52 Project: Garden Fencing

I think I'm going to stop posting garden projects as separate projects. It's really one big project. This weeks portion of the garden project was to put up a fence on tier 2 to keep the small varmints out (mostly rabbits and a few raccoons).



















































I know it doesn't seem like much but it did take a while and was necessary. Noticed the peas are starting to come up - you can't quite see them in the photos.

52 Projects: Easiest Project Ever

This weeks project was to hook up the speakers in my living room to my computer. I'm tired of swapping CD's in the living room to listen to what I want. I've been putting all my music on my computer through iTunes (copying all the old CD's and I'm even going to purchase a turn table to convert my LPs - yes I'm that old - to MP3's so I can keep them on my computer). I want to be able to play any of my music anywhere in the house, but to start in the living room.

I'm a bit of an Apple Fanboy. Yes you could get something almost as good for less money but it's that "almost as good" that I just don't have time for anymore. Don't get me wrong. I love gadgets and I love geeking out. I've built linux servers from components and developed custom builds of the operating system. I wired my whole house with CAT 5. I built a full local area network including a SAN throughout the house. I put in a secure wireless network for guests and laptops. You can stream movies to any of my TV's. And all this was a lot of work. Hours and hours of learning and configuring. If you don't count my time I saved lots of money too.
For this project I just wanted to wire my speakers into my computer. It's about a 30 foot run. I looked at getting a speaker switch, running wires from my PC to the switch to the attic to the living room. I've done enough of this so I'm pretty fast. I figured I could do this in about 4 hours. The multi speaker box was around $300 and the speaker cable and banana plugs would run around another $75. Then I remember this:

The Apple airport express. It's $100. It has an ethernet port, a usb printer port, and a speaker port. You can stream music wirelessly. I thought I could stream music from my computer, through the wireless network, to the apple airport express and into my speakers (via the speaker port - the one with the jack in it below).

I'd already set aside four hours for this so I figured I'd give it a try. A friend had loaned me his airport express so what the heck. Long and short of this is it took me 5 minute to hook this all together. And it worked perfectly. It was so ridiculously simple it's not even worth describing - just read the directions. From my computer I can now stream music to my living room. Using my iPhone and the Apple Remote product I don't even have to be near my computer to do this.

Going to hook up the family room downstairs and the outside speakers next. At $100 per room I'm still way ahead when you consider my time (and probably even equipment costs). See if my friend ever gets the loaner airport express back ;-).

Project Update: Seeds are growing!

My Garden is starting nicely.  I'll probably transplant this week to bigger pots (still too cold for outside - though I did plant peas and fava beans outdoors this past weekend).

52 Projects: Spring Cleaning?

It's March 26th - Four days into the start of spring. See the photo below and see if you can guess my project for this weekend (and it did take all weekend)




Well it took all week end but I think it was worth it. Still a lot of stuff I probably don't need but at least it looks better.



Probably should of shot more photo's cause I don't know how long this will last.

52 Projects: Winter Walk

I've been walking with my border collie Zoey for five years now. It's done wonders for me both physically and spiritually. Though we walk a lot of different places one of our favorites is Dash Point State Park by our home. We've walked it over 1000 times. I'm going to start a photo essay showing the park in each of the four seasons. These are my winter shots (with some minor comments).

Start of the trail

Can you spot the border collie? She's pretty camouflaged against the snow and damp dirt.

Winding trail covered with snow.

There are lot's of small streams and creeks running through the park.

Again - where's Zoey?

Snow covered bridges - you'll see more of this one in the spring shoot because it's beautiful.

Trails are well marked here - they're used by lots of cyclists (IMBA = International Mountain Bike Association).

Take warning they don't kid

Beautiful but cold winter day (I did this walk on Feb 28th)...do da do do do do...

Gak - Slippery. Under the mud was a lot of blood. Glad I didn't know.

The road out. Total for this walk is about 4 miles. The trails in here easily let me do 7 when time permits.

That's it. Took a lot more photo's but didn't want to post them all here. I'll do another "Photo Project" in a few months in the spring - the comparison will be fun.

52 Projects: Planting the Garden

It's time to start the seeds!  So cool.

First step was figuring out what can be planted when - in addition to my seed guide, I read each packet and developed a planting schedule for the next few months.

I carefully labeled each packet so I know what I planted.  I also (unlike last year) wrote not only the name but the variety of the beast.  Now I can get my hands dirty!

Today I planted (indoors):

• Spinach;
• Mustard Greens;
• Butterhead Lettuce;
• Romaine Lettuce;
• Arugula;
• Mesclun;
• A  bunch of tomato varieties: Brandywine, golden nugget, heirloom, sweet 100, beefsteak, and roma's;
• Eggplant (first time ever);
• Broccoli-Rabb; and
• Leeks.

 

 

We're going to try and get some dirt in this week (the second tier needs some more top soil) so we can put peas and fava beans next weekend.  They can be planted out doors now.

52 Projects:Baked I/O Board

Oh no...not another cooking post. Well kind of.

My tank of an HP LaserJet 2300 stopped working the other day. I was able to print a settings page and found out the I/O card was no longer being recognized by the printer. Last I checked these were around $300 bucks - cheaper than a new printer but still. So I started searching the intertubes and found this article:http://www.fixyourownprinter.com/forums/laser/51585

It suggested "baking" your I/O board. Right - I wonder how many they got with that one. A day or so later I was talking with my friend Jeff who's involved in the electronics industry. I told him the story and he said it'd probably work. Something about cold solder joints and remelting the solder. Well what the heck - the board was likely shot anyway. Lets try an HP EIO board bake off!

I took out the board

Took the plastic bits off the board

Fixed up a baking sheet for my board

Fortunately the oven was preheated

Because Fran was making bacon for potato salad (I sure hope the board doesn't give off too many toxic fumes)

I baked my board for about 8 minutes (I was going to do 5 but lost track of time)

And TA-DA - the printer works like new!

Still think this was a bit crazy but - hey took about 30 minutes and saved $300.

52 Projects: The Kitchen Shelf

We finished a remodel of our kitchen 2 years ago.  We've yet to put anything up on the walls etc (e.g. pictures).  I put up a shelf to reduce the clutter on the counter.  Small and insignificant I know but hey - it's a project.  Who know's I might even put a picture or two behind it soon...

52 Projects: Garden Bed Prep

This weeks project wasn't a load of fun.  It was too nice to build a new floor mat for my office - had to be outside.  It was cold but that was a good thing.  My project was to dig up the garden bed to prepare for planting.  I dug both the old one (which was easy) and the new one (which wasn't).

I live on glacial moraine.  That is the crap left over when the glacier retreats.  Not the good soil mind you but basically the rocks and clay.  To garden I've got to loosen up the moraine, break it up, put in top soil, and compost.  The first step is loosening up the soil.  I use a shovel (and at times an adze/pick combo made for breaking up concrete).  It's like digging rocks.  This is compounded by whoever was the developer for our neighborhood.  S/he basically used my yard to dump concrete waste and the stuff he excavated from other homes in the area.  I've got double the rocks. And concrete.  And old nails.

Last year I dug up the what is now, the old bed.  I then spent the whole summer trying to remove rocks and put down top soil while growing my garden.  I will say there are fewer rocks this year.  The new bed is a different story - it's like the old bed was last year.  Thought I was going to break the tip of my shovel.  So I'm done sweating and whining for a bit.  Here are the pics:

Upper bed before.

Upper bead after.  I know - doesn't look much different.  The plants appreciate it.

I tried using this beast but the shovel was more efficient.

From a few weeks ago here's the before picture of the second bed.

And here are the after shots.

It still needs a raking and top soil - give me a week.  Off to stretch out and then a soak in the hot tub.

52 Projects: Give Me Some Space

Dawkins is a cheap PC I bought years ago to act as a server. It’s been chugging along uninterrupted under my desk for quite a while (like 5 years).  It runs the CentOS version of linux doing multiple duties including acting as a:

• file server for my family
• server to backup my work server (a cloud based server)
• streaming media server
• development platform for me for web development when I feel the need to be geeky

Lately Dawkins has been slowing down - I think there's a problem.

Here’s the problem
As the picture shows Dawkins is running out of hard disk space. My experience (and Dawkins is just reaffirming this) is that when linux machines get low on hard disk space performance degrades. Disk swapping etc I guess. So it’s time for an upgrade.

What kind of drive do I need?
This is an old beast. I don’t believe this has very advanced drives so the best way to approach this is to shut Dawkins down, open it up, and see what’s there. The shutdown command in linux with the -h (halt) option should do the trick: shutdown -h now

Ewwe - Dawkins is dusty inside. Lets take him out and dust him off (I learned long ago not to blow the dust out of a PC indoors…well OK not that long ago).

Now I need to get the old drive out to see what kind it is. A Barracuda 7200 160GB drive! State of the art in 2004. We’ll get something bigger and just leave this as the boot disk.

A little more background research…
But before I do that it’s been years since I’ve done admin work on a linux machine - I need to figure out how to find and make the drive accessible once I get it in. A little internet research is in order.

One of the really nice things about linux is the community of folks that will help you with stuff. A quick google search on “Adding a Drive to a linux system” turned up this site which provides exactly what I’m looking for (it seems anyway).

Off to InfoTech
Infotech is a great local computer store. They’ve got everything a geek (and post-geek like me) could want at reasonable prices. I found this 500gb WD Caviar drive for $80.

Installing the drive

Drive installation was pretty easy.  Just screw it in and attach the cables (power and data).  I’ll let the pics speak for themselves. Only issue was making sure the jumpers on both drives were set appropriately. One had to be the master and the other the slave.  I dug up the manuals on-line and set them appropriately.  You use these little bits of plastic that are easily lost to set the role of the drive.

Restarting Dawkins
The moment of truth

Mounting the drive (permanently)

I followed the instructions above mostly. Only thing that didn’t work was setting the drive as an extended partition - it wouldn’t format if I did that. Googling around I found that if I set it to be a primary partition it all would work. Sure enough it did. I honestly don’t know the difference between extended and primary and I really don’t care. I’ve got 500 gig’s of extra space on my server!

Changing scripts etc to take advantage of this new space.
The last step was simply to adjust some scripts I had to take advantage of the new space. When backups are done I want the files stored on the new big drive. Didn’t take long and to be honest your situtation will not be the same as mine so it really wasn’t worth going into detail about.

That’s it for this week. I’ve got several ideas for next week depending on the weather and my mood. I have to start prep on the Garden and the picture below is my office floor mat (you’ll notice it’s breaking up). I was walking through Costco the other day and saw some bamboo flooring that was pretty cheap - I wonder if I can make my own floor mat?