Category around the house

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Okay, remember the bit about daylight bulbs before? Here’s a perfect example of why. This is the florescent fixture on the ceiling of my laundry room, with the cover removed. On the outside are the two new daylight bulbs, and on the inside are the two standard “cool white” bulbs.

I set the camera’s white balance to ‘daylight’ in order to be consistent and shot this in program mode so the exposure would be a nice, even middle ground.

See how yellow those center tubes are? Gah. No wonder things never looked right in that room. Walking in there with the light on now just looks and feels better. Things just seem right.

Unfortunately, when I installed the bulbs in the kitchen I found they are about 2cm too short, so they are up in the housings a bit. I don’t think this will cause a problem, but I’m going to wait until after dark to experiment with them and the remaining working old bulb. I might even have to return these (at $9.something a piece I’ll definitely return them if I don’t like them) and find something else.

Guh, this is a pain. All I want is bright daylight colored bulbs! Heh…

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I know it’s all suburban and crap, but I wanted to make the slice of it in which I live at least a little prettier. So, between my frustration with the look of and the need to mound dirt in order to have enough space for planting stuff in the concrete ring around the base of the tree off my front porch, I replaced it.

Total cost for this project was less than $40, including the purchase of two new garden hand tools, a bag of potting mix, and a cold chisel for trimming a piece of the brick. All in all, I think it looks better, and it seems like it’ll probably be easier to water. It’s not perfectly level, but it’s pretty close. The root system of the tree made it nearly impossible to dig down and level everything perfectly, but I think it’ll be all right. If not, I’ll just dig it out next year and adjust the stone.

Tomorrow I’m going to attempt to install new mirrored disks in a file server, and hopefully the day after that I’ll install some florescent lights in my garage. I think a pair of dual-tube 8′ fixtures (total of four 110W tubes) should sufficiently illuminate my garage. Right now I’ve got a pair of 100W incandescent bulbs and it’s just not enough to do real work by. Hopefully with the brighter light I’ll be able to do detail work on my car, like cleaning out the inside, waxing it, etc. It needs it, too. The last time I made a good effort to clean it was before my big trip in November.

All the pictures for today:
· The picture from above of the ring around the base of the tree.
· Wider shot of the tree and the base.
· Looking off the front porch past the flowers showing the trees and a neighboring condo.

Also, large appliance repair information doesn’t appear to be available online.

I *think* I need a new thermostat for my fridge, but I’m not sure.

UPDATE: Rock. It seems that repairclinic.com allows you to email them with questions about what could be wrong, and they’ll reply with info, offering to sell you the part. I sent this:

Recently my refrigerator has been seeming to run quite a bit, and during this time the temperature swings tremendously. In the freezer compartment the temperature will regularly swing from -20°F up to +40°F.

When playing with the refrigerator temperature control, the compressor doesn’t kick on or off until the knob is almost at it’s maximums. For example, I just had to turn it to off in order to turn the compressor off, and then up more than 70% through the dial’s travel before it turned on.

Could this be a bad thermostat? Or, do you think it could be something else? I’ve already ensured that the condenser and all surrounding components are free of dust, but this hasn’t remedied the problem.

Thanks for any suggestions you can give…

So, now we wait!

Hey everyone! Want to know why it’s important to clean the coils on your fridge once in a while?

Because a condenser that looks like this doesn’t do a very good job of bleeding off heat!

Fortunately mine now looks like this…

Not that things can just be good, mind you. I think my fridge needs a new thermostat, as the temp know has to be turned to about 10% short of either extreme in order to have it turn on and off. (I take this to mean the thermostat has a HUGE range of temperature fluctuation.)

I’ll give it another few days and see what happens. This would really be a nice time to have a data logger so that I could record how much the temperature really does swing.

You know, OxyClean is probably my new favorite cleaner. Not any of the special OxyClean products, but the plain old original stuff. It’s basically sodium percarbonate and nothing else. I’ve been a fan of using tri-sodium phosphate as a non-surfactant detergent, but the phosphates are really bad for ground water and lakes and stuff. Well, sodium percarbonate seems to work equally well, and is now available in retail stores. Yay!

I decided to give it a try after using a beer brewing cleaner called B-Brite. It made water feel like it had TSP in it, so I pulled the MSDS. Well, what do you know… sodium percarbonate. Now I just use that stuff instead.

Also, since I have rather oily skin, my pillow cases and such tend to get a little discolored and stuff, just from oil on my shaved head getting in there. Since sodium percarbonate is a great degreaser, throwing some in with your laundry takes care of skin oils on sheets, towels, clothing, everything. It just works well.

Hmm, you know, I’m starting to suspect that Simple Green is sodium percarbonate in water with color and scent.

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For some reason I had the desire to rearrange my basement. I’d been thinking about it for a while, so I finally did it. For what it’s worth, I put things in roughly the positions I’d thought they would go had I finished the basement, and in doing so I’ve realized that things wouldn’t quite fit as planned…

Anyway, for those of you that have seen my basement before, you’ll see it’s quite a bit different. I also have plans to have the (everlasting) rod hole leak in the corner fixed, and as you can see here, there wouldn’t have been much room to work on the wall.

So, I did a bunch of rearranging, some cleaning and straightening, made an impromptu run of CAT5 (for the Airport Express) and set the levels on the home theater speakers. I’m going to try to remember to grab some coax from Home Depot tomorrow so I can run a CATV signal over to the TV. So, everything is in order, and I’m pretty happy with where it all is.

Oh, I do still have to run power to the arcade games. I almost forgot that, and they are useless without electricity.