Posts
Tools for housebuilding
We started building our house two summers ago using the tools we already had lying around: some hammers, a primitive Makita chop saw, and an aging cordless drill and circular saw set. We also borrowed an old and somewhat weak table saw from a neighbor. Pretty quickly we realized that we needed better tools to make the building process go more quickly. This was important because building in Vermont is a race against time and the weather: the house had to be closed in before winter.
March 5, 2014
Using integrated card reader in Linux Mint on ThinkPad T61
The ThinkPad T61 has a built-in SD card reader that does not work with Linux Mint 15 out of the box. When you insert an SD card, dmesg reports thousands of errors looking like this: [166065.569415] mmcblk0: error -84 transferring data, sector 1, nr 7, cmd response 0x900, card status 0x0 The solution, which was given at the end of this forum discussion , is to install the libccid package, using this command:
February 21, 2014
Plumbing headaches
The electrical work we did last summer was fun, but the plumbing was not. Electrical wiring is pretty simple, for the most part. If you can keep a mental model of the three conductors (hot, neutral, and ground) and make sure they’re always connected properly, you’ve got 90% of it. And there aren’t that many different types of wires and conduits, at least in our house. But plumbing is a different beast.
February 5, 2014
Radon mitigation
Last summer we borrowed a radon tester from a friend and left it in the basement for a few weeks. We didn’t expect a problem because the old house, 400 feet away, had pretty low levels of radon in its basement. So we were alarmed to see the levels rising to around 18 pCi/L, more than four times higher than the amount the EPA says is its “action level ”. We bought our own radon tester and it confirmed the high readings.
December 16, 2013
Kitchen and living room lighting
We spent a lot of time and effort figuring out what kind of lighting we wanted for the kitchen and living room, the 15x30 one story “great room” with cathedral ceilings.
December 13, 2013
Electrical wiring
It’s been a long time since I wrote any updates about our house. We’re finally slowing down after a long push all summer to make the house habitable inside. We worked 12 hour days for months to get the electricals, plumbing, cabinets, countertops and shelving installed. It’s mostly done now and we’re able to relax a little and enjoy the house and its surroundings.
October 30, 2013
Making window sills
The rough openings around the windows are ugly and need to be trimmed, so we’ve started that project in a serious way this past week. We have 35 windows in the house, so this is going to be a lot of work. Each window takes anywhere from five to eight boards to trim it, depending on which wall of the house it’s on and how oversized the rough opening is. We’re using leftover pine sheathing to make the boards, and each board has to be cut and ripped to a custom size (because of slight variations in rough opening size). We’re also sanding each visible surface and applying a couple of coats of PolyWhey for moisture protection.
May 13, 2013
Applying polyurethane to the floors
After we sanded the floors, we were getting ready to apply the satin PolyWhey , a whey-based low-toxicity polyurethane. But we were delayed due to injuries, so two kind friends (thanks, E. and D.!) applied three coats of the stuff over a period of a couple of weeks. It looked great, but we decided to add an extra coat for better longevity, so we did that ourselves.
May 13, 2013
Fixing high CPU usage in Linux Mint 13 on ThinkPad X200s
One of the first things I noticed on the X200s after installing Mint 13 was that after logging in or after a suspend/resume, CPU usage seemed too high. The most immediate symptoms were that the mouse and keyboard were very slow to respond. The top command showed that various processes with kworker in their names were responsible for hogging nearly all of the CPU. This high CPU usage would continue for a minute or two before subsiding, but would reoccur at unpredictable times.
May 13, 2013
Fixing unresponsive wifi on ThinkPad X200s running Linux Mint 13
I upgraded the OS on a ThinkPad X200s from Linux Mint 10 to Linux Mint 13 (which is based on Ubuntu 12.04), and noticed that the wifi adapter no longer worked properly. It was able to obtain an IP address from a router, but attempts to send or receive data failed. This problem, as usual, is discussed on various forums , and is due to a bug in Intel’s wifi driver.
April 19, 2013