1. It's a pain to get the thin-set on the walls without holes and vacations, because the thin-set gerbles up under the notched trowel and pulls off the wall.
This can be minimized by keeping lots of cement in the area the trowel is about to run over.
A: put lots of thin-set on the trowel itself, up against the notches
B: pull the trowel at less than 45 degrees so it tends to force the cement through the notches
C: advance into a low spot, smoosh the trowel almost to the wall to adhere the cement on the trowel to the wall, lift back to the 45 degree angle, advance the trowel. Makes for a rocky-looking track but at least it's a full fill.
2. I'm trying, AGAIN, to use caulk as well as cement: caulk between the tiles as sealer, since there's no room for grout. It works better to cut the caulk gun tip with a notch, so it runs along the edge of the tile without slipping off either direction.
Monday, March 30, 2009
Saturday, January 17, 2009
I'm installing the Schluter Kerdi membrane in the shower. It bridges from the fiber-reinforced cement wallboard, to the back concrete wall, and between both those and the poured-in concrete shower pan.
The general technique is: smear especially viscous thin-set mortar on the wall, back-scrape it with a notched trowel, then set the membrane on top and rub it into place, smooshing the underlying thinset about so it bonds to the whole surface of the membrane.
Here's an important hint: the kerdi comes in rolls, so it has a springy closure action to it. One by-product of this is you better make sure you have the membrane oriented so it wants to roll into the wall, rather than off the wall, because it will do exactly that. The tips all come off the thin-set and you have to stack wax-paper-encased boxes against it to keep it in place.
Folds in corners are really difficult. I don't know how to do them. I should've purchased some of the pre-made corners, but my brother assured me that it was easy to do.
The general technique is: smear especially viscous thin-set mortar on the wall, back-scrape it with a notched trowel, then set the membrane on top and rub it into place, smooshing the underlying thinset about so it bonds to the whole surface of the membrane.
Here's an important hint: the kerdi comes in rolls, so it has a springy closure action to it. One by-product of this is you better make sure you have the membrane oriented so it wants to roll into the wall, rather than off the wall, because it will do exactly that. The tips all come off the thin-set and you have to stack wax-paper-encased boxes against it to keep it in place.
Folds in corners are really difficult. I don't know how to do them. I should've purchased some of the pre-made corners, but my brother assured me that it was easy to do.
Friday, January 16, 2009
1. I just got a load du butt metrique of LEGO chainlinks for the 3-D chocolate printer project. It took me thirty minutes to get them all snapped together. It's like a delicate belt.
2. My dog will eat half a raw jalapeño pepper. Crunch crunch crunch. She licks her lips a lot afterwards... but she'll take another one. Then again, she's been known to snort ants repeatedly.
3. The firefox3/flash fix didn't take. It worked for a bit, but it's back to nattering negativism about glibc-2.4 and I'm back to grumbling.
4. I forgot the most important part of my whole previous biking post. I got back to work and sat down, as one may reasonably expect from an employed person. Before I'd gone, I'd polished off 1/4 of a chicken pot pie I made two nights ago. (Somehow the roux part worked! as in I put in the butter, I put in the flour, I stirred them right round baby right round like a record baby and added in a bit of milk, and started dumping hot chicken stock in, and the whole works went like pudding, and I kept dumping in chicken stock like I was bailing a sinking schooner and it continued with the pudding-like consistency. Apparently all the little starch molecules put their hands together and started dancing around, instead of hiding sullenly down in the corners as they usually are wont to do.)
The point being: I'd eaten. But then I'd gone and ridden like 50k. And my stomach, it said HUNGRY. and my brain said 'yeah, okay, I know: in a bit' and my stomach said **HUNGRY**! and my brain said, "well, see, the thing is, been gaining a lot of weight lately... like, y'know, a LOT" and my stomach said "Whiskey Tumeric FOCACCIO!" and then went on a long rant that sounded something like this:
hungryhungryhungryhungryHUNGRY!Hungry HUNGRY
2. My dog will eat half a raw jalapeño pepper. Crunch crunch crunch. She licks her lips a lot afterwards... but she'll take another one. Then again, she's been known to snort ants repeatedly.
3. The firefox3/flash fix didn't take. It worked for a bit, but it's back to nattering negativism about glibc-2.4 and I'm back to grumbling.
4. I forgot the most important part of my whole previous biking post. I got back to work and sat down, as one may reasonably expect from an employed person. Before I'd gone, I'd polished off 1/4 of a chicken pot pie I made two nights ago. (Somehow the roux part worked! as in I put in the butter, I put in the flour, I stirred them right round baby right round like a record baby and added in a bit of milk, and started dumping hot chicken stock in, and the whole works went like pudding, and I kept dumping in chicken stock like I was bailing a sinking schooner and it continued with the pudding-like consistency. Apparently all the little starch molecules put their hands together and started dancing around, instead of hiding sullenly down in the corners as they usually are wont to do.)
The point being: I'd eaten. But then I'd gone and ridden like 50k. And my stomach, it said HUNGRY. and my brain said 'yeah, okay, I know: in a bit' and my stomach said **HUNGRY**! and my brain said, "well, see, the thing is, been gaining a lot of weight lately... like, y'know, a LOT" and my stomach said "Whiskey Tumeric FOCACCIO!" and then went on a long rant that sounded something like this:
hungryhungryhungryhungryHUNGRY!Hungry HUNGRY
HUNGRYHUNGRYHUNGRYHUNGRYHUNGRYHUNGRYHungry!
hhhuunnnggggrrrrryyyy
Man, it's been like this for 20 years.
I'm taking a break from the assembly-language posts I've been doing, to actually blather on a bit. This is my spare-tire journal, in case LJ goes kerflooey, but people do read this apart from LJ so maybe I should actually fill it in with some prose.
Today, at lunch, we went out for a ride. First time I've been out this year, as it so happens: my lungs are still recovering from the New Year's Eve Amazing All-Denver-Boulder Pothead Convention disguised as an EMT concert. Now, far be it from me to condemn potheads. Some of my good friends are potheads. But, dude, yeah, you, dude, the one with the knitted green and yellow hat, you can go OUTSIDE. There's a reason we have no-smoking venues, ya know.
Howls of self-righteous outrage, Bruce.
Anyway, so, yeah, the bikings. I managed to stay with the pack up the big hillclimb near the start of our usual Friday route. My lungs didn't even burst. My tube did, though. Front tire goes wuggedywuggedy. Phoo. Performance tubes are teh suck. They keep splitting along moldlines, like cheap tubes do. I guess I better pony up the dosh for some Conti tubes. Grumble. So I fixed it and took a short cut across the course, in an attempt to hook up with them (but they never caught me, ungrumble.)
I also plotted a board I'd designed, a USB-to-serial converter for proto boards, but forgot to check the chip footprint. The board came out beautifully. Chip's about half a millimeter too wide for its little feet, which lop over onto other circuitry. Bah. Check fit FIRST.
Hm. I ended up back in abbreviated grumbling, as always. Sorry. Maybe more prose next time.
Today, at lunch, we went out for a ride. First time I've been out this year, as it so happens: my lungs are still recovering from the New Year's Eve Amazing All-Denver-Boulder Pothead Convention disguised as an EMT concert. Now, far be it from me to condemn potheads. Some of my good friends are potheads. But, dude, yeah, you, dude, the one with the knitted green and yellow hat, you can go OUTSIDE. There's a reason we have no-smoking venues, ya know.
Howls of self-righteous outrage, Bruce.
Anyway, so, yeah, the bikings. I managed to stay with the pack up the big hillclimb near the start of our usual Friday route. My lungs didn't even burst. My tube did, though. Front tire goes wuggedywuggedy. Phoo. Performance tubes are teh suck. They keep splitting along moldlines, like cheap tubes do. I guess I better pony up the dosh for some Conti tubes. Grumble. So I fixed it and took a short cut across the course, in an attempt to hook up with them (but they never caught me, ungrumble.)
I also plotted a board I'd designed, a USB-to-serial converter for proto boards, but forgot to check the chip footprint. The board came out beautifully. Chip's about half a millimeter too wide for its little feet, which lop over onto other circuitry. Bah. Check fit FIRST.
Hm. I ended up back in abbreviated grumbling, as always. Sorry. Maybe more prose next time.
Tuesday, January 13, 2009
Notes for my future self: linux
1. Getting Firefox3 working.
Install. Type in about:config, enter network.dns into the filter. Find enter.dns.disable_ipv6 and toggle it to 'true'.
Why: the dsl modem is ipv4-only and can't handle ipv6 dns requests.
(Better fix: get new dsl modem.)
2. Getting Flash working in Firefox3.
Try flash10. If that doesn't work, exit ff3, start from console. ("which firefox", then find the correct directory. Should be /usr/bin/ but if I've installed it, chances are it'll be /usr/src/firefox. Go to directory, ./firefox.) Watch console, browse to youtube. If it throws a pile of glibc-2.4 errors, it's still broken.
Go to Adobe, download the flash9 debugger for linux, untar, go into /debug, find the libflash.so gzip file, untar THAT, and move the libflash.so into /$browser/plugins and it should work.
3. Getting a USB boot install working (in case the machine can boot from usb but can't from CDROM for whatever reason, or just because it's more convenient to use a thumbdrive than carrying a CDROM around.)
The slooooooow way: needs downloaded image, burnt CD, >=1G usb thumbdrive. Run network assistant to make a bootable USB thumbdrive. Wait 6 hours. mount the drive, throw away the 'mepis' folder, then copy the entire .iso image over to the root directory. Go into /boot/grub and edit menu.lst. Add to the boot option you're likely to use, to the second line (the kernel option line) 'fromiso=(isoname).iso fromhd=/dev/sdb1' and it should do fine.
For extra credit, with a multi-gig thumbdrive, make several partitions and install this on one partition (in which case it'll be /dev/sdb(partition number) (although as long as you tell it to look in /sdbX it seems to search them all rather than looking in the old /hda group and crashing horribly.)
Install. Type in about:config, enter network.dns into the filter. Find enter.dns.disable_ipv6 and toggle it to 'true'.
Why: the dsl modem is ipv4-only and can't handle ipv6 dns requests.
(Better fix: get new dsl modem.)
2. Getting Flash working in Firefox3.
Try flash10. If that doesn't work, exit ff3, start from console. ("which firefox", then find the correct directory. Should be /usr/bin/ but if I've installed it, chances are it'll be /usr/src/firefox. Go to directory, ./firefox.) Watch console, browse to youtube. If it throws a pile of glibc-2.4 errors, it's still broken.
Go to Adobe, download the flash9 debugger for linux, untar, go into /debug, find the libflash.so gzip file, untar THAT, and move the libflash.so into /$browser/plugins and it should work.
3. Getting a USB boot install working (in case the machine can boot from usb but can't from CDROM for whatever reason, or just because it's more convenient to use a thumbdrive than carrying a CDROM around.)
The slooooooow way: needs downloaded image, burnt CD, >=1G usb thumbdrive. Run network assistant to make a bootable USB thumbdrive. Wait 6 hours. mount the drive, throw away the 'mepis' folder, then copy the entire .iso image over to the root directory. Go into /boot/grub and edit menu.lst. Add to the boot option you're likely to use, to the second line (the kernel option line) 'fromiso=(isoname).iso fromhd=/dev/sdb1' and it should do fine.
For extra credit, with a multi-gig thumbdrive, make several partitions and install this on one partition (in which case it'll be /dev/sdb(partition number) (although as long as you tell it to look in /sdbX it seems to search them all rather than looking in the old /hda group and crashing horribly.)
Tuesday, January 6, 2009
Notes to my future self: plumbing and wardriving
1. Shower faucet stops working. Turn off water, remove cartridge, note which direction cartridge comes out of enclosure (because it has 180 degree symmetry but if flipped it swaps hot and cold: EXCITING.)
Soak cartridge in white vinegar. Dissolves out the insoluble crap. Shower is functional again: yaaaaaaaaaaaaaay.
2. Kismet. Install from repos. Edit kismet.conf, add in identification for wireless driver. Wireless driver info SHOULD be in dmesg or /var/logs/dmesg but it isn't. I had to chase it down in the modules (although I bet it's in /proc)
Soak cartridge in white vinegar. Dissolves out the insoluble crap. Shower is functional again: yaaaaaaaaaaaaaay.
2. Kismet. Install from repos. Edit kismet.conf, add in identification for wireless driver. Wireless driver info SHOULD be in dmesg or /var/logs/dmesg but it isn't. I had to chase it down in the modules (although I bet it's in /proc)
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)