Category: Home Improvement
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Kitchen Shelving
As we renovate our house, we are living in a much smaller place with a really small kitchen. When we got a Linea Mini and a Eureka Zenith 65E High Speed Espresso Grinder for Christmas, we needed a good spot and I designed a set of shelves to fit in our kitchen alcove and dramatically…
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Three Way Troubleshooting
Tonight, I was rewiring switches to a more modern set of switches. These days I don’t have time to learn by experience, I have to think my way through this. Without experience, I have to go back to first principles. Funny enough, understanding a four way switch is very similar to understanding digital logic and…
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New Jersey School Heat Map
This morning before church, I wrote some code to build a contour plot of schools in New Jersey. The “hot” reddish regions have the best schools and the cooler regions don’t. Tech Stuff: How it’s made This wasn’t that easy. Since I had all the code from my previous post, it should have been very…
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July 4th Home Project: Thermostat Bracket
This post is about how to use design tools to save time and build nice stuff at home using computer controlled machines (CNC). In addition to describing my design process, I’ve also included the helpful references I found along the way. Our old thermostat was too small for our wall. I could have replaced the…
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Amana 7200TW Door Latch Replacement
Quick post, just to help others who might find themselves in a similar situation regarding a front-end loader washer with a door latch that doesn’t close Big trouble . . . door latch broke on our amana front end loader. First thing I do when I need to fix something is look for ownership so…
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GE GXULQR Twist and Lock Kitchen or Bath Filtration System Replacement Filter Won’t Fit
If you ever have to replace your under the sink GE filter (specifically the GE GXULQR), be ready for a frustrating ride. It looks like this: You can find the manual here and the ge product page here. It is billed as the “Twist and Lock” Replacement Filter, the inside female hex socket sometimes rotates…
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Practical Cutting Stock Problem
Warning. This post is for an audience of close to zero. My technical friends will find this pretty basic, and my non-technical friends will find this too technical. Welcome to the middle space that I occupy between these two worlds. I wanted to build this series of retaining walls to replace the overgrown ivy and…
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Analysis of The Boohers’ Energy Usage
Using my Vera Lite and Z-wave home energy monitor I was able to record a week’s worth of electricity consumption at 30 second intervals. I was surprised how hard it was to use the data to do anything, but amazed with how my behavior changed when I knew our household consumption was being tracked. Again,…
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Home Energy Usage
I decided to look at my home energy usage. Below are notes on how I’m approaching it. I wish I could get insight from the MIOS graphing plugin, but it is pretty basic and can’t throw out outliers and has terrible zoom capability. I also never figured out how to set the y-axis. In order…
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MiCasa Verde (MiOS) DataMine Logging
For my home automation goals, I chose MiCasaVerde VeraLite due to my friend’s recommendation. The VeraLite is a small linux controller that runs the MIDIbox Operating System MiOS and gives a homeowner the ability to easily control lights, security cameras, door locks, alarm systems, and even the thermostat, among many other home systems. For example,…