. But I eventually got the game to run. My game has more bugs than the game in the tutorial. Mainly because I didn’t exactly know what I was doing and because I was trying to copy the code from the video, which was hard to read. I tried downloading his final code to compare it to mine, but I couldn’t find it. If I wanted to spend more time to figure out my mistake, I probably could. But the main thing I wanted to learn was how to go about making a game and how to use the DragonRuby workflow. Even with my buggy final game, I definitely learned more about those two things. So I feel like this was time that was well spent.
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Using a Barcode Scanner
I got a Tera 1D Barcode scanner at work. What I want to use it for is to be able to scan a barcode on a circuit board and then print out more labels with barcodes to stick on the boxes that we’ll be shipping them in. I also have an old iMac that I’m going to use for this project, along with a Brother QL 550 label printer.
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Transplant Time
I started a bunch of geranium seeds at the end of January. And look at them now.
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Table Repair
One of the very first pieces of furniture I bought after I bought around 24 years ago was a table with a butcher block top. I’ve been using this table for a few years as my electronics workbench. Yesterday, I was going to do some electronics, when I noticed that the table had cracked.
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Starting Geraniums
Last year I ordered a bunch of geranium seeds. I wanted to try to grow them from seed because they can be a little expensive if you buy a lot of them. But I like them and they generally grow pretty well here. I read that they take a long time to grow to the size that you’d buy at the store. So you should start them in January and I did.
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MacPorts, gems and ruby notes
I’ve had a number of issues with my macports, ruby and rails setup after I updated the OS to 12.1. First I want to document some things that helped me to figure out some of my problems.
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New tool, new repair
I bought a pneumatic stapler that just arrived the other day. I had been thinking about learning how to upholster things and this would be a good tool to have. Then, I was looking at an old folding table I have an realized I could use it for this.
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Hello 2022
There’s really no burning desire that I have for this year. I think the pandemic has washed away any big hopes or ideas. All I’d really like to be able to do this year is maybe travel somewhere and not worry about getting sick. The other stuff is just continuations for my resolutions for previous years. I’d like to continue to walk more. Getting up and going for a walk first thing in the morning just seems to start my day off right. That doesn’t include walking in a few inches of snow (like now), so I know I won’t be doing it every day. But a general moving around more is what I want to do. And I have been doing that, so it’s just a matter of keeping it up.
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2021 is a wrap
Not a bad year for me personally, I know I’m very lucky, but 2021 is probably not a year I’d choose to repeat. I’m very grateful for the scientists in the world who didn’t hate biology (like me) and ended up developing a life-saving vaccine to save so many lives. And while it’s not (and probably never will be) eradicated, has let me do many simple things, like go to the grocery store and continue to work without worrying about my health.
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Back to Making
I finally got around to using my workshop again after the solar panels went in. I had a fun little project that I started around Thanksgiving and just finished last week. My friend wanted a table that would sit right outside her window to make it easy for her to put food out for her cats when the weather got cold. I’m not much of an animal person, but this project sounded like fun. I think I mainly liked it because it sounded like the perfect thing to make out of some of the junk wood in my basement. And it was a fun project. I had all the materials for the project in my basement, except for an outdoor finish and some bolts for adjustable feet. So I spent around $20 in total. And now I have some finish that I can use on other outdoor wood projects.
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Half Year Check-In
It’s definitely been a while since I’ve even looked at my website. The past few months have been kind of crazy with me working a ridiculous amount and not having much time to do almost anything. However, back in March, I made a decision that I was going to change the main focus of the year. I wanted to see if I could lose enough weight to no longer be classified as clinically obese, so get my BMI under 30. I joined Noom, which has helped. And I’m happy to say that as of the other day, I was down 20 pounds and made my first target.
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New Biking Year
Broke out the bike today, so I can say that I did bike in February. I definitely skipped December and January. But the weather is getting better, so it’s time. I had to go to my brother’s house and decided to pump up the tires and take it for a spin. Since I then left something at my brother’s house, I had to go back to pick it up. So I’ve biked two miles this month. That means around 2242 more miles to go to beat my best biking year ever, which was 2015. That might be a fun challenge.
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Icy Wall
I think the pictures below perfectly show why I was concentrating all my tuckpointing repairs on this particular section of my house. I have to work on the gutter this summer to fix this issue. Hopefully, the little bit of tuckpointing that I did will limit the amount of water that gets into the basement. I’m sure that some will get in, but as long as it’s not too much, I should be ok. If it’s a lot, I’m going to have a huge mess to clean up.
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Version 2
For practice and to get better, I made another voltage controlled oscillator. This time, I also ordered a custom front panel that I designed. The front panel ended up costing me around $55, so it’s by far the most expensive part of this project. It’s also something that I doubt I do again, but it was way fun to figure out how to do it.