It looks like the three wall units will fit almost perfectly into the space I have in mind for them. I have a fourth unit but it's wide and shallow, and won't fit with the others. It's a shame I don't have four the same but I can always build a few simple shelves to go in the remaining space. So far today I've done a lot of clearing up of messes, and also executed some violence against pipework. The old cast iron pipes that once fed an upstairs radiator needed to come out because they were so close to the wall they wouldn't allow space for enough insulation. I tried to use a little finesse with a pipe wrench to take things apart into sections but it soon because clear the very old sealant in the junctions wasn't going to give up its grip. So the next step was to resort to violence. A sabre saw blade designed for "thick metal", acquired from the hardware store a couple of hours ago, ripped through the pipe like it was barely there. I wasn't sure how effective it would be against elderly cast iron but needn't have worried. The spare blade I bought will most likely remain a spare for a time. Although the blade ripped through the pipe it also ripped through my battery pretty well too. When I swapped out the fading battery for one of my Flexvolt doodads (60V/2Ah or 20V/6Ah) the blade flew through the pipes again. The sabre saw is one of the tools I periodically consider upgrading to the 60V line, but don't really use it enough to warrant the expense. So now the pipe is out of the way I can continue ripping apart the wood that's behind the pipe. One pleasant surprise, given how whoever constructed this abomination refused to use a single trim nail when they had an apparently endless supply of construction grade nails, was that a piece of trim between the sink and the underside of the windowsill came away fairly easily. I was wondering just how ugly a job of nailing it had been done but got my pry bar behind it and gently pried it, only to find it came away without any effort at all. Not a single nail held it in place, nothing more than a little friction between the trim underneath it and the underside of the window sill. Why couldn't they have done more work like that?
Bad news: Found a lump of coal in my Christmas stocking (political revenge). Good news: Added to the wood burner, the coal burned hot and all night long (low sulfur). Nice of Santa to clean the chimney.
Yesterday's final hurrah was to cut and rip some more featherboards off from around the window. This window is much more like I expected, wood trim nailed to the sides of the brickwork, with air gaps. I can't see daylight through the gaps, which is a nice surprise, but there is a bit of a draft coming in. I'm going to take the day off today but the next step is to to chisel away enough that I can spray foam into the cavity, then fill the gaps. It's been quite an adventure getting this far but it will be good to block some of the worst of the cold air coming in. In the depths of winter the temperature in the cupboard under the sink can literally drop to freezing and sometimes a little lower still. That shouldn't be happening indoors, so I'll be happy to get that resolved. It's silly when you have to leave cupboard doors open to make sure pipes don't freeze. Given how cold it gets under there, hopefully fixing this one will save a good chunk of change on heating going forward.
You got the coal because I knew you could use it. Not because you are on the naughy list. (The naughty list got switches this year.) Incidentally, you're welcome for the chimney cleaning. I end up doing a lot of that. Occupational hazzard. SANTA
Even though it's Christmas and I'm taking a day off from the heavy duty wrecking it seemed a shame not to do anything home improvement related. I just fitted a door sweep to one of our external doors. We had a bit of a draft coming in under the door, and now we don't. It's nice to have a quick job I can do while lunch cooks.
Are you familiar with SSD brands and what's good? I'm thinking of an upgrade for my wife's laptop (500GB, maybe 1TB), and an upgrade for mine (2TB minimum). I'd rather pay more for something that won't let me down than cheap out and find myself hoping I took a recent backup. Both machines can only take a SATA drive so things like the M2 form factor aren't an option.
It's pretty hard to go wrong with the named brands. In my build I have: OS drives: - 1x Samsung 970 Evo (1TB m.2; Windows) - 1x Western Digital SN750 (1TB m.2; Linux) Storage: - 1x Crucial P5 (1tb m.2) - 2x Samsung 850 Evo (1x 500GB sata, 1x 250GB sata) - 1x Crucial MX500 (500GB sata) (The kiddo's computer has a 250GB 850 Evo, and there's a DRAM-less Crucial BX drive sitting in a box, exactly where it should be.) These three providers have been just fine for me: no complaints, and I'm happy with what I have. They'd be my go-to, so I'd consider them the 'not cheaping out' option. In the sata space, you have the Evo series from Samsung, Crucial's MX, WD's Blue line. Intel, Adata, SanDisk, Kingston, etc., are all probably fine too. For any you went with, you'd want to research the model you were thinking of getting. I'd avoid anything DRAM-less, personally.
I found Amazon selling Kingston A400 drives fairly cheaply - a 250GB for my wife's laptop was only $25 so I got one of those. I had planned to go bigger but that was based on seeing prices such that upgrading from 250 to 500GB would only add $10 to the price. With the A400 range doubling the space doubled the price, so I figured she didn't need the extra space. Her current 250GB drive has something like 225GB free, and the 25GB used includes a Windoze installation. For my laptop I'm debating around $400 for a higher end Samsung, or looking at one of the newer NUC machines and freeing up a load of space on my desktop. Then I could use an M2 form factor SSD, maybe even two of them, and get the big performance boost. It would be really nice to know ahead of time just what performance boost a SATA SSD would give me in my laptop. I guess an upgrade to my wife's machine will give me a sense of that, and then I can decide whether to upgrade the drive now, leave it until I'm facing a space crunch with an external HDD if necessary, or buy a whole new machine. I kinda like the idea of a fully functional PC in a space smaller than an old Gamecube. With a small HDMI projector it potentially remains reasonably portable, although arguably less useful in a fully public space like an airport. But then I'm in airports so infrequently that's not really too much of a concern.
Loads more ripping and tearing over on the other side. I got the pipes that used to feed the radiator in the room above cut and removed. That was tricky because I had to monitor what was happening on three levels - the room above had the stubs that once connected to a radiator, the room I'm working in had the pipes and the room below in the basement had the other end of the pipes. It seemed like one false move and I'd cause the weight of the pipes to land on something that might prefer not to have pipes landing on it. So a degree of ingenuity was required, which varied from having my wife hold a pipe in one room while I cut it off in the room above, to lifting a pipe and having her hold the weight of it while I got in the room underneath and propped it on a scrap of 2x4. For good measure I found two more pipes I wasn't expecting. I traced them to the basement and they turned out to be old pipes, long since disconnected. Cutting those was interesting - they were both heavily furred with a nasty looking brown solid (presumably some variation of rust crystals) and one was right in the corner so getting at it with a blade was tricky. My sabre saw ripped through both of them, eventually, but cutting the one right in the corner off close to floor level resulted in a blade going to meet its maker. I think the pipe pinged, the end of the blade hit the pipe and bent. Never mind, it served its purpose and cut everything I particularly needed to be cut. Next up was clearing wood out of the way. I accumulated a stack of it in the basement, to the point I couldn't get at my power tools. That's now stacked more neatly and just about all of it has the nails removed. I wasn't sure whether to bother taking nails out of wood that's destined for the fire but it makes it so much easier and safer to carry without nails. Then came the hammer and chisel again, as I chipped away mortar from badly filled seams. There were a few of those. Now I've got some nice new wire brushes to clean them out and I can pack them with fresh mortar. Then I can get back to cutting the struts between the floor joists above. They don't seem to be doing anything useful but I think what I'll do is cut them away so I can spray around the beams with foam, then replace them with new struts slightly further from the wall. I don't think they will make any difference but I've got a couple of old 2x4 beams I recovered so I might as well replace them now, rather than find once I've rebuilt that they actually were doing something useful.
Family went downhill skiing today, our youngest for his first time ever. He was doing intermediate runs by the end of the day. Just a gorgeous day as the valley was in the fog, but we were in the clear. I'll have to post a picture or two.
Sounds like a smart move on the A400. Really the only thing to keep in mind is that there's not a huge day-to-day difference between SATA and m.2 (SATA or NVMe) drives, unless you're transffering large amounts of data, regularly. The formfactor and lack of cables is nice, though (that is, the lack of the sata and 3pin power). The mini-itx (and smaller) formfactors appeal to me quite a lot in theory, but in reality, I run a bigger case for the airflow, ease of work, expansion options, etc.
That's a good thought on the NVMe, it's easy for someone prone to over-analyse (i.e. someone like me) to get bogged down in detailed specs and want to get the fastest possible transfer speeds when the reality is that even if NVMe is an order of magnitude faster than SATA the chances are a SATA SSD is still going to give me a monstrous performance boost compared to a regular magnetic drive with spinning platters. The biggest files I'm expecting to work with regularly run to maybe 200MB or so, when I'm tinkering with big photo files. I like the idea of a tiny little box sitting on my table rather than the laptop that takes up a fair chunk of space. I'm not overly bothered about ease of work on a box because these days I'm more inclined to set it up and leave it alone rather than be constantly tinkering with it, and it seems most things I'm going to want to do can be connected via USB/Thunderbolt/whatever rather than specifically needing internal space. Since SSDs seem to have a limit to how much total data you can write before they start to fail, do you know whether using an application like TruCrypt will meaningfully shorten their lives? I'd assume not but don't know just what that does under the hood.
Why does your average Floridian (I live in Florida, in case you forgot) not understand downhill skiing? They don't understand how you can keep all that water on a slant.
Not sure if I did this right... https://photos.app.goo.gl/2VyUkAaRriFn2qsD7 Hopefully, just the one picture.
The day ranged from -10°C when we arrived to -1°C by the end of the day. Only light winds where exposed at the top, where it can get very blustery and very cold.