Photo Sync… Again

Posted on by Jordan

Back in the early days of this blog, shortly after the wedding in fact, I talked about the problem of keeping picture collections in sync. At the time I settled on SyncToy, a little utility released by Microsoft. It has worked fairly well over the years, but not without some shortcomings.

The two that have continually tripped me up are first the fact that it needs to be run as a scheduled task, and some how the power management on the laptop always walks on my schedule, and two, Picasa gets a little cute with hidden files and “unsaved changes” being tucked away in different folders.

The first problem is fixable, except I have fought with it off and on for years, and find it tedious at this point.

The second could perhaps be solved by letting SyncToy grab the hidden files along with the remaining pictures, but after a few really messy “edit on both machines then wipe out one set of changes” problems I don’t think letting those kinds of things resolve in an overnight batch environment is a good idea.

With that in mind, I was rather excited to hear a discussion of BitTorrent Sync in a recent Security Now podcast. It may not actually be the ideal solution, but I don’t feel that I have time to really research my options right now, and it has been really fun to setup and play with! The tool is built to keep folders in sync anywhere on the web, but works just fine inside a local network.

The configuration is perhaps a little more technical than I would like, but after a few missteps I think I have something that will work, and work within seconds of changes happening on one machine. Given the “magic” that Picasa does using hidden files and folders, what I appear to have created is an instance where Picasa acts like a single installation across both machines. Albums, favorites, and edits are mirrored immediately to the second machine. It may lead to a terrible disaster were we ever to attempt to use the application in both places at the same time, but I don’t see that as a significant risk.

Pulling Out The Stops

Posted on by Jordan

We are now under 50 days until the expected arrival of “Baby N”!

 

So far we have:

  • Prepared a room
  • Found and reconditioned baby furniture
  • Ordered and assembled a new crib
  • Decorated the room, complete with large hand made initials
  • packed enough clothes into the room that I suspect “Baby N” will never wear the same outfit twice until well after age 2
  • Performed extensive tune-up maintenance on our designated baby hauling vehicle.

What could be left you ask?

A photography studio! Not to fear though, pintrest has guided us to a whole host of ideas to build one right here in our living room!

As you can kind of see, the design is fairly simple. Just some 2×4 stands over some hardwood flooring, a piece of nice wide trim and a fabric backdrop and you have your very own mock room!

We found the flooring (Real bamboo!) at the local Habitat for Humanity “restore.” We were looking for, and found, a partial box of flooring to use, rather than having to pick up an entire case of something. We also found some scrap wood with neat texture to it that may end up in the background if we manage to get it cleaned up a little before it gets too cold.

Now, you may also be wondering, why this was all setup in our living room? Well because Heather had a friend with a two-week old baby who was willing to let her take some pictures. Sadly I forgot to clear it with Heather and the mom so… just to be on the safe side I will avoid posting anything from their session except to say I think you can look forward to some very nice pictures of our daughter in the near future!

-Jordan

 

 

Nightstand

Posted on by Jordan

About the same time I was deep into the frame project, I started getting really frustrated with the little table thing that I was using for a nightstand.It was basically six boards screwed together, painted and then scuffed up enough to make it seem antique. It wasn’t particularly well made, and didn’t hold up well when Heather dealt with the issue of it being a bit short by piling seven or eight large books on top of it. Wobbly and too small more or less sums up the problems.

At that point I thought, “hey, I have a saw, and at least six boards, I should try making a better one!”

So I cut some boards:

Cutting the groves for the bottom shelf was considerably trickier than I was expecting, but the results were serviceable at least. What I had there was a table that was structurally sound, but wasn’t ever going to pass inspection with Heather to gain entry into our bedroom.

Step two, use some of this extra trim to make the table a little fancier:

A little trim, a little putty, and a lot of sanding and my little table was starting to look promising! All it needed now was a coat of “Heather and Jordan standard black” and it will blend right in! I got somewhat lucky in that it was an incredibly nice weekend, and Heather was away being the guest of honor at her (our?) first baby shower. This left me plenty of time to sand and paint.

There it is, ready for inspection… and it passed! 🙂

After moving a few large stacks of books, there was even a place for it:

As you can see, it even matches the other items in our bedroom! I came to appreciate again the brilliance of Heather’s “buy second hand stuff and repaint it” system, because if I had needed to stain that piece… well there is a lot of putty involved in making that look finished that wouldn’t have really stained correctly. Paint however, paint is forgiving as long as you are willing to do enough sanding. 🙂

 

-Jordan

 

The Frame

Posted on by Jordan

This post is purely shop-project focused, so if you aren’t interested in that, perhaps you would enjoy an essay Heather found. I have spent a lot of time thinking about it as of late, maybe you will find it interesting too: I Don’t Wait Anymore

Ok, on to the project!

I mentioned a few weeks ago that I had managed to sell the idea of buying a saw in order to frame something for the baby’s room. Well I got the saw:

But that means I had to actually try making this frame. To be honest I started feeling rather intimidated the more I thought about it. Intimidation or no, I had this fancy new saw on my bench, and knew I needed to give the frame a shot. Things did not get off to an encouraging start when I flipped a piece of casing end-for-end thinking it would be easier to cut right handed that way… only to realize that it made my cut completely backwards… after I completed the cut.

On the bright side, we had picked out some inexpensive casing, so the replacement board wasn’t a significant portion of the budget 🙂

eight painstakingly double-checked cuts later, and I was ready for the scary part: glue

You can kind of see the guide I made to help keep things square. It didn’t work out as well as I had hoped, but did at least give me something to brace against. I quickly realized that I need some clamps. Wouldn’t need to be anything fancy, but gluing doesn’t work too well when you can’t hold things together with a little pressure.

To that end, I carefully drilled some pilot holes in from the top and bottom sections to let me draw the corners together with a trim screw. My first two corners worked ok, but really should have been counter-sunk. The second two I stepped up to a larger pilot bit, and then free-handed a pseudo-countersink to finish it off, and had really good results. It really helped that the casing was blurring the lines between cardboard and wood, but I was producing respectable corners that were somewhat solid.

The picture above shows right before the last corner, where I may have become a little over-confident and let my screw pull the corner out of alignment at a critical moment. In the end however, it wasn’t so far off, and some putty, sandpaper, and black spray-paint  were next in the plan anyway.

After a few coats of paint, all that was left to do was add some hooks to the top, and double-sided poster hanging strips to the lower edges and we have a fairly nice looking map if I can be so bold:

I won’t say that I found a new hobby in frame-making, but it was a nice change of pace from my normal digital project! 🙂

 

-Jordan

 

State Fair 2012

Posted on by Jordan

Another year at the fair and another failure to capture a picture of noteworthy food on a stick!

The fair featured a whopping fifty-seven items on a stick!

While we didn’t get any pictures of the food on a stick, Heather and I did go to the fair. Not for a real long trip, but long enough to eat some festival type foods and to remember how overwhelming that many people wandering around can be.

They also had a moose made of chocolate:

I mean, that’s worth the price of admission right there! 🙂

In other news this week:

  • I finally fixed the HeatherAndJordan.com front page.
  • Heather took baby pictures for a friend
  • Heather took two-year pictures of a friend’s child
  • I ordered a compound miter saw from Amazon  — best “I can help you with this project if…” deal to date! 🙂
  • Heather was, for the first time 100% sure she felt our baby kick.

 

It’s been a fun week!

-Jordan

Household Projects

Posted on by Jordan

A couple of projects to talk about today, one more urgent than the other:

First up, our oven suffered a burned out heating element:

After a little research I found out this isn’t unheard of, and replacing the element is very simple. The big news here is just that Heather was standing right there when it happened and could shut the oven down before anything too drastic happened. Even then there was more molten metal involved than I like to have in my house.

The next item up I won’t go into much detail about just yet, but I am working up a simple database driven web app to solve a problem for Heather. It will be interesting to see if I can produce something fully featured enough for her to consider using it, but if nothing else it’s an interesting project and I don’t feel like I am reinventing the wheel.

How interesting? Well, it’s build on a Django, Python and MySQL. I have experience in none of those, so step one was just to get them working. My initial plan had been to run my dev environment inside a VMWare player, but I wasted a week trying to get a VM I was happy with and then decided to just run the whole dev environment on my PC. Fun fact, Python guys aren’t that into Windows. I wound up having to manually compile a few things… and then ran smack into the error in this post.

Hopefully I will have an actual demo site up in a few more weeks now that I have the tech stack configured and running.

-Jordan

 

First Aid Kit

Posted on by Jordan

One of the nice things about working with the scouts is that I get frequent reminders of things I should probably be doing. One of those things is “have a first aid kit at home”

We had some stuff, and I have small kits in our cars from a long time ago.

One of the interesting quotes I heard on the subject was from the EMT who provided our basic medical training when I went through the adult leader training almost two years ago. To the best of my memory what he said was “if you have something in your first aid kit, and you don’t know what it is or what it’s for you need to get rid of it” he then went on to recommend you just put together your own kit with only the essentials.

I finally got around to starting on that a few weeks ago:

I mashed together lists from the Red Cross and the Boy Scout Handbook plus a few odds and ends I had heard were important. I still have a few things left to add, and I haven’t figured out the perfect container for this stuff yet, but I am pretty proud of it.

A few notes:

I probably went overboard on the scissors. Those black ones in the picture are emergency room grade trauma sheers, and if the Amazon reviews are to be believed, will hold up to years of cutting off shoes and belts without issue. Ironic I suppose that I went cheap a month back on a saw I hope to use many times, and then spent extra on sheers I hope to never use.

What is a “triangle bandage”? To be honest I didn’t know, despite finding them on nearly every first aid list. A little searching indicated they were incredibly useful, and a must-have in a first aid kit. Well you can see the packs in the above picture, and here is one unpacked:

The material is considerably heavier than just gauze, but still feels like it would absorb liquid if you needed it too. I think the idea is the bandage serves as an outer wrap, considering the first aid kid contains about four different kinds of sterile gauze pack. The package included two safety pins so you can hold in in position once you get something figured out. It most reminds me of a slightly over-sized Scout neckerchief, and I imagine you could use any of the techniques from the Scout manual that called the neckerchief with this. (because even the most prepared former Scout probably isn’t wearing his neckerchief 20 years later)

One more picture to give a sense of scale:

It’s a large bandage! Side note, Heather protested loudly at taking this picture… apparently she feels demonstrating first aid items is too close to needing them… or something, maybe she just thought I was enjoying the whole first aid kit thing a little too much 🙂

-Jordan

Radio Flyer Project

Posted on by Jordan

We have had a wagon buried in the garage for nearly a year now. It was “broken” but I hadn’t taken the time to figure out what it’s problem was.

With the influx of nice weather we have had over the past few days I took the opportunity to dive into the project. The wagon felt really wobbly and clearly had some problems. Initially it looked as though the only issue was four flat tires, and some loose screws.

In the process of resolving those issues it became clear the wagon had bigger issues:

What isn’t clearly shown in the picture is that the bracket holding the rear axle leans slightly towards the front wheels. What is pretty obvious in the picture is that the wagon has been braced and drilled for something else to be attached between that rear axle and the middle of the wagon.

My initial plan involved a 2×4 shaved to the proper angle, some glue, and a big U-bolt. When I was wondering around my local hardware store looking for a U-bolt I found some angle iron intended to be used in building shelving, and realized I could produce something far stronger:

This also meant I needed to buy a hack saw… although, my being always somewhat budget focused meant I got a really cheap one… all the same, what you see in the picture is cut, drilled, bolted, and painted to match the rest of the undercarriage. Not too shabby, and it was fun to actually use my new bench and vice!

On to installation:

Notice any problems? I may have been too optimistic about the reach of those bolts, so back to the hardware store…

Now for a brief tangent, that I feel sort of torn about. I think it’s great that my local mega hardware store stocks things like loose bolts and the like. The problem comes when you need to check out. The poor people manning the register simply aren’t used to dealing with it. I spent over five minutes to check out with $0.50 worth of fasteners. It tried the patience a little.

Ok, so back in the garage with some longer bolts:

Maybe I went a little long this time… at least I didn’t need to make yet another trip to the store.

After putting the wagon back on it’s wheels, I was happy to find that it was really solid. Now the only real concern was the ugly stain on the bed.

Soap and water wasn’t as effective as I had hoped, but it still managed to fade the stain substantially. Makes me wish the factory had put a real sealant down so that things couldn’t soak into the wood grain. Having done what I could, I put the fences back on and it was looking pretty good!

You may be thinking, “but what are they going to do with a wagon?” Well friend, as luck would have it, right before I sat down to write this, Heather arrived home from the store to demonstrate:

Getting a load of groceries up to the third floor isn’t the easiest thing in the word, but the combination of a wagon and the elevator works out pretty well.

(Alternative answer: “What can’t you do with a great wagon like this!?” )

-Jordan

Weekend Thoughts

Posted on by Jordan

Not a whole lot to say this week.

It feels like winter is finally here. Heather has worked hard to fight off any sign of cabin fever by inviting people over at every opportunity.

She entertained a group of women from her office, and then the next night we had a group over from church.

I had hoped to be able to post the updated build of the heatherandjordan.com front page, but I discovered again that CSS hacking is not my calling. I say hacking because my attempts at starting from scratch quickly reminded me that I don’t really have an eye for that kind of design. After having drop[ed back through plan ‘B’ and on to ‘C’ I have managed to hack up a template into something I like. There are just a few more touches I would like to incorporate before it goes live.

In somewhat related news I have had the chance to be part of a team conducting technical interviews at work. I wouldn’t say I am great at it, but it’s nice to feel like I can provide some guidance as to who might be joining my team. At the very least this gets me thinking about my own skill-set. It would appear that I have a very solid technical understanding of my little corner of the IT world. On the other hand, I am painfully aware that I haven’t really done anything interesting for a while.

In theory I can and should be doing a little bit of hobby programming just to keep learning new things, but it takes time and energy that I don’t always want to devote to the task. I think I start to understand why people work on open-source projects though, it lets you poke at problems wildly different than the ones at work.

This kind of loops back around to the web site overhaul, as the hold up is trying to something interesting with an image loading script project, but I spent way too much time in the CSS weeds over the weekend. Hopefully with that done I can dive back into java script and PHP to pound out the rest of this arguably simple feature.

If you have any great ideas for a little programming project that wouldn’t require a thousand hours of developer I might be interested… most of my project ideas suffer death from scope-creep before I have the first line of code saved. 🙂

-Jordan