Category: House

New PC

Posted on by Chewbode

I’ve finally had time to build out my new PC, and I’m writing this from it. It’s really nice to have such a fast machine. I think I’ll end up being a lot more productive in the long run. Most of my day-to-day software has been installed. Dev tools, 3D printing software, and games are still pending (well, I did install Minecraft and tested it – wow!).

A nice side-effect of building the new computer is that I’ve been able to clean up the office a lot. All of the boxes are now gone and my desk is no longer an assembly area anymore.

We’re on day 3 of the Monte Carlo seeds in the aquarium. Still no visible germination.

I ordered some Dewalt folding workbenches to augment the workspace in the garage. I think these will help m a lot with some upcoming projects.

Speaking of garage, I’m going to go in there now to do some cleanup while Visual Studio 2019 installs.

Office Remodel Day 137

Posted on by Chewbode

It’s been awhile since I posted an update on the office remodel, but the big stuff is complete. The countertops were installed several weeks ago, I’ve purchased and hung the cabinets and have also gotten the guitars and electronics parts bins on the wall. The only things left to do are:

  • Buy a 70″ (or less) sleeper sofa.
  • Buy an area run.
  • Get some art and/or shelving for the walls.

Here are some photos:

Cari’s desk.

 

My desk.

 

The guitars’ new home.

 

All of the storage.

Office Remodel Day 68

Posted on by Chewbode

It looks like we’re near the end of the long road to a remodeled office. Typically, the fabricator comes out and measures everything, you pick the materials you want (we’re doing quartz), you get an estimate, you sign off on it, you get an install date, and then they do the install. And that whole process usually takes three to four weeks.

For us, they came out and measured… two-and-a-half months ago. That room has been cleaned, painted, a few things re-arranged and completely emptied out. The drawer pedestals have been installed and affixed to the walls. All of this was done the first two weeks after the initial order.

Yesterday, we finally got the estimate and signed off. We’re expecting the countertop to be delivered in 7 to 12 business days. Today I need to finish building out the supports for the counter to sit on and it’s also time to order new chairs, drawer organizers, cupboards, etc. for the room.

The room before adding countertop supports.

Standard Saturday

Posted on by Chewbode

Here’s a boring, day-in-the-life-of post…

Going to do a little yard work today – trim the palm tree, weed the plant beds. Then I need to look at the clothes dryer. The drum’s not turning, so hopefully it’s not a burned out motor (I think it is, tho). I also need to complete re-edging the den after painting a couple of weeks ago. That won’t take too long. As part of that remodel, I need to talk to a cabinetry contractor about some supports for the new quartz worksurface that’s being built, which should arrive in the next couple of weeks. I’ll also need to decide on the wall cabinets and get an estimate from him on hanging them.

Grilling is on the docket for today as well.

Lots of Digging

Posted on by Chewbode

It’s been quite a while since I’ve posted up here. I’ve created a reminder on my phone to post at least once per week, so we’ll see if that helps me or not.

Over the past two weeks, I’ve finally gotten on the Minecraft bandwagon. Yeah, I know it’s late, but I tried playing the game about 10 years ago, and for some reason I wasn’t interested. But, I revisited it and have to say that it’s really been a great mental relaxation game. Nothing too heavy. Simple. It’s been fun playing on a server with a couple of friends, which helps too.

I’m still working on the lighting project for the kitchen cabinets. I’m really hoping to be done with the entire project by the end of September. Decided to use a Raspberry Pi and a microcontroller, which is new for me. It’s taking more time than expected, but is moving forward.

Keeping my eye on this:

Site Tweak, Beginning the Weekend

Posted on by Chewbode

Since the site’s back up, I decided to head over to the Internet Archive‘s Wayback Machine to force a snapshot of this site. After doing so, I thought to myself “I wonder if there’s an automated way to do this?”. And, there is. I’ve installed a plugin that will submit a new snapshot each time the site is updated. Publishing this post will be the first test.

There are several projects lined up this weekend:

  • UPS Battery: I ordered a new replacement battery for the UPS on my workstation, since the battery in there is pretty much dead. Gotta go pick it up from the store tomorrow.
  • Patio Set: Heading to the store to get a new patio set for the house.
  • Ceiling fans: I ordered three ceiling fans; one for the office and one each for the upstairs bedrooms. Tomorrow they get installed.
  • Loft Furniture: We got two couched for the loft upstairs. One was a regular sofa and the other was a sleeper-sofa. The sleeper-sofa still needs to be moved upstairs.
  • Clean House: It’s time for a through once-over; cleaning the bathrooms, good mopping of the tile floors, and vacuuming the carpets.
  • Organize Garage: Will be heading out to get some shelving units for the garage to tidy it up and prepare to house my new (third) car.
  • Build Hacker Boxes: I signed up for the Hacker Boxes subscription service. I still need to build kit 16, and kit 17 just arrived.
  • 3D Printer: Need to get the printer up and running.

Ok, I’m gonna start prepping stuff. More later…

A Long-Overdue Update

Posted on by Chewbode

Hey, the site’s working again and I’m back…

We moved into the new house on October 29, 2016, which was five months ago. Of course, just prior to the move I shut down and packed up the entire network from our old apartment and brought it to the house. For the first 3.5 months here, the servers were powered up, but there was no internet connectivity to them. This was due to the fact that the ISP Ethernet hand-off was in the laundry room, whereas the server rack is located in my office. And there was no Ethernet between. Workstations, mobile devices, Apple TVs, etc. were all using the default Wi-Fi from the ISP. Then, finally, about 1.5 months ago, I finally got up into the attic and ran some cable to cross-connect my pfSense firewall to the ISP. Viola!

So, you may ask, if the servers have been online for the last month-and-a-half, why has the site been inaccessible? Well, that’s because I upgraded the ESXi hypervisors and ran into an issue with unsupported network cards. As a result, the entire DMZ (where this site is hosted) was not accessible. Until today. I’ve fixed the issue, obviously.

Anyway, the house is doing great. Lots of little projects, organization, and decorating still going on. More on that soon. Also, I’m going to be posting some project-related info soon too.