Back in the analog days, your light was controlled either at the lamp or at the switch. If you were going on vacation, you might plug it into a clock work timer so no one noticed the house was unoccupied. As we move to home automation, you have a lot of flexibility in how to control things. Do you want to control at the wall, the lamp or the bulb?
Continue reading “Where to put the brains?”Worst sink drain design I’ve ever seen
When we bought the new house, I was happy to see that both upstairs bathrooms had new vanities. I didn’t realize then that the new fixtures were probably worse than the 50 year old units that they replaced.
More smarts for an old house
Or adding physical controls to a virtual system
One of the pain points on our smart home journey has been allowing visitors and children without i-devices to control the lights. So far I’ve installed two different solutions, and one of them actually works. The one that doesn’t work is due to the construction of my home, the device itself seems fine.
Better still, the one that works is easier to install and cheaper to purchase.
Continue reading “More smarts for an old house”Hidden in Plain Sight
Not so much hidden really as trick the brain to ignore the power cords for the rear speakers.
In the beginning
It is Finished
Finally, six months behind schedule, my living room wall is finished.
Continue reading “It is Finished”A Modern Tent
As much as we love the ger, it’s too cumbersome for shorter trips or space constrained sites. I decided we needed a modern family tent, because the wee ones are too wee for separate tents.
First attempt at rust repair.
It’s been bugging me for a while that there is rust visible around my tow hooks, so I decided to try to make my first (of many {Never buy an East Coast truck}) efforts at rust repair.
Living room update (part 2)
Project creep (and my parts still aren’t in the country)
I’m sitting with the wife one evening talking about the wall. She mentions that a friend had a deep red accent wall and it looked great.
The entertainment center is going on the only wall in the room that works as an accent wall, now I have to paint it. Of course, the other walls in the room are a pale yellow and they will look terrible with red, so I have to paint the entire room.
Continue reading “Living room update (part 2)”Cleaning up the (music) library
We are an unapologetic Apple house. Phones, tablets, computers, even an AppleTV in the family room. When you use Apple products in the manner which they are designed they really do just work.
That being said, when you start to do things that the folks in Cupertino hadn’t planned on, it gets challenging. This is also probably true for Windows environments, but Mac users are really accustomed to things that just work.
Continue reading “Cleaning up the (music) library”Happy New Year. Happy New Network.
Lots of curse words and money thrown about unexpectedly.
It seems that my wireless router had reached its effective end of life, or at least the end of my fault tolerance.
Whenever my wife and I watched television, the router would go for about five – ten minutes and then require a reboot. This didn’t happen to the kids. It may be because our shows are high def, and theirs are cartoons. It is about six years old and doesn’t support all the latest protocols, so I decided to upgrade.
Continue reading “Happy New Year. Happy New Network.”
Modern Anachronist 