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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…)

diNovo Mini with Mac Mini

Bluetooth technology is still flaky and connections tend to break up, pairings get lost, etc. I decided to move the Logitech diNovo Edge keyboard to the downstairs ‘media cellar’, primarily due to size issues. The replacement is another diNovo, but the Mini version this time. Both of these keyboards actually run pretty well with Mac Mini, even if they are not formally supported. diNovo Mini did provoke a “keyboard not recognized” dialog, and Mac wanted me to press the key next to right from the left shift (which did nothing). But canceling that, you get a very nice, super-small bluetooth keyboard for the living-room use. The ‘ClickPad’ mouse replacement doubles as a four-directional cursor key, but the most important feature is that the entire pad is a button, so that you can pretty much use the system with one hand, guiding the mouse with your thumb and pressing it achieves mouse clicks with the same finger. Very nice! On the other hand, downstairs, I had much more trouble to get diNovo Edge to keep up its connection with the Vista OS over the bluetooth link.

Streaming media into PS3

I have made various attempts to get media streaming in our house from a server in cellar to clients set up in various other rooms. So far the only system that has really worked well has been the Squeezebox (Logitech, previously Slimdevices). They have dedicated server software that runs very well in a Linux server and integrates perfectly with the well designed player, both over Wi-Fi as well as Ethernet. Otherwise, no luck. Now, after investing to a Sony PlayStation 3, I got dedicated enough to try and solve the media streaming issues to really use this high-powered gaming console as a network-enabled home media center. It turned out that it was finally impossible to get PS3 to connect to anything without investing to more hardware: our home network has been build gradually, connecting piece to piece, and universal plug-and-play and other necessary media discovery protocols did not work if PS3 was connected wirelessly into a separate Wi-Fi router, and that was connected to another ADSL-modem-router (plus external switch) combo that I had piled up in our network cabinet. After getting rid of the old ADSL-modem and Wi-Fi box, and instead getting a combined Wi-Fi-modem-router device (Telewell TW-EA514, pictured), the problems appear to be solved. Now PS3 can at least see the Vista machine downstairs having a Windows Media Player 11, and connect to media shared through it. Several steps were, nevertheless, yet required before anything else beside music files could be seen through the media player. I am still unsure whether the settings in Control Panel/Network and Sharing Center/Media Sharing, or the paths added into the Media Player Library, or paths in the Windows Media Center finally did it, but now I seem to be able to access all my media also through the PS3. (Oops, while writing this, Vista crashed, lets see whether anything at all works after this…) Only thing I can say is that the era of effortless, transparent home networking and media device interoperability is not yet here.

Autumn vacation

I have been spending this week with my family, after a few months of busy working and traveling schedule. It has been mostly raining (slowing down some of the gardening work), but this has allowed me to spend more time with my son (pictured). Luka is growing very fast, running around and learning new words and tricks every day. Glad we got these few days together to learn to know each other a bit better (last autumn, when he just had born, I was all the time traveling around the world, and promised to change the situation this year).

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”

Finncon lecture on the futures of living

I have shared my Finncon lecture about the science and fiction (fiction mostly) of houses and living in Slideshare (in Finnish only):

Mayra Tulevaisuuden Talo

view presentation (tags: finncon08 finncon2008 finncon)

PS. You can follow the Finncon photo stream in Flickr from here.

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.