Repairs - Moen Chateau valve repair (UPDATE)

In a home there is ALWAYS something to do and fix.

This time is an old bathtub/shower valve that start to be difficult to operate.

Is an old Moen Chateau fixture, with very very very probably a totally worn out cartridge.

This article should be titled "plan for the worse, hope for the best" :)

Cooling the server area 2.0

Years ago .. almost 10 !!! I did set up a cooling system for the server area, basically a under stairs area in garage. 

Is time to try to improve the system.

Repairs - Mazda 5 Aux input

 

This time I spent some resources to fix the AUX input on my Mazda 5 2012.

Repairs - attic fans

Arkansas is very hot place in summer, so basically every roof has one or more fans to help to reduce the accumulation of heat and humidity.

It is very important structure for the health of the house.

Repairs - HP OfficeJet 4630 (UPDATE)

 

Back in the 2014 I did buy the HP Office-jet 4630.

Nice machine and it worked flawlessly until few days ago.

Here how I fixed it.

Huzzah32 - fHelper

Time ago I did work on a fun project to control the soil of a plant in the office, the fHelper project.



However the project had some problems.

Home Automation - controlling lights with CURL and HA-Bridge

 In order to control lights are years I'm using HA-Bridge, running on a server I call HA server.

Originally (and possible it will return there) was hosted by Opus, my main server.

It is quite  a while now is running over a Raspberry Pi.
This article is about how to control X10 via HA-Bridge from another computer in the network (hint, the network is not exposed to the outside)

Plex - RIPping the Blu Ray rift

  The main purpose of Plex is to have my Movie collection always available.
I usually RIP the DVD I own and save the movies on my server in order to stream my content when I want, without the need to play disk jokey with tons of DVD.

But ... what about Blu Ray ?

Ender 3 Pro - an unclogging story

 

For many years I did prints without any problem, then recently, while trying some new filaments, I started to experience clogging events, one really bad.

Hopefully these notes can help to know what to do in a clog event.

Ender 3 Pro - PID tuning

Normally the printer is coming with already stored some calibration information.

One of them is the Proportional Integral Derivative (PID) controller for the temperature of the hot end and the bed.

It is necessary to execute the PID in case sensors are changed or just to be sure everything is OK.  

Repairs - ASUS TUF FC705G fan replacement

Notes about the replacement of both fans (CPU/GPU) to an Game computer ASUS TUF FX705G.

The PC is a game laptop and fans are really a necessity to dissipate the heat generated by the CPU and the embedded GPU.
When they fails (not if, when) the system become quite unusable, noisy and incredibly hot even on the keyboard.

Plex - Management tools

Plex is a great media server, but sometime is necessary to have something extra to perform some operations, like for example extract the list of movies available on the server.

There is something out there, let see some choices.

Repairs - bread toaster

Our current bread toaster, a West Bend Model 78824, has now 6 years (given or taken) and half of it stopped to work.

One of the two levers is not engaging anymore.
So ... let's repair it !! 

Home Automation - remotely controlling lights from HA server via ssh

In order to control lights are years I'm using Heyu and HA-Bridge, running on a server.

Originally (and possible it will return there) was hosted by Opus, my server.

It is quite  a while now is running over a Raspberry Pi.
This article is about how to control X10 via Heyu from another computer in the network (hint, the network is not exposed to the outside)

The Old Lady Project - Introduction

Years ago (I think was the 2009) I  did buy, with the idea to restore it, an old tube radio, immediately called "The Old Lady".

The radio is a Truetone D-1001.

However the electronic was really in bad shape and of course, who the heck has time to work on it ?

So the Old Lady went in a box, waiting.

Server chronical - Digitemp - reading from DS1490F

Digitemp is a software capable to read Dallas 1Wire sensors for the temperature, the DS18S20.

It was in use on the old server for years in order to acquire different temperatures and thus control automatically some Fans in the server room.

Let's see if it can be revived in the new server.

Server chronicles - Drobo on ProLiant

 On the old server I used a USB Drobo unit to backup data.

In theory should be enough to connect the unit to the server to see it .. and in part is true, but there are some unexpected problems.