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Office Lounge

During recent employment in the HVAC industry, the company I was working for had a slow period during the spring which resulted in not much work coming in through the front door. I happen to be a carpenter, so I was asked if I would mind building office walls for the company to make up the time (and get a full 40 for the week instead of sit at home).

Sure, why not… It had been some time since I had worked, having spent the first 4 months of the year at NAIT getting a gasfitting ticket, and now, finally employed in the field, I still needed another 300 or so hours to complete the apprenticeship portion of the ticket. I could care less if it was doing HVAC or stapling flyers, I wanted the ticket finished and on the wall – so yes. I’ll do that. Read more “Office Lounge” →

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Upgrading the Home Theater

For years I have been using a few Android 5.1 TV boxes, with a specialized version of Kodi 16.1, to stream video to the various TV’s in the house. This went through a few iterations early on as I developed know how and method.

To begin with, in 2007 I built a tower PC, which is still in use today. It was top of the line at the time… an ASUS P5k Deulux board ran 4 screens, Sound Blaster and TV tuner cards, and all the bells and whistles required at the time.

I ran XP Media Center Edition, which recorded to the tower, and with the included remote, it was pretty sweet at the time.

I went 5 years with that setup, continued to learn, and eventually cut off the cable in 2012, where I went through a strange withdrawal which only those who have done it can understand. The TV became a choice instead of a passtime. Ads, or even skipping past them, were a thing of the past, and overhearing conversations about how the latest commercial was “so funny” showed me just how brainwashed I had become in spite of my own awareness, but I digress… Read more “Upgrading the Home Theater” →

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Rack attack!!

Yes, here comes the tale of the inevitable, the essential, and long awaited upgrade of our home network to relative industry standard.

After many years, and unceremonious additions of a gigabit switch and router, I’ve finally gathered the needed ingredients for a substantial upgrade across the majority of the network. Now, I didn’t get stupid about it by sticking in 10GBE switches and the like, but rather I cast an eye towards future proofing the setup for the next ten years or so.

The first on the list was an upgrade to my current NAS, a Synology DS212+, which had served me well (pun intended) for a decade. It began life here with 2TB drives, which soon filled up and were replaced with 2 – 6TB drives. These were installed without protection as JBOD (just a bunch of discs), were approaching capacity, and beginning to throw minor errors in their health check, so I knew time was running out. Also, as I learned, I had begun to call on it for much more over the year (eg. this site) and while the DS212+ was great for serving video, it was only ‘able’ to do everything else. Read more “Rack attack!!” →

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Hi-Velocity Installation

The company I have been working for recently undertook an installation for Hi-Velocity Systems. They are situated in Edmonton, have been around for 35 years, and to the best of my knowledge, do all their own manufacturing locally, which is utterly uncommon in this day and age.

The main emphasis of this type of system seems to be the ability to create a uniform indoor temperature, floor to ceiling, by using small diameter vents to supply high velocity air, thus resulting in a venturi effect similar to a carburetor. The design relies upon airtight plenums on the heat run side to maintain pressure throughout the system. Read more “Hi-Velocity Installation” →

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The New Arsenal

One of the things about taking on a new trade is re-tooling yourself to benefit from the know how. It is never cheap, usually done over a period of years, but not in these times.

The globalist that run this world have been papering over a financial collapse for several years now, which has eroded the faith in central banks the world over. One of the results has been the emergence of crypto-currencies as an alternative. These are now being used for international trade settlement, and the US dollar is beginning to be refused. The US currency reserves which used to be held by foreign nations for this purpose are not needed, and are starting to be returned. The result is inflation.
Read more “The New Arsenal” →