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What are you doinng during CV-19

Thinking about making a "laptop battery conditioner" system. The idea is to leave my laptop plugged in, but allow its battery to charge / discharge to varying levels over time.

My plan is to write a Win32 program to collect battery stats every so often and send messages to a microcontroller circuit that will send RF signals to turn on/off the smart outlet that the laptop itself is plugged into.

Before I get too far along, please tell me if I'm reinventing the wheel ... or if there's an easier way. :dunno:
 
Ryan Mooney said:
Amazing how much difference it makes isn't it! When we moved into our current house it was fairly new, and the fellow who buil it was a contractor who was planning to retire in it, about the time the trim went in his wife decided they were moving to California and you could see the substantial quality dip in the last layer. So I redid most of the trim & flooring within the first couple years. One of the things we did was repaint after I'd pulled the el-cheapo carpets out was to re-pain the walls with a bit more resilient paint. It turned out the main hall probably hadn't ever been painted, when we started putting paint on it we looked at each other and said "this was just primer grey before wasn't it". You couldn't really tell because it was a darkish hall, but man it brightened up afterwards with a fresh coat of semi-gloss on it. Huge difference.
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Changing an old 4-way switch now and if I don't get it working that hall is really gonna be dark!
Problem is, there is no wiring diagram on the old one and the wires apparently don't directly cross over.
I typed that some time ago and just discovered I never sent it... the issue is now fixed.
 
Well, the boss decided that the railing at the top of the stairs was more important than finishing the attic, so I spent a good portion of the day making the thing come together before I took it apart to stain it. It's drying now and tomorrow I'll put a coat or two of poly on it and that might mean it finally gets installed on Monday. Pictures then.
 
The company I work for has set up the means to work from home for all those like me that can do it. As it is considered essential bussines all people that work in production have to go to work, but the company is supplying mask, gloves and has set up a series of protocols that everybody has to adhere to.
LOML has increased her working hours as she works at the health service, so when she gets home we do some cardio and pilates for a full hour with the help of so many videos in youtube. I,m tidying my shop and wood bits and I am going to start a new project tomorrow.
 
Lot's of walking as we generally try to get in a 4 to 6 mile walk each day. We also have our bikes but the weather has not been the best for that yet.

Most of you don't know, but we sold our house in Bellingham last fall and are living temporarily in a small town nearer work until we move to our home in the Methow Valley in May/June(?). We are currently living in an apartment (townhouses) complex and it is a shock to our system. Let's just say we are surrounded by twenty year old's without any sense of others. Pray for us!

Add Covid-19 to this mix and if it was not for the long walks we would be committed to an asylum by now. Actually I think the neighbors would be better.

I work from "home", so I can't even get away because of work.

This trail runs for something like twenty miles up the valley. It is called the Cascade Trail and is the bed of an old railroad that ran up the valley to where they mined steel grade coke.


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Prepping garden beds.. one shovel full at a time.

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Flip it over, fill it in. The bare strip on the right will be the walkway, the stuff on the left gets piled back on top effectively at least tripling the soil depth from the original 6" over original hardpan.

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Ten more to go!
 
Bill Satko said:
Maybe the perspective is off on the photos but that looks like more than a garden.
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About 60' long and 2.5' wide per block, looking at doing 10 blocks plus a few squash and melon hills around the outside. There are three family's (well three and a half it's complicated) involved so it's not quite as crazy as it seems. Part of the trick is figuring out schedules and layout so we're not there at the same time or overlapping activities. I can shovel about one row per day plus maybe a bit more if I get started early and pack a hearty lunch. When I was young and spry I reckon I could probably have done three but I move slower and play out quicker now.

This is about the size of garden I had at the last house for the two of us. We didn't have to go to the grocery store very often ;). The soil there wasn't as miserable as well I'm working with here is though and I had a barn full of goat manure to work from so we'll see how this goes. I am working on a fairly aggressive amendment and testing program so that plus digging it down past the hard pan ought to help some.

It's keeping me busy anyway. I'll either come out of it back into better shape or permanently crippled :rofl:
 
There's a hard pan clay layer about 6" down. Made somewhat worse by a few years of shallow tilling and overhead sprinkler usage compacting it (not originally my plot, just working to reclaim it to useable). Lacking a mule and a plow the only reasonable way to get through the hard pan is by shoveling as the little tractor tiller they have just bounces off of it. Luckily the first 6" and the stuff under the had pan aren't all that bad so you can bust through that layer with a little oomph and then the edges break of not too bad if you take reasonable bites. So it goes fairly quickly as these things go (which isn't really very but yeah flint soil would be a whole lot worse!!! :eek: :eek: :eek: ). Kansas soil it ain't, but it sure could be worse.
 
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