It was about two years ago that I started building my workshop and pretty much managed to complete it in six months. I say “pretty much” because I never quite got around to putting fascia boards on it so the front and back roofy bits always looked a bit scruffy.
Well….no more
So the fascia boards are the bits of wood that make the top triangle.
Now you can see that because I didn’t know what I was doing I didn’t put a load of nails into the cladding which is why you can now see a bunch of the boards starting to warp. Fortunately I still have some nail gun nails so I’ll have to rent my favourite power tool from Hodgsons, mark out where the stud walls are and then shoot a load more nails in. Sounds like a job for the Summer.
For those people old enough to remember the halcyon days of mobile gaming, Angry Birds, Cut The Rope, et al before the developers got all greedy with In-App purchases and adverts every 30 seconds, will surely remember Plants v Zombies.
For those that do remember PvZ then you will surely remember the opening audio to each level “The zombies…are coming”. Well, ummm, I kinda changed it to be “The Chillis … are coming”
Some Scotch Bonnet and some finger chilli – not sure which is which yet
Earlier I pondered if the seeds in the Chilli’s from Aldi would germinate. Turns out they did.
Being the early rising dutiful husband that I am I often greet Emma with a cup of tea in the morning. On normal days I’ll have a quick look at what time she set the alarm for and I’ll make tea and take it upstairs just in time to switch off her alarm and then we settle in with tea to do the Guardian crossword.
This is fine except for weekends. She doesn’t set an alarm on weekends. So I’d always in the past try and pick a reasonable time and wander up. This seldom worked out. She’d either be fast asleep or she’d come downstairs before I made tea. This situation could not persist.
A long long time ago Amazon released these really quite cool things called “Amazon Dash Buttons” where you would hook them up to your WiFi and when you press the Dash Button it would contact the Amazon Mothership and order you another whatever, box of teabags, toilet roll, dishwasher tablets – whatever it was set up for.
So I bought one on eBay.
A lot of the info on the web talked about them having a soldered in flat battery which was going to be a pain. After taking my Dremel to the button I discovered that the version I had was filled with a AAA battery. So I replaced the battery and got to configuring my firewall so that the MAC address of the Dash Button couldn’t get outside my network since it seems Amazon are being a bunch of dicks about this sort of thing and remotely bricking any devices that contact the server.
After much hacking involving playing some audio into the Dash Button, performing a factory reset, and then using a Python script to configure the button for my IOT network I had the beginnings of a solution. I have a Raspberry Pi that was already doing a few things and now it also sits and listens for an ARP packet from the MAC address of the Dash Button. When it receives the ARP it will then call a Telegram script that I wrote which will message my phone with a “Bring Tea” message.
So far so good – but there’s no ACK. I could go to the bottom of the stairs and shout up “OK, tea incoming” but that would just wake everyone else up. So I released the hounds…well hound.
Violet, our pet Whippet loves getting in bed with us when we’re doing the crossword. So the sequence of events is now:
Emma wakes up.
Presses the tea button.
I open the door for Violet and she runs upstairs and gets in bed with Emma
I make tea and take it upstairs.
We complete the crossword and the nine-letter anagram.
Not long after it started getting these minging scuffs on the front of it making the whole garage door look a bit rubbish. I couldn’t work out what was causing the problem so every now and then I’d give it a lick of spray paint and it would nice again, for a while.
Recently one of the locking straps snapped so I took it all apart and discovered that some of the plastic circle things that hold the locking straps in place had snapped too. So I ordered a bunch of bits from eBay and set to work. Whilst I was doing all this I noticed that there were scuff marks on the inside of the steel housing that corresponded with the scuff marks on the door. That was it! That was what was cacking up my doors. Upon closer inspection it seemed the top part of the steel housing was bowing down a bit – no idea why but I put a small hole in it with a metal drill, stuck a 100mm torx screw through the hole and screwed it into a roof support above. Screwing the screw in raised the housing top higher and no more scuffing occurred. A jet wash and a bit of spray paint later and we have this
Every now and then my Mum and I will have a few drinks in the rather fabulous Goats Gate and then get a Chinese takeaway. I took a picture to send to Uncle Chris who was busy holidaying at the time. It turned out to be such a lovely picture I had to publish it.
I like cooking. I like cooking with chillies. I like growing stuff. So I’m growing some chillies from some seeds that were inside the chillies that I bought from Aldi. I’m unsure whether they will produce any plants since there was always a rumour that vegetable producers irradiated their produce to keep it fresher and stop people growing the seeds.
