Driver of 1993 Ford Ranger slams into rear of Andy’s truck, parked on the street. Driver tested .209 BAC & admitted to text-ing while driving: Georgia text-ing while driving prohibition went into effect 12:01 July 1st – initial reports indicate this is the first citation ever issued under that law.

Definition of small world: When your neighbor can tell you about the night the driver of the ’93 Ranger had… “That guy is the bassist for a band I know – they were on at the Clermont the night before.. somebody was at the bar buying the band so many shots that evening, they couldn’t even go on for their set!”

Pictures:

[View with PicLens]

-”The screen’s bad”
-”Oh, how old is it?”
-”About ten years, maybe newer.”
-”Oh, then not really, no… but I may have a use for it.”
-”OK”

(That was summarized.)

I’d seen a number of write-ups of people turning old laptops into digital photo frames, and I figured this would make a good candidate. (After I replaced the backlight bulb – first ever for me; it was interesting.)

No real details on the build. Basically:

-Make sure you have a working laptop that will join a wireless network and you can remote to (LogMeIn, etc..)
- Rip the screen out of a laptop, mount it to a matte and in a shadow box. (I literally just hot glued the screen to the matte, and fit the matte into the clamps behind the glass (I kept the glass in place for protection.)
-Remove all the extra stuff from the body of the laptop to reduce weight, size, etc.
-Add any components you want to the laptop (I added a PCMCIA wireless card – yes it’s that old, and the receiver to a wireless keyboard and mouse I have.)
-Extend the power button off the motherboard or bezel and mount a button to the box to turn it on and off.
-Mount body of laptop in shadow box (I used mounting tape and secured it to the back panel.)

Enjoy – there’s lots of things you can do with it. I plan on using it as a photo frame with my photos and a box in the kitchen to view recipes off of – options are endless, and I’m not going to go into them here…

Photos:

Screen, mounted on matte

Front side

Finished Unit

Into a kitchen that four people can stand in together (comfortably). Into a back yard that Axel can run around as I grill our first official dinner on the Weber JBIV gave us. Into a neighborhood where we can take a walk and say ‘hi’ to the neighbors as we pass by their homes. Across the street from the lady that brought over two tomato plants as we were moving in.

As you can tell, we’re happy. Happy.

Kitchen

Showdown...

Living room; boxes to go...

I was happy to oblige and prepare a red velvet cake – everyone seemed in awe of my nonchalant acceptance of the task. I googled it and found this recipe from food network.

Upon rounding up the ingredients, I discovered I would need to buy 4 (FOUR) packages of food coloring, just to get the amount of liquid red food coloring I’d need. (and it probably wouldn’t be that red)

Crazy enough, I was at an Indian market the day before, just perusing and noticed they had dry food coloring.

I high tailed it back over to the market and picked up a jar of the red food coloring and returned home to proceed.

With just a quarter of a teaspoon, my batter was already looking good:

Red Velvet Batter

and it turned out pretty good at the pot-luck, at least no one complained..

Although, Andy commented that it wasn’t the best he’s had… perhaps I need a more intimidating recipe?

Today I helped Kathy re-do her site. She bought a domain name a year ago, and used godaddy to host the site, and a few editors (dreamweaver, etc) to build it. I let her do all this because at the time I wasn’t comfortable with configuring and using, much lest self hosting content management systems.

I was using blogger at the time, and eventually researched Drupal and then WordPress. I migrated my blog to wordpress and came to the conclusion that it would be a good candidate for a CMS, even for a more ‘static style’ professional self promotion page.

It’s a testament to WordPress that Kathy was able to come over at 2 on a Sunday afternoon and by 6 we had a fully functional, CMS driven, very good looking web site: katherineshores.com

Also in the kit was a great filler wand with a push-pin valve on the bottom, so that you press against the bottom of the jar – filling it from the bottom, creating no foam.

Andy & the filler wand

(BTW, over the course of the last week, Andy has gotten more involved in the initiative – even though he honorarily named the vintage ‘Shenanigans’… seems every time he comes home on a weekend I’ve concocted some new thing to entertain myself with.)

First bottle being filled

So, one by one they got filled…

Capper

And one by one they got capped.. Until all 49 were done…

Filled bottles

So, in one week they should be good to go… aging for another four weeks after that…

Cleaning and boxing

Next is chardonnay!!

So, after a little research I found a local brewing supply store not too far north of my place: Home Brewing Supplies. I wish I’d taken pictures, but the place was pretty cool – kits for winemaking (on my list), beermaking, cheesmeaking, and all the associated equipment (which isn’t that expensive, actually).

I broke down and bought the two-stage fermenting kit that comes with a glass carboy, as I will need it when making wine eventually.

For now, I’m just using the fermenting bucket – I’ll add an additional fermenting bucket to the setup eventually, and this will most likely be the bottling bucket (note the spigot).

Fermenting Bucket

There’s a bunch of other things that came with it as well (caper, hydrometer, siphon rig, sanitizer, etc)

Other stuff

So after a little reading I jumped in:

Boiling Brew (no eye of newt)

Combining the malt extract, corn sugar, etc, you get ‘wort’, which is added to cold water to get 5 gallons of the stuff…

Wort in fermenter

Once it comes down to room temperature again, the yeast can be added

blooming yeast

And the whole thing sealed up with a nifty one-way gas release mechanism

nifty air release mechanism

Theoretically, next weekend the beer will be ready to bottle. After that it’s another two to three weeks before they’re to be consumed.

All in all, the initial outlay for gear is notable, but not crazy expensive 90 bucks for the kit I got. The ingredient kit I used was only $30, which for two cases is very cheap (half price…)

More to come.

Andy is always saying we can get by with less ‘stuff’ around, and I agree.. For now, a key rack and ten dollar organizer have made our entry table (which Kelly was gracious enough to give us) tolerable again.. And all this little odds and ends that always go walking just as your trying to leave the house are corralled..

thermo

So, I finally broke down at Target and spent the 15  bucks on a thermometer with a corded thermocouple so that I could monitor the internal temperature  of things in the oven. It features a removable cable with a two-conductor phono jack, presumably for the purposes of cleaning it.

It’s a nice little sans-frills unit from a company called Taylor.

We got around to using it the other night on a meat-loaf, only to have it have a weird readout:

Weird Readout

The readout would flicker between ‘LLL’ and the actual temperature as I twisted the connector round and round in the plug. I could get it to stay, but as soon as I turned away from it, it went back to ‘LLL’ – making the alarm feature worthless.

Not that I’ve ever had a problem returning anything to Target, but I wasn’t really ready to put up with the hassle of taking it back – besides, I needed it to work THEN, not two days from then! I said to myself: “I can fix this, I’ve worked several jobs [as an audio technician] fixing just these types of problems!”

So I took it into the office and fired up the soldering iron – I basically assumed that I was going to have to cut the connector off the thermocouple and solder it directly to the PCB. To hell with being able to disconnect it…

Once I got it apart and took a closer look, I began to wonder if the jack was the actual problem… it seemed sturdy enough.

Cable and jack

Partly out of curiosity, partly out of ‘this wire seems extraordinarily loose’, I took the display portion completely out of the housing (BTW – SIX screws to hold the PCB to the housing?! It’s only two square inches!)

So, once flipped over, the problem was annoyingly obvious:

The problem

The caption says “No Solder Here”  Seriously – possibly the most critical solder connection for a thermocouple based thermostat (The connection to the thermocouple) was not even soldered! It hadn’t just broken, it hadn’t cracked, it wasn’t insufficiently soldered – it was never soldered!

So, a few seconds later, it was fixed. And I didn’t have to connect the wire directly onto the PCB – I can still unplug it if necessary.

I wonder if I broke the warranty…

Thermometer Fixed