Mostly lemon based

Category: General

  • When I get into it…

    …I can be pretty effective.

    IMG_20150325_185443

    The stairs have had a second coat of paint (I was contemplating a third, but by the time I’d finished with the other projects of the day, it was really too late).

    Kathryn’s present continues to progress. I’m hoping that it’ll look quite good when it’s done – I spent about an hour on it today… nearly all the missing bits have arrived now, and I should be able to reassemble it pretty soon :)

    Also, as you may gather from the picture, the greendrobe now sports some more glass. With some tweaking I’ve managed to get the window pane onto the side. My original intention was to glaze the top triangular sections, but for the sake of simplicity and my sanity I’m thinking I might just board them. It also means I can use the somewhat ropey diagonal I put in to strengthen the sides a little more.

    Anyhow, it’s all slowly coming together…

  • Hey rod, meet back, commence beating.

    So when we decided on painting the trim… we decided to have a feature colour. Red, it is. ‘Kimono Red’. Or simply ‘Kimono’ I think. And I wandered round slathering random bits of the trim in red and we decided that this bit, or that bit, that would be red and the rest of it white.

    And there was this section that I thought I could get away without masking off (I sort of stand by that judgement) when it came to painting the white which is going over the old white trim.

    However, it turns out it’s a complete frigging nightmare.

    I spent an awfully long time very carefully edging it today, and it’s not nearly as neat as when I use the posh masking tape because I am simply not that good (nor that patient) with a brush. The other side of the stairs, that’s masked off:

    IMG_20150324_173345

    Which is kinda easier, although there will undoubtably be horrors when I remove it, which’ll require me cleaning paint off the stairs.

    Painting this is distressingly traumatic if I’m brutally honest. Largely because it turns out that the house is entirely made of small, unreachable corners, difficult junctions and impossible to reach awkwardly placed bits. I don’t think I’ve ever had to paint staircase spindles before and it turns out I’m really not a fan. Of course there’s the deep joy of multiple corners, which are never my favourite thing, in addition to which there’s the endless game of what order to paint things in. The one nice thing is that the new just-off-white paint (‘Piano Key’, apparently) does look way, way whiter than the yellowing old paint. And it does look like it’ll make quite a difference to the stairs.

    It is funny though. One of the things that makes this house stand out from our last one as being ‘better quality*’ is the trim. Our last house had very little in the way of wood trim, and that which it did have was a whole bundle less complicated. This house, the wood trim is a real feature (lamb’s tongue trim around the door frames, no less)… and it is one of the things I normally like. But at the moment it’s driving me a little bit spare.

    But in the end, we’re slowly getting there.

    * It really is way better built than our last house. Waaaay better.

  • Suck it up

    So, I like Plex. I like it a lot; it does a lot of things very well. Unfortunately, one of the things it doesn’t do is allow you to limit data usage on audio tracks. This is ‘unfortunate’ – and somewhat of an oddity, at least as far as I’m concerned.

    Data use...

    This is a problem because I don’t have unlimited data. I’ve got what I thought was fairly generous 5 Gb allowance, but over the month Plex has sucked up over 2.5Gb of that on just a few hours of use.

    Having scoured the forums, lots of people have commented that it’d be nice to have a transcode-to-lower-data-rate function, but there seems to be no enthusiasm to add it – which is odd, because the thing I (and a lot of people, seemingly) do the most is listen to audio. I rarely watch video on my mobile; so the fact it transcodes it down to use a lower data rate is nice, but not desperately important to me. Then, whilst I was poking around looking for an answer I came across Subsonic.

    Having installed it this morning I can say a few things:
    – It has some really nice features (like handling podcasts) which may mean I can finally completely dump iTunes.
    – It’s not nearly so cuddly as Plex.
    – It weirdly could find all the tracks but failed to add them properly to the database because I pointed it at the disk with them on, not the (two layers down) subdirectory with the audio-file directories in.*
    – It’s installation and FAQ information could do with some Technical Writerly assistance (most of it was fine, but I spent ages trying to work out why it was generating the error “Sorry, you are not authorized to perform the requested operation” when I tried to access any music folders before realising that I hadn’t cleaned the database after scanning them with the wrong file locations.
    – It’s also much cheaper than Plex.

    However, it does allow me to tweak the audio settings down for Mobile Data separately to WiFi, which means that since usually I’m listening to it in the car, or while walking, and I don’t need my much higher quality audio, I should be able to feel a bit more comfortable about the amount of data I’m using.

    Anyhow, we’ll give it a go for the month and see how things go – if they go well, then that’ll be an actual subscription service I’ll need to pay for (but at $1 a month, I think I’ll cope :) ).

    * I pointed it at “/media/Delia Derbyshire” which is the disk that houses all the audio files (obviously). However, it wanted to be pointed at “/media/Delia Derbyshire/Audio/…” (…=Clean Rips, or …=Digital Downloads, or …=Dirty Old MP3s).

  • shadesofmauve:

    shadesofmauve:

    shadesofmauve:

    I decided to give Parks and Rec a try while I clean my room.

    This is not entertaining this is a normal day at work.

    Okay, never-mind, clearly this is set in an alternate un-reality. Public employees are allowed to canvas? That’s a bizarre alien world.

    Okay, seriously — pilots are often a little ragged, so can anyone tell me: do future episodes have more of other characters and less of Leslie Knope being a painfully incompetent ass, or should I switch to Hulu and try Community instead?

    So the recommendation from NPR (source of all information) was to start with the last episode of Season 1 and move on to Season 2. Personally I’d even just start with Season 2. I never made it through Season 1 – mostly because of Leslie Knope’s ineptness, but she becomes way more competent in Season 2.

  • Batteries are for the weak

    So, it’s no secret that I adore my little Moskva watch. 1950’s tech that keeps accurate enough time for me, and doesn’t use any batteries; which given the infrequency of my use of it, it’s nice to not be using batteries because my old watches I’d pull them out and they’d invariably be dead.

    I’d had a different-but-related problem with my nurse’s watches. They always died at inopportune moments. I’d wear one for ages, it’d die, then it’d take me months to get a new battery (because my own department has clocks everywhere, and on the ultra rare occasions I need one where there isn’t a clock, my phone has a timer on it).

    So I decided to see if I could pick up a mechanical nurses’s watch, except.. it turns out that they’re not that common anymore. I imagine no-one wants to pay for the sort of cost that an actual mechanical watch costs. Eventually I found one on e-bay which was inscribed, but otherwise a nice example.

    IMG_20150321_172949

    My cunning plan, such as it was, was to steal the strap that’s on the watch I bought when I got a job as a healthcare assistant. Unfortunately, it’s gone walkies and I can’t work out where it is*. Second plan: get a cheap-ass watch, steal the pendantyfobbystrappy bit from it and replace the one on the watch I’d just bought. Clever, non?

    Non. It turned out the cheap-ass watch had a interference fit pin holding the strap on, rather a proper watch strap spring thingie (who’s name escapes me).

    So then I broke out my dad’s pin-vice and a miniature drill (thankfully there was an unbroken one in there, my dad often bought multiples because he, and I, would frequently break them).

    IMG_20150321_173014

    Which kinda made me feel nostalgic.

    Thankfully, the new strap is made of cheesemetal, or something similar… As you’d expect from a watch that was as dreadfully cheap as the one that I’d bought. But, pin-vice and drilling and a new pin and lo I have a non-inscribed watch that keeps good time and should, with luck, last me as long as I continue to nurse***.

    IMG_20150321_172958

    *Probably it’s absconded on some drinking binge with the nut-runners I spent half of today looking for**.
    ** That may be a slight exaggeration.
    *** Unless I put it through the laundry.

  • Definitely greendrobe, I think

    Much progress today, thanks largely to the arrival of the new and vastly superior Makita LiIon Drill/Screwdriver. It’s so vastly superior to the ‘Challenge’ piece of cack that I’ve been using that it’s quite, quite astonishing. Although, that said, the Challenge one does seem to have higher torque available in ‘screw’ mode than the Makita.

    Anyhow, with the help of my best beloved and after much trimming of crappy bits of timber (because I was somewhat short) – I managed to get the back piece completed. The whole boxy bit of it is now screwed together with thirty billion screws.

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    It’s even more or less square. It’s not perfect, but then I wasn’t going for perfect, especially since I’ve loaned out my chop saw and thus cutting lots of bits of wood to the same size is actually quite difficult. Anyhow, it’s pleasingly together and now the next exciting task is to make the top window bit. For which I need… more pallets.

    Kathryn’s repotted the plants, so they’re getting ready to make their way out there…

    And in other news I’ve (finally) got around to adding:

    <meta http-equiv=”X-Clacks-Overhead” content=”GNU Terry Pratchett” />

    To the page code :)

  • soulrevision:

    I’m just here to remind you that everything that is happening in Ferguson right now is because of the residents and activists in Ferguson that have spent 215 days protesting. I’m also here to remind you that Black people have led this movement. And for this reason, we will never allow anyone to force a white savior narrative on us. We are perfectly capable of freeing ourselves and speaking to our own experiences, we don’t need anyone doing that for us. We are capable. We WILL get free. “Ain’t no power like the power of the people cause the power of the people don’t stop!”

  • lolfactory:

    The Rich Having Problems With the Super-Rich

    ? funny tumblr pictures

    ? MOAR funny pictures

  • shorm:

    This is supposed to be motivating, but mostly it just… comes off as slightly threatening.

    Just do it. Run. Because of what’s out there. Right beHIND YOU DID YOU NOT HEAR ME RUN

    Is this some sort of nightvale related advert?

  • vashtijoy:

    poppypicklesticks:

    teenage feminist: Look tumblr!  I literally went to the drug store and look at what I just found: here are two razors made by a grand total of one company: from the men’s section and the women’s section!

    tumblr: gasp!

    teenage feminist: AND THE MAN’S PRODUCT IS SLIGHTLY CHEAPER!!!!

    tumblr: Gasp!  How triggering!

    teenage feminist: There you have it.  The fact that one company makes razors cheaper for men and not women is… undeniable evidence that this thing I just made up called Gendertax is ABSOLUTELY REAL!!!!!!!!!

    tumblr: Applause!  Checkmate MRAs and womenagainstfeminism!  This is why we need all the feminisms!

    teenage feminist: Literally activism. 

    First, it wasn’t “slightly cheaper”, it was a lot cheaper, for essentially the same product in a pretty colour. You got more refills with the man’s razor too.

    But why are they more expensive?

    1. Marketing. Good razors for women are viewed as being something of a luxury item, despite ….
    2. Profiteering. There is more pressure on women to depilate, and they’re pressured to do it more extensively. (the legs and arms standard is nothing like the face and neck standard.) This is a really good way to make money, if you’re a shit.

    This all sucks.

    In conclusion: always buy men’s razors, they’re way cheaper and effectively identical. Or, you know, fuck the system and don’t bother.

    Or, if you wanna shave go back further and get a single blade safety razor. Super cheap, gender neutral, and work just fine… :-)