Posts
Tiny House 7: Insulation and a word about the design
Something I should have mentioned at the beginning of this series: the design of this tiny house is due to David Howard of FirstDay Cottage . My ex-wife and I built one of his house “kits” in Vermont in 2012-2013.
May 31, 2025
Tiny House 6: Sheathing and House Wrap
I continued to install more sheathing boards (1x6 pine t&g) until I ran out of wood about 1/3 of the way through the east roof. Otherwise it’s done. Here’s a partial view of the interior:
May 28, 2025
Tiny House 5: The Work Resumes
I had to stop working on the tiny house at the end of January due to the onset of the rainy season, after a 24 day dry spell. The day before it rained I covered the whole thing with tarps (which are expensive!).
May 9, 2025
Moving from Git to Fossil
This article describes the procedure I used to convert my git repositories to Fossil . Git is a perfectly fine source code manager; it was designed for large projects that have hundreds of contributors, like the Linux kernel. But for small projects git is a bit of overkill, and there are number of things that I find annoying about it.
May 8, 2025
Make Firefox Disable the Screensaver
After switching back to Firefox for Linux Mint (version 135), I noticed right away that it doesn’t disable the screensaver when watching videos (e.g., YouTube). This appears to be an old problem that was never fixed. It’s a confusing problem on Mint with the Mate desktop, because there are two parts of the screensaver settings in Mate:
March 26, 2025
Enlarging Firefox Bookmark Dialog Box
I recently had to stop using Ungoogled Chromium for various reaasons, the main one being that it no longer worked with YouTube, and the fix for that problem broke other web sites. So I reverted back to Firefox, which is fine (mostly). But one annoying problem is that the dialog box for adding a bookmark is very small, showing only about six rows.
March 4, 2025
Setting Default Browser on Linux
I’ve been using Ungoogled Chromium for quite a while now, but some time in the last few days it stopped played YouTube videos successfully. The symptom was that after 19 seconds, the video would stop playing and a spinner would display forever.
February 27, 2025
Tiny House 4: End Walls
I put up the end walls over the last few days, so the framing is done:
January 22, 2025
Tiny House 3: Posts and Rafters
After I finished installing the floor (2x6 tongue and groove pine), I assembled and installed the five bents (a “bent” is the timber framer’s term for a post/rafter assembly). Here is what it looks like now:
January 18, 2025
Tiny House 2: Floor Boards
I spent a few hours yesterday and today installing floor boards. These are 2x6 tongue and groove pine boards that span the 40 inches between the floor beams. I nailed them to the beams with 6d box nails through the tongues. This way the nails are hidden from view. The smaller nails are necessary to keep the tongues from splitting.
January 10, 2025