Just a Little Note
I’ve finally fleshed out the page on my Rainwater Collection System. You can see a photo of the final product below:
Photos on the complete deck railing will be forthcoming shortly… :)
Holy Crap Weeds Suck
Okay, so we were dumb. We decided to lay down our topsoil and then wait months and months before getting our final grade approval, after which we could look toward planting a lawn. Well, it turns out that the local flora absolutely love fresh black dirt, and the result was a veritable forest, nay, jungle of weeds.
The problem is, tomorrow we are supposed to have some inspector come to verify our final grade. And I can only assume that the poor sucker will want to, you know, be able to see the ground. So, I decided it was time to weed. Two and a half hours later, give or take, I was done, and the result was this:
Notice the barbecue, which I placed beside the pile for reference (note, the pile is more oblong than round, so you’re seeing the broadside in that photo).
The weeds were so bad that the process basically involved blindly grabbing and pulling at whatever I could find. Which is, coincidentally, very similar to one of the basic forms in my highly refined street fighting technique (the other being the Homer Simpson form… you know, crying like a little baby until your opponent turns away in disgust, at which point you kick some back!).
How To Cut A Perfect 4x4 At Home
I don’t know about you, but I don’t have an oversized miter saw with which to cut my 4x4 posts. Like most DIYers, I’m limited to a circular saw for larger scale cuts, but such a saw can only hit around 2 3/4” depth. Thus, the general approach I’ve used in the past is to mark my cut on both sides of the 4x4, then cut one side, flip, and cut the other. However, this can often produce ridges because the second cut isn’t perfectly aligned with the first. Fortunately, during my work on our deck railing, I came up with a procedure that produces virtually flawless 4x4 cuts with only a circular saw and a hand saw. The steps are as follows:
- Mark your cut and then use the circular saw to cut the one side to the saw’s maximum depth.
- Rotate the piece toward you one quarter turn.
- Insert the saw blade into the half-cut line and complete the cut.
- Using the hand saw, cut out the remaining material.
Voila! Faster and more accurate than hand cutting the whole thing, but without the nasty flaws of the standard cut-flip-cut procedure.
Yeah, I know, this is probably obvious stuff, but for me, this is brilliant! :)
Anyway, back to work…
The Gallery Cometh
I decided to take a tour through my collection of digital camera photos and was, frankly, surprised at how much stuff I had. Worse, none of it was terribly accessible nor shareable. And so I finally cracked and decided it was time to get some kind of photo gallery going on.
Now, I could have one with Gallery, which Brad has used to power his photo gallery, but I really wanted something that would integrate directly into my wiki, so that I could easily incorporate gallery photos into wiki pages, comment on them in the normal fashion, etc, etc. Unfortunately, nothing of the sort really exists for Oddmuse, meaning it was time to roll my own.
The result is my Gallery. It’s pretty bare bones, at this point… really, it’s just functional enough to be useful. It can:
- Add galleries and images through a standard web interface.
- Support infinite nesting of galleries.
- Handle zips and tarballs, as well as standard image formats.
- Does the usual pagination stuff, so you don’t get all gallery images at once.
- Does on-demand scaling of images, so people can choose different resolutions.
And all of this is done in the context of the standard wiki subsystems, so you can comment, search, etc (though search is b0rked for image captions and descriptions right now… that’s on my todo list).
Anyway, there you have it. Take a look. Give me feedback if you like. And if I can make the code, you know, not horrible, I’ll release the source to it.
