Month: August 2022

So. In the ongoing “we built a fucking extension” saga there was a point where we had wallpaper hung on the walls. It was beautiful. We marveled at the inability to see the joins between the adjacent rolls of paper. The decorator even went the extra mile and put our TV wall mount back up.

Fast forward a couple of months and we bought a bigger TV for the wall. We had to. It’s a big wall and the 55″ TV just looked too small. To go with the new 75″ TV we bought a new wall mount. As I was taking down the old wall mount I took a screw out and water started gushing out of the wall. The decorator had screwed straight through a pipe but the screw had sealed it….until I took it out again.

As you can see, my brand new wall now has a massive hole in it which I’ll have to put a new piece of plasterboard in, tape it up and then skim over it. On the bright side it’ll be a new set of skills!

The legend that is Uncle Chris came over and between the two of us we managed to chop out the offending bit of pipe work and following two trips to Screwfix [ the only place open on a Bank Holiday Monday ] we managed to seal it all up

Don’t ever build an extension! Take the money the extension would cost and sell your house and add the extension costs onto the sale price. FML

My Father’s ashes are spread around the tree in my front garden. Since it was his birthday we decided to have a “Grandad Dave” glass of wine with him and follow in his footsteps of filling the glass until the meniscus came higher than the rim of the glass.

Many people have the view that I do some crazy stuff. But my crazy stuff doesn’t even come close to this madman.

He lives a few miles down the road from me and he’s planning to sail across the Atlantic [ Newfoundland to Lizard Point ] in this…

It’s 1.1m long. He can barely move once inside it. He’s going to be in a sitting position for 90 days. The food he’s taking with him contains Aspirin to thin his blood in order to reduce the risk of DVT. Just mental. Properly mental.

We moved into the house about 16 years ago and I inherited the manky old hosepipe that was mounted on the wall. It leaked, it kinked up, it was a pain in the arse to wind in, it had to go.

So I bought a new one from CostCo. A thing of beauty. German engineering. It winds itself in and applies the brakes as it gets close to winding all the way in. It doesn’t leak and it’s longer than the last one too. Well chuffed.

Whilst walking through the Lidl Middle aisle I spotted a six gang power block with surge protection [ exactly the sort of thing I could have done with to protect my Unifi switch ] so I bought it.

Whilst plugging stuff in I decided to get organised and label the individual plugs, and then I decided to plug the plugs in alphabetical order.

Definitely have too much time on my hands.

It was the boy’s birthday so as usual Emma created a masterpiece

During the electrical safety check that had to be done ( to get the certificate for the electrics in the house ) the power supply went on and off quite a few times. Because I’m an idiot I didn’t turn off all my networking gear at the plug. So when all the power eventually came back on my Unifi switch didn’t 🙁

A quick google/amazon search revealed you can’t buy these things anymore. A search on eBay then revealed that they’re about £200 for a replacement. After much consideration and pissing about with a spare switch I had I eventually came to the conclusion that it really didn’t have to be a Unifi switch. All I really needed was a switch capable of delivering PoE.

Enter stage left….a Netgear switch for £50

So the main part of this blog post isn’t that I bought a Netgear switch. It’s that I used my Ryobi tools to cut a hole in my network layout boards and slotted the switch in so that the ports popped out of the front. Then Amelia and I took some beading we had lying around and cut it to shape to make some nice edging. Then I used my nailgun to make an utter mess of mounting it. I may well remove the nails and mount it with glue instead.