Cordless Electric Automatic Defingerer

If ever you feel at some point in your life that you have too many fingers, and that they have become entirely too burdensome and weigh heavy on your soul, then I have good news for you: technology has the answer you've been waiting for.

This miracle of the modern age is the Greenworks 40v 24 inch hedge trimmer, which I can only assume is a clever euphemism for a finger removal device. This particular example was found on ebay and advertised as "ready to use".

That sure is a lot of rust for something that's supposedly "ready to use". I guess this will take a little bit of work before I can put it into service removing extraneous fingers.

On the plus side, it did come with free mud daubers.

Somewhat irritatingly, the case around the motor needs to be disassembled in order to properly separate the blades, so off comes the handle, the guard, and out come the screws.

It's a standard brushed DC motor inside, no fancy brushless setup here.

Speaking of all those screws I pulled out, they're going to go for a little swim in some evaporust.

Not the blades and runners, though. Mostly because I don't really have a container that's the right shape to soak them in, but also because I want to make sure the mating surfaces are polished nice and smooth.

And they definitely need some polishing. For that job, I'll be using the 3m purple scotch-brite stripping disc. The silicon carbide abrasive cuts through rust and mill scale and paint and whatever else really quickly, but only polishes the steel underneath without removing a noticeable amount of material.

The key is to use a very light touch, as the disc will just chew itself to bits if you bear down hard on it. It is mostly plastic after all.

Anyway, after a bit of work the blades and runners are nice and shiny with no signs of the rust that they were previously caked in.

And to keep it that way, a little Boeshield is just what the doctor ordered.

Anyway, the hardware is going to need to steep in the rustoleum for about 24 hours before it's cleaned up, so let's go bake some cookies.

I used some Ghiradelli chocolate chips this time, because I felt like changing things up a little from the Guittard chips that I usually get and not at all just because the Safeway I usually shop at was completely out of their entire stock of Guittard chocolate chips. The flatter, coin-shaped Ghiradelli chips made an interesting pattern of chocolate fault-line inclusions rather than the more defined chip shape that the conical Guittard chips yield. Neat.

Anyway, the hardware is looking good the next day.

And with a quick rinse it's ready for reassembly.

The blades and runners get bolted back together in the reverse order of disassembly.

Then the case gets reassembled.

And with the battery snapped into place, it's ready to slice some fingers off! Huzzah!

The Shrinks

So I've had my iPad for a fair few years now, and it's served me rather well.

Unfortunately I neglected to take it out of my pocket when I was doing laundry today, and after going through the washer and dryer it shrunk considerably.

In all seriousness though, my iPad hadn't been getting a lot of use since I started using my Macbook Air as a couch computer, given that the iPad and MBA are so similar in size and the MBA has a keyboard and stands up on its own without a stand.

As such, since it was getting long in the tooth, it made a lot more sense to move things down a size or two to better slot it in between my MBA and my iPhone. The iPad Mini, being about the size of a book (or an e-reader for you iPad kids that have never seen a paper book in your life), made a lot of sense.

From there the only remaining decision was whether to get the new model or a refurb of the old one. While there's something to be said for grabbing the latest and greatest (optimizing for the longest supported life, getting more storage, RAM, CPU speed etc), I decided that the compatibility with my Apple Pencil would be the deciding factor for going with the older refurb. It meant I wouldn't have to spend another $130 or so over top of the cost of the full priced iPad in order to maintain my stylusability.

As for the old iPad, it is not destined for the dusty e-waste drawer just yet. It will be finding a new loving home soon.

Functional Embellishment

It will perhaps be no surprise to hear that I'm not especially prone to flights of decorative fancy. You might wonder, then, what use I would have for something as whimsical as an embroidery machine.

Well, let me tell you.

I have a queen size bed. That means that my mattress is 60 inches wide and 80 inches long, which is dangerously close to square but still nowhere near rotationally symmetrical in practical terms.

That means that when it comes to fitted sheets, it can be quite a chore to figure out which is the long side and which is the short side.

But, no more.

I've actually been planning to do this for a while, but only got around to it today. I was inspired by one set of fitted sheets I got that had a little tag sewn into the hem in 4 places. Two of the tags said "Side" and two said "Top or Bottom" even though "End" would have been just as clear and much shorter, but whatever.

The "Top or Bottom" tags were kind of redundant but I frequently used the "Side" tags to orient myself when folding the sheets or fitting them to my mattress.

Now since a fitted sheet is, shall we say, quite large, I used a technique where you first baste the material to be sewn onto the embroidery stabilizer, rather than hooping them both together which can be a bit challenging to align.

Then it's into the machine to let it do its work.

This is a tear-away stabilizer, so once the stitching is done it just rips off where the needle perforated it.

And then the label is stitched on, in nice big letters that are exceptionally easy to find when you're half tangled in the sheet trying to orient it properly.

On both sides, of course.

The only downside is that it took me a few hours to do all four fitted sheets I own (most of that time was spent faffing about getting things aligned, basted in place, stabilizer torn away, etc. The stitching only took about 5 minutes at a time), and so now I've been staring at the word "Side" for so long that the letters have lost their meaning.

I'm So Tired

So the rear tire on Purple Haze, my main road bike, was starting to get a bit thin. How thin? Well, let's check the tire wear indicator divot.

Which no longer exists. Cool. Well I'm sure there's a little tread left, right?

Very, very little.

Alright, it's time to replace this tire. Now this tire is a Continental GP4000s-II in a 25mm width.

And when it's fully inflated it measures...

28mm, not 25mm. This turned out a little awkward last time I replaced one of the tires because I bought a Continental GP5000 in a 25mm width.

Which measures 24mm.

So to get things back on track I got myself a 28mm GP5000 this time.

And it measures...

Hmm, close enough.

As per usual, I put the new tire on the front and rotated the old front tire to the rear, since the front is more safety critical and wears out at a much slower rate than the rear.

So it won't be too long before this 25mm rear wears out and I can get back to 28mm-ish on both ends... which I had spent years thinking was 25mm.

Around The Yard

So a while back, not long after I moved in, I planted some yarrow along the back retaining wall. I ended up with more yarrow than space to plant it in, so I stuck the remainder in some pots with a plan to use them down the road to fill in any gaps if some died or didn't fill out well.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, some died or didn't fill out well.

This end of the wall tends to dry out a lot quicker and gets pretty beaten on by the afternoon sun, so it's not really a shock that the yarrow here hasn't fared as well.

In case you're wondering, the irrigation hose here is a leftover from the previous owner's half-hearted (or perhaps half-assed) attempt to automate the watering here. Except they didn't actually hook it up to anything other than a garden hose quick-connect, so to use it you need to unspool a garden hose, click it into the quick-connect, turn the water on, come back later and turn the water off, then disconnect the hose and get sprayed in the face with hose water because the pressure never really dropped when you turned off the hose.

So yeah, I've just been watering this manually and ignoring the "irrigation system" here.

Anyway, that's neither here nor there, let's get that potted yarrow into the ground.

I also pruned off some of the spent flower stalks from the one here that had been somehow clinging to life. I'm hoping that these will fill in enough to shade the soil which should break the cycle of the soil drying out causing the yarrow to get stunted causing the soil to not be shaded causing the soil to dry out...

In other news, the red palm thingie in the back yard is getting horny.

For whatever reason it decided that it wants to have a second trunk. More power to it, I guess.

As for the emotional support lawn, it seems like the soil has plenty of nutrients after I did a few years of chicken shit topdressing.

And in other yards, here's a few pictures of the Santa Teresa spring that I took earlier this week while out on my morning bike ride.

And another picture of some nearby scenery.

Because why not.

Rabbit Goo

So it's high time I spread some rabbit goo on my windows.

At least it is according to this randomly-named Chinese purveyor of decorative window films over at the House of Bezos.

I wonder where I'll find the instructions on how to install this?

Anyway, the north-facing windows on my house tend to spend most of their time either partially or fully closed. This is because they face right out onto the street, and that leads to them being slightly less private than I'd like when the blinds are open. This hasn't been a huge burden, all told, but it has meant that I rarely get the opportunity to look out of the north side of my house, which I find myself wanting to do from time to time.

So the solution I came up with is to install some window film over the lower half of the north-facing windows, just high enough so that it blocks the line of sight between me and the neighbours, but not so high that it completely obscures my view of the sky and trees and so on.

I opted to go for this frosted film with a pattern of googie-style sparkle/star/whatever thingies for two reasons. First, my house was built in the 60s so something like this would have been broadly period for it. Second, the small clear bits still let me peep outside through the film if I find myself wanting to do so, while not compromising the privacy in any major way.

This stuff is pretty easy to install, you just cut it a little oversize, spray down the window (after cleaning it mind you, so you don't permanently entomb a layer of dirt under the film) and slap it up there, squeegeeing out the bubbles from the middle to the edges.

Once it's solidly in place, a little trim around the edges neatens things up.

The kitchen was the main goal for this, since the other north-facing room on my house is my bedroom and I tend to spend most of my time in that room completely unconscious and not peering out of the window.

But the window film is pretty cheap, so I did the bedroom too.

There's usually some sheer drapes that go over this window too, so it gets two layers of privacy when the blinds are open.

I apparently did my measurements well, as this was all that remained of the two rolls when I was done.

But not everything went perfectly, there was one casualty of this project.

My poor spray bottle. You left us too soon.