Whatcha doin????

What could have been a trivial task (removing some nails so I can take some wall studs out) turned out to be more complex than I could have expected.

Most of the nails came out with a little gentle persuasion. One of them required me to hit a pry bar with a hammer to get enough force on it. The final one took things to an extreme. I couldn't get very far underneath it so I needed to use a smaller bar, one that I could hammer under the nail head and then hammer away from the stud. Once I'd got it extracted about 1/4" I could get a bigger bar underneath it, and rained hammer blows on the bar to shift the nail. And shift it did, albeit desperately slowly. Then once it was out a little further I put a 3-foot wrecking bar under it and strained against the bar, only to find I still struggled. I couldn't put my full weight on it, because if it suddenly gave the end of the bar was likely to damage some other things I couldn't move. So I took to hitting the end of the wrecking bar with a hammer, and eventually got it to pry out a bit further. Then I ran out of space to operate the bar, so rested the end on a wood offcut and tried again. I got the nail out but the force it took also moved the wall stud, which then needed a hammer to knock it back into place. This isn't a supporting stud wall but the studs aren't cut with any slack relative to the space.

So all in all it took me over an hour to pull half a dozen nails out. At least now I can take the next steps with that wall.

 

It was their most recent review of ep. 6-9.
These guys are so on point about these things. Their simple inclusion of clips from TNG just destroy everything about Picard's character in the "Picard" series. There is a popular quote out there, possibly coined by them, paraphrased as "{New} Start Trek is being written by people that hate Star Trek."

 

I'll give that a watch once Heard's testimony is concluded. I don't know what it is about writers these days. They grew up on excellent TV, only to write trash? Star Trek, Doctor Who, anything CW...

 

Yep, spot-on in their assessment. Like Doctor Who, I don't know how anyone could enjoy this, or Discovery, or Lower Decks, and I'm guessing Strange New Worlds isn't going to be any better. At least in Discovery, they had the mirror universe stuff in seasons 1 - 2 and Georgiou was worth watching... If you could get past crying magic space Jesus.

 

I don't know, I've told people that shows are fine only for them to tell me that the language is awful, and I didn't notice. Will have to look into Goliath.

 

A big rearrangement. I started to reclaim a spare bedroom and turn it into a space I can set up my laptop on a decent sized desk. My desk that has been in the attic in pieces is in a prtty sorry state but it's a clean flat surface and it's better than perching on a tiny desk where I was before. So now I not only have more space to work but I also have more access to the wall in the next room to receive some attention.

This is part of our current living space so it's not a full-on wrecking job, Ijust neeed to pull the baseboard off, remove a few inches of the lath and plaster wall (carefully, so I don't end up with piles of dust in the carpet or floating about the room), spray some foam into the gaps in the wall where the floor joists sit, and then prepare to spray insulation into the wall cavity below.

I'll need to prepare something to pin back into place to cover over the gaps. It doesn't need to be pretty because the baseboards will cover it, it just needs to be roughly the same thickness as the lath and plaster I'm removing. Then I can rent a doodad to blow insulation, blow it into the downstairs wall cavity, pin the replacement board into place, put the baseboard back on, and then spray into the upstairs cavity from the attic. Then I can set the furniture in that room back against the wall where it needs to be.

 

I managed to get the baseboard off without breaking anything. At least nothing that mattered - I cut a cable that wasn't connected at the other end because it was in the way but that was all. Then I got the bottom few inches of lath and plaster gently pulled down and everything cleaned up. There were gaps in the concrete blocks, as I expected, where the joists rest in the wall. There are a bunch of other gaps too but they are much smaller. A single can of spray foam filled all the gaps by the joists except for one - I ran out of foam just as I started to fill it.

Now I just need to decide whether to run a new piece of cable from that room back to the breaker panel. It would be nice to get a few sockets off a single generic circuit and at least make a start on a dedicated circuit for that bedroom. I already have dedicated circuits for three bedrooms, although two of them are gutted rooms and only have a single socket on their dedicated circuits so far. It looks like I should be able to make a simple cable run betweeen the joists of the adjacent room, which will make it relatively easy to feed it into this bedroom. I just need to figure how to feed it through the corners of the bay, where there are extra thick wall studs and floor joists in awkward places.

Maybe next weekend I can rent the doodad that blows the insulation. That would be cool.

 

Fun With Fishtape.

It took a few goes to feed a fishtape from the guest room all the way under our room into the cavity at the far end behind the closet but after several attempts I got it, and pulled a string back so I can use it to pull a cable back to the breaker panel.

I think I've also figured out how to hang a ceiling fan in our living room. It is a temporary measure until I gut the room but that's going to be a while into the future.

 

The plan to hang the fan worked nicely. The fan is hung and wired. I ran out of daylight so didn't connect the other end of the cable. I can do that tomorrow when turning off the lighting circuit doesn't leave me working by the light of a head lamp.

 

Watching the geneva convention violating cross/redirect of Amber heard.

 

Had to get a new phone. Fortunately almost all my data, websites, and apps were able to transfer. And since I got a newer version of the same brand of phone (the old one was a Samsung Galaxy A20. The new one is a Samsung Galaxy S21+) it even ordered everything like my old phone. However, now I have the fun job of reentering all my passwords. And if I don't remember them, which I often don't, I have to change them. Fun, fun, fun. At least this new phone is working MUCH better than the old one.

 

Get yourself one of them password managers.

 

This morning I got the ceiling fan connected to the main lighting circuit.

This afternoon I decided to take down a light fitting that my wife and I have never liked. I was wary of just what I'd find behind it. It turned out that removing the fitting was easy enough but for some reason whoever put the back box in used both nails and screws to secure it. Pulling out two 3" nails from inside a 4" diameter metal box was interesting.

The back box was secured to a piece of 2x4 nailed between the ceiling joists. Except it was nailed from the far ends, which I couldn't get at without pulling a big chunk of ceiling down. So I had to cut it with my sabre saw and flex it until it came away from the nails. The short end was tricky, I had to use the long end and hit it with a hammer to get any leverage behind it, but eventually got there. It was interesting doing all that through a 4" diameter hole in a compressed cardboard ceiling tile without damaging it.

The wiring isn't as grim as I feared it might be. I've got a skanky piece of ungrounded cable that's connected to knob and tube that lurks above the upper ceiling. What I'll need to do is much like I did in the room where I just fitted the fan - drill through the upper ceiling, feed a fish tape to a known spot and then pull a new cable and connect it all up. I'll just tape over the ends of the knob and tube because there's one more fixture I need to replace before I can disconnect it completely.

At present I am feeling optimistic that I can get another ceiling fan fitted without too much ugly work. Having only gone to the hardware store yesterday to get a support brace and a ceiling fan I can see myself going back tomorrow to buy the exact same thing again.

 

That's an idea I'll have to look into. For now I've got all the passwords back in the new phone. And on top of it all, the new phone has them all synced in with my biometrics so whenever I try to sign in all I have to do is use my thumbprint (either thumb, I have both in there.)

 

My concern with doing away with passwords and multi-code security is the potential for it to be broken. I remember a while ago there was a legal case (I think in the US but can't be sure) where apparently law enforcement could force someone to unlock a phone if the security was based on biometrics but not if it was based on a password that the person knew. Apparently the legal argument was something along the lines that disclosing a password could be considered self-incrimination but a biometric is based on something a person is rather than something a person knows and therefor wasn't covered.

Of course if a hacker is able to steal biometrics you can never change it, so they are you for as long as they want to be.

Maybe what we all need is something like a chip implant. It could be somewhere convenient, like the right hand or the forehead. We'd need a mark as well, so the person with the scanner would know where to scan. Nothing could go wrong with such an idea, could it?

 

In other news I got a brace mounted to a support inside the ceiling. I'm not thrilled with it, but getting it out now would be as tricky as getting it in turned out to be. The problem was a good old fashioned lack of space - doing all my work through a 4" hole in the ceiling has many limitations. But it's there now and when I pull down on it I can feel the entire ceiling flex a little rather than just the brace, which is much as it was in the adjacent room. So it should be strong enough to hold a fan. I got a nice new piece of wire to feed it, and got the old wires taped off and tucked out of the way. Now I just need to run a new piece of cable to where the switch is and join it all together. That will mean the kitchen ceiling fan is the only thing left that's connected to the nasty knob and tube wiring. As soon as I can replace that wiring I can disconnect the far end of the knob and tube and then, as I renovate the rooms we're currently using, I can physically remove it whenever it suits me.

My wife and I are both really looking forward to not having any live knob and tube wiring in the house any more. It's not a big deal having a single light fitting connected to it but it will be good to know it's all disconnected, even if only because it means we know that everything is properly grounded.