Most Popular Posts

Using All Of The Space

2014-09-01 11:33:14 -

If your house has more than one floor, chances are good that there is a lot of wasted space above and below your stairs that is just crying out to be filled with stuff. Shelves underneath the stairs are easy, and something that I added when we first moved in. But after years of climbing up and down the steps and staring at all of that empty white space up there, I finally had to do something with it, so as a side project to my current family room remodel, I've conjured up an entirely new room right off the kitchen that I'm calling a butler's pantry.

Extend A Vent For Five Bucks

2015-03-14 16:43:14 -

If you have a room arranged in a such a way that the furnace vents are underneath your furniture, you might benefit from an Extend A Vent. But don't buy one from Amazon, or anywhere else for that matter. It is hardly worth the $15, or $17, or $18 that most places online are charging for these two flimsy pieces of plastic that barely fit together. I bought one, and like many others who commented on Amazon's page, I felt like I had been taken. When my wife saw the product, she said, "hey, that looks just like my seed trays!" She was right. The plastic is the same thickness, and same general length and shape as the Jiffy Seed Starter trays you can buy at Lowes, and Home Depot for five dollars.

reMarkable 2 Tablet

2020-11-25 15:45:00 -

It's been almost exactly a year since I bought my original reMarkable tablet used off of eBay. It served me well, but it had a few undesirable quirks that I couldn't get past. Chief among these was its pitiful battery life (usually only a day or two before it had to be charged again, whether you were using it or not), but I also grew to dislike the buttons at the bottom of the bezel because I found myself resting my hand on them by accident and advancing the page while I was writing.

Wolverine 8mm Film Scanner

2020-03-14 10:31:01 -

I am part of the generation that spanned the digital revolution which means I have dozens of reels full of my parents' Super 8mm film going back to the mid-60s. I have made one previous attempt to convert these old home movies to DVD, with moderate success. The quality of video made by simply recording the image from a movie projector suffers from hot spots, mismatched frame rates, and other artifacts. A much better method is a frame-by-frame transfer using a film scanner. I recently bought the Wolverine MovieMaker Pro from Amazon and have been very pleased with the quality of the MP4 videos that it produces. They are 1440x1080 at 20fps and I would say that the color is very good. It claims to be able to handle up to 9" reels, but I only have 7" reels, so I haven't been able to test that.

Experiments in Statistical Inference

2019-03-31 15:37:13 -

When I was in high school I took a Probability and Statistics class. My teacher had this really cool setup that allowed us to perform experiments by using a big bowl of marbles in various colors and paddles with holes in them that could be used to grab samples of marbles at random. Recently, I've been preparing to teach my kids some of the fundamental principles of statistics (helped in part by Dr. Nic on YouTube) and I went looking for a similar set that I could purchase.

Sweet Dreams

2021-01-23 14:40:42 -

Let me start by saying that bed warmers always seemed like a unnecessary luxury to me. That was until we got one 10 years ago and started using it in the winter to pre-heat our bed before we retired for the evening. Once you become accustomed to sliding into warm flannel sheets, it's hard to do without. I'll also say that we were in the habit of turning it off before we laid down to sleep, but recently I've discovered if I leave it on the lowest level, I sleep a lot more soundly. It has been a big benefit, but this post isn't about improving your sleep. This is about eliminating the chore of turning on your bed warmer every night through the magic of home automation.

Handy Andy Plying Tool

2019-01-20 14:06:30 -

My wife is into yarn. Almost as much as I am into Legos. So there is lots of yarn around my house, and lots of tools for carding, spinning, dying, and knitting said yarn. But we didn't have a tool for plying yarn. Until today.

Outdoor Garden Sink

2018-11-03 14:40:14 -

My present to my wife this year for her birthday was to build her an outdoor sink - a place where she can clean off her garden tools and wash vegetables before bringing them into the house. We had an old washtub that we weren't using and a bunch of cedar left over from our new deck so I took inspiration from this blog post over at Bonnie Plants. Mine doesn't look much like theirs, but I really liked the rustic appearance. Because mine is tucked under an existing deck, I wanted to use the back side for storage. That, coupled with the fact that the ground underneath is not level, added some engineering challenges to the build, but I'm happy with the results. More importantly, my wife likes it too. I'll add some more photos when the plumbing is complete.

Silver Anniversary

2021-02-10 16:11:15 -

This month we are celebrating 25 years of our presence on the internet. When I started this web site in 1996 the internet wasn't very big, with only about 100,000 different domains. My site is older than Google, YouTube and Facebook, to name a few. I've been a blogger since before that was a thing. And while the frequency of my posts hasn't remained consistent over the years (getting married and having kids will do that to ya), I'm still here.

Synology DiskStation DS920+

2020-12-21 16:10:00 -

After six years of storing files on my DS412+, it wasn't even half full, and Synology hasn't yet pulled the trick I now expect from all hardware manufacturers - forced obsolescence through software updates. The old Intel processor is from 2012, but it still runs the latest DSM. We'll see how long that lasts.