Nearly free, dirt-simple skylight illuminates slum shack housing in the Philippines. It's a 1L bottle with water in it, and some bleach to prevent algae growth. It's positioned halfway through the corrugated steel roof, with a rim of the same material to hold it in place. The water scatters the light and illuminates the whole room, as opposed to ( Read more... )

But I'll be reinstalling Windows. Something is off with the current setup. Nothing in startup is weird, system resources seem normal, but a lot of things that were smooth before have gotten laggy just in the last couple of weeks. I ran a free AV tool and caught a piece of something, but that didn't result in any performance changes. I'm going ( Read more... )

I finally got around to going shopping for new cores for my bathtub faucet. It's a clawfoot, which makes access all kinds of easy.

( Blah plumbing blah )

I will soon be in possession of a 1999 Mercury Grand Marquis, white, automatic, 4.6 liter V8, alloy wheels, in excellent condition ( Read more... )

My TV has an odd handicap that I posted about long ago. It's got an integrated VCR (now nonfunctional), and all signals get piped through it. This means Macrovision copy protection kicks in when anything DVD got sent to my TV. I solved the problem by altering my DVD player's firmware, detailed in this post. It's now Macrovision-free, region- ( Read more... )

...is still making noise. It's not overtight, it's properly lubricated, and three different professional bike mechanics have said that the cones and hubshells look completely fine. I get the feeling that trying to troubleshoot this issue piecemeal would be a fool's errand. I've already put in new bearings. The noises seem to happen in time with ( Read more... )

My other big drive died a while back, so I've been using a much smaller one for a backup drive. "Smaller" as in I had to delete my older backup to make room for a fresh one. And, of course, this time I grabbed the wrong Desktop directory from Documents and Settings. So I lost a whole bunch of photos. All my Washington DC photos, all my Seattle ( Read more... )

On the strident, shrieking, bitter and derisive recommendation of a damnportlanders poster several days ago ("real egg yolks are ORANGE!"), I went to my local farmer's market yesterday to buy some organic farm fresh eggs. $4 for half a dozen! Yeah, tastier than cheap grocery store eggs, but not orange and not dramatic enough to justify the vast amount of sand ( Read more... )

I broke that hub down on my bike's rear wheel and wow, those bearings were really, really tight. Like, absurdly tight. I remembered that I actually had adjusted them, properly, only a few months ago, so it's weird that they found a way to work themselves tighter. Creepy. But not as creepy as my faulty memory-breaking it down fully and yoinking ( Read more... )

I've been getting a more and more common knocking sound from the back of my bike while riding, like a spoke reflector knocking the frame or something equally dumb. Gag me with a spoon, but I think it's bad bearings. It took me forever to arrive at that conclusion. Seriously, what sounds like plastic knocking metal, can happen whenever but ( Read more... )