2017

My DIY Projects The Basement

On Moving and a lot of Small Projects

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Moving into a new house tends to create a lot of little projects.  There’s been a few extra in the case of my new home, since it didn’t have any appliances, and was missing quire a few of the small trimmings.  Things like, handles on the kitchen cabinets.  It’s an easy little thing to add, a few measurements and a bit of drilling is all, but it needed done.

There’s also been quite a few larger projects.  Like the appliances.  The fridge and stove pretty much go right in and plug in, though the fridge needed a water line run to it to work the ice maker.  Then there’s the dishwasher, which needed to be hooked up to power, and needed both a water and drain line run to it.  These aren’t that bad either, punch a hole through a cabinet, drop the lines, tap into the existing sink plumbing.  This whole project also involved adding a garbage disposal to the sink however, which itself required the addition of a switch the run the thing.

Little projects.  Like hanging curtain rods on all of the windows.

Or putting in some railing on the front and back stairs, which was something required by insurance.

This is of course a little more involved, what with needed to drill into concrete and cut the railing to fit and whatnot.  Then there’s things like hanging decorations and some display racks in my wife’s office.  Or assembling shelving in the basement for my junk, which resulted in a trip to the ER when I dropped one unit on my foot while trying to tip it up, and failing to do so.

There was also the dilemma of the washer an dryer.  The closet for the laundry appliances was very small, so we had to get some smaller appliances.  The Washer hooked up easily enough, it just hooks to the hot and cold and existing drain.  The dryer was something else completely.  There wasn’t a dryer vent hole, and with the cramped space, there wasn’t a lot of room to add one.  I managed to chop a hole in the wall and go down through the floor tot he open basement, where I added a bit of duct work to go out the side of the house through an existing unused hole where a vent used to exist.

Then there were the issues.  Early on we discovered that the plumbing wasn’t draining properly.  A call to the plumber and we found that the sewer line was blocked, and after an expensive call and some digging, the sewer was fixed.  More recently there was a power issue in the basement area.  I did a bit of checking on all of the junction boxes but ultimately had to get an electrician in.  He tightened a lot fo connections in the breaker box and found a bad wire on the problem circuit.

Speaking of the basement, things are coming along well there as well.  Just before the power issue I was in the process of adding some outlets for the TV and video game corner.  Which will be pretty cool when done.

The Basement

Basement – My New Space

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Since the primary focus of this blog is projects, i thought it would be appropriate to talk about my new space a bit.  Last week, I’ve moved into a new home.  Mostly we wanted a home that was more on one level to accommodate my wife and kids and their mobility issues, but also we moved closer to where I work.  The new house has a pretty nice unfinished basement area, which opens out to the backyard under a deck on the main/upper floor.  Being unfinished, it’s effectively a clean slate to do what I want with.  My son is taking a corner of it for his room, but I’ve been working to plan out the rest of it to accommodate a media area, space for my toys and space for my electronics and computer.

A lot of things will probably flux a bit but I’ve got a pretty good idea of how things are going to lay out.  It may be a bit before any real work gets done, there are other projects that have funding priority over building walls in the basement, but I still wanted to throw out a baseline starting point.  I’ll do some updates from time to time as work is done.

Here’s the primary space, full of boxes at the moment.  The far space in the back will be the space for electronics, my computer, and books.  Essentially, the office space.  I also have plans to set up a little photography space in the corner using a corner unit I built several years ago.  The corner unit has a large top surface I can set up lighting and backdrops on and space underneath that I can store props and diorama parts in for use in photos.

I have some better book cases in storage that will go on the back wall.  The desk will probably continue to stick out int he room the way it is there in the center.  The space to the right where the larger boxes are I intend to build some nice shelving units to contain my collection of toys.

This will be the future media wall.  Its a bit more cleaned up than the other corner, we were without internet and TV for a bit so I pulled all of the DVDs out onto this shelf so the kids could find them more easily.  The main issue here is the lack of any power outlets, however adding outlets will be fairly easy.  The udea int he long run will be to add a second identical book case on the right full of video games, and put the TV in the middle mounted to the wall.  I also want to build or buy some sort of unit to go under the TV that will house all of my various game consoles and their controllers, all ready to be used and played.  We have a couch to go in front of all of this, but there isn’t space at the moment so it’s in the garage.

At this point I’ve mostly been working on sorting and organizing boxes.  Things are at a bit of a stand still until I can retrieve the other book cases and add some power outlets.  I also don’t want to get things too settled until I can add some actual walls in front of the concrete, I’m not a huge fan of that grungy cave look.  The ceiling will likely end up being a drop ceiling so that I can still access the underside of the floor easily.

 

 

Programming Projects

Building A Cross Platform App with Xamarin

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So, I made an app.  A for real, runs on things app.  More accurately, I followed a little tutorial to make an app, as part of the Xamarin Challenge over at Thurrott.com.  The app itself is a little weather app, it even includes location based weather and forecasting.  I know this isn’t particularly impressive but I think it’s pretty neat.

Part of the point of the exercise is that it show off the cross platform ability of Xamarin as a development plaform.  The end app uses the same code and runs on Windows 10, iOS and Android.  Unfortunately, I don’t own a MAC or an iOS device to test the iOS code but I was able to run both the Android and Windows 10 versions of the App.  I even ran the Android APK on my Fire Tablet.

I can’t say I learned a ton about how to actually make apps using Xamarin, though I plan to poke through the code provided more later.  What I learned more of was how to trouble shoot Visual Studio, which seems to be a bit more than buggy.  There is a forum set up for people looking for assistance on this contest and there are a lot of issues that all seem unrelated to each other but all related to issues with Visual Studio.

For example, I had issues getting the location based weather to work, until I went through and updated the Android Emulator files and build an emulator that ran on Android 7.  In a later step I found several of the NuGet packages weren’t installing properly, I never really figured out why but I ended up having to add them individually to each of the app platforms rather than the blanket “Install this on all platforms” system.

In the end, I did manage to get through and the app says everything was submitted and accepted.

 

Books

Change Agent by Daniel Suarez

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NOTE: This book was provided by the publisher for free to the reviewer in advance of release. This review also originally appeared on Lameazoid.com

I should probably start off by mentioning that I am a huge fan of Daniel Suarez.  I have read all of his previous books, a few of them more than once.  He definitely has a great “not too distant” future sort of style that comes off as very plausible in his Sci-Fi Techno-Thriller novels.  While I wouldn’t rate Change Agent as his be best work yet, I still give that to Daemon, it’s certainly not on the bottom of my list.  They all rank pretty high in my opinion.

The general plot follows Kenneth Durand, who has been genetically altered via a Change Agent, sort of a DNA virus, to have the form of the wanted criminal Marcus Wyckes.  A large proportion of the story follows Durand as he travels through Singapore and Thailand to try to find a way to return to his former self.  He meets a variety of folks along the way good and bad, and must deal with some inner turmoil in the concepts of what truly makes a person who they are.  Much of the near future aspects of this revolve around the concept of genomic manipulation primarily, but other more familiar concepts such as the mass use of drones and AR/VR style interfaces for technology.

The core story is well done and there is a nice sense of urgency along the way to Durand’s mission, mostly from the constant pursuit by the authorities.  The main areas where it falls apart is the periphery.  Some of Durand’s colleagues are involved in the pursuit of Durand/Wyckes but they don’t really seem to every question the possibility of Durand being anyone except who he appears to be, despite the world around them.  There also isn’t a much done with Durand’s family, which is his entire motivation, beyond surface level exposure.  Meanwhile many of the people Durand meets later feel like they don’t really have any good reason to trust him yet they often do explicitly.  The subplot involving (the real) Wyckes’ henchman never feels quite fully explored either.

These sub plots could have been fleshed out a bit further and could have helped the story feel more complete.  The core plot works regardless, though there are some parts that felt like they dragged a bit early on and around the three quarters mark.  The real fun, like all of Daniel Suarez’s books, comes from the “what if” world that is presented.  Daemon and Freedom looked at the web and AI, Kill Decision was AI and drones, Change Agent looks at genetics and technology overexposure.

If you enjoy the writing style of Daniel Suarez or similar authors such as Neal Stephenson, John Scalzi, or William Gibson, you’ll probably enjoy Change Agent.

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