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There are 111 posts filed in Mr. Fixit (this is page 10 of 12).
I’ve noticed that when my cat paws through her catbox it raises a lot of dust. I run an air filter near it but I don’t want/need to run it all day or turn it on by hand every time she uses the catbox.
Its the Internets to the rescue! This gentleman blogged about a motion-sensor outlet, which turns any appliance into a motion-activated one. Now I can hook the air filter up and only have run it when the cat’s near the catbox.
Problem solved. Thanks for the tip, Joe!
We just got through washing our cars and boy do they look great! In spite of the water restrictions we weren’t even sneaky about it. In fact, we were hoping someone would call the water police on us because then we could show how we did it completely with reclaimed rainwater.
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I feel like the dog that finally caught the car it was chasing: now what? I’ve got a tank full of 330 gallons of rainwater and nothing yet to do with it. Spent some time yesterday with Travis at Lowes, looking for some piping I could use to hook up a garden hose to the tank. Out of a long aisle there was exactly nothing I needed. Guess I’ll have to be more creative.
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So the switch to the VPS Farm hosting provider is not going as smoothly as I’d hoped. Even with a swap partition enabled, the session ran out of memory.
I set up my home network management software instance to monitor the server for memory issues but I turned my network management box off as painters are working in the room where it normally lives. Thus I was unable to track issues with the server. I did have a console open on it which indicated it died around 11 AM today, though from what I still don’t know. Seems every 36 hours it decides to done blowed up.
Bear with me, folks, as I work out these issues. Thanks, y’all.
I’ve always thought that the video craze that Youtube and others started would be great for teaching people things. You know, stuff that might not be flashy enough for regular TV. Looks like I found just such a resource this morning in 5min.
5min bills itself as a “life videopedia,” offering Flash videos showing you how to do almost anything. From guitar lessons to skiing to fixing your computer, you can find it on 5min.
I wish I’d thought of it done it myself!
Spent the afternoon and evening yesterday pulling cable under the house. I was surprised to see only one dead mouse under there. It had long ago stopped smelling, so I ignored it in favor of getting my wiring job done.
I pulled four ethernet drops and two coaxial drops to split between the den and the playroom. When I goofed up and didn’t properly locate the spot where they would go, I enlisted Kelly to help me run additional cable. Had I not made that mistake I could have shaved two hours off my job. D’oh! There is truth in the old adage: measure twice, cut once!
At lunch I will put connectors on the garage ends and then the jacks will go live. Hooray!
No, I’m not talking about the bizarre “martyred” Palestinian TV show mouse, but the mice in my garage. You see, for a long while now we’ve had mice living in our garage. I think it corresponds to the time I first put up a bird feeder in the backyard.
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One of the things I did on my get-stuff-done morning was retrieve the killer nonworking gable fan from the attic. After rigging up a plug and giving it juice, I determined the thermal safety breaker has tripped. The thermal breaker is a non-replaceable part which, when activated, turns the motor into a unique doorstop or lively conversation piece.
I’m still thinking it might be worth $50 to put up another fan. It gets to 130 degrees F up there, which makes the air conditioner work harder. The ideal solution would be to put in a radiant barrier but I think that would run $300 or more with the space I’d have to cover (~$.50 psf, if i recall). Maybe I’ll consider that in the fall (when it will also help with heating).
Why didn’t I get a degree in thermodynamics? Or curmudgeonry?
I spent yesterday afternoon adding a shelf to our utility closet. It was a wire Closetmaid shelf, the kind I used to sell as a hardware salesman after high school.
You’d think it would be a snap to install a wire shelf, but you’d be wrong. Because these shelves are designed to be mounted without using wall studs, they require multiple screws in the drywall. I had to carefully remove 10 or so drywall fasteners to get the old shelf out, then add another twenty to put the new shelf and the old shelf in their new locations. I did this all the while Travis was sleeping in his room ten feet away.
By the time he awoke from his nap I was done hanging shelves. Now to paste over the old holes and everything will be finished. The new shelf doubles our storage space in the utility closet.
During winter its a challenge to keep indoor air from getting too dry, yet when heaters defrost their coils they regularly expend a large amount of water vapor in a cloud of steam. I wonder if that steam could be safely captured and somehow used to add moisture to the indoor air? Probably not, I suppose, since it might not be clean enough, but it does make me wonder.
