Ok, calling it a project is a bit of a stretch. Its something I have been doing for the past year, that really worked out well. Its not even something I can show off, quite the contrary.
I have been cleaning up my old Facebook posts.
Its something I have tried to do a few times, except Facebook does not really provide a good interface for browsing old posts. Its there, but its clunky and prone to “refresh and start over.”
A lot of my early posts were thing like, Friendfeed and Social Media shares or even just straight Tweets posted to Facebook. They don’t serve any purpose. Not that anyone is scrolling way back to see all that garbage.
I wanted to delete it though, for a variety of reasons, then even moreso with all this AI crap feeding from everyone’s data.
So last year, I had a bit of a revelation. Facebook, has a daily “Memories” page, that shows all your old posts from that day, to encourage you to reshare your old posts as memories. Each post on this page, has the standard Facebook menu on it, which includes a delete option.
So I simply, made a point, of once a day, deleting everything.
Not everything, but a lot.
One thing I learned was that my current trend of “not really using Facebook”, has been my “always trend.”
This just goes back to a large desire to just, being everything back to my own control and my own blog. Its always kind of been that way, but lately I have been actively pursuing it. Even though I post to Bluesky and Mastodon, everything feeds back here in hidden categories, so in the future, I don’t have to sort it out and archive it. I already have the archive.
Another Facebook related one is Instagram. I have always kind of disliked Instagram because unless you use the platform a lot, it doesn’t show your stuff to anyone. If no one is going to see my stuff, I may as well just post it to my own blog. I have been doing that some here already with my “Snaps” posts. Just, posts with single photos. I am going to set up something similar over on Lameazoid with Toys stuff, and maybe game screen shots. I have a ton of toy photos to schedule put for daily posts. I also have a ton of random game screen shots. It would not even be the first time I made a website around random screen shots, I had a Geocities site for that back in the days of dial up.
Anyway, I am kind of happy I managed to keep up with my Daily Facebook deletions all year. It really shows now because my “Memories” pages are suddenly very barren.
Josh Miller aka “Ramen Junkie”. I write about my various hobbies here. Mostly coding, photography, and music. Sometimes I just write about life in general. I also post sometimes about toy collecting and video games at Lameazoid.com.
I started posting these, a while back but they kind of fell by the wayside. I guess some of it just got covered in regular posting, and some of it ends up on the other blog, if I bother. Probably, I decided I didn’t really care. But maybe I should care. So here we are.
I have actually done a few of my “wishlist todo” projects this week. I have recently been hardcore digging through my too many bookmarks problem in Firefox. This has been an ongoing effort for a few months now, but I started on a phase two of this project this week. Specifically, I set up a separate bookmarking app, for some of these bookmarks. After some looking at options, I very lightly started using Raindrop.io, but I also remembered that I really want to not rely on other services that may randomly raise prices, limit features, or just plain close.
So instead, I set up LinkAce, in my docker set up. It was, surprisingly simple. Some of my attempts at docker set ups fizzle out. The biggest thing I have to watch for in the docker-compose files is for port use. Everything thinks its alone and wants to exist at port 80 or 8080. I have them numbered up now, 8080, 8081, 8082, etc.
The long term sort of idea.
Link Ace will be a sort of, well sorted repository of things that could be useful when I want to go look for them.
Anything that is a text or article gets clipped and dumped to my text archive.
It needs clean up, but I have been working on a series of markdown files that work as a sort of wiki for coding information.
Various bookmarked todos get put on a proper list. “To Read”, “To Watch” “To Play” etc.
Anything I may want to buy gets put in a big spreadsheet with pricing etc. I have actually already done this, since these bookmarks were already sorted together.
I have a zillion little projects bookmarked, these will all go in a list as well, or possibly (Probably) get sorted put into a Joplin notebook for each project. Like, sometimes I research a bit of a coding idea, them bookmark several different code snipped I may want to use.
Things I actually regularly use, will just stay in Firefox. The idea is to get Firefox itself down to maybe, 50 actual bookmarks. Not, 10,000. I am not sure I am exaggerating with that 10,000.
Anyway, projects this week, I got side tracked. I hung up an antenna on the side of the house today. I may put it on a proper mast later, but for now, I just stuck it on the leftover DirecTV mast that hangs off the back of the deck. I have not tested it yet. I doubt I get a ton of channels, but I should be able to get WAND and WBUI, which are both in town.
Everything else is like 40 miles away. I doubt I can get them with the antenna where it is. I literally have done this sort of thing for a living as my job for almost 20 years now. I have a “pretty good idea” of how well this placement will work. For now, it will work for what I want, which is the occasional need for local news, The Macy’s Thanksgiving Parade, and maybe The Super Bowl.
I am not even going to be here for the Macy’s Parade, so that is… Kind of a bust.
Anyway, in the past, I could get a few channels just laying the antenna out in the deck and hooking it up. If I were super cool I could use some of the spiffy work tools I have to peak the signal etc. But I am not cool like that, also, the position won’t let me actually swing the antenna all the way around to point AT 90% of the towers in the area.
Another project I made a lot of headway on, because I can do it easily while playing Throne and Liberty. Years ago I purchased a bundle of Piano courses from a teaching website. I have been, for many years, meaning to go through and capture them with OBS for offline use, and just, archival in case that teaching website ever goes offline. YT-DL did not work annoyingly. Even using browser cookies. So a manual OBS recording, then clipping them apart in Clip Champ is the way.
In other less exciting news, I got new shoes. My old ones had a big hole in one side and I threw them out. I went to three whole stores, then bought some boring Sketchers, because I almost always buy Sketchers. Then today, I went to put on my old old old shoes to go work outside and discovered my “old old old work shoes”, are the same as my new shoes. Except the work shoes are all gross and filthy.
Josh Miller aka “Ramen Junkie”. I write about my various hobbies here. Mostly coding, photography, and music. Sometimes I just write about life in general. I also post sometimes about toy collecting and video games at Lameazoid.com.
So lately I have been a bit busy in the background helping my wife and daughter with a big project. They are opening up a vintage clothing store. They already sell online, but they are now working on opening a physical store as well. Technically, my daughter is opening up a store, and my wife is going to be running her online stuff out of the back. They have talked off and on about renting or buying a space and found a location a few months ago that fits their needs and budget.
They have done a lot more of the work than I have, mostly because they have more available time, but also because they seem to want to do a lot of it so they know its done the way they want. I have been doing a lot of little side projects though related to it and helping out with moving the totes of stuff they have to sell in store or online to the shop from storage.
One of the first big projects was stripping and refinishing the old wood flooring. The previous tenant was an HVAC shop and the floors were kind of gross and a bit rough. We rented an upright sander from Menards and I got to have the fun of running that for a few hours one afternoon. It was surprisingly easy to work actually. The hardest part was lifting it in and out of the van because its heavy as heck.
“Pro tip”, the handle, at least on the one we got, comes right off of you remove the locking bolt. Its much easier to transport in two pieces.
They spent the next few days doing additional detail sanding and then putting several coats of polyurethane down on the sanded floor. Its not perfect but it looks a heck of a lot better than it did.
The next major step was painting the walls, another project I didn’t participate in, mostly due to my day job.
I have constructed a few things though and still have more to do.
One thing we looked into was hanger organizers. Amazon had a few options, but we decided that we could just build a few. I bought up a bunch of PVC piping and constructed these stand up racks for spare hangers.
I filled the bottom half of each one with sand to give it some ballast so they don’t fall over.
Another simpler project was adding wheels to a lot of the furniture used in the backroom space so its all easier to move about as needed.
One thing my daughter really wanted were these dressing rooms, which were constructed out of some black iron pipe. They make “fancy” decorative pipes, but it was cheaper, and probably sturdier, to just buy some actual pipes. The main issue there was the coating on actual pipes is very gross and dirty and comes off easily, something you don’t want in a clothing store, so we sealed the popes before installing them.
Just for comparison, the first dressing room photo here, is the same corner where I am sanding in the above image.
Probably the most complex project was the store’s sign. We will probably upgrade eventually to something mounted on the building, but for now I have built this nice stand up sign. They originally were looking at A frame signs but the wind is a big problem with those falling over. Then we looked at some swinging signs and decided those would work much better because the sign itself will swing instead of folding up and falling over.
We also decided the pre built models online were kind of cheap, and I have the tools and ability to build things, so we just bought the wood to build a sign. Its also much heavier this was to make it more resistant to the wind as well.
I am not sure I have ever really talked about their businesses yet. It is “two businesses”. My daughter runs the Vintage clothing stuff on Lady Lettie Bug which means items of a particular style and type. My wife has R&T Thrift, which is a bit more general resale.
Most of the items come from estate sales. They will often go early to find things they want for sure, this is more often where the nicer higher value items come from. They also have made friends with several of the people who run these sales and will do a buy out of the leftover clothing after the sales. This helps them find more “hidden gem” sort of items for cheap, and helps the estate sellers clean out the homes.
Not everything from the buyouts is useful though, and a lot of the work is sorting through it all. The amounts can range anywhere from a single closet to an entire minivan full of clothes.
It gets sorted and separated into several categories.
Some of it is just gross or ruined and goes into the garbage.
Some of it is just damaged but could be cut up into rags
Some of it is just slightly damaged or discolored but otherwise usable, most of these items are either donated or put out at the curb for free.
Some of it is decent but doesn’t meet a value threshold for online, these often go into totes for a later garage sale. Pretty much everything above this line also gets laundered and cleaned unless it still has tags and is clean.
Some items are nice and have been found to have sold online, so they get put aside to be listed.
If it is a certain style or type, anything from the last category goes to my daughter as vintage instead of thrift.
One big benefit of the shop space is that it has hookups for a washer and dryer, though we don’t have a set there yet. We do a LOT of laundry and have gone through several washers over the last few years. This isn’t helped though by the washer space at the house being small so we basically can only really use smaller, cheaper, washers.
Anyway, its been a fun new adventure. There are social accounts and weblinks for everything over on the landing page for the business if you are interested in vintage clothing items.
Josh Miller aka “Ramen Junkie”. I write about my various hobbies here. Mostly coding, photography, and music. Sometimes I just write about life in general. I also post sometimes about toy collecting and video games at Lameazoid.com.
Since I’ve actually taken an interest in vinyl records, One thing I really wanted to do was build a simple little record shelf. This would serve two purposes basically. One, it looks cool. Two, it gives me another way to decorate the basement a bit. The concrete block walls are a pain to work with, especially the outside wall where all my music stuff is. The temperature changes mean nothing sticks to it long term. In other areas I’ve hung frames from the rafters using small chains. For this space, I’ve got a nice shelf I can use and swap out what’s on display as I get more records.
It wasn’t an overly complicated project, but it took longer than planned since my wife had the garage full of garage sale stuff and I couldn’t really reach any tools. Also it’s been blazing hot out, and I don’t care to work outside in that much heat. On the problem of the heat, probably sometime int he fall, I’ll drag the shelf and the lower shelving out and stain and seal it. Neither plays very well with the heat either.
The shelf itself is a handful of 1×4 pine boards. It’s a bit more complicated than it might seem at first. For starters, I like the look of inset joints over just using metal L braces, so I went and inset and glued the shelves inside the sides. This was a bit tricky because I don’t actually own any bar clamps. I also added the little back catch pieces under each shelf, so the albums wouldn’t be resting on the wall itself. This was slightly complicated because there is a power conduit running down this wall i had to work around. The shelves themselves are notched around the power conduit as well. I also only have so many clamps large enough to glue these, so it took like a week of “clue one piece then come back.”
Each shelf also has an angled groove cut along the length so the albums sit slightly down in the shelf and are more secure. The whole thing is screwed to the rafter above for support. In fact the whole thing is much sturdier than I thought it would be. My main worry is that the albums would tumble off, damaging the records, but now that it’s up, I actually am not worried about that at all. Everything is very stable.
Also, my original plan was to stick the CD holder I had been using back on the lower shelf, in front of the new shelf. I immediately hated this look. But I also realized that there was a small gap near the bottom, so I added one more smaller shelf to put (most of) the CDs on. I really liked this end result. Plus the board I used here was a different type of wood that was just around, and it’s a much sturdier type of wood than the pine, so I didn’t end up needing to add a center leg like I had worried I might need to do.
I suppose it’s also worth noting the equipment itself. The entire set up is pretty minimal. Everything is centered around this small mixer and amp combination.
I originally bought the mixer for use at my PC, I wanted to be able to play games on one machine, and watch a video on another machine, and merge the audio out one headset. That didn’t really work out to be as useful as I had hoped, but instead I get to use the mixer for my music instead. The amp I bought to go with some nice JBL speakers I had, that needed 2 wire connections to work, also connected to the PC originally. Except I never ever use anything but a headset on my PC, so it was a waste.
Connected to the Mixer are the input options. They can be played all at once, since it’s a mixer not a switch, but I’m not sure why you would want to. There is a Raspberry Pi hidden under the little shelf that connect to my music library and can be controlled remotely via a webpage. I have this kind of mediocre CD player that I’ll probably replace one day with something better, but still compact. Even a portable CD player would probably work better. There is also an Amazon Echo connected, but since Amazon jacked up their music service, I don’t use it as much. I also have an aux cord hanging off for connecting to a phone.
Lastly is my record player, which I bought at a garage sale. It works pretty well for my needs though. It’s an Audiotechnica AT-LP60, nothing fancy.
Lastly I have this recently acquired audio switcher. Right now I just have the one set of speakers, but at the very least, it will be easy to add a second set outside so I can listen to music while out on the deck or porch under the deck out back. The output selector will make this much easier to accomplish and it’s something I’d thought about getting at some point before, then I came across one at an estate sale.
Josh Miller aka “Ramen Junkie”. I write about my various hobbies here. Mostly coding, photography, and music. Sometimes I just write about life in general. I also post sometimes about toy collecting and video games at Lameazoid.com.
I have been slacking on my posts, though technically still doing better than I had been. It’s a combination of being busy and just being generally meh overall. One think keeping me busy was re-mulching the flower beds around the house. Not just throwing down new mulch though, I mean raking up the old and putting down new weed barrier. This meant going around the existing plants and the little metal stakes to hold the weed barrier down were a pain because there is a ton of super packed rock in the area that makes them hard to insert into the ground.
In the case of the tree out back, it also meant digging up the ground around the tree to add a new flower bed space completely. We added a lot of new plants to the area as well, though most in pots for ease of use.
Then my wife put all her decor out again.
We also started working on the basic garden set up for the year. In the past we’ve had issues with trying to garden at this house because there is a lot of wildlife that comes around that eat or dig up everything. Right now it’s in buckets, though I plan to put legs on these wooden boxes we have to put the buckets into. Which is part of what the pile of wood behind the garden plants at the bottom is for. We also may use the stairs as a tiered herb garden. It’s all wood that was salvaged from my parent’s deck which they recently had replaced.
Anyway, here are some photos of the completed set up.
Here is a random bonus of the backyard from when I was mowing recently.
Josh Miller aka “Ramen Junkie”. I write about my various hobbies here. Mostly coding, photography, and music. Sometimes I just write about life in general. I also post sometimes about toy collecting and video games at Lameazoid.com.
Ramen Junkie 
