I decided to take an entire week off work, but instead of doing the sensible thing and playing on the PS3 the entire time, I finished my deck. Now it’s done, I only have the rest of the back garden to worry about. Hmm.
Steps:
First railing done:
The best tool ever – nail gun:
The finished article – although the fascia and lattice still need to be attached:
Some garden (yard) progress this weekend – despite a week of sun, and then an entire weekend of rain and thunderstorms. We were almost thwarted by the landscaping company delivering 7 tonnes of the wrong kind of rock (4-8″ river cobble as opposed to 2″ decorative rock). They scooped it all away and delivered the right stuff in less than 24 hours, which was good. Here’s the wrong rock – click any of the pictures for larger versions:
Here is the right rock in place:
And here’s the border between the rock and rubber mulch:
This area currently only has a weeping crabapple – people have said “oh my god, what’s wrong with that tree?” many times! We’re going to cover it with rubber mulch for now to stop the weeds growing, but eventually this area will have a pool.
Finally, here’s the deck so far with Amber pulling weeds around it. I need to put the stairs on before I can finish the trim, which is a darker shade of composite wood (Trex).
Usually when we go away on holiday, something happens with either the server (power supply fails, Comcast decides to knock it off the Internet) or the security cameras (transmissions mysteriously stop, etc). This holiday was no exception. I noticed after we landed that there appeared to be a large piece of tumbleweed completely blocking the lens. I thought it might have been put there deliberately – and I was right.
I give you exhibit A:
It built a pretty good nest, but the camera mount couldn’t hold it up and eventually tilted downwards, at which point the bird gave up. There was a single blue egg inside, but sadly it never had a chance because there was a snow storm a couple of days after the bird finished the nest.
Hooray for 8ft trees and LED lights! Happy Christmas!
Following on from my “boredom” post, here’s something that has been keeping me busy for a while. I have a home server called Frankenputer, and it runs a package called Zoneminder along with the web server.
Connected to it I have two black & white outdoor cameras (el cheapo $30 things from Harbor Freight) and one indoor colour wired ethernet camera. The outdoor cameras are connected via very long cables to individual video capture cards in the server. The problem I am having right now is that the picture quality at daytime is fairly noisy:
At night though, it’s plainly crap:
Zoneminder is also fairly terrible at motion detection, requiring a very clean image to work with, and very precise fiddling with “blob counts” and other non-intuitive variables. If I connect either of the cameras to a proper TV, there is absolutely no interference, leading me to believe that the interference is being generated inside the server. However, if I connect a closer source of video to the server (such as a VCR), the picture is also perfect! I think what is happening is that the long run of camera cable (100 feet) is causing the composite video voltage levels to drop, and interference in the server is becoming more noticeable. Any hints would be appreciated though.
I am wondering whether to retire Frankenputer and get a new motherboard, CPU and memory, or to get ethernet cameras all around. Here’s a snap from the ethernet camera:
For the last few weeks I’ve been building a deck. My “bible” is the Home Depot Decks 1-2-3 book, which does a fairly good job of explaining how to build a deck to someone with reasonable carpentry skills.
This is actually only my second carpentry project – the first being some shelves in the garage.
If there’s anything I have learned, it’s the following:
You know what really pisses me off? Comcast. Oh, you already know this, but I thought I’d share with you another reason why they piss me off:
Picture this: we are watching a movie, and this shows up on all channels (analogue and digital). You cannot switch off the digital receiver, and it stays on for five minutes. The TV programmes currently being watched are not paused, and recordings that are in process get gaps in them. A sharp tone is played at maximum volume, easily able to damage speakers that are turned up loud. The information is not localised in any way; the entire of Colorado sees the same message. It goes away, and then it comes back ten minutes later.
Fox occasionally issues “storm watches” to tell people that they may issue a “storm warning”, which is itself a notice that they may issue a “storm alert” at some point in the future. The annoying thing is that they play a very weird tone over the programme being watched and squash the programme into the top half of the screen so they can show these messages.
Yes, in a state prone to tornados and flash floods, this can be useful, but please localise the information. I wonder if they have ever read “The Boy Who Cried Wolf”.
PS. It’s not raining (yet).
Amber and I got home from work on Tuesday at about the same time. We were in for perhaps ten minutes, and I went to the front of the house to get something when I glanced outside. Someone had replaced the dead tree in our front garden! How nice!
I found out what killed the old one, thanks to iPhoto:
Left: happier days. Right: R.I.P. tree.
It’s a bit difficult to see, but we added bark chips around the base of the tree, then it rained, and then it flooded. The bark chips stopped the excess water from drying up. New rule: don’t over-water the tree.
We had a lot of rain in Colorado last week, and the ground on the left side of our house settled a bit. It was just enough to break the PVC sprinkler pipe off the end of the copper water supply pipe, and the whole side of our house (outside) flooded. It took two whole days to shift the stones from on top of the weed barrier sheet, pull up the sheet, dig down to fix the pipe, and then pack the soil down using dirt I obtained from the building site across the road. The ground had sunk 4-6 inches in total.
Earlier this year, we found we had an 18 pCi/l (pico Curies per litre) reading of radon in our house. The EPA recommended limit is 4 pCi/l. For those who don’t know, radon is a colourless, odourless radioactive gas that comes from the ground and can increase the risk of getting lung cancer. A few weeks ago we had an extractor fan hooked up to the basement sump (like a moat going around the perimeter of the house for water to drain away). Here are the results:
Yay, no horrible slow death by cancer!