Workshop and Garden
The workshop re-organize is still moving forward. I moved some shelving units into an adjacent area which the builder had designated a future bathroom (i.e. there was rough plumbing buried in the concrete), built some more shelves, made some custom clamp and square hangers and hung up a shelving unit I had built in the 1980’s and never re-hung in the next two houses. This freed up some wall space and a place to put the mitre saw. Then I made a cart to get the drill press off the floor and save my knees getting down to see where the hole was going. That’s complete, but I want to put some varnish on it while it’s empty – unfortunately, like a giant junk magnet, it’s already covered in “stuff”.
The cart also incorporates a place to store and run smaller motorized tools, like a grinder, shaper, belt sander and knife sharpener. Probably two workshops ago, I came up with the idea of putting these small tools on wooden bases which were all 18″ wide. I built a rough cabinet with two sections a bit over 18″ wide with cleats on the side, and I stored most of the tools in there. The problem was, they were stored two deep, so once something got put away it tended to stay hidden and unused. The new design is open on two sides, with a top surface where two tools can be used. We shall see whether this works, and if I’ve built the whole thing sturdily enough to carry all the weight! One grinder came from Mary-Jo’s Dad’s business – it’s way over 50 years old, I’d say, and built like a tank, and just as heavy to move.
The basketball post I began removing last year has not miraculously dug itself up – yet. My wonderful device for stringing lights at the top of 30’ Spruce trees was a one-year wonder as this year we went horizontal, and draped the lights along the top of the back fence for our back garden display.
This year, along with the drill press stand, I made Ruff a three level cat perch custom made to fit into the window of the kitchen. In the tradition of recent projects I used some particle board a neighbour gave me sometime around 1980 and cedar milled from our deck railings. The drill press cart used more deck cedar and the tops from a desk Mary-Jo used in the 1990’s and Anna used up until a couple of years ago.
As I didn’t want to hang the bird feeder back over the garden, I made a stand so it will hang over a compost bin (which used to be Anna’s toy bucket in 1993 or so) on the deck (in front of Ruff’s window). This was made using offcuts from the cart project and a twisted 2×2 which I used to hang my clamps from until this year when I made proper (well, better) clamp storage.
At this rate, when I’ve finished my workshop I’ll have no wood left to make anything from.
Oh, and I re-levelled the pavers around the pool – again. Boring.
Technology and Music
I did add some short how-to videos to my YouTube channel, but I’m still collecting new video clips faster than I’m editing and publishing them. Some posts were added to my blogs, but not as many as I’d planned. I’m getting a bit fed up feeding the giant media companies and getting a few “likes” in return. It’s pretty galling when “the algorithm” tells me I’d get more exposure if I paid $35 to reach another 1000 viewers – not only am I providing free product, but they want me to pay them to show it!
My DVD database got a re-structure this year – I had made a rookie mistake by thinking that the thing I wanted to track was a box of one or more videos when the important thing was the actual movie. A subtle point, and a fairly natural mistake when I was looking at 500 video boxes, but there were some collections that included a movie that I already had separately, and when I marked one as “Watched” the other still showed up as “Not watched since 2015” or whenever. So I fixed that and added a pivot table which I can use for statistics. Apparently I watched 116 videos in 2021, 84 in 22 and so far 77 this year. I’m certain that that information is worth the price of the upgrade!
As for new technology, the Google Home / Assistant setup still provides lots of amusement, and is actually useful. In the last week, I’ve been playing with music streaming – mostly to provide Christmas background music to get me in the mood to write a Christmas letter. I’m having a fine time trying to get YouTube Music to provide me with a decent selection while turning down all the offers to upgrade to Premium. I now know that while I can cast to a device which includes a screen, I need Premium to cast to a smart speaker that doesn’t have a screen. So I cast to my office TV through the amp/receiver and once the connection is made, I can turn off the TV and it continues to play.
Now I’ve a third-party server (Plex) on my PC so I can play music stored on the hard disk to my phone and then cast it to a smart speaker. I found we had about a dozen CDs (remember them?) full of Christmas music and yesterday I tried to remember what program I had used to rip CDs to mp3. I found one program that looked likely and wasted an hour trying to get it to work. Then I found that Windows Media Player would do the job, so I now have 6 hours of ad-free Christmas music that I can play in most of the rooms where I spend time.
The thing is, we pretty much only play music around the house at Christmas time, so I’m not about to invest any large amounts, let alone sign up for monthly payments. Last year, the free services began to come back with “unavailable” to Xmas music requests as we got closer to Christmas; I’m guessing their licencing limits the number of plays, so it became a scarce resource.
Speaking of music, I’ve always been attracted to tools which appeared to be a simple way to produce music for non-musical beings like myself. (Artiphon Orba, anyone?) So when Humble Bundle (cheap, slightly outdated bundles of downloadable stuff) came out with a set of software and media which included a DAW (Digital Audio Workstation, I think GarageBand is similar), a couple of virtual instruments and synthesisers and more audio loops than I could listen to in a year for under $30, I was IN.
It turns out that you still have to know about music, even to understand the beginner tutorials – concepts like key, chord, octave are things I thought I kinda knew, but “kinda” isn’t enough. I had fun producing the background music for a short video, but the trouble is I have no idea whether it’s good or terrible. I like it, but then I know nothing about music and the thrill of getting any semblance of music out of the software probably clouds my judgement a teeny bit. I don’t even know what to call what I’m doing: it’s not composing, playing, conducting or arranging – it’s choosing clips and putting then in a certain order, at a certain tempo (don’t really know what that means either!) and at certain relative volumes with certain effects. Having just read what a re-mix is, I don’t think it’s that either.
Anyway, it’s fun doing whatever it is, and I’m even trying to learn some of the musical terms. Another problem is that I suspect the “rules” for music are like the “rules” for art, wine pairing, colour coordination, photographic composition, cooking and a host of other things: you’re supposed to study for 30 years and only then do you get to ignore the rules. You’re not allowed to just start by ignoring the rules!
If nothing else, I think I now have the ability to take some existing music and change its length to fit a video in a slightly more refined manner than simply chopping a bit off the end and fading out.
Stay tuned for the next episode of the Never-Ending Workshop Saga.
