So... What are YOU doing? - Part 8

[tango]

I'm starting to decorate the house for Christmas today.

My wife did that a few weeks ago. She likes a bit of sparkle when the clocks go back. Today we plugged in the lights on the bushes out front. At some point I'm going to run a new wire out to that socket and put a wifi relay on it so we don't need a separate timer. It will also mean we can tell the outside lights to come on at a time related to sunset rather than an absolute time, which will be nice.

 

[Lamb]

My husband won't let me put lights outside...or any decorations His aunt had everything stolen one year so he is traumatized from that.

 

[tango]

My husband won't let me put lights outside...or any decorations His aunt had everything stolen one year so he is traumatized from that.

If you use cheap lights it doesn't matter if someone steals them.

We have lights worth maybe $30 and an outdoor timer worth $15 or so. If someone is desperate enough to steal stuff you could get for less than $50 new (and that you'd struggle to get $20 for stolen) they're welcome to it.

At some point I plan to replace the outdoor timer with a wifi relay that will sit in the basement. Not only will it mean I have more control over the lights (specifically varying the time they come on based on actual sunset rather than the same time every day) but it will also remove one component that could conceivably be stolen.

 

[Lamb]

If you use cheap lights it doesn't matter if someone steals them.

We have lights worth maybe $30 and an outdoor timer worth $15 or so. If someone is desperate enough to steal stuff you could get for less than $50 new (and that you'd struggle to get $20 for stolen) they're welcome to it.

At some point I plan to replace the outdoor timer with a wifi relay that will sit in the basement. Not only will it mean I have more control over the lights (specifically varying the time they come on based on actual sunset rather than the same time every day) but it will also remove one component that could conceivably be stolen.

He's very frugal and wouldn't want to lose $50.

 

[tango]

He's very frugal and wouldn't want to lose $50.

I wouldn't want to lose $50 either, but I'm not sure I'd let a single theft however many years ago put me off taking even the slightest chance. Do you live in an area where theft of seasonal decorations is a big problem?

 

[Lamb]

I wouldn't want to lose $50 either, but I'm not sure I'd let a single theft however many years ago put me off taking even the slightest chance. Do you live in an area where theft of seasonal decorations is a big problem?

It's just his thinking and he's the type who doesn't change. We've never done it, so we'll never do it. It's hard to explain.

 

[tango]

It's just his thinking and he's the type who doesn't change. We've never done it, so we'll never do it. It's hard to explain.

I know some people who are reluctant to change. I don't understand the reluctance to try new things when the potential for failure is low and the downsides are limited, but it's not like putting lights out is obligatory.

 

[Lamb]

I know some people who are reluctant to change. I don't understand the reluctance to try new things when the potential for failure is low and the downsides are limited, but it's not like putting lights out is obligatory.

It was years of disappointment for our daughter who wanted to see pretty lights on the house or on the lawn.

 

[tango]

It was years of disappointment for our daughter who wanted to see pretty lights on the house or on the lawn.

My wife buys lights from the thrift store. Some years the grand total value of the lights is less than the value of the porch furniture.

 

[tango]

Home network upgrade.

My laptop is a bit of a dinosaur but to replace it with something even comparable in specification would cost me well over $1000, and it still works just fine so I don't want to drop that kind of money. But it is a bit of a drag having slow internet on it - when it was new having 802.11g on a laptop was bleeding edge although naturally there are much faster standards now. Having a laptop with 802.11g limited to 54mbps, with a wireless router diagonally across the house, meant that internet speeds were fairly slow. It had never been an issue until we got fiber internet, and I'd got so used to the internet speed being the bottleneck I never really thought about it.

Anyway, thanks to a Black Friday deal I got a couple more network access points, so my primary point is a better one now, the old master is now a slave where the master used to be, and I have a nice new one sitting next to my laptop connected with a cable. When my laptop was new gigabit ethernet was cutting edge, and my laptop has it. So now instead of running at about 30-40mbps between the laptop and the internet my most recent speed test, through a VPN, clocked in at 450mbps. The internet connection I pay for is 500mbps, so I'll gladly take that.

It makes quite a change when I download a file and instead of watching a progress bar it goes straight to finished.

The access points support wired ethernet for faster backhaul but with the speeds I'm seeing I don't know I need to run physical cables between them. I spent some time looking at how I'd run from one to another, but when they can talk to each other wirelessly at very fast speeds I don't think I need it. The only question is whether to run network cables to provide physical sockets in the hope it makes the house more saleable whenever that time comes, although I suspect only a serious geek would care about that sort of thing. If I do it I'd want to leave the wires fitted loosely through holes I drilled, so it would be easy to use the existing cable to pull a new cable, if somewhere down the line we find network cables carrying 100Gbps+ or some such.

 

[fuddy]

Lamb, your hubby wouldn't happen to be scandinavian, would he? Sounds like my dad, who was half Norwegian \ half Swedish.

Darn Scandahoovian Lutherans anyway...

 

[tango]

Got a bit of fiddly electrical work done.

I'd used 14/2 cable to run a switch loop for the lights in the spaces that will be closets. Current code says light switches should have a neutral wire so they support smart switches and although it doesn't technically apply because what's there is grandfathered in I figured I might as well add a neutral before everything is drywalled over and I can't get at anything.

The options were to either run a load of extra 14/2 which would have been a real drag, or replace the 14/2 switch loop cable with 14/3. So that's what I did. I now have a switch loop with a neutral wire, connected to a dumb switch that doesn't need it. But it's ready for if/when I (or a future owner of the house) wants to use a smart switch to control the light in the closet. It's hard to know why you'd want a smart switch for the closet light but I guess if you want to be able to turn all the lights off remotely you might. If you get three hours up the road when going away on vacation and wonder if you turned off the lights, you can use your phone and turn them all off at once.

It was fiddly trying to do it because the 14/2 was stapled to the ceiling joists, which makes it hard to use an old cable to pull a new cable. Thankfully I could still get at the staples to loosen them and get the new cable pulled through. Rooting around under the floor in the attic, which isn't insulated and so gets really cold this time of year, wasn't a lot of fun.

 

[Krissy Cakes]

Online and watching stuff with my mother in law and Jordan's aunt.

 

[Lamb]

Lamb, your hubby wouldn't happen to be scandinavian, would he? Sounds like my dad, who was half Norwegian \ half Swedish.

Darn Scandahoovian Lutherans anyway...

No, he's half Italian and half Irish...and very much Catholic.

 

[tango]

Wishing it was warmer, running in this kind of cold isn't a lot of fun. Wishing there was a gym closer to home - a previous winter we looked for gyms but most of them are either further than we'd want to drive for it, or require a long term commitment, or impose a joining fee. I don't really want to pay north of $50 just for the privilege of being permitted to pay them monthly, knowing that any time I let the membership lapse it will cost me another joining fee for them to deign to take my money some more.

 

[Lamb]

Watching the news right now and getting things ready for tomorrow.

 

[Krissy Cakes]

Watching TV with my husband.

 

[tango]

This thread went quiet.

A couple of days my house breaking project stalled so I started another round of draft hunting. It involved pulling down an entire closet, which was so small as to be useless so wasn't a great loss, and then the rest of the chimney stack I first attacked some time back. Along the way I found a particularly nasty draft and got it sealed, and also hauled the best part of a ton of concrete to a friend's house because he can use it for something or other in his back yard. I still have a draft but it's behind a unit with a sink in it, and removing that looks like a non-trivial task. At present it's definitely non-trivial because there's so much other stuff in the way, but maybe I can find somewhere else to put it all. It's good to get drafts fixed before the weather gets really cold, and I often wonder just how much money it saves when all it takes to fix a draft is a bead of sealant. It seems odd to think that a $5 tube of sealant can pay for itself a dozen times over within barely a month.

Today's job was to look at a timer. It's a really old one that was my wife's aunt's, and it recently stopped working. It's easy enough to buy another one but I like to mend stuff so I took it to the basement and opened it up. Inside it was like a miniature mechanical clock. The plates were riveted together so I couldn't completely dismantle it and clean it, so I just added some oil to it and adjusted the depthing on the escapement, and that seems to have fixed it. I don't know how long the fix will last - in an ideal world I'd want to clean it properly to avoid the problem of having an abrasive paste of oil and dust but since that's not an option this will have to do. I have no idea how old this thing is but from what I can piece together it must be 25 years old or more. It's fun to get dead things working again. It has a mechnical ticking sound and a mechanical ping, from a gong striking a bell. Modern ones come with a quartz timer and a beeper, and it's just not the same.

 

[Lamb]

We're waiting to start the snowblower. I think we only got 2 inches of snow.

 

[tango]

I

We're waiting to start the snowblower. I think we only got 2 inches of snow.

Is it worth running a snowblower for that little snow?

We got about four inches of snow yesterday. It fell slowly but steadily for most of the day, but it was the light powdery snow that's easy to clear. I went for a walk in the evening and saw someone using a leaf blower to blow the snow off their car, which got me thinking that maybe a leaf blower would be an effective way to deal with light powdery snow. It's easy to shovel but takes so many passes across the driveway because the shovel leaves a trail either side. In previous years one of next door's kids (we share a driveway, so clearing it is usually a joint effort) has wielded a wide broom to clear up the remains from the rest of us pushing shovels.

Maybe I'll get a blower next time there's a sale on at the local hardware store.