A bunch of random stuff

I had a busy set of days off.  I somehow managed to get a lot done, considering that one day was lost to church, and another to overtime.  The overtime is a good thing, because I had to spend a lot of money this past week.

I was forced to purchase a new phone last week.  I'm *not* fond of replacing stuff - especially stuff that I've gotten used to, but there wasn't much choice in this case.  The power button on the phone had mashed all the way in, and it wasn't waking up any more.  I had to plug it in to wake it up and then enter the password to use it.  Not good.

So I transferred all the files off the six year old Droid Turbo, and then it got wiped.

The replacement is a Samsung A51, which I'm still trying to get used to.  I like the big screen, but haven't adjusted to holding this monster in my hand.  There are a number of things that will need to be tweaked to eliminate unnecessary notifications and for added privacy. 

I've spent a lot of time "force stopping" the bloatware that came with the phone, but some of it can't be shut off - I'm looking at you, "Bixby".  A lot of phone apps spy on you - report back to some company as you use them - in addition to whatever the government is doing under the hood.

Another reason I'm not very happy with this new phone is that one of my favorite apps is no longer available.  I purchased and installed the NEXT 3D Launcher on the droid, and it had a beautiful interface.   The video below shows about 1 minute of normal android interface, followed by the cool NEXT 3D Launcher interface.  I really miss it.

Since the NEXT 3D app is no longer available on the play store, I can't load and use it, and that feels rough.  It also feels rough buying a new phone that cost several hundred dollars, especially when I really liked my old phone and didn't want to part with it.  Everything wears out sooner or later, I guess.

On a brighter note, I found something really useful on the Google Play Store, and that is The Stoic app.  You get a daily quote from famous Greek and Roman stoics.  Their writings contain some very cool and practical advice on how to live a stoic life.  

Other stuff:  This past Labor Day we had a pretty big wind storm.  

 Below is some damage that happened north of us, near Hope, Idaho.  Trees down everywhere.

The wind storm drove most of the 3-day weekend campers back home, and knocked over several trees on our property.  We were without power for nearly 12 hours.  After about 3 hours without power, I broke out the small generator and powered up our two refrigerators.  It's an annoying little camping generator with a small gas tank that has to be refueled every hour or so.  I didn't want to rig up the big generator because it weighs 165 lbs.  I'm saving that one for the real deal - which is probably coming right after the election, hahaha.  

Anyway,  the downed trees had to be dealt with, so I cut off the limbs and piled them up (no burns allowed yet).  I took the logs to a neighbor lady who burns for heat, and then helped her split them.

The shop needed some house-keeping.  I have a tendency to hurriedly toss stuff into corners and get on with other things.  I'm not in the shop all that much - certainly not as much as I would like to be, and so the disorganization builds up.  Piles from various projects accumulate until I get sick of them.  Then when I have free time to straighten things back out,  I do that.  This corner was a disaster until I got the 2x4s attached and hung things up.

The area below was a mess as well.  Everything was hung from a variety of hooks at different levels before the 2x4 boards were attached.  The generators are underneath.  The 9500 Watt generator is the red one on the right.  The camping 2500 Watt generator is the small red one.  The blue thing is a pressure washer.

Other random stuff:  I got a really good Stihl chainsaw as a birthday gift when we moved to forested acreage property.  When the Stihl showed up, I retired the old chainsaw.  I decided to see if the little 25 year-old Mac Cat™ chainsaw still worked.  It's a cute little saw, good for smaller jobs if you can keep the tiny chain teeth from dulling too quickly.

I didn't recall draining the gas when I stopped using it, so there was a good possibility the gas tank and carb were full of gunk.  Obviously I'd bought a new bar and a chain for it before putting it away.  This weekend I cleaned it up, added a couple ounces of gas/oil mix and gave it a shot.  It ran like a champ after a couple of pulls!  Vintage!  The primer bulb is discolored and probably about ready to crack.  I should replace that and put it in the trunk of the Subaru.  Someday on the way to/from work, I will almost certainly come across a downed tree on the road, and need to section it to move it. 

Then there's the damn printer.  I'm bleeding money these days.  The old HP 7530 Officejet printer was really sweet when it was new.  It scanned, copied, printed and faxed - all at pretty good resolution.

The 7530 had a nice touch screen interface that all of us understood, and each of us knew how to replace the ink cartridges and reset it afterwards.  Recently it was giving us *a lot* of problems.  It was about 9 years old, and the print head (ink cartridge carrier/dispenser) threw ink all over the insides of the printer a couple of times.  I replaced the print head, and the printer worked OK afterwards.  Below, the ink cartridge side of the print head.

Below: The paper side of the print head, from which the ink gets sprayed onto the paper, and when it malfunctions, throughout the inside of the printer!

The inside of the printer got covered with sticky ink goo from the print head faults, and there was no way to clean every surface of the interior.  No matter how much I tried, there was always ink residue on the rollers, and so the rollers would smear streaks on every print job.  I recently replaced the print head once again, and the printer quit working entirely.  It would chug for about five minutes, saying that it was "preparing", then it would go silent, and start "preparing" all over again.  It never reached the point where it was "ready to print".

Well before the printer failed, I had already decided that we were done with inkjets.  When it died, I just had to decide which Laser Jet would replace it.  I decided on the M479fdw, partly because it was on sale direct from HP.  It arrived a few days ago, and I was able to set it up without any trouble.  That was a nice experience after all the inkjet trouble.

The major factors choosing this model were that didn't use ink cartridges, and that it has the touch screen that we are familiar with.  It scans, copies, faxes, and does some other stuff that I don't really care about.  I did print a .pdf from my phone over the WiFi connection, and that was kind of cool - just because.

Lastly there are a few bulbs that are not yet converted over to LED.  The reason that I haven't switched yet is because they are expensive.  The remaining fluorescent bulbs are 8ft long tubes in the shop.  The shop has a 13 foot ceiling, which is another reason they haven 't been replaced - I hate working on ladders.  However, I now have one fixture that is not igniting (center right), and the rest are getting dim - especially when it's cold in the shop.  That's most of the winter and spring, which are approaching rapidly.

A new V-array LED aluminum-mounted bulb set is on order.  They have a 65 Watt power draw - 150 Watt equivalent light output.  Standard wattage for 8ft fluorescent tubes is 75 Watts, and a High Output tube is 110 Watts, so these 150 Watt equivalents this will be an improvement, no matter what type of bulb the original owner installed up there.  I just need to find time to work my way around the shop on a ladder, bypass the ballasts, and install the new lights.  Hopefully this will be the last time I do anything with those lights.

Speaking of the shop, I've intended to add a digital timer to the fart fan in the bathroom.  These are an awesome idea, because you don't have to remember to go back and shut the fan off later.  I have installed one in each bathroom in the house.  Out in the shop, the fan might run for a week if I forget to shut it off - a huge waste of electricity and money.  The cheapest purchase I've made recently was to get one of these timers off Amazon.  Below is one I installed earlier in the house.

In addition to all of that, I began the annual winter prep - you can't put this off for too long.  I applied Weed & Feed to the lawn, gathered up the garden hoses, closed the crawl space vents, and opened the furnace vent dampers in the basement.  I had the propane tanks topped off ahead of the election, just in case!  I vacuumed roof shingle sand out of the rain gutters, and re-attached loops of eave heat trace that came loose over the last couple of winters.  A few of the clips had come loose and there were spots that weren't getting heated very well.  Also it messed up the neat pattern.

There are a few things left to do of course, but it's not yet time:  Empty and bring in the wasp traps, blow the sprinklers, put on studded tires, attach the plow on the truck and put the bags of traction sand in the back, set up the dehumidifiers in the garage and shop, attach the battery tenders to the motorbikes and lawn mowers, and set up the snow marker stakes.  It can all be done in a day, but there's much to do.

Lastly there's this:  A buddy of mine is storing a rather large vintage boat at our house that's in need of some TLC.  Storage is not a big deal, because we have room to hide the thing out behind the shop.

However... we pulled the out-drives off the boat so that we could do some winter repair/maintenance on them and re-paint them.  I'll probably be doing a lot of the work because he doesn't live all that close.  Yes, they've been in salt water.  They look nasty, but you have to be very gentle with the abrasives, because they are soft aluminum alloy.

As I said, busy.  But you know what?  It's better to be busy and accomplishing things instead of goofing off.  At least that's what the stoics say!