Posts
Making and installing beams
The last week and half has been taken up with making the floor beams and installing them. The beams in this house are 15 foot long sandwiches made from two 2x10s with a 2x4 nailed in between them. Our house has 22 of these beams on the first floor, so there was a lot of fabrication to be done. It was a rainy week and we didn’t have a sheltered work area near the house site, so we took a couple of days to disassemble a 22x14 hoop greenhouse down by the road and move it up close to the house site. This gave us a good dry place to build and store beams.
June 11, 2012
Trenches and pipes and septic tank
Before we could make any progress on the house this week, we had to work on getting the utility pipes up the hill from the old house near the road to the new house site 300 feet up the hill. The excavator dug the trench a while back, which then got filled with pipes. We laid down the green (SDR-35) septic drain pipe ourselves, with cleanouts every 80 feet. Our electrician laid down the pipes for the electric service, phone, and future fiber and cable. (We don’t have fiber or cable in this part of the Vermont, but we’re hoping it will arrive within the next couple of years and wanted to plan for it.
June 2, 2012
Sill plates and foundation mistakes
Our first full day of doing our own work on the house involved installing sill plates:
May 26, 2012
First wood delivery and tarp management
A week ago our first load of wood from FirstDay showed up. Because we’re within 100 miles of them, we’re getting two or three deliveries rather than one huge one. This load had enough material to build the floors and walls. The truck was fairly large and wouldn’t have been able to turn around at our house site, which is about 300 feet up a driveway from the road. So the driver unloaded the wood using a cute little three-wheeled forklift that was carried on the back of the truck:
May 25, 2012
Foundation
Getting the foundation installed was a pretty stressful job. Nearly all of the work had to be hired out to other people, and we spent a lot of time being the general contractors: lots of phone calls, scheduling work around the many dependencies, etc. This foundation required extra care because our hillside has a very high water table. So we spent lots of money on crushed stone to be used liberally under and around the foundation.
May 18, 2012
FirstDay Cottage under way
Last summer we had planned to start building a new FirstDay Cottage kit on a rural piece of land in central Vermont. The plans were halted by hurricane Irene, which blew in the day after we were supposed to start digging the foundation. The foundation never happened, and by the time the roads in our part of Vermont were fixed, it was too late to start digging or building. So we had to put off the building until this year, after mud season.
May 11, 2012
Downloading / backing up Gmail messages by date range
I currently use fetchmail to download my Gmail email via POP3 to my laptop, where I read it with a text-mode email client called sup . But for a couple of months back in 2009, I was in the middle of a cross-country move and temporarily switched to using the Gmail web UI. Then when I switched back to using fetchmail, it wasn’t able to read those two months’ worth of email, which remained missing until today.
August 18, 2011
Linux Mint / Ubuntu tweaks
Each time I install Linux Mint on a new machine, or upgrade an installation, I have to perform a set of tweaks to get the system to look and behave the way I want. After doing these tweaks yet again over the weekend, I decided to write them down for posterity.
April 27, 2011
Extracting a subset of pages from a PDF document
For an upcoming plane trip, I wanted to extract one chapter from an Intel IA32 Architecture Software Developer manual for reading on my Kindle. In the past, I would have used pdftk for this purpose, but this is an old, unsupported tool that cannot handle the AESV2 encryption used in Intel’s manuals. I then tried to use the Multivalent tools , which supposedly contain various PDF manipulation tools, but this package seems to have suffered from software rot, and the supplied .jar file no longer contains the necessary classes.
January 21, 2011
Reading non-DRM ebooks using the Amazon Kindle app for Android
[Update: According to recent comments (thanks!) the procedure described below no longer works and there is apparently no workaround.] The new Amazon Kindle app for Android stores its books in the “kindle” directory on the phone’s SD card. I naively assumed that I could copy any non-Amazon but Kindle-compatible books into that directory and have the app recognize them. I tried this with a mobipocket Jane Austen collection (a .prc file) that works just fine on the Kindle, but the Android app crashed immediately after display the book’s title and author.
June 30, 2010