COVID cases are still climbing up for Georgia. We’re headed toward the record high for the state we had back in January.
The good news is it seems the shots in January are working.
Narrative: It’s 10AM and I don’t have much to show for it. Talked to mom for half an hour, I’ve not even had breakfast yet.
We’re trying to get organized and get rid of the junk lying around the house so that our kids will have an easier time with our departure. We’ve been in his home for 37 years and we’ve accumulated a pile of STUFF. At one point we built a storage shed out back. When that crumpled and leaked we rented a 20Ft storage unit for our overflow! We condensed that down to my cave, and it’s at least waist high in stuff still here.
COVID cases are still climbing up for Georgia. We’re headed toward the record high for the state we had back in January.
The good news is it seems the shots in January are working.
Narrative: Georgia can be rather humid and the garage feels it even worse because of the water that runs under the door. I put a dehumidifier in the garage which can easily maintain 55% humidity. The problem is that the bucket can get full in two days. The larger units have a pump that can vacate the water, but that would generate too much heat for our small garage. I bought a tiny pump the other day, and I do mean “Tiny” to put in the bottom of the dehumidifier bucket.
It is working very well so far!
Need to find one of my battery chargers for the van whilst it’s being stored.
This small charger should be enough to keep the battery charged. I may put a timer on it so that it’s not charging the battery when the garage is 100 degrees. (Battery voltages need to be lower when the temperatures are higher than normal.)
Tonight we loose our broadband connection so that our ISP can improve their performance. According to an E-Mail that I got yesterday our connection to Pahrump may drop between midnight and 8AM tomorrow. The firewall has a cellular hot spot for backup Internet. When I tested this earlier this month it took about 30 seconds to rebuild the tunnel to my Atlanta network.
COVID cases are still climbing up for Georgia. We’re headed toward the record high for the state we had back in January.
The good news is it seems the shots in January are working.
Narrative: Georgia can be rather humid and the garage feels it even worse because of the water that runs under the door. I put a dehumidifier in the garage which can easily maintain 55% humidity. The problem is that the bucket can get full in two days. The larger units have a pump that can vacate the water, but that would generate too much heat for our small garage. I bought a tiny pump the other day, and I do mean “Tiny” to put in the bottom of the dehumidifier bucket.
I was truly surprised at the amount of water that came out of this tiny pump. (It emptied the bucket in only 90 seconds.) In the end it serves to start a siphon as the water falls toward the driveway. I can run the pump for one minute and that will empty the bucket with the siphon finishing off the remainder. I tried vinyl tubing inside the dehumidifier, but it was too stiff inside the bucket chamber. Silicon tubing was a much better hose since it is considerably more flexible. I switched to vinyl tubing once outside the dehumidifier for durability on the garage floor. There is a small chance that the input to the pump will get clogged with debris, I’ll deal with that if it happens.
Our prescriptions were accidently sent to Pahrump. We’ve got a friend down the street that moved them out of the heat for us.
We’ve got to find, sort and give all the medical expenses to the tax guy on our next trip out to Pahrump. (The scanner will come in handy.) The estate currently owes $3000 in Federal Income taxes.
The cases are up a tic, but they are not very bad. Still the Gwinnett County Schools are mandating masks for teachers and students.
Narrative: Just woke up, checked the news and the COVID report. I posted this morning’s report to yesterday’s blog entry. I spent too much time reading the news, it’s awful these days.
I am updating my two Linux Mint laptops (Champagne and Perl) and it appears that they MUST have IPV6 to update. (That can be problematic on some networks like the one in Nevada that’s IPV4 only.)
I have one laptop that is intermittent and i couldn’t get to boot and the other one is W7. I think I’ll carry both Mint laptops to Vegas.
The cases are up a tic, but they are not very bad. Still the Gwinnett County Schools are mandating masks for teachers and students.
Narrative: Just woke up, checked the news and the COVID report.
Joined the team at the school to learn the new light board. It’s MUCH smaller and the controls are clunky. But hey, they spent 10K on it!
Found the hard drive from the red Netbook, i copied the documents to the NAS using a Pi4. Which mine is late by the way. I ordered one next day on Tuesday and it’s looking like it will arrive after we leave.
This is the spread of the Delta variant in the month of July.
Spent the rest of the day cleaning and trying to mow the lawn before it rained.
We played scrabble before retiring for the evening.
The cases are up a tic, but they are not very bad. Still the Gwinnett County Schools are mandating masks for teachers and students.
Narrative: Just woke up, the plumber is coming today.
This is a water pressure regulator. Our home is below the level at which a proper pressure is applied to the water supply. (Pressure is too high) In fact the pressure is so high it will cause the overpressure on the water heater to vent. (If you are not paying attention.) We added a tank on our water heater many years ago and now the warning is simple, you turn on the faucet and the water sprays onto the countertops.
Digging these things out requires a bit of thought, you can’t just dig it up with a shovel. I dug as deep as I thought I could go with a shovel then used the hose to loosen the dirt around the lines. (Which makes a terrible mess)
I added these blocks to get my boots out of the mud.
All done, and for the record I was correct that the regulator was bad. Like before the plumber put a regulator on the house to check the pressure and it was fine. I tried to convince him that the pressure would rise until the faucets started leaking. His response was that the water heater was expanding and raising the pressure. He recommended replacing the expansion tank. I wasn’t convinced. He asked me to turn on the water heater and he’d watch the pressure, it didn’t change much. He then removed the expansion tank and checked the bladder pressure 55psi! (Perfect) Then scratching his head he went back to check his pressure gauge and it read over 100PSI. TADA! What we both missed was that we could turn off the hot water heater and isolate the expansion tank from the cold water supply. Then any problem with the regulator would be immediately apparent.
I’ve been growing ever more concerned about privacy with the major search engines, Google Chrome browser reporting everything we do and risks from getting malware from visiting a website. (Drive By Malware)
Narrative: Just woke up and got my coffee, trying to get organized. I slept in a little this morning. Checked my E-Mail while I considered what to do today.
Drilled into my mom’s HP E-Print Printer in Florida to change the name on the HP E-Mail address and test the interface. I successfully printed from here and we’re trying R’s phone to make sure it can print. R’s tablet was able to print. Eventually I want mom to be able to print from her tablet.
We’re going to buy this Printer/Scanner on our next trip out. I want to scan documents before we start sorting / shredding them just in case we need the information later. This printer is also network accessible whether at home or in Las Vegas.
Narrative: Just woke up and got my coffee, trying to get organized. I slept in a little this morning. Checked my E-Mail and i received a large number of them from Nevada around 1AM in the morning.
Apparently there was a large thunderstorm that flowed through Pahrump early this morning. Some of the lightning triggered the motion sensors of the cameras to varying degrees. A lightning strike is only about 3-6 microseconds, it is a very small amount of time.
All the microSD cards arrived and were inserted into the 7 cameras I am carrying. I intend on having a Raspi Home Automation and a Raspi for remote access in the garage. I’d like to set them where they can dissipate the head, haven’t figured that out yet. I had a thought of setting them in oil that would average out the temperatures and dissipate the heat into the cement floor. I need to get the blower working in the swamp cooler, if not just replace the entire thing. I need a way of circulating the air in the afternoon. The mass of the building delays the heat until about 4 in the afternoon. Then the temp rises pretty steadily even though the outside temperature is cooling off. It would also pretty awesome to have a NODEMCU control the unit remotely.
