Cari is away in Miami for the weekend and I have a bunch of little household projects I want to complete.
Out in the yard, I need to replace the old garden hoses and sprayers, pull some weeds, apply lawn fertilizer, and trim the palm tree and Bird of Paradise in the front yard.
In the garage, I have a few tool holders to hang and need to recycle some old rotors and a car battery.
Inside there are some pieces of iron artwork I need to hang, as well as some normal chores such as laundry.
And, if I can get all of those things done, I have some work to do on the DeLorean and some more organization to do in the office.
I recently saw a YouTube video from Norman Chan of Tested.com reviewing the TinyTV from TinyCircuits. Instantly, I needed (and ordered) one. It arrived a few days ago and I spent some time painting it and putting it together. Here’s a quick video.
And some before and after pictures:
This is the printed “case” right out of the box.The front. Painted and assembled.The back.With the remote.
As noted before, I got the new boxes in for my nerd collectables et al. And today I’ve transferred everything into them. Behold.
The box.The main collectibles box.The second storage box has a bunch of lanyards, badges, and materials from cons.
This last image shows the new boxes in one of the cupboards (top right). I pulled everything out of here today and re-organized it all. I don’t have a “before” picture, but this is actually a lot better. Still not done, though. More organizing to come.
And, lastly, here’s a quick view of the state of the DeLorean.
I feel lucky that all of the craziness that began in 2020 has barely affected me and Cari. What’s missed the most is hanging out with friends, both near and far, and not being with them during the holidays. Other than that, every once in a while I get the craving to go out to a restaurant. We have not eaten out since the pandemic started, and that’s not really an issue with online ordering as it is these days.
I’m also not blinded by the fact that an arbitrary number on a piece of paper now says it’s a different year and things will be different. Sure, I’m hopeful that maybe things will be much more normal by the end of 2021, but I fear that the narrow-mindedness of people who think that everything bad died with the turn of the calendar will once again push us into a heavily quarantined state. The beginnings of which is already being felt in California.
With all that said, I’m being positive of what the future holds.
I finally got the 3D printer dialed in and can print some really great tolerances. I decided to begin an overdue project of printing divided inserts for my Akro-Mils parts organizers in the office. Over the years they’ve become disorganized and, frankly, I’m wasting space in them.
A standard drawer with a six-compartment divider.How I’m labeling what’s in the bins.The bin removed from the drawer.More bins printing.
I spent some time getting some other things done today too. I recently bought a Chamberlain Home Hub and hooked that up to the garage doors so I can now remotely check to see if I left them open, and even use Siri to raise and lower the doors.
I also started power washing the lanai and the patio furniture. You can see in the picture below that it was pretty dirty. There’s still some more work to do tomorrow, but it’s looking really good.
Four plus years of dirt built up here. Need to power wash this floor yearly, me thinks.Nice, clean furniture.
Well, day 10 is coming to a close and I feel like I truly was able to rest and also be productive over this break.
Today I completed several small tasks/projects around the house. I wrote some code and a couple of short scripts. Now it’s time to stop thinking while I sit and watch Game 1 of the Eastern Conference Finals.
I fixed the vertical blind in the living room, but I forgot that the lawn service usually comes on Tuesdays or Wednesdays, so I’ve postponed applying the fertilizer until after they’ve come.
Instead, I spent some time cleaning up my desk and organizing. I still have a stack of magazines to go through, so I’m going to go take a shower and then spend the rest of the day reading. Since this is vacation day 4 of 10, I feel I need to be somewhat productive in a relaxing way.
I’ve also gone through HackerBox #57, “Safe Mode”, I may start working on that too today or tomorrow.
This morning I finished capturing all of the DV tapes. In total there was about 17.5 hours of footage. The next step will be to figure out how to also capture the roughly ten or so 8mm/Hi-8 tapes, of which I don’t have a camcorder or deck for that format. I’ve ordered a capture card and need to get my hands on a playback device.
Next up is doing some work around the house. Going to go apply fertilizer to the lawn and then I need to fix one of the vertical blind blades.
The planter is finished. This past weekend, I spent a grand total of about 5 hours in the garage cutting, sanding, and assembling. Here’s what it started like:
The front yard flower planter, in raw-board form.
And it evolved into this:
It’s about 8′ 7″ long, 12″ wide, and 12″ tall.
Oh, and I think I forgot to show what the drill bit holders look like hanging on the peg board in the garage, so here’s a picture of that.
Yesterday I spent three hours cleaning up and organizing in the garage. A lot of the worked centered around putting away all of the spare aquarium supplies and equipment back into their proper places on the shelves. Then, I took the time to finally break down a ton of cardboard boxes and put them into the recycling bin in preparation for next Monday. Because of COVID challenges, Hillsborough county has moved our recycling pickup to every other week for now. That means all cans and plastic containers need to be smashed down flat and all cardboard needs to be cut up to smaller pieces so we get efficient, compact usage of the bin. Anyway, I also put away and re-organized several tools and finally did a big cleanup of the workbench area.
One of the little organization things I’ve been wanting to do is to get my drill bits into a “first order of retrieval” state. This required getting them out of their store-bought, pocket sized holders and into something that could be mounted on the pegboard over the workbench. Last year I found these holders on Thingiverse and printed out the 1/16 thru 3/16 and 13/64 thru 1/4 blocks. However, I had some other odd sized bits and a plumb-bob I wanted to also fit into the this format. Yesterday I finally created those two blocks, printed them, and got them into the garage, completing that project.
A screenshot of one of the drill bit blocks in Tinkercad.
Sunday I went to Lowe’s and picked up all of the materials for the front yard flower box. I’ll begin working on that soon.
I received HackerBox 0057: Safe Mode. I’m still organizing how I want to tackle all of these outstanding kits. I have boxes 16, 17, 18, 19, 20, 54, 55, 56 as well that all need to be completed. I also bought an ESP8266-based weather station kit last year and am including this in the pile of kits to build. This one might be the first, actually.
One of the projects I’ve got in the new schedule is a planter for the front yard, just next to the porch. It measures 8′ 9″ long and 16″ wide. I drew up the rough plan back in May, but tonight I planned out all the wood, the cuts that need to be made and solidified the design in LightWave 3D. All of the materials are in my Lowe’s online shopping cart and I’ll likely pull the trigger and order them tomorrow.
We completed assembling and populating the new fish tank and I was able to put the surrogate 10 gallon tank and all the supporting tools back into the garage to dry out over the next few days until I can properly put them back on the shelves.
I went through the hard drives of my old PC and cleared off all of the data I might need and put it on my new machine.
I have a lot of projects I want to complete and have decided to start properly planning them out and putting them on a schedule. This basically means that I’m going to take all of my non-day-job time and divide it up and organize it so I can start to get things completed. Once I figure this out, I may post a calendar on the site here.
I’ve also been thinking alot about how much content I’m consuming and whether or not I want to slow that down. I’ve unsubscribed from several YouTube channels and have brought my weekly viewing down from about (on average) 7h 17m to about 4h 00m. I need to do the same with podcasts as well and trim all of the fat.
