I saw these ads during the football games last weekend, and wondered how in the world they were approved with the words “Paid for by the US Government” in bold letters at the bottom. And nobody says anything about them. The White House claims they are public service announcements, and they were paid for with DHS funds.
This past Thursday, the girls and I went to our local Walgreens and got some of our shots taken care of; I did a double-dose of flu and COVID. This will hopefully protect me from at least 13% of the winter’s oncoming contagions. I was a little foggy on Friday but was able to work through it, and apart from a morning headache it had no other impact.
I felt so good, in fact, that I went to help Bennett put the rear axle in his Hudson on Saturday. I pulled the Scout out of the garage and drove it for the first time in probably more than a month. Sore arms be damned, I spent the afternoon crawling around on the garage floor under the car, first replacing the ancient shocks, which took much longer than it needed to, even though the bolts came right out. It turned out that putting new shocks in took twice the amount of time it should have; fat new bushings didn’t want to fit in 70-year-old mounts.
Then we did a delicate dance with the axle up on a floor jack turned sideways, scooting it up over each leaf spring, which took another floor jack and some graduate-level geometry. It actually went in easier than we thought it would, and we were able to drop it directly on the leaf spring perches and bolt it right up. Then we jacked up the driver’s side to put the swaybar back on and stepped back to admire our work. Bennett jumped behind the wheel and started the car up to see if it would row through the gears, and we were happy to see the rear hubs spinning in both directions.
That’s one step closer to getting the car rolling, after which he can start jockeying cars around to make room for Dan’s shiny Scout, the negotiations for which are still ongoing. I’m trying to pitch in where I can to make that happen for multiple reasons: I want to see him get the Hudson on the road, I want to help him buy that Scout, and I really want Dan’s family to find the title for the Scout I bought. With that in hand, my truck would be worth much more and I would feel comfortable starting major work on it—or passing it on to someone else.
Sunday was a complete washout, unfortunately. I stayed inside and worked on house projects with football games in the background, which was a cozy way to spend the day.
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I still hate needles but I’ve decided I’m going to keep giving blood as long as I’m able to. The Red Cross got in touch with me the minute my wait period was over from last time, so Monday afternoon the three of us drove over to a local church to donate. Finn is O- like me, so they were happy to have her, but she’s too small to qualify to donate Power Red like I did. I stared at my phone while the nurse put the line in, and they hooked me up to the big machine. The sensation of filtered blood being pumped back into my arm is always bizarre, and not unlike having the contrast pushed when I do CAT scans: my lips and eyes tingle—but at least here I don’t feel like I’m going to pee my pants, which is nice. We finished up and as I wolfed down some snacks Finn felt faint and had to lie back down because she hadn’t eaten any real breakfast or lunch LIKE WE TOLD HER TO. Jen and I stood next to the bed and watched as her lips turned from ice blue back to a healthy pink while the nurses gave her a hard time.
Between the shots and giving blood, I should be a lot more worn down than I am, but physically I don’t feel bad. Knowing that our family is giving something back is always a good feeling, even when the world feels like it’s falling apart outside.
Folk Implosion, Free to Go. Lou Barlow was the original bassist for Dinosaur Jr. up until he had a falling-out with J. Mascis and spent the next decade and a half writing kiss-off songs to his old bandmate. He also formed Folk Implosion along with his solo work and created some really good music. About twenty years ago they made up and have been making music together ever since. Full disclosure: the first Dino album after Barlow left is one of my all-time desert island discs.
This tune is good but frankly, Natural One is much better. However, this is the one currently stuck in my head. I don’t make the rules here.
It’s been a busy week here at IdiotCentral; there’s some news I’m not ready to share yet which has been taking up most of my free time preparing for. In the meantime, I’ve been taking care of some small tasks around the house that have been nagging me for years.
- There’s been a spot in the tile up in the master bathroom that has been missing its grout for years. Way back when I was working on the sinks, one of the cats knocked over a jar of purple PVC primer, which stained the brand-new epoxy grout (I don’t even want to know what’s in that stuff). A new container of the grout we originally used is only sold in 5-gallon tubs for $70, which was a lot of money to spend on a section the width of a china dish. I finally bit the bullet and bought a $10 container of standard grout made by the same manufacturer in the same color, and filled the crack with that. It’s impossible to see a difference, and the crack is filled.
- It’s FOOTBAW season again, which requires the use of a digital aerial to pick up local TV signal—I refuse to pay for cable and/or an NFL package, or as it’s now known, the content shown in between betting app commercials. As I’ve mentioned before, our house is a faraday cage, being clad in heavy Eisenhower-era aluminum siding, so I had to first map out where the local tower is (northeast, above Baltimore City) and then figure out how to get a digital antenna to the top of the house facing that direction, and run coax all the way down to a powered signal splitter in the basement. I stuck the aerial in the eastward attic window and hung coax over the edge of the roof and down to the basement window, where it’s currently feeding me the Ravens game in the den. WHITE TRASH FOR THE WIN. When it’s dry outside, I’ll lengthen the cable and mount it to the side of the house safely, then drill a hole through the window frame and seal it to be able to close the window properly.
- There’s been a tiny section of the living room bookcase that was left with a gap as I put the moulding back in place, and it’s bugged me ever since then. I milled and sanded a tiny piece of wood, tapped it into place, so now I need to hit it with some paint in order to forget about it.
- Next to that, we’ve got a functional audio system in place. I bought a cheap phonograph preamp for the record player to boost the signal on our head unit, which doesn’t have one, and that makes all the difference. Meanwhile, in a box of castoff electronics at work, I found a 12V power supply with the correct input for Dad’s old circa 1993 portable Kenwood CD player, and connected that to the system.
I’ve made plenty of progress on the 2026 house punchlist, but there’s clearly more that can be done before the snow flies—the one that stands out the most on that list is working on scraping and painting the outside windowframes.
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And I posted another truck update on the YouTube channel. I’m still just outside YT’s requirements to be able to monetize the channel—I’ve surpassed the subscriber number, I’m posting the right number of videos, but I can’t seem to cross the watch hour threshold—I’m consistently hovering at 2,900 and I need to get to 3,000. I’d really love to be able to link my storefront to the channel to boost sales, so I’m going to focus on a big project in the next couple of weeks to see if I can boost views.
Man, I could not be happier for these kids. Baltimore REPRESENT
“Opening a lock is the easiest thing for a clockmaker,” said Klausmann. From then on, they sneaked in day or night under the unsuspecting noses of the Panthéon’s officials.
A group of Parisian craftsmen snuck into the Panthéon in Paris to restore a clock that had been broken and left rusting since the 1960’s. They set up a secret workshop, including tables, electricity, and a working computer, and completely serviced the clock before contacting the administration to show them the finished product. Thankfully, in a rare case of people doing what’s right and not necessarily the letter of the law, all of the auteurs were recently cleared of any charges—for a ‘crime’ that happened in 2005.
(via Kottke)
Lifehacker published a really good article on installing a simple solar house setup with battery backup as a bundle. One thing the author mentioned is that a lot of utilities aren’t crediting the full amount for any power fed back into the grid, which is bullshit. His total cost was $8000 for the panels, battery and inverter, and he says he got a deal on the latter from Costco, which is good to know. I’d really like to install solar on the house somehow, but, as with everything else, money isn’t available right now.
This week’s earworm is Reign, a track off the second album by UNKLE, from 2003. James Lavelle has always had incredible taste in collaborators (Ian Brown, Josh Homme, Autolux, Big In Japan, Mark Lanegan, 3D, Chris Goss), and even if the quality of his output has dropped since Psyence Fiction—which is an impossibly high bar to jump. Never, Never Land was a really good album, and this is one of the standout tracks. This is not the first time it’s been stuck in my head; something in the stuttering drum rhythm really clicks for me.
Fun Fact: Baltimore-based Big In Japan, a side project of another band called Lake Trout, was the touring band for UNKLE in the late 2000’s.
Bonus: The Harvard Gazette did a quick explanation of the earworm, which originated from the German Ohrwurm, which means musical itch.
It’s hard to believe that it’s been eighteen years since we brought this little tater tot home from the hospital. It’s been a confusing mixture of rewarding, challenging, maddening and invigorating, but the amount of love I have for this goofy nerd I made with Jen knows no bounds.
Over the last couple of weekends, I’ve spent a bunch of time trying to get an outside wireless access point set up at the house. Earlier this year Jen bought a BirdBuddy and struggled to get it to connect quickly or reliably; we get great reception and all rooms of the house from one router, but because our house is covered in thick sheets of Eisenhower-era aluminum siding, the effect is that of a Faraday cage: wireless signal doesn’t penetrate the outside of the house easily. I’ve done a couple of experiments with various off the shelf plugin repeaters but none of them are able to extend the signal past the back door, so I decided I was going to have to get serious and buy an outside unit. In order to make this work, I knew I was going to have to employ what is called power over ethernet, where the network signal and power both run on the same wire. This avoids having to run an extension cord outside, installation of an outside electrical box, or other dumb/expensive solutions.
Thus began a tumble down the rabbit hole of trying to find something that worked. The first one I bought was the same brand as our TP-Link router. But it came with a special name, which basically meant it was a commercial level unit which required the installation of a special app on my phone and all sorts of other nonsense to get it to work. I have an aversion to installing random janky security nightmare apps just to accomplish what should be a simple web-based task, so that unit got packaged back up and returned.
The next one I tried was another name brand, which got a bunch of good ratings online. I unboxed it, set the whole thing up, and found that the little power over ethernet injector that came with it was dead. So I had Amazon ship me a $10 injector, and when I plugged that in, I found that the repeater was still dead. This was really getting frustrating. I boxed that one up, returned it, and found a third unit with one of those word-jumble Amazon names that actually wound up being cheaper than the first two. While I wasn’t as impressed with the weather resistance of its design, I did a test run inside the house and was pleased to see that it powered right up. I mounted it outside under the porch and configured it via its built-in web interface, which is As Things Should Be.
Then can the next step: getting Jen’s BirdBuddy to see it and work with it. In order to change the network access point on the camera, you basically have to reset the whole thing. I also found out that it does not like 5GHz frequency, so I had to shut that down on the router. After doing that and connecting it to the new access point, we found that nothing had changed: the network indicator still spun and spun when we requested a livestream. I’m thinking that there may be something wrong with the BirdBuddy itself, but I will say it is nice to finally have the outside access point. It’s within line of sight of the garage, which means I don’t have to walk back into the house to load a website. More research on the BirdBuddy is required.
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In the living room, I’ve been assembling a simple entertainment center based around an old Denon head unit and turntable I’ve had kicking around. We took the old IKEA cabinet from my rowhome in Canton and put some new legs on it, which raised it up off the floor and gave it a more mid-century modern feel to fit in with the rest of our furniture. I hooked up a pair of bookshelf speakers I scored at a yard sale and one of dad’s old subwoofers underneath to get good sound. The turntable is a really nice Technics unit from the mildew house we went through years ago, and I splurged on a new needle for it. After doing a test spin, I found that the signal going to the head was super weak. It turned out the Denon did not have a photograph preamp, so I had to pick one of those up from the jungle site. Once that was in, I spun a copy of Steely Dan’s Aja, and it sounds really good. Next, I had to find a DC power unit for dad’s circa 1993 portable Kenwood CD player. I was able to find one in the pile of orphan power units at work and got that hooked up. Then I put a separate cable in for an iPod, and with that, we’ve got a working functional sound system in the living room.
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Last week I drove north to go look at some inexpensive Insta360 cameras, which were being sold for $10/ea via Marketplace. These were first-gen units which happen to be extremely small, with the drawback being a short recording time: 30 seconds at regular speed, or up until the internal 8GB card filled on timelapse. They were cheap, so I bought four, and charged them up when I got home. Getting them to mount to my laptop took some doing; I had to reformat their internal drives and do a firmware update, and was able to get them to connect reliably. After doing some trickery I was able to install an older version of the Insta360 app on my old iPhone 6, but couldn’t get the cameras to sync with the phone, so there’s no way to update things like their internal clocks, default recording modes, or other settings. Thankfully though, they do record and hold a battery charge, and I was able to do some recording with them, then use the Insta360 app on my laptop to edit and export decent-quality video. They’ll be good for short recordings or time-lapse shots hanging off the back of the truck, and if they fall off I won’t be too upset.