Lee.org

Here is a good portion of my job as a school-based OT.

Welp, it’s wildfire season in Northern California. I just got finished sealing up the intake of our heating system. The smoke outside is pretty bad. The air filter does a lot to help.

It’s an overcast day but not foggy, that’s smoke in the street

If the smoke in the bay area has your throat feeling down, get a good furnace filter and clean your indoor air. It works wonders.
We swapped out our regular MERV 8 for a MERV 13 and the house feels so much more like home! If your fan switch on your furnace doesn’t work, you can probably temporarily rewire it at the furnace so “heat” turns on the fan.

Here’s how we rewired a friend’s house that only had 2 wires. I used this guide to show what wires go where.

After putting the filter on, I still smelled smoke through the vents. Air was leaking into the system under the house! I went under the house and used aluminum duct sealing tape to seal up the joins in the air intake system. I sealed the join between the intake register and the intake plenum, and between the intake plenum and the furnace itself. It involved a lot of crawling around in right spaces but was worth it! To check the system, I lit a match and blew it out: I could see where the smoke was being pulled in to the system and my family could smell the smoke in the house. When I was done, the smoke was not being pulled in and my family could only barely smell the smoke inside the house. I also used my daughter’s walkie talkies to ask how the smell was upstairs. Hurray!

What is spinning around my head in a bad way this morning? Nearby forest fire smoke in our house, a heat wave, distance learning, the pandemic, and our fascist narcissist idiot president and those suckered in by him.

9-1-20 Update: I got an eero mesh router with 3 nodes for the house and it’s great :-)

My single-router hopes are dashed: I got a pretty good one (TP-Link Archer A7) but the kitchen appliances block the far side of the house no matter what I do. I thought about rewiring stuff in the crawlspace to relocate the router but I’d rather just pay money to fix the problem.

I’ve got a 2-day old powerline wifi adapter sitting on my desk. the trouble is, none of my computing devices are nailed down. Mannually switching networks every time I go into or out of my music room is a terrible option!

In the living room, I have a great signal on my laptop on my router. When I bring my laptop into the music room, I’ve got a crappy signal to the router and a great signal on the wifi extender. But my computer doesn’t switch over to the extender, it suffers it’s way through my refrigerator.

We are thinking about getting a Little Free Library. I wrote to a neighbor with one about their experience and got a really great response. If you’re thinking of getting one, read on:

I wrote, “Hi, we saw that you have a Little Free Library. We live just down the road and were wondering how it has worked out for you. Any tips? We’re thinking of getting one for our front yard. :-)”

Their response:

When you need to watch a website for changes, VisualPing.io it my go-to. You get enough free credits to watch one page daily, and watching more pages is inexpensive. I’ve been watching my daughter’s after-school program’s website for updates during the pandemic and VisualPing has been helpful.

Do you want a power rack or other home gym equipment? (and COVID making it both nessesary and hard to get?) A good friend and professional fabricator will be building and selling a set of about 10 power racks and other equipment in the Bay Area. He’s aiming for it to be competitively priced and (of course) local pickup/delivery.

Message me if interested!

If you need to download a video on Youtube or Vimeo or wherever, this process will often do it for you, fer free and without downloading some likely-spammy-scammy software.

The key is: most video online is HTML5. VLC can play any HTML5 video… and get you the link to download it. (via)

An important lesson about people and business:

From 2003 to 2005 I ran my own business fixing computers and such. I called it The Computer Guy,

I had just finished fixing a client’s broken email program (Outlook) and was packing up. I watched as he shut off his Windows laptop by simply holding down the power button until the computer died. My stomach lurched at the sight of it! I grit my teeth, and let out a breath to calm myself. I gently asked him if that was always how he turned off his computer. “Yes, it’s easier than finding that other way. I’ve never had any trouble.” I thought about the reason I was hired, to fix his mysteriously broken email program and told him there was a good chance it broke because of his bullet-to-the-head shutdown style. Then I started showing him how to shut down safely. He didn’t want to hear it, repeating how his current method was working just find. I redoubled my calm and told him, “Shutting down your computer that way is just fine ninety-nine times out of a hundred. That last time will break things but good. You’ve got my number.” Part of me wanted to shake him and make him do it right, instead I gave him a friendly smile, my business card, and left.

100 days later, like exactly 100 days later, I got a call! The computer wouldn’t boot. After I fixed everything, he was quite open to learning how to push the little “shut down” button instead of murdering his computer on a daily basis. When we were done, he gave me a very hearty handshake!