Category: The Kitchen Sink

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Fun, Fun, Fun. . .

And I don’t even have a T-Bird for “Daddy” to take away. . .

So, our Third World County™ “baling wire and chewing gum” telco has decided to enter the late 20th Century and extend fiber to the house. Sound cool? Notsomuch.

Let me ‘splain. [pause] No, there is too much. Let me sum up.

Fiber to the house means no more power over telco lines (no copper to carry it), and telco line power, or a substitute, is needed for POTS.

So, substitute is. . . a required outdoor power outlet where the telco line enters.

The current location for the telco line is. . . suboptimal, for several reasons. (One reason? Since the fiber line was run in at the street, they’d have to trench around 3/4 of the house to get to the current entrance. Another? The line into the house from the original construction sucks dead bunnies through a straw and needs replacing anyway. There are others.) So, I offered ’em a place on the South wall of the garage for placement of the new box and entry to the house.

But. No interior POTS wiring there. No electrical circuit with a line to that wall.

In attic:

  • run Cat5e (since I have scads of the stuff) from Network closet to South wall of garage and effect an exit to the location for new box.
  • sever the power to the light in the garage (NOT the line to the light switch!) and install a junction box with a line paying down the South wall of the garage (encased in non-conductive protective material–reasons below)
  • install an exterior, weatherproof outlet/box.

Not such a trouble, but. . .

Yeh, it was.

The garage was originally a carport, as I understand (makes sense from the construction). South wall of garage construction:

Brick shirtwaist between three concrete columns; above that, ordinary stick wall (w/ typical drywall) that was added between the brick shirtwaist and the STEEL BEAM that ties the columns together. So. . . no drilling a hole and fishing cable/wiring through the wall, no.

Then. . . the original wood siding was covered over about 30 years ago with vinyl siding (with styrofoam insulating sheets between the vinyl and the wood siding).

Ugly (and not entirely safe) cable/wiring routing, hence need to cover. Weird layers of materials to penetrate to route wiring/cabling to exterior. Lots of exercise with a ¾” auger bit in a manual brace&bit setup. Destroying as little vinyl siding as possible (temps hovering around freezing, so the stuff’s pretty brittle), using a caulk/sealant that barely works at these temps, repairing drywall, installing a new grounding rod for the system–some semi-techie reasons why I prefer local grounding for the outlet to supplement to circuit grounding: all these and more made for fun, fun, fun.

And THAT’S the short version. *heh*

Just glad I had most of the tools and materials on hand, and wasn’t out much on what I didn’t have, because we don’t use our phone line for anything that fiber would improve (voice only) and I’m SURE the phone company, besides using MY power, now, will end up raising my rate for basic POTS service.

Oh, well. Part of the price one pays for living in an otherwise ideal Third World County™.

Oh, it’s nice to have decent POTS wiring in the house now. AND, when the guys come by to trench for the line to the house, I got ’em to commit to hauling off a bunch of yard waste–I made sure it was right in the route from the street to the new box ;-)– and put the fence back afterwards. *heh* So, at least I’ll have something for the telco’s use of my electricity.

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Staying Dry *sigh*

‘T’was the week before Xmas and all through the castle,
Not a faucet was dripping or flowing *sigh*–hassle.
“No leaks inside, let’s call the city.”
“No leaks on our side; it’s all yours, more’s the pity.”

‘T’was the week before Xmas and all through the house.
Not a creature was drinking–not even a mouse!
But oh! Is that water, stored in the pantry?
Prayers of thanks, shouts of joy are raised from the chantry. . .

I’ll just let you imagine the rest.

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Only a Bronze

[*heh* I’m even late posting this. Completed–well, aside from a few minor lil tweaks ‘n’ touchups–last week.]

Well, the roof’s finished, for most values of “finished” given that I will probably be tweaking tiny little things for some time to come, but so slowly that I only got a bronze bagel*:

Some lessons learned or reinforced:

Could NOT have done it w/o some help. TYVM, “crew” (my Wonder Woman, Son&Heir and Lovely Daughter).

Always allow for screwups. I purchased extra lumber and steel panels and trim to allow for that, and that was a Very Good Thing. Very second panel: had to have a hole cut for a plumbing vent and… I cut it wrong. Notaproblem, as I had extra panels and the hole didn’t prevent cutting two end pieces that needed to be 1′ X 16′. I did purchase almost exactly 1/2 the screws I needed to install the purlins, but since a trip to Lowes isn’t a problem for me, no biggie there, either.

Safety, safety, safety. The safety anchors, harness (TYVM for the loan, Joshua and Lovely Daughter!), rope, caribiner and descender I used were sometimes cumbersome, but just one slip was enough for me to be glad I was using them. The two times I neglected to wear gloves when handling the steel panels, I cut my hands. Hot stoves and all that…

Not as young as I used to be. Yeh, well, that’s a lesson most folks eventually learn, eh? 🙂

Using the right tool, correctly, beats repairing work damaged by using the wrong tool. Just sayin’. Spend a little extra for the right tools. (Besides: MORE TOOLS! ;-))

Clean gutters more often. *sigh* Fortunately, we re-prioritized this roofing job and moved it ahead of other things for the house, because I located a 9″ X 14″ section of roof deck (out over the soffit) that was rotted. Yep. Downspout at that location had been plugged up and water had backed up and soaked under the drip edge. No problem to repair, since I had all the lumber I needed to do the job, but it could easily have been worse. Clean gutters more often. (Yes, the gutters had “leaf shields” but they’ve never really worked well.)

Continue reading “Only a Bronze”

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Maintenance Mode

TWC will be largely static this week. No, the blog isn’t going to be in maintenance mode: twc central, RW version, is in maintenance mode… all week long. Going to try to beat both the 100-degree+ weather and the rain forecast for later in the week by getting the roof finished during the heat, before the rain. Fun Fun Fun. 🙂

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Useful Snack Making Tools

So, I took a flyer on a Mastrad A64601 Top Chips Maker and Slicer Set at Woot.

It was inexpensive, and I figured, from the reviews at Amazon (where it costs more) that even if it wasn’t “all that and a bag of chips” *heh* I could still get my money’s worth of use out of it, especially since my set came with both the mandoline and three trays, instead of the one offered by Amazon (though more are available separately).

Sure enough, it’s been a useful lil tool set. I’ve made sweet potato and apple “chips”–though the apple chips turned out more like apple leather; still good–and loads and loads of potato chips, some with some pretty unusual seasonings.

But what about the holy grail of chips, the corn chip? Yep. As good as baked tortilla chips at least. Made a batch (4:30 mins for 1 tray or 7 mins for 2 trays, stacked), sliced monterey jack cheese and peppers while that was going on, put a plate back in for another 2 mins with the cheese and peppers on top of tghe chips made.

Yum.

(For the tortilla chips, I just cut a stack of corn tortillas into quarters and placed ’em on the trays and microwaved ’em as noted above.)

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FYI to Windows Users

A 2012 reminder on a basic computer security habit: Get and install AND USE Secunia PSI to help keep various softwares on your Windows computers updated, fully patched with all known security patches.

Oh, and while Microsoft is at work updating Microsoft Security Essentials (and re-rebranding it back to “Windows Defender”–see here for an offline version) for Windows 8, if you want to pair it with the most consistently “highest rated” free anti-malware software–AVG Free–it’s now OK to do so. MSSE has always “worked well with others” on my systems, but AVG Anti Virus Free 2012 has been designed to work much better with other anti-malware products than before. If you like having a second opinion handy and can spare the processor cycles to have two AVs running, that’d be how I’d pair a couple up.

DO NOTE: AVG is pretty aggressive about flagging things it considers “hacking tools” or other powerful low level software tools as dangerous, and it will move such things to its “virus vault” by default. For example, it really, really doesn’t like tools like ProduKey (a tool to simply look up product keys for Microsoft software already installed on a computer–handy if Microsoft “Genuine (DIS)Advantage” suddenly forgets your copy of M$Office is registered already *sigh*) and Ophcrack, which I keep as a current ISO file for whenever I need to burn another copy to help someone out who’s forgotten their own Windows password (sadly, it happens more often than you might think; I put it down to all the autolobotomy kits that’re pushed by the Mass MEdia Podpeople Hivemind, Academia Nut Fruitcake Bakeries, etc. *heh*). So, if you decide to use it, and if you use such tools, always double check its actions.

Just sayin’.

And as always, just practice halfway sensible safe computing. Scan everything you download before invoking it. Have some sort of reiable link scanner installed. I like the combo of Opera Browse and WOT (Web of Trust), but AVG’s Link Scanner is very good. I also recommend that Windows users who want internet filtering try OpenDNS Free rather than using the Microsoft Parental Controls feature.

Of course, there’s a lot more* to maintaining nominal security on Windows computers, but these are Good Things.

*Strong passwords, changed frequently? Yep. Both software and “hardware” firewalls? Yep. The highest level of encryption available for one’s wireless network? Yep. And so on.

On the “strong passwords” front… I may be overdoing it a wee tad, but, well, let me tell you how to crack mine.

1. Have a database with the lyrics of many 100s of songs, as I recall/sing them, in 5 or more languages.
2. Find out which song I’ve selected for a particular password’s generation.
3. Begin compiling all the passwords that can be generated by selecting the first letter of each word in one or more of the verses from the selected song (complete with any special character substitutions and capitalizations determined according to my own, idiosyncratic, principles). Most of these passwords run to 64 or more characters.
4. Voilà! You have cracked one of my passwords! Unless I just changed it, of course.

🙂

BTW, such passwords are very easy for me to recall, but “I have a little list” in my safe, just in case I’m not around and family needs access to my stuff. That’s a different kind of security, but one to keep in mind.

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“Noughts and Crosses”

Yeh, maybe Limeys ( ;-)) call it that, I dunno. Sounds British anyway. When I was a kid, we called the game, “Tic-Tac-Toe” and played it only when we were already bored to tears, so its complete predictability didn’t matter so much. Other folks apparently called it by other names, as this off-shoot discovered by Lovely Daughter demonstrates: