nuxx.net
Making, baking, and (un-)breaking things in Southeast Michigan.

Category around the house

My Office

(Cross posted from YakYak…)


Here’s my desk / office at home taken with an 8mm fisheye lens. You can just barely see the door and G5, which are in opposite corners of a 12′ x 12′ room.

That’s exactly how it is now, except I’ve opened the just-received-before-photo box from Advanced Circuits. (They are the prototype PCBs for a project I’m working on.)

Click on the image to make it full size…

(And please ignore all the wacky flare. It is a fisheye with a 47W diffused daylight CF near the edge.)

around the houseelectronicsmoved from livejournal

Dr. Bronner’s Peppermint Pure Castile Liquid Soap

(Click for full size image…)

Oh, I also (finally) replaced the Dial-branded pump soap dispensers which I’ve had in the bathrooms since I bought this place with something nicer. The old dispensers weren’t dirty or worn out, but I was fairly tired of the smell and anti-bacterial-ness of Dial soap. The cheap, prone-to-toppling dispensers were a bit of a bother too.

Stopping at Trader Joes on the way home I picked up a bottle of Dr. Bronner’s Liqiud Soap, in Peppermint. At US$8.99 for one quart it’s not very cheap, but it is very nice soap.

Also, don’t forget to read about E. H. Bronner‘s colorful, driven personality.

acquired thingsaround the housemoved from livejournal

2007 Flowers (Plants)

Rosemary
(Click for more photos of the 2007 Flowers around my house (photo gallery retired)…)

Arriving home a bit early from training at the Microsoft facility in Southfield I decided to head over to Deneweth’s Greenhouses, which is just down 22 Mile Road from my house, and grab some flowers.

Well, instead of following the trend from previous years and planting just flowers I decided to pick up some pretty herbs and chilis as well. The four things planted are Rosemary (Rosmarinus officinalis – as seen above), Caribbean Red Habernaro, Obsession with Blue Eye Verbena, and Victoria Blue Salvia Farinacea. I’m quite happy with how they all look spaced out around my front porch and such. With the salvia growing to 12″ – 20″ it should be nicely, imposingly friendly. Hopefully the chilis will be good, and the rosemary gets as bushy as I’d like. Ideally I could regularly bake bread using the rosemary. Mmm!

around the housemoved from livejournal

Basement Cleaning

Clean, more-empty basement.

Looking towards my workbench in the clean, more-empty basement.
(Click for more photos…)

Well, after dragging my feet on it for a while, I finally finished up cleaning my basement this evening. I still have a pile of things to take to Salvation Army (hopefully tomorrow) and a whole bunch of bottles to get rid of. Anyone who wants to return them to Red Wagon — where they will all be accepted — is welcome to have them all, and any deposit obtained from returning them. I just don’t feel like it. There is probably $20 worth, too.

While I know it won’t sound as good as it could, I also hung the rear speakers from the ceiling in the basement, getting them off of stands, wires out of the way, and generally making things look nicer.

As can be seen here I also did away with the very large green ping pong-like table thing, and turned what was the rack of computers into a shelf for things. This shelf wasn’t needed as I spent a good bit of time earlier in the year condensing many of my computing things on to my desktop, saving power, cutting down on maintenance, etc.

So, all in all this is a good thing. Hopefully I’ll get to cleaning the bathroom(s), kitchen, and doing a general dusting and vacuuming sometime this holiday weekend.

around the housemoved from livejournal

Screen Door

Front door screen retainer.

There are a few times each year which sticks in my mind. The first time the furnace has to be turned on (and the accompanying burnt dust smell). The first snowfall which makes it too difficult to go somewhere. The first day so hot that one must retreat to the cold of the basement.

Growing up I remember this day as the time when my dad (and eventually I) would open my bedroom window, slide the glass panes out of the way, and slide the screen into place. That was also the amazing day where there would be nothing in the window and I could lean out, looking straight down at the ground. This was also the day when my dad would get the screens for the front and side storm doors out of the rafters of the garage, replace the screen material (if needed), remove the glass from the doors, and replace them with screens.

After this point all the doors and windows could be opened and the finally-warm Michigan wind would blow through, airing out the house from months of being closed up against the cold.

Today is that day.

around the housemoved from livejournalweather

Lightsticks In The Toilet


Toilet after pouring in the contents of green and red cyalume lightsticks.
(Click for more photos of playing with Lightsticks In The Toilet (photo gallery retired)…)

Tonight while going through a few old boxes in the basement I came across red and green lightsticks, still in the wrappers. So, I opened them and activated them. After playing around with them for a little while I decided to do something I played with when I was much younger, except this time I decided to take some pictures of it.

What did I do? I cut open the light sticks and poured them in the toilet, watching the slowly changing, swirling psychedelic glow emanating from my toilet. Unfortunately these toilets aren’t that great for it, as most of the oily phenyl oxalate ester and H2O2 ran down into the bottom of the toilet and out of view. Still, there were some interesting things to see.

  
(Click to view each image at a larger size…)

More photos of this all are available here in the Lightsticks In The Toilet (photo gallery retired) album. Some of the better photos are:

· Toilet water with just the green cyalume lightstick compound in it.
· Red and green cyalume lightsticks setting on the toilet lid.
· Closer image of the toilet water containing cyalume lightstick compound.
· Lightstick compound swirling down the toilet as it is flushed.
· Photo 1 of red and green cyalume lightstick compound in toilet.
· Photo 2 of red and green cyalume lightstick compound in toilet.
· Photo 3 of red and green cyalume lightstick compound in toilet.
· Photo 4 of red and green cyalume lightstick compound in toilet.
· Glowing sink containing the remains of the cut open lightsticks.
· Lightsick remnants and cuts in the sink where I set them so they wouldn’t make a mess.

around the housemaking thingsmoved from livejournal

Data Destruction


Spool from a DLT IV cartridge cut open with a bandsaw.
(Click for more Data Destruction (photo gallery retired) photos…)

While cleaning out the basement (yes, the long-awaited get-rid-of-the-crap-you-don’t-use cleaning) I came across a bunch of old magnetic media which I wanted to render unreadable. I tried a few different methods, and I think that the best is the use of a band saw. As you can see above, DLT cartridges are easily disposed of by removing the spool from the housing and cutting half-way through them with a bandsaw. This turns the whole spool of magnetic ribbon into lengths no longer than ~6 inches. When a bunch of cut tapes are mixed in a box and then tossed like a salad they can be rendered nearly irrecoverable. I don’t think even the big agencies would be too anxious to try and recover data from that.

I also cut into hard drives, from edge of drive to spindle, and in one case cut away one corner of the whole drive. Having to dispose of some ZIP disks and DATs I also sliced into portions of these with the bandsaw before tossing them. ZIP disks would be cut to the hub of the platter, and DATs straight into the side of the tape bearing the full spool until reaching the hub.

I still have to figure out a good way to dispose of lots of both pressed and burned CDs. This too may employ the bandsaw, although a bonfire would work good as well.

around the housecomputersmoved from livejournal

Simplifying the network…


Cable Modem and Airport Express behind / beneath a couch.

So, tonight I took a big step and drastically simplified my network here at home. After moving the cable modem to the living room (photo gallery retired) and hanging it off of an Airport Express I’ve been able to turn off the entire rack of equipment in my basement. It’s really, really quiet down there. As part of this I’ve moved my entire house to wireless, with the exception of the TiVo and PlayStation 2, which hang off of a switch connected to the basement Airport Express. (I originally had one in each of these locations so they can play music through both stereos.)

Everything is bridged together nicely with WDS, which Apple makes exceedingly easy to do. (Set up the master AP, turn on the client / repeater ones, and it’ll script the setup on all of them.)

My >3 year old G5 (photo gallery retired) is happily using the connection and both my work laptop and the DS (photo gallery retired) see it just fine. I’ve also moved all backup receiving to an external disk hanging off of the G5. A few more external disks are likely to find there way here soon, just so I can back everything up to some sort of removable / different media.

It’s now strangely quiet in the basement, and I need to figure out what I’ll do with the rack down there. I might trash some of the machines, as they aren’t especially useful anymore. Maybe I’ll use it to store some of the project stuff I’ve been working on. Maybe photography and music equipment, or something like that…

I find it a bit weird to be cutting my home network down so far, but I really think that it’s the smartest thing from a power consumption and simplicity perspective. Also, fewer machines to support means fewer things to go wrong, and that’s a good thing.

around the housecomputersmoved from livejournal

What’s that sound…

Continuing with photos of things in my basement, I give you this: a photo of one of the speakers now hanging next to my workbench.

I’ve had these speakers hanging around in a closet for a few years now after acquiring them during a quantity purchase from ABC Warehouse where they were being sold for cheap. They were briefly used in my office back in my apartment, but were put away when I moved here.

In the end I only had to spend around US$4 to get everything hung, and all of that was spent on eye hooks and some 20 gauge steel wire at Lowes. Partially because I was too cheap to buy ~100′ of zip cord (and partially because I knew it would work) I cabled them up with a single run of CAT5, one pair for each terminal. Suspension was done via eye hooks and some measured, cut, and bent wire. It seems to have worked out well. As expected, the hardest part was the cable run across the basement. During this I was reminded something I already knew: construction people are lazy.

As I was being lazy myself, I decided to just run the speaker wire parallel to the mains power, through the same holes in the joists. Since the speakers aren’t that great to begin with, I shouldn’t notice any interference. Well, in running this I found that (as expected) all the holes drilled by my dad and I were nice and clean, parallel with the floor. All the holes drilled by the original electricians were sloppy, mostly pointing upwards with the original Romex simply rammed through.

Anyway, it’s done, and now I can listen to music at my workbench without having to turn the home theater stuff at the other end of the basement up. I’ve been somewhat worried about bothering my neighbors, so I figure that this is a good way to cut down on such noise.

Now to get a good night sleep, something I haven’t done in all too many days.

around the housemaking thingsmoved from livejournal