DIY – Page 5 – frans goes blog

Bored of Verdana

Staring at this blog numerous times per day, I am starting to feel it needs another facelift at some point. But since I do not have the time to start tweaking with the WPress theme frameworks, child themes etc., I just try a minor tweak — changing the typeface and the character spacing a bit towards more spacey and readable (I wish) format. Any comments?

Building media room ventilation

This is probably the ugliest cooler casing ever, but when finished and properly installed, it should help with the fresh air flow to my media room in cellar. (Built around SilverStone FM121 cooler fan, some wooden and aluminium parts added, fitted together with liberal use of Super Epoxy…)

Terrace and pergola project finished

Last summer, I wrote about our terrace and pergola project; and in May this year I mentioned that we are continuing with the paint layers next. After that, most of May and June free time was spent adding a couple of layers of paint to every surface of the construction. The rafters (or laths) supporting the transparent roofing were painted while still on the ground. The transparent roofing was made from Icopal Fastlock Uni — a strong polycarbonate sheet material, which has UV filtering top layer and a 10 year guarantee. However, I think “Fastlock” is a bit exaggeration on the fixing mechanism: it took a couple of days of dedicated pushing, pulling and nailing to get the thin, 20 cm sheets connected and then solidly fixed to the rafters. The outcome was nice, though. The roof looks pretty neutral (and it is a must in a climate like we have in Finland). Here are some photos:

Freshly painted terrace, doing some washing:

Fixing the “fastlocks”:

The finished terrace & pergola:

You can see the entire story of the project in photos via this link.

Pergola project continues…

As you might remember, I spent the entire last summer vacation building a terrace and pergola into our garden. As these things take their time, this job continues this summer, including some additional constructions to support vines and other plants. The entire thing also needs to be painted (you cannot paint fresh preservative-treated wood as it contains too much water — now, as it is one year later, it is possible). We will be using Valtti Non-Slip from Tikkurila for the floor and Tikkurila Aitamaali for the upper parts. More photos in Flickr:

Working on a wardrobe

Being a carpenter is not really my forte, but having a house of your own sort of comes with this sort of things. We had had the elements for ages, but now, during the holidays was the once-in-a-winter chance of putting the damned wardrobe together. Laura had the basic functional ideas, like combining Elfa shelving and drawer storage elements together with the sliding doors framework that was manufactured by Kirena. There is a surprising number of measurements, drill holes and other details you can get wrong in a simple piece of furniture like this one. But this is ready now — after just two days of work. (Only one similar one left to go…)

Experiment with a lambskin, a swing and a kid

An example what you might come up with, when you have the Holiday season and you need to invent something (anything) to keep the toddler (and yourself) entertained:

(sorry, Luka…)

Terrace and pergola project

This summer has mostly been spent in the garden. Our small terrace and pergola project proved to be much more extensive than I thought in the beginning. The part that took longest was making the foundations. It might be that we were a bit overcautious in terms of frost isolation, but it would had been shame if the entire construction would tilt to its side after the first proper winter. I think we moved more than eight tons of earth away Continue reading “Terrace and pergola project”

DYI: home sensor networks

This is probably the most tightly budgeted version of moving towards a home sensor network. After comparing few real IP network solutions (and after testing one in our research project), I decided to stay away from them and rely on cheap consumer electronics to do those individual tasks that we need. Thus, to measure temperatures and moistures from various parts of our house, I got a weather centre from Clas Ohlson (a Nordic electronics chain) and few extra wireless sensor units. This particular model (UPM, model number 36-2384) can take four external sensors, all equipped with temperature and humidity sensors. And how to know what is the temperature in sauna? Clas Ohlson comes to help, again. Just pick up a wireless pair of oven thermometers (model number 34-6723), and there you go. And you have various alarm functions build in, too. But no centralised controls, full log files, remote controlling or other such sweet IT things, of course.

Vista sleep and power save states

I had long wondered about the Vista power save schemes, and about sleep state — particularly that it did not exist; even when you tried to force the computer into sleep or hibernate, it would just wake up immediately, after a couple of seconds of flicker in screen. This weekend I finally got a half an hour and looked into this, and the problem was in BIOS settings. The default BIOS power save setting in most motherboards/BIOSes is S1 (POS, Power-On-Suspend), and that does not work with Vista. Vista expects the setting S3, which you need to set by pressing Del or F8 key during the power-up sequence, then use keyboard-only to navigate to the “Power” BIOS settings, and change S1 into S3; then press F10 or similar to save settings and exit/reboot. This was the way for me at least to get this damned Vista machine finally to get some sleep. For more, see e.g. these pages:

http://www.mydigitallife.info/2007/10/30/missing-or-not-found-allow-hybrid-sleep-in-vista-power-options-advanced-settings/
“Set up S3 sleep state in Vista for significant power savings” (http://articles.techrepublic.com.com/5100-10877_11-6185330.html)

Topfield recordings into DivX

One of the essential utilities in the media ecology of our home is the PRV — personal video recorder with search functions and a hard disk. We have the Topfield TF5100PVR, suitable for the DVB-T standard we use here in Finland. Since ‘Toppy’ has a hard disk, but no CD/DVD burner, the media archiving has its challenges, though. I think I have now finally figured a process to transfer Topfield recordings into DivX files for archiving and sharing:

use Altair or similar program to transfer the .REC files from Topfield into a personal computer (a short, high quality USB cable is a must for this)
use ProjectX to demux the .REC stream into audio and video components. At this point it is also best to use ProjectX to edit the recording, trim it of extra materials etc. (More instructions in Finnish: http://fi.wikibooks.org/wiki/Topfield_TF5X00/Tallennusten_hallinta — project home page: http://sourceforge.net/projects/project-x)
Now you have .M2V video and .MP2 audio files of the recording, and these need to be combined into MPEG-2 before it can be compressed further. I tried several solutions, but the only that worked was DVDAuthorGUI program, which takes m2v and mp2 as sources for a DVD project; after saved to a disk, go to VIDEO_TS subfolder, and identify a .VOB file that contains the sound and video of your recording. (It might be necessary to use VLC media player to see the file contents http://www.videolan.org/vlc/.) DVDAuthorGUI is here: http://download.videohelp.com/liquid217/dvdauthorgui.p and good (albeit Finnish) instructions here: http://fin.afterdawn.com/artikkelit/arkisto/dvd_authorointi_page_3.cfm — I tried also to use Nero for making .vob files, but could not get the audio in and synced.
After this, it is only one stop away from DivX, for which you need a tool like Dr. DivX: http://labs.divx.com/DrDivXDownload — the point of DivX encoding is that it provides a rather high-quality compression of video recording, and there are many DVD players that support playing DivX files (you should check the supported codec versions though, and update your player firmware when necessary). You only need the .vob file as the source file for Dr. DivX, and can discard all other files from the DVDAuthorGUI folders.
The output from Dr. DivX should now be the .divx file that you can use. Enjoy! (Thanks for guys at DVDPlaza.fi and AfterDawn.com for tips!)