Media - our house - Page 17

A selfie of me, a white man with short hair and a short red beard, taken from a very low angle next to my desk chair. On my lap is a small scruffy blonde dog lying with his head draped over the side of my leg.

Furry hot water bottle: deployed.

Posted on 12 June 2024, 16:00

A wide-angle photo of a room that's empty apart from a large white IKEA cupboard at the right. On the far side of the room the view looks out into the backyard, and there's sunlight streaming in.

The same room, but now there's a second IKEA cupboard next to the first, a waist-high chest of drawers, and a white nightstand. There's a bed at the left, and the top light is on because the view out the window into the backyard is black because it's now night time.

About five hours of this afternoon involved unpacking a bunch of stuff from a battered old IKEA cupboard and extremely shitty Fantastic Furniture desk, then assembling a new IKEA cupboard, chest of drawers, and night stand. Between all the walking back and forth with that plus my regular workout on the elliptical, I've done 12.5k steps now.

::collapses::

our house ikea darkroom tidying and rearranging

Posted on 3 June 2024, 19:43

A photo of a compact Breville Bambino Plus espresso machine in black and silver, a tall-ish and narrow black Eureka Mignon Specialita grinder, and a rather long but short black Nespresso machine, all sitting side-by-side on our kitchen benchtop.

@yayKM bought herself a Nespresso machine because she is not REMOTELY awake enough in the morning to use the full espresso setup and wanted something with minimal steps that was not instant coffee.

So now we can do:

Espresso
Nespresso
Moka pot
V60 pour over
Cold brew

I think we're probably good for coffee-making methods at this point. 😅

our house darkroom coffee

Posted on 30 May 2024, 12:36

A photo of two small black cube-shaped objects with a vertical slot cut out of the front of them. The one on the right has a larger slot which is holding a blue circuit board with three bright LEDs lit up in blue, green, and yellow. The one on the left has a smaller slot which is holding a smaller circuit board (the ESP32) with a USB-C port on one side of it. (The holder on the left is showing what's on the back side of the holder on the right.)

There are three short wires looping out to connect from the ESP32 on the back to the LED module on the front.

I still need to write up a full blog post about my latest ESP32 adventures, but suffice it say they've consisted of indoor air quality sensors, RGB LED modules, teeeeensy little ESP32 boards, and my very first 3D-printed things!

From top to bottom, the LEDs show the outdoor dew point, outdoor air quality, and indoor air quality (or office air quality for the other one), where blue is good and it goes through the spectrum to red is bad, and on the left you can see the back side of the holder where the ESP32 lives. I used Tinkercad to design and print the holders, and got a friend to actually print them out. The first ones didn't QUITE fit the LED boards so I had to go back and slightly tweak them, and the second round was a great success. I airbrushed them black because the resin he used was this weird pale almost-flesh colour that looked terrible, haha.

our house diy darkroom esp32 3d printing

Posted on 29 May 2024, 21:22

A photo of a Blackstar ID:CORE V4 20 guitar amp, it's a compact black box with silver trim on the front mesh and knobs on the top panel. There's nothing for scale but it's pretty compact, 37cm wide × 29cm high × 18cm deep.

Putting my union referral bonuses to good use. 😎

our house darkroom new toys guitar amp

Posted on 28 May 2024, 10:36

A photo of our TV in the living room showing Plex's preview screen for Hackers.

Oh man, tonight we watched Hackers (1995) which I'd never actually seen before. SO GLORIOUSLY TERRIBLE, everyone is just totally hamming it up, and oh man the quotes. "Set your computer to receive a file!" I think wins my award for the best one. I also love how a little PowerBook with a shitty LCD ("With active matrix!" Crash Override exclaims) is somehow projecting what's on its internal display onto the faces of the people using it. 😂 And the "Hack the Gibson" scene at the climax went on so unnecessarily long I feel like they must have made too many computer graphics sequences but decided they HAD to use them.

I'm always amused by TV shows whose main characters are allegedly high school students, and yet the students all look like they're at least 30. I feel like Derry Girls has probably gotten the closest to "These people could actually be in high school", with the exception of Michelle (and even she was borderline).

Man, what a killer soundtrack though.

our house darkroom tv

Posted on 25 May 2024, 21:33

A photo of a small microcontroller circuit board sitting above a window, with a bunch of wires messily coming out of it.

The ESP32 hacking continues apace, I soldered together a two-into-one ground wire so I could have both the outdoor temperature sensor and the outdoor air quality sensor attached to the one ESP32 board, instead of needing two separate boards! (The boards I'm using have a 3.3V power pin and a 5V power pin, but only one ground pin.)

I also fixed up my MicroPython code because it turns out it wasn't ACTUALLY asynchronous, it only appeared that way. 😬 Until now all the boards that had multiple sensors were checking both sensors at 30-second intervals which masked the problem, but while the temperature sensor is checked every 30 seconds, the air quality sensor is only every three minutes. The end result was that the temperature sensor would be read, 30 seconds later the air quality one would be, and then three minutes later the temperature sensor would be read again, then after another 30 seconds the air quality sensor again, etc. Oops.

our house diy darkroom esp32

Posted on 22 May 2024, 11:29

A photo of our TV showing the very start of a game of Guitar Hero, with the two scrolling tracks side-by-side. The song is Whiplash by Metallica.

Just spent the last three hours playing Guitar Hero: Metallica with the seventeen year-old. 🤘🏻 They're big into Metallica and Megadeth and all the old-school bands like that (and they're currently wearing a Rob Zombie t-shirt) so it was extra fun.

I started out on easy difficulty and was doing very well, so moved up to medium where you add in the fourth button on your fretting hand. Unfortunately I realised that all my bass guitar practice had made that very difficult because when I'm using my pinky finger together with my index finger on an actual bass, you really have to stretch out the pinky to reach the correct fret, and I kept duly doing that and ending up on the orange button instead of blue. 😛 I gave it a red hot go and then bumped it back to easy again at the end of our session, haha.

I had also entirely forgotten just how noisy the old consoles were, the Xbox Series X and its utter silence has completely spoilt me!

our house lily darkroom gaming guitar hero

Posted on 18 May 2024, 18:25

A photo of a dark blue rectangular upright box with two little plastic wheels on the bottom on one side. It says "Ecosa mattress" on the side, and while there's nothing for scale the website informed us that it's 43x43x110cm.

Mattressinnabox anyone? It even has wheels and a handle on top!

(It was delivered at 5:30pm tonight and you're meant to give it at least ten hours to expand once you unpack it so we're going to take it out first thing in the morning tomorrow.)

our house darkroom mattress

Posted on 6 May 2024, 18:58

A photo of a small scruffy blonde dog lying on a balled-up dark blue blanket on the floor, when he has his dog bed right next to him.

Beanie very carefully had to remove his top blanket from his bed and lie on it next to his bed.

beanie our house dog darkroom

Posted on 3 May 2024, 23:39