He’s alive and well in Anchorage playing at the farmers market.
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Author: Reeves Little
Akismet is a WordPress plug-in for controlling comment spam, if there are any questionable comments they will be held for moderation. While I do need to sort through a few junk comments every couple of weeks, there’s a bunch more I never need to even bother with. Any comment which is obviously spammy goes right into the junk folder and is never even presented for moderation. No muss, no fuss. You really should have Akismet enabled if you’re running WordPress… or Drupal, or Joomla, or Mediawiki or any other platform which supports Akismet.
Just how useful is it? This evening while I was reviewing some of the spam comments on my blog I took a look in the spam folder and was shocked to find that in the past week my blog has received almost 6,000 spam comments. Holy cow that’s a lot of junk.
In the old days I would have set commenting on old posts to time out and cull through new comments to delete the junk. The volume was never this huge, but it was still a pain. Thanks to Akismet I didn’t have to sort through a single bit of the garbage.
I started running Akismet a long time ago and only just now realized what a massive time saver it’s been over the years. Thanks Akismet and Automatic!
Our front hall light has three switches, downstairs, upstairs and on the landing by the front door. I finally got tired of having to run up and down the stairs to adjust the dimmer so this weekend up replaced the three rocker switches with some smarter components which allow me to adjust the light level from any of the three switches, no more running up and down stairs. Ah… laziness is such a great motivator.
Replacing light switches is generally pretty simple… but replacing a four-way circuit was something new to me. A key thing to understand: the number in “3” and “4”-way switches has nothing to do with the number of light switches, it has to do with the number of switched wires. In my entryway I have three light switches… the circuit is, however, made up of two 3-way switches and one 4-way switch. I wasn’t quite sure what makes a four-way circuit work but thankfully came across an excellent animation by Rick Mathews which completely demystified 4-way switches.
So, a bit of studying on the internet, a bit of wiring, a bit of testing, a bit of finding the lights don’t work and a bit more wiring… I’m now a happy, lazy nerd.
On more than one occasion I’ve wanted to open something up, only to find it has some weird fastener put in place to keep me out. I can understand wanting to keep thieves and vandals out, but I’m perfectly capable of fixing a rusted cable connection hiding behind my provider’s special box (and certainly don’t want to pay the cable company $120/hr to do it).
I bought this set of security bits off Amazon about a year ago and it continues to prove useful again and again. It’s worth noting that not all the bits are security bits. A nice surprise that came in the mix: a bit for turning wing nuts.
I highly recommend this set. Even if you never need the security bits, the hex bits make assembling Ikea furniture a snap. Your wrists will thank you.
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Fun with high PSI H2O
Paula and I were cleaning our patio today when a wave of emotion hit me. Can anyone think of a better way for me to express my undying love than to carve it out of the slimy layer of dirt caked on our concrete? No, of course not. I am the master of romance.
Yes ladies, I’m taken.
I’ve ticked one more thing off my list of nerdy things I’ve been wanting to try: building speakers. Admittedly, I didn’t do the full building experience this time, choosing instead to start with an existing set of speaker cabinets and upgrading them. It was a great way to start learning about the hobby.
This project moved from the “someday” to “now” project list when Paula and I came across a pair of retro-looking bookshelf speakers at Goodwill. The speakers weren’t high quality and they could have been blown out for all I knew, but they looked kind of cool and the price was right. At under $20 they were less than wood and speaker grill cloth to build my own cabinets, so we picked them up and headed home to try them out. I was pleased to find out that my newly purchased speakers were completely blown.
With the help of the staff at Parts Express I selected appropriately sized drivers (the round speaker bits to us humans) and crossovers (the electronics that split high and low frequencies) for my old cabinets. When I went to buy the crossovers I was pleasantly surprised to find they would be out of stock until mid-May. Yes, pleasantly surprised because that meant I would also get to build my own crossovers.
Now, all that remains is to sit back and turn on some music.
At around 8 tonight (which should have felt like 7 due to the time change) exhaustion set in. I didn’t really feel like I should be all that tired but looking back on what I got done the fatigue feels a bit more justified.
It all started with building a shelf top and then kind of snowballed…
When we tore out and replaced our patio we put in a hot/cold hose faucet for washing the dog (yes, it’s totally worth it, no more muddy greyhound coming through the house). In order to make sure the tap doesn’t freeze in the winter the pipes have to extend 16″ into the house… but our wall is on 12″ thick. To disguise the intruding pipes we found a cool looking deco-style doorbell cover at a local architectural salvage yard. I’ve had the cover mounted on my wall for over a year now and always intended to build a shelf to go on top. This weekend I finally finished the shelf (and Finney approves).
Saturday morning I woke around 6 and needed to occupy myself so I popped down to Home Depot and picked up some wood for the shelf. Once I cut down the stock, mitered the trim and glued it all together I sanded and prepped the chime box to get it ready for paint. The sanding went quickly, however, and I was now forced to sit and wait while the glue dried.
Never one to be happy waiting I decided it was a good time to experiment with cutting down some Ikea cabinet doors we picked up at their parking lot sale.
The desk I built for my office was intended to have doors and drawers, but I never made it past just building and finishing the outer cabinets. We purchased the surplus doors from Ikea to use on my desk… a little over a year later and the first door has finally made it onto my desk.
I already had purchased a set of hinges to try out, but I didn’t think to buy any sort of stop or catch for the door. This provided me with my next project opportunity: interior shelves for my desk. Thanks to some left over melamine shelves I was able to knock another thing off my hit list (and The King approves).
By the time Sunday morning rolled around the glue on my shelf had set up nicely and after a little light sanding it was time for a coat of primer. Primer has to dry too, nuts. What else is there?
When we replaced our garage doors in 2008 the installer just ran the wire on the outside of the wall. At the time I was good with them not trying to cut into our drywall but it always bugged me the way the wires looked. While the primer dried I did a little rewiring. Garage door openers now look professionally installed (or it will… once I finish painting the wall).
The shelf still needed painting and painting meant more drying time… but the weekend was winding down so while the paint dried I busied myself by putting away all the toys I got out this weekend, the majority of which were occupying Paula’s parking space in the garage.
Building the shelf led to making a desk door which led to making a desk shelf which led to rewiring my garage door which led to one thoroughly exhausted Reeves.
You know those tiny little bags of screws and bits you get with Ikea furniture and computer components? Don’t struggle to pull them apart, just squeeze and slide!
The cheap re-sealable “Ziploc” bags that come already filled are often made out of very thin plastic and the seal can be stronger than the material to which it’s attached. I’ve found that the easiest way to open these little bags is to slide the two tracks against each other and the bag will pop open at the corners. In most cases you can even open the baggies one handed, keeping the other hand free to pat yourself on the back (something I find necessary since my wife is rarely as impressed with me as I am with myself).
When the power goes out we enjoy a quiet evening with the old-time comfort of a nice fire…
And the glow of our phones as we check Facebook, play games and watch videos. I guess it’s not so old-time after all.
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When coffee is just not good enough
It was a struggle to drag myself out of bed this morning. I had a full night’s sleep, but it was just one of those days when the first twenty minutes of the day are spent examining my body for telltale tire tracks. Perhaps snoozing the alarm seven more times will put me right.
While I have no idea why I’m so very tired today, my body is clearly attempting to send me a message. So, when considering the options available to make myself for breakfast, there was really only one clear and rational choice: pancakes with fresh strawberries on top.
Suitably fortified, my brain felt the need to point out that several hundred calories of carbs topped with just two strawberries really isn’t the most logical way to combat fatigue. Finney became the beneficiary of my momentary lapse of bad judgment.
I’ll eat better for lunch… perhaps Five Guys?