Finally managed to get at the cavity on the other side of the window I was fighting with the other day. I had to cut it away using a variety of tools, making sure I could cut enough to provide access to the space to spray foam but without trashing any blades designed for cutting wood by mashing them against brick. Once I'd managed to cut away enough of the wood - I couldn't just remove the piece because it went behind wall units and I didn't really want to deal with having to take those off the walls - I was able to spray another can of foam into the cavity. Hopefully it will really start to make a difference to the temperature in that room. I've got another double window to deal with, with presumably one cavity either end and something else - I have no idea what - in the middle. Hopefully it's nothing too ugly, although from the icy temperatures in the unit below the window I'm expecting to find something pretty ugly there. I have another five cans of foam, so hopefully that will be enough. If needs be the hardware store is only a couple of miles away - I can get more foam!
Not a gamer, but have recently gotten into NVIDIA (puny GTX 1650) cards for video editing, which my 300 watt system can handle with onboard memory at 12gigs. Awesome stuff, and I can only imagine the capabilities of those higher cards. Too uncoordinated and impatient for games. A friend in Cal, using a water-cooled gaming pc runs a coil through his tropical fish tank. Another world. Also, VR seems elementary, as yet, but what potential for, well... fun.
VR will be great when it matures more. Personally, I'm waiting for holodecks. Right now though, RT is A+ where it's supported and makes sense to run. No water cooling here though: all air.
Today I got to play Fun With Wiring. I decided I want to get a temporary power socket in the room I've been working on lately. I will probably want to put an electric bar heater in there to keep the chill off during the winter and would really rather not have one of my long heavy extension cords tied up. A light would be really useful in there as well. So I figured I'd run a new piece of cable to a switch, then run a piece of 12/3 from the switch to a light fitting, then run 12/2 from the light fitting to the temporary socket. It's tricky because I have one wall still in place with no more than 3/4" featherboards between it and an uneven concrete block wall, so running cables through that wall was interesting. Then getting cables across the ceiling was also interesting, and ended up with me pulling down a few ceiling tiles and making a slightly bigger hole in the ceiling where the existing knob-and-tube wires poked through. Poking a cable clearly wasn't going to happen as it kept getting caught on stuff so I wheeled out my fish tape, which really came into its own. For the second cable pull I had to undo everything and flip the tape over because the head of it was snagging on something inside the ceiling cavity. Flipping it over worked very well. Now I have the piece of 12/3 in place, the last piece of 12/2 in place and all I need is to patch another piece of 12/2 into a nearby junction box and join it all together. That last bit should be easy enough, I'll just need to remember I've potentially got a constant 600W draw on that circuit, if I need to run the air compressor or shop vac on it. It should cope with it all - I'm using 12ga cable so I can draw 20A if I need to, I just need to be aware. I stopped work because it was getting increasingly tedious going endlessly up and down stairs poking cable, pulling, poking, pulling etc, and having to work by the light of a battery powered worklight. It's a decent light, it's just a hassle to keep carrying it around with me. Tomorrow's fun is wondering which of my offcuts will reach from the switch location to the junction box and getting it all together. If anyone hears a loud bang and a bright light, it might just be me getting something wrong....
When we had a guy come in to sort out our breaker box situation - we had two electricity supplies, two breaker panels etc and wanted everything consolidated, he found a particularly interesting piece of wiring. As he pulled stuff out there was a shower of sparks, he jumped back and said "I got tickled". Not how I'd have put it. It turned out there was a particularly weird circuit that bridged both panels. I knew there was something a little odd going on but had never managed to fully trace what that particularly surprise turned out to be. Thankfully now it's long since gone.
I got some more of my room dismantled. Needless to say there were lots of construction grade nails used to hold together something that was little more than some trim masquerading as a cupboard. I even managed to preserve most of the wood I dismantled, and have one full cupboard removed from the wall. Tomorrow I can get the next one off, and get at another piece of window trim.
Been catching up on the ole Milton Friedman. Happy to report that people listened ... err, nevermind.
Next thing you know, you'll be reading Blackstone, Locke, Bonhoeffer, and Plato... C'mon, man. And if any of my UK brethren are unfamiliar with the greatest two modern philosophers, you need to get up to speed on the now in syndication only "Calvin & Hobbes", or with the current "Pearls Before Swine" comics, in which all truth outside of Holy Writ is indeed revealed.
You know I heard about this guy who wrote a book about a republic, and he pitted a dude who loved crates against a guy who fancied himself a 'Thrasymachus' -- clearly an alt-right pseudo macho Nietzchean wannabe. I don't want to imply any person I mention is a prophet, but I do often come back to the thought: isn't it interesting how we read the Bible and with the clarity of hindsight and a narrative that makes it obvious, we question the stupidity of the people who ignored their prophets, and yet that unfortunate reality has never stopped repeating, even up to the present day. If we were to rip Friedman out of time and transport him from the 60s and 70s into any of the last few years, the man would still be on point (of course the man would be considered a raging racist today for daring to mention such things as 'color blindness').
Verily forsooth the truthfulness strong in you is math and the reality of the human condition= economics when I taught business law and ethics in a local MBA program years ago, the class almost died at the idea of Friedman, fully embraced Mill, thought Kant was an utter fool, and really lived circular race and gender economic theories ie “it takes a village as long as I decide who gets to be in the village”
I find it quite interesting that so many people are happy to accept the concepts of supply and demand when it comes to the price of a book or a pizza but flip the monetary equation around, present the concept that instead of a pizza costing $20 a dollar is worth 1/20 of a pizza, and show that what we call inflation is merely a shift in supply and demand for these green bits of paper (i.e. the dollar that was once worth 1/20 of a pizza is now worth 1/22 of a pizza) and they struggle to accept the concept. When you put stock market "gains" in terms of how many pizzas were invested compared to how many pizzas were returned (or indeed using some other non-monetary baseline) it can be quite interesting. And then the comparison that an ounce of gold bought a decent toga in Roman times and buys a decent suit in today's times. It's held its value so much better than random bits of paper deemed to have value by government diktat. Interestingly even the push for a $15 minimum wage has some kinda-sorta merit. I gather the minimum wage in 1964 was $1.25/hour, or five quarters. Five quarters from 1964 (the 90% silver ones) would be worth around $22 today. Just another example of government doing what government does best, destroying value every which way while crowing about what a good job they are doing.
I got some more of my room taken apart today. It was an exercise in frustration, lateral thinking and creative use of expletives to remove one single unit from the wall. It was held in place by two screws but undoing the screws left it wiggly but not free. Thence followed an extended period of ripping apart everything around it trying to figure out what was holding it in place. Eventually I found the offending screws but there was no way I could get to them, so I cut them with a carbide oscillating blade. Finally I could get the unit off the wall. Since it was off I figured I might as well take the rest of the trim off the wall. This evening I took apart a load of boxing from the corner of the wall and ceiling on the adjacent wall. I'll need to have that removed so I can get the next wall unit off, which I need to get at the window trim. I really didn't think I'd have to dismantle the entire room just to get the trim off the windows, but there you go. At least I can reuse the wall units, and much of the wood will no doubt provide useful fuel to a friend's workshop. I just wish there was a market for used nails, I have quite a collection of them.
Perhaps today will be the day the last of the wall units I need to remove actually gets removed. It's really handy having the new light I rigged up. Previously I pretty much had to stop work at 4:30 but now I can keep going as long as I want. Which I guess is a mixed blessing. With any luck the wall unit will come away from the wall nice and cleanly. At least now I've got a good idea of how whoever put in this stuff held it all together. The answer is simple - nails, and lots of them. Why use a small pin when you can use half a dozen construction grade nails, right?
The wall unit is down. Not very many expletives were used to achieve this. I've started to remove sections of the featherboards but fear I may need a little more dismantling to get at everything I'll need access to. Perhaps that can be tomorrow's job. Having removed the wall unit, a lot of boxing and framing material around it, and a chunk of drywall, I can now mostly get at the spaces around the windows. This window is more like I was expecting, which hopefully means a single can of foam will fill everything I need. Removing framing over this unit was easy - I figured I didn't need to preserve short pieces of old 2x4 so just ripped through it with my sabre saw. Then I could use a pry bar to get the ends away, and get at the nicer wood that they were nailed to. I currently have two large bags of drywall scraps that probably weigh about 70-80 pounds each and a bag of wood scraps destined for a friend's workshop that weighs about 50 pounds. The drywall will have to wait until my next run to the landfill, and I'll ask my friend when he can collect the wood scraps. He burns them in his otherwise unheated workshop. Over the next few days I need to dismantle a little more trim, then rip some more featherboards off the wall, then I can get busy spraying foam into cavities and liberally using cement to fill gaps in the brickwork. Even just stuffing a handful of fiberglass into a gap in the brickwork I found has made it feel warmer in there already. The thermometer indicated the temperature rose a couple of degrees even as it stayed around freezing outside. Hopefully a more permanent fix with cement and concrete will really make things better. I now have three matching wall units sitting on the floor. I hope they will fit in the space I have in mind for them in my workshop in the basement. They will come in handy down there.
If the end result is ever achieved it will certainly be a house that's cheaper to heat than the one I moved into nearly six years ago. A strict like-for-like comparison right now isn't possible because the heating loop in an entire section of the house is drained (and obviously so much depends on outside temperatures, which I'm not measuring in my heating oil tracking) but so far heating oil usage is down something like 30% from when I started. Before I drained the heating loops it didn't make a whole lot of difference - less than 10% - when the section of the house we're currently using had the thermostat set to 45 degrees just to stop stuff from freezing. I only hope I actually get to see the end result - my standard response to people asking when I expect to finish is "hopefully before I die". At least now I've got one room finished so I have an idea in my head what it will look like, one day....