Gonna build a shed

So I settled on a 8x10 lean to style shed (I prefer to call it a single slope roof), I just ordered about $900 in materials set to be delivered to my home Today mid day.

I'm off work for the weekend and don't go back until Wednesday of next week so we'll see how much we manage to get done. I'm going to go buy a skill saw and a better hammer for framing and have a very busy weekend of shed building.

I must have had a significant brain fart between when I measured the space and started drawing the shed. The space would have accommodated a 6x8 or 8x8 shed, but there is no chance in hell a 8x10 fits without significant reworking the area. So the first order of business for me will be cutting a large chunk of a rotting crap deck off and disposing of that material.

Parts list
6         Pier blocks
2         2x6 10' treated
6         2x6 8' treated
3         4x8 3/4" Tongue and Grove OSB
25       2x4 8' framing lumber
33       2x4 10 framing lumber
2         2x4 12' Framing lumber
4         4x8 1/2" TLL waferwood OSB
5         4x9 1/2" TLL waferwood OSB
5         4x8 7/16 OSB
6         10' Metal roofing
2         lbs of framing nails

Gonna need a shed

One of the finer points of home ownership (particularly when you have children) is trying to deal with the accumulation of stuff.

Stuff is expensive, it requires maintenance and most annoyingly it takes up space.   Hobbies and activities all have accompanying needs for stuff.  That stuff eats up every open spot in your home until...you're gonna need a shed.   My property already has a shed, unfortunately it's hanging precariously on stilts as the people that built the shed didn't really consider drainage and nearly 1/5 of the ground under it has washed away.  In the Pacific Northwest watershed management is pretty much what owning property is about.  I live on a hill (are there any actual flat spots in the PNW that aren't in a flood plain?) and the shed is at the bottom of a driveway, the paved driveway acts as a natural river to push the sometimes alarming rainfall right under the shed. I mitigated the worst of the water issues by damning the water from going under the shed, and chiseled a notch in the retaining wall lip that was preventing the water from continuing on down the hill, but I'm stuck with a shed that I want to tear down to repair the washed out section and put in a proper retaining wall with appropriate drainage installed.

The shed is full. Pretty much as full as it can be. Full of stuff, and it's going to take time to tear down the shed, fix the wall and rebuild it, which means that stuff has to come out of the shed and be somewhere. My house sits on about .38 acre so I have some footprint to play with and I have a spot picked out for an auxiliary shed so I've been busily playing with shed design ideas.  The current shed is a 10x12 which according to the planning laws I can find on my cities website is the largest you can make without a permit.  I've read it several times and there's language about how close to property lines it can be, but nothing that says you cannot have more than one. The space I'm looking at isn't large enough for a that, so I'm playing with either an 8x10 or 8x8, the biggest factor at the moment is cost. 10' 4x4's seem to be about double the cost of 8' ones.  I could try to do it on the cheap and use 2x6's, but I'm just not sure that's the route to go.

Hidden cubby on Ikea bed

A while ago we bought an ikea bed. It's kinda huge and has drawers which was pretty important for our old house as the closet space is very limited. When I finished assembling the thing I was really struck by the huge dead space left between the drawer and the head board.

I thought to myself what a perfect place to install a hidden chubby for those things you hope the children never find. I'm a huge fan of Make magazine and various Hackaday kind of sites that have projects of hidden storage and rooms in everyday objects. It's from reading about these projects that I was aware of hidden/invisible hinge setups. I carefully measured the board that I was going to replace and ordered a hinge that would fit into the that space. I was going for a completely hidden finished product, and since the Fjell was a pine bed finding stock that would match wasn't hard, nor was the painting of it.  I installed it on the side of the bed that is closer to a wall so you cannot see it from far away, and used a magnetic child latch to keep it from swinging open. 





Score one for the hidden sex toy storage cabinet.

Google suggestions all up in my face

I use the google for lots of services in this life. Most recently it's started making recommendations for music.

It is not good at this.




That's a solid no google. Not good.

I'm reasonably sure it's because I watched this video sometime ago.



The song is interesting, the video is pretty much every bit as awful as the particles song.

Windows 10 cracking

I work in IT so I frequently have an interest in checking out how the "other" team works their magic.  It comes up from time to time that for completely legitimet reasons I need to use tools that might be considered hacking tools. The most recent case of this came up a few days back, someone set a non-standard password a laptop that the company owns.  It wasn't written down and I've since forgotten it.  It's not critical, but it is the backup for a system that we use to control the lights in the facility. I tried different combinations for a few days, but finally decided to dip into my back of tricks.

The following video (that you'll need to turn on closed captioning for) shows the steps to break into an up to date windows 10 machine by having physcial access to the machine.

The short version is use the bios/boot options to boot into a windows installer disk. From there start the install and go to the repair this machine option.  Use the commandline to rename the on screen keyboard executable to osk.old and copy cmd.exe as osk.exe. Exit the install media and boot to the sign on screen.  On the sign on screen open the accessability menu and turn on the on screen keyboard.  Boom now you are running a command prompt with administrative rights.

The command net user <username> * lets you set a new password.

Time to break in is under 10 minutes.

Cool tool

I've been using a lot of android devices for some of the side hustle grinding I didn't write about.  Apps are a pain in the ass, but I'm in charge of disposal of the old devices so I have access to lots of older, but still serviceable android phones.  It's tedious to manage 4+ phones, each app needs a little care and feeding throughout the day.  If I try to keep them with me at work and at home then there's the process of gathering them, and making sure everything is plugged in once I get to my destination and the apps are running again. 

It's not really been a pain point, I've stopped moving them to and from work and just check a few times in the evening.  It slowed down earning but also cut the headache of it all down too.  For some reason I thought about trying to remotely manage them.  I found a few apps that would let you remotely manage phones wirelessly, but none of them looked like you could control the screen in real time. In my search I found Vysor.  It's slick and really aimed for developers (if you stick to the free version they will overlay ads on your screen from time to time) but it lets you see the phone screen and click on apps like you're in front of it.

I started using Chrome remote desktop to manage my home PC's without all the the hassle of setting up a vpn so now I can just plug the phones into a single machine remote to it, and manage all the phones from a single location. 

Nothing useful to say today

Randomish. I've gotten asked about laptops from several people the last few days though.  2 through family and another from a friend of my wife.  I'm pretty sure it's been at least a year since the last time someone asked for direction on purchasing a laptop, interesting to get 3 in 2 weeks.

DIY Sweetened condensed milk

Cleaning out my old drafts.

Some time ago I read an article on Lifehacker about Diy sweetented condensed milk.  It's semi rare that you need this stuff (really only for the holidays) so I don't keep it around, but it is extremely useful stuff if you have an inclination for making deserts.  Sure, you can just go buy it, but where's the fun in that?

The one linked by lifehacker on Dish-away.com used powdered milk, and that's just offensive on it's face. I don't keep it around as much now that we have kids because we buy milk by the gallon weekly, so I looked for a version that uses the milk I keep around to make the sweetened condensed milk.  This version from kitchensteardship.com seems like a winner, using butter raw sugar and whole milk, plus her method is about as lazy as you can get.  Dissolve the sugar in the milk and keep turning the stove down until you don't have to stir the milk while it cooks down.

Killer Carrot-Ginger Superfood Salad

If you're new the internet you'll know that it has a peculiar habit of falling apart as time goes on.  There's a bizarre kind of kill or be killed entropy to the web that causes many websites to fall off the internet, and others to live on forever( do yourself a favor and go relive the awesomeness of that old website). In this edition I'm perserving for posterity a recipe that I found on a tumblr blog. The original website the recipe came from and the original tumblr that posted it have all gone dark. To make it easier to find when I want to make it later I'm posting it here on my bloggy blog. I claim no credit for photos or recipe. I'm linking via the wayback machine and to the tumblr I found to give as much credit to where I found it as I can.

So credit to Chompandthrive.com for photos.

Ingredients:

Dressing:

1.5 cups of carrots, peeled and roughly chopped (about 3 large carrots)

1.5 cups of water

1/3 peeled and chopped ginger

1 clove of garlic

1 teaspoon of apple cider vinegar

1.5 tablespoons of honey

juice from 1 medium lemon

1 cup of olive oil

Salad:

2 heads of broccoli, chopped

3 ounces of shiitake mushrooms

1/2 teaspoon of garlic powder

1/2 teaspoon of salt

1/2 teaspoon of pepper

6 cups of red organic kale

5 cups of shredded red cabbage

2 cups of edamame

2 medium avocados

1 pint of blueberries ( 2 of the smallest boxes)

1 cup of pepitas (pumpkin seeds without the shell)

Directions: 

Killer Carrot-Ginger Dressing:

Add the water and carrot to a saucepan and boil for 7-10 minutes, or until the carrot is able to be pierced with a fork. Remove from heat and let cool, about 10 minutes. Reserve all of the cooking liquid and add it to a food processor with the carrots, chopped ginger, garlic, apple cider vinegar, honey, and juice from 1 lemon. Blend until contents are smooth. Drizzle in the olive oil last until an emulsion forms.

Superfood Salad:

On low heat, in a saute pan, add the shiitake mushrooms and chopped broccoli pieces. Season with garlic powder, salt, and pepper, and drizzle with olive oil. Cook over low heat (2 out of 10) for about 10 minutes, just until the vegetables are no longer raw. Set aside. Chop the organic red kale and add it to a bowl. Layer on the shredded red cabbage, broccoli and shiitakes mushrooms, edamame, avocados, blueberries, and pepitas. Top with the carrot-ginger dressing and serve.

Nvidia shield

I've been thinking about getting one of the Nvidia shield consoles for a while now.  The little console that could if you will, the home media server version has my eye because I can run plex on it and 500gb of storage gives you room for quite a few movies (assuming you've optimized them a bit), and from what I'm reading the newest version of shield experience lets you add libraries from SMB network shares, usb drives and micro sd cards.  This is great news and I'm saving my bloggy dollars as we speak to get one (half way there!).

That was enough to get my interest for sure, I've been running kodi via the Openelec on an old Acer Aspire revo r1600 (it's a ridiculous product name). It's a crappy nettop atom based pc with the one redeeming quality of having the nvidia ion chipset on it. Nvidia ion was h264 (the standard for .mp4 video) processing.  Meaning the dual core atom processor circa 2009 is able to playback 1080p video without stuttering.  The cpu alone wouldn't be up to the task, and topping out at like 19w it is tiny and only needs an hdmi to be a full featured media center.  Out of the box openelec supported my Media Center usb ir adapter and I can run it with the Logitech Harmony remote and from the xbox 360.  Keeping a keyboard handy is still worth the effort as I've been having some trouble with my usb wifi adapter lately, but otherwise it runs easily.  Kodi doesn't support streaming and transcoding out of the box and doesn't have the fit and polish of Plex, so I've been wanting to jump to that as my full time media player.  Simplifies all kinds of tasks for content on the go and for kids in the house on tablets. 

The final push for me to want the shield was plex had a lifetime plex pass sale recently, $75 for apps, and early access to features and the ability to back up your phones pictures to your media server was too good of a deal.  After I bought my subscription I found a video on running emulators for classic games on the Shield too. We still have our old Nintendo and Super NES, but I never got a N64 and I really miss classic Mario Kart.  The new ones don't have the same soul... So I'm not encouraging anyone to look for the app called happychick on a .hk based website that would allow you to play emulators on your android device, but if you did do those things you might look at this really cool bluetooth gaming controller that works really well with the emulator (allegedly) 

finally, full disclosure.

Well then, grinding the side hustle

I suppose it's been just over 2 years since I've posted on blogger. After the forced public G+ profile thing this space became infinitely less attractive, not that anything was ever all that personal or interesting in of itself, more it was nice to have place to write about things without having to spend so much time filtering for appropriateness.

I used to have a friendly little blogger ring. I'm not sure if any of them are still following on rss, but if you are, what have you been up to since blogger stole your adsense stream?  I've been in a number of things myself but the most profitable by far has been swagbucks(*). I usually do about $30-100 a month there depending on promotions and offers and my own shopping habits.  I don't buy thing just to get the swagbucks, but if it's something I'm going to by I do try to find a way to get swagbucks for it.  I needed some new shirts for work, they had a promotion with Khol's that took a few minutes of effort with emailing reciepts, but I got 2 shirts and about $30 bucks back for the effort. I got $250 signing up for uber and completing a minimum number of trips so if you have the time and inclination it's a decent Beermoney side hustle.  Most if not all of it goes to Amazon gift cards, but since they sell most everything it's seems like a worthwhile adventure.

For the more time wasting but in theory could be lucrative category I've been hitting up some Bitcoin and Monero Faucets.  Most are kind of garbage, but these one's are the least annoying that I've found.

First things first, you need a wallet. Bitcoin for bitcoin monero for monero.  I'm using bitcoin core on my desktop for my bitcoin wallet.  I'm not sure how I feel about a wallet in the cloud for bitcoin.  Monero being more secure and more private I'm using Freewallet on my phone.  Freewallet supports all the major cryptocurrencies, if you don't want a lot of headache, this one is probably the one for you.

I get about .0002 btc every 30 days  with the first 2 sites claiming once an hour or less during the work day. currently ~$.95. Not impressive, but just add it to the daily things you do for beer money at work and forget about it.
Moonbits.co.in - easy, uses coinpot micropayment site
Bonusbitcoin.co - easy uses coinpot micropayment site
Onewayfaucet.us - easy, uses Faucethub.io micropayment site
Luckybtcfaucet.website - easy, uses Faucethub.io micropayment site

I've done way better with monero mining, in no small part because I have access to way too much idle cpu power.  If you're interested at trying your hand at it, I've mined about 2 monero or $160 in the last 3 months using minergate.  Premise is simple your crunching hashes looking for ones that are valuable.  It's arbitrary and kinda silly, but that's the way of digital wealth creation.

I've also been trying out Alexamaster.net, I payed out a few times after a year of using the site, ($10ish dollars, but then I looked into promoting websites)  I'm not sure that it's going to shake out in the end, but I've been using it to drive traffic to this site.  I'm only on week two of trying this out, but my adsense account says my earnings have bumped up a bit.  If you do the autosurf it takes a lot babysitting (and a good antivirus because seriously they are trying to get you).  Never the less, it would be nice to see another adsense check, it's been years since the last one.

What you got for side hustle bloggy friends? I'm listening.
Full disclosure, those links are affiliate links.  I get refferal bonuses if you do sign up with those links.

Apple trees for cider

In November of last year my wife and I bought a house. Prior to that we owned a Town-home with a zero lot line, so I never really got to start my garden or the various hippy ideas that floated in my head. The new home is on .38 acre, which isn't huge by any stretch, but will let me have a garden and plant some fruit trees. I've been shopping for heirloom varieties for cider making and have a few that seem interesting.

I found a site called Trees of Antiquity that specializes in heirloom varieties that will ship trees ready to plant.

First is the Manchurian Crab. I'm particularly interested in a crab variety that works well in my cooler summers and has a somewhat early harvest, that will also act as a pollinator for an eating or dessert apple tree that I would like to plant.

The second apple tree that is interesting is a Cox's Orange Pippin. It's supposed to be quite tasty and it appears to be compatible with the crab apple for bloom time and fertility, so they should do a good job of helping to keep each other pollinated. I also read that the Cox tree is good for espalier which could be useful to give me a little bit of a privacy screen between my home and the neighbors.  Previous owners of this house cut down some privacy bushes that were on the fence line so a tree that could do double duty of fruit and privacy seems like a win.

Two years later

I wasn't sure if I'd ever come back to this blog, I'm still frustrated at Google for tearing off the little badge of anonymity that made it so freeing to be on the blogger platform. I'm reasonably sure that that choice propelled the growth of several micro-blogging sites like tumblr and squarespace. Places where you could easily post without having to reveal your identity. It's not that this was ever a terribly personal site, but it was a nice place to unpack things, to consider them and keep track of them. I'm considering coming back here for a personal and public face that isn't Facebook. We'll see how that goes.

Oh look, Google finally got a clue...too late

The real name policy and google+ fucking nightmare is finally getting acknowledged as the clusterfuck that everyone said it was back when they started trying to make it a thing. It's largely why I've abandoned this shit hole. They held my blog hostage, use your real name or it's going to be read only, and I caved.

I caved because I've been blogging here for years, I liked it more or less and liked some of the people I'd met. Not so much after they purged all the good people, but the spammers are still thriving. They've driven adsense payouts down to the point that it's not even worth pursuing as a small time blogger.

So thanks for the memories Google, blogger used to be kind of awesome.

Beer update snippet

I escaped for an afternoon and brewed with a friend a little over a week ago, I have a citra pale ale sitting in secondary on a 1oz addition of citra hops. It's cloudy because we didn't put moss in the boil kettle and at this point looks a lot like a little lighter Manny's Pale ale (his pale is almost copper).

Should be about 5.6% abv all said and done.

I'm vaguely tempted to leave it cloudy (I like that about Manny's), but since it's going into a keg and I hate haveing to clean my keg after a dirty beer I'll probably cold crash it hard and see how clear I can get it.

Stuff and junk

An odd assortment of tidbits that have nowhere else to go. At nearly 1000 posts I'm loath to let this place wither on the vine, but at the same time Google's real name policy makes me loathe to participate any longer? Where does that leave me, something like facebook? A highly postured subsection of myself where I post PR approved sunshine to keep from endangering my future? There's plenty of places still online not owned by Google, and not being slowly killed by their aborted/failed/stalled crap social network. I cannot believe that they mortgaged their sub-properties to try and buoy up a new one. Look what it got you Google, no one wants to manage two social networks for the purpose of connecting and sharing. It's too tedious, people are happy to maintain different profiles for different purposes. This blog was some spleen venting, some part nerding out about various technology things, other parts being a book nerd. It was a place to put things to remember for later, a place a few friends knew about so I could just be me.

Our past defines us, moving to somewhere new gives us a chance to change that and our corporate overlords don't care for that. It's  hard to sell to a multi-headed hydra of a person. They need to be one monolithic person a collection of all there pieces so we know exactly how they'll move when we push them. To that extent it's no wonder that the NSA was tapping into Google's vast store of information about us. They already did the hard work aggregating data on us.

But enough about my complaining what about Me?

Well, I've been busy. Oldest boy is working his way towards being 3 and we just had another son that's 3 weeks old. Otherwise I've been spending way, way too much time in the hospital for <cough>swollen testicle<cough> for my own good. Now as much fun as it is to have repeated ultrasounds on your nuts, the blood work and peeing in the cup hardly makes it worth the effort. Also I got my favorite and most often response from the many days there. "Huh, don't know what that was about. Looks fine now."

Thanks Doc, glad to see those years of med school are working out for you.

In the months since my wife got pregnant, I've not managed to brew a damn thing (though I did do a run on my still) and only have made one batch of hard cider in the last year. My brewing skills are in serious disrepair, and I want to get a lead test kit before I run the still again (better safe than sorry)

Donuts

http://www.saveur.com/article/recipes/Cinnamon-Sugar-Cider-Donuts

http://www.saveur.com/article/Recipes/hawaii-malasadas

http://www.saveur.com/article/Recipes/long-johns

http://www.saveur.com/article/Recipes/french-crullers

Distracted, but there's more to it

I've really been using a different platform for the last few years, but the nail in the coffin here was Google's real name policy. I could have kept anonymous, but wouldn't have been able to keep posting at the time I made the choice I couldn't imagine not having this place to come and vomit up the contents of my mind.

It was an illusion of privacy, but I did feel comfortable in that veil. I felt it was enough that you would have to put a lot together to tie it all to me in a meaningful manner. I didn't name any names and never posted anything terribly intimate or embarrassing or even professionally damaging. This was largely random bits of stuff almost a journal, but with all the personal bits held back.

In the time I've been here I've posted a shy of 900 times in 5 years, on another platform that I use that offers anonymity I've posted over 1200 times in less than 3 years. I know for a fact that the anonymity has always been a part of that. I know no one there, I'm not trying to make money on that platform so it's not attached to anything that can be traced back to me. Why is that important? I don't know, but it I think the post counts speak volumes about my engagement.

How's it going blogger?

I've sort of missed this platform, but not really been in the mood to post here for a variety of personal reasons.

The summer has been hot, and I've been in the gym non-stop. I competed in 2 super-sprint distance Triathlons, went camping and generally went with the summer flow. I've started in a fairly committed fashion to follow the paleo diet, and even doing some HIIT in addition to my weight lifting.

Not terribly interesting in a lot of ways, but I'm feeling great and working on getting strong. Pulling 385lbs on the deadlift and working on strength and flexibility to do full depth front and back squats. I can do it with 135lbs on both, but I'm nervous about going up in weight on that particular lift.

What about you guys, been up to much?

Flying man short film

This is scary good. It's crazy how often superhero stories are told with superhero as the central character not focusing on the havoc that falls all around them. To pull a name out of the air take The Avengers. New York was fucked up, the majority of what we saw was the superheros with a small nod to that there were people in the city. The superhero in this story doesn't exist as a super or hyper moral person, just a dispenser of a certain brand of justice.




Via GAS