In the garden, and RAIN!!! (2)
POSTED BY: SIGNYM
UPDATED: Friday, September 11, 2026 15:29
VIEWED: 338648
PAGE 739 of 834
Quote:
Originally posted by SIGNYM:
SIX, I'm not sure I understand what you're saying about paint and grain. But your idea about light and shadow showing up better on painted surfaces... I never thought of that before, but it really would make details like beading etc really stand out, wouldn't it?
Hubby is a woodworker, and for him seeing and matching grain is very important. He slways goes with clear finishes like tung oil. So I guess in that way he's more like your stepdad. Painting wood is a sin!
My point is that I don't have any beading, and that it's not fair for a woodworker/furniture restorer to crap on painting wood when all they've ever seen is pieces that come in because the paint job was terrible. And I'm just mentioning that you can still see all of the wood grain through the paint. That's why it doesn't look like IKEA furniture, because everything you buy painted there is completely, solidly flat and isn't made of real wood.
People are going to have their preferences, but when you paint something well (and I am talking top-tier painting), I think it looks just as good top-tier stain and poly.
I'm just glad the culture kind of caught up with me on that one. The first time I saw a house trimmed out in white in some TV show or movie years ago I knew that's what I wanted to do. Now you see it everywhere.
But I'm willing to bet that most of it doesn't look as good as mine does.
Anyway... I think I'm abandoning the idea of an always-on outlet for the toilet cab. That code stating that the electric coming into the cabinet needs to be hard pipe kind of ruined the idea. I don't even see any way for me to put in a piece of conduit long enough for the job from inside the cabinet, and because of the soffit in the bathroom in the basement, there doesn't appear to be a way to put one up from the bottom either. Even if there was, the electric down there is a rat's nest and after 15 minutes of looking at everything I still have zero gameplan on that. With the ceiling open, I'm counting at least three junction boxes up there that would be completely hidden and inaccessible if I put anything but a dropped ceiling in there, which is against code, and from the bottom half where there is no drywall I'm not seeing anything that makes any sense about what they've done. I just don't want to deal with all of that right now. I just want my bathroom back.
I suppose technically it doesn't need to be done right now and could be done later if I ever changed my mind. I'm not going to be caulking in either of the cabinets. I'm not even going to cover up the old medicine cabinet hole since this cab is much larger and will cover it completely once screwed in. If I ever wanted to remove the medicine cabinet to get to electric again, all I would have to do is unzip 4 screws that will be holding it into the wall with drywall anchors and I'll have all the access that's currently available to me, and it would be easy enough to tie the new electric into it.
Oh well... I said last night I shouldn't get too excited about the idea.
I'm going to have to make a decision soon on the height of everything too so I can cut out a hole for the electrical box since fishing that flex line through the 2 rows of studs is not going to be easy like I thought it would be. I think it's impossible to even try without having a hole on the other side. Had I lucked out and the studs in between lined up better, I think this could have been pretty easy, but it doesn't look like that's the case.
I don't think I am going to have to destroy any wall that isn't going to be covered by the cabinet, but in order to not do that I might have to dig out my 90 degree drill and hope I can find some wood drill bits that are longer than 16" so I can drill through a few studs to feed the line directly through them.
If I do anything
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Quote:
Originally posted by SIGNYM:
Oh gosh, BRENDA, that really WAS a bad hand! Maybe luck will even it out with a really good day soon.
Where are your photos now, and where are you transferring them to? Just curious!
SIX, I'm not sure I understand what you're saying about paint and grain. But your idea about light and shadow showing up better on painted surfaces... I never thought of that before, but it really would make details like beading etc really stand out, wouldn't it?
Hubby is a woodworker, and for him seeing and matching grain is very important. He slways goes with clear finishes like tung oil. So I guess in that way he's more like your stepdad. Painting wood is a sin!
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"It may be dangerous to be America's enemy, but to be America's friend is fatal."- Henry Kissinger
It was a horrible hand SIG. I very rarely get hands that those.
The tv photos are on my computer here and I am trying to put them on a USB stick. But alas my hand was shaking badly, bad directions. One mistake nothing bad but it freaked me out enough that I gave up for today.
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Nice...
Though I didn't get any work on the bathroom done, I did wrap up the curated build and I've just finished creating a burnable image of it. Now I'm going to overwrite the first build I had on one of my new externals with this one to test out that it works.
Messing with that Mac Mini might be a little more difficult than I originally thought it would. It's old enough where there isn't an HDMI port. What a weird connection it has, with a mini DVI output. Fortunately, I should be able to still connect it to the TV because it has an adapter to HDMI, but that means there won't be any sound. Maybe it's possible I can use the headphone jack and connect that directly to the soundbar and get sound that way? I'm pretty sure that without a soundbar you'd be completely SOL trying to get an old Mac to work on a TV because of that, but the soundbar might work.
I'm glad I didn't throw out that Samsung soundbar that's missing the subwoofer. The one week I was going to put it out with the trash for somebody to take it, but it was raining so I kept it in the garage until it was a nice day on trash day. If I end up giving this thing away, I can at least have a way for it to output some amount of sound if the person doesn't already have a soundbar in their setup.
I wonder how easy or hard it would be to get the drive out of there to clone. Unfortunately, I have to do it that way and I can't just install the whole build from an external drive. Hopefully in the future the software available to us allows for that, but if I want to use this thing I'm going to have to figure out how to open it without breaking it.
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Those who dance always seem crazy to those who can't hear the music.
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Not too hopeful about the Mac. The good news is that it was old enough where it had full sized USB inputs so I didn't need adapters for the mouse/keyboard/thumbdrive. It didn't come with a power cord either, but surprisingly I had one that fit.
I powered it up and I get a blinking folder with a question mark inside it which I guess is code that it can't find the OS for one reason or another. That alone isn't terrible news, because this thing is so old that it uses a 2.5" laptop hard drive and not the SSD sticks that the ones a few years later started using. If the drive is bad, I do have spares to try out.
But the real problem for me is that most times I power up the thing I don't even get to the folder. My TV just doesn't recognize it the whole time. Even the few times it did, there was no sort of BIOS or any text on screen at all until the folder came up. I don't have any clue how Apple products work at all, so troubleshooting is not something I can easily do, and trying to find relevant information on a Mac Mini from before 2014 in 2026 isn't very helpful either.
I've opened it up from the bottom and removed a few screws here and there, but I still can't figure out how to slip the guts out of the side of it. There must be at least one more screw I cant see holding it in. Oh well.. It's too dark to be messing with that now. I'll look tomorrow when the sun's up. I was really hoping to at least try this thing out and see if it was worth keeping before I chucked it, but tomorrow I think I'm going to make a quick decision that this is just going in the trash. I've got enough on my plate without adding a week of antique Mac troubleshooting to the list.
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Those who dance always seem crazy to those who can't hear the music.
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OOPS!
I must really have not wanted to try to figure out how to work on old Macs.
I had to pull my flashlight out to see what the memory sticks it was rocking were anyhow, so I found a few more screws while I was at it. Those didn't help either. It turns out I had enough of them out to pull SOME of the innards out all along... It just took a LOT of force. But they did not slide out all in one piece like the 2018 model did on a youtube video, and using so much force to slide it out because it was stuck with old age gunk, I broke some wire connections to bits that were still stuck in there in a way that I'm not ever going to bother fixing. Oh well...
RIP Mac Mini.
The good news is that was back when all the Mac stuff was all x86 / Intel based, so those 2GB sticks in there will probably be upgrading my friend's laptop if that's worth saving. That POS is so slow it wouldn't surprise me if there was only 1 or 2 GB in there. I already had two 2GB sticks from one of my own dead laptops in the attic too, but there's different kinds of memory out there and maybe now we've got a better shot that I've got the right type and it's more than he had in there.
The best news is that the drive itself was fine. Got me a new used 1TB hard drive that's sitting in one of my brand new enclosures right now. Shame it's only 5400RPM, but it can be used as a data drive.
And the side news that was good was just knowing it had a 5400RPM drive and only 4GB worth of memory, it wasn't going to perform any better than that junker old PC I've been messing with, so I don't feel bad that I broke it.
I do have one more Mac that I plan on doing something with. This one's a lot newer and nicer. It's one of those All in One setups that my brother on the east coast gave me when they got a new one. I have no idea what the specs are, but they should dwarf those of the Mini from 2014. Not sure what I'm going to do with that thing yet, but I'm going to be a lot more careful with it. It's probably still new enough to get official Mac OS upgrades and is internet-worthy, so maybe I'll just use it as it was designed once I get myself a nice little desk for my small bedroom.
Other than that, I've got to figure out what I'm going to do with my own All in One Windows PC that I upgraded from around 5 years ago. The one I was trying to install an SSD drive into to speed it up, but found out that it was so old the BIOS didn't even know what SSD was. I'm hoping there's an HDMI out to put it on a larger screen, but even if there isn't I think I can still do something cool with it. At least I know what I'm doing when I'm working with one of those.
That's all the old PCs I was going to mess around with. I've got one other one in the stack, but that's an extra one I bought off some guy a few years back and is identical to the one that I've been using to do all of this work and just a backup in case that breaks on me.
This will be good. Now that I don't have to mess around with the Mac Mini anymore and I'm done pulling out the hard drive from that old PC my old man gave me that I've been testing things out with, I can button that thing up and get rid of all the wires and junk I've got all over the living room so I can clean it all up again. Looks like a bomb hit it with all this tech stuff lying around everywhere. I'm still going to be doing work to that PC before it finds its new home, but it doesn't need to be open anymore.
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Those who dance always seem crazy to those who can't hear the music.
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Nice...
After a bit of a scare, I got that old PC all sealed up and working right. I have no explanation for why it fixed itself, but I had all sorts of boot problems. I couldn't even get it to boot from an external at one point. It was like my BIOS settings got all out of wack there or something. Had to do a factory reset on that and get everything running right again, but not after resetting the memory half a dozen times and even pulling the drive back out to test on another computer first. Weird.
So I've got two very different images for very different build purposes that are verified as working now, and I'll be working on a downgraded version that could work just fine on a 64GB thumbstick which could later be added to with larger external storage. This will make it as modular and easy to distribute as possible.
Mac is in the trash and I'm sitting on 4 decent sized externals I didn't have a month ago and about 8TB of free space on my regularly used drives I didn't have 3 months ago.
I should put the last coat of paint on those pieces today.
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Those who dance always seem crazy to those who can't hear the music.
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Out in a minute on what is suppose to be a wet day at some point.
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SIX. Apple specifically designs things NOT to be taken apart so you HAVE to send them in for repair! It's a gotcha, just like their software.
For older PCs, sometimes pulling drives, cards, memory sticks, and connectors and putting them back in again is what's required. Whenever hubby got a failed PC that's the first thing he would do because over time, connections corrode.
Another thing is to clean the PC overall, the vents, and the heat sink specifically with blasts of compressed air. As you've posted, electronics like to work in the cold and PCs need to breathe. If you're looking at an old HDD, and the drive motor isn't starting up, tapping the HDD on edge can get it unstuck.
On occasion he'd put an HDD in the frig for a bit to get important data off of it.
IDK if any of that applies, but that was his first troubleshooting procedure.
Glad it's working for you again!
Oh BTW your paint job is amazing. IDK how you managed to paint such complex shapes so evenly, w/o drips and sags, and not bury the workpiece in hugely thick coats. For me, that would need spray paint and even then I'm not sure it would look as good. I'm seriously impressed!
*****
Oh, BRENDA. It's hard to get anything done if your hands are shaking that badly. Is there anything you can do about that?
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"It may be dangerous to be America's enemy, but to be America's friend is fatal."- Henry Kissinger
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Quote:
Originally posted by SIGNYM:
SIX. Apple specifically designs things NOT to be taken apart so you HAVE to send them in for repair! It's a gotcha, just like their software.
For older PCs, sometimes pulling drives, cards, memory sticks, and connectors and putting them back in again is what's required. Whenever hubby got a failed PC that's the first thing he would do because over time, connections corrode.
Another thing is to clean the PC overall, the vents, and the heat sink specifically with blasts of compressed air. As you've posted, electronics like to work in the cold and PCs need to breathe. If you're looking at an old HDD, and the drive motor isn't starting up, tapping the HDD on edge can get it unstuck.
On occasion he'd put an HDD in the frig for a bit to get important data off of it.
IDK if any of that applies, but that was his first troubleshooting procedure.
Glad it's working for you again!
Oh BTW your paint job is amazing. IDK how you managed to paint such complex shapes so evenly, w/o drips and sags, and not bury the workpiece in hugely thick coats. For me, that would need spray paint and even then I'm not sure it would look as good. I'm seriously impressed!
*****
Oh, BRENDA. It's hard to get anything done if your hands are shaking that badly. Is there anything you can do about that?
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"It may be dangerous to be America's enemy, but to be America's friend is fatal."- Henry Kissinger
The worst of it SIG is that I am a righty. So really about all I try to do is take it off the mouse or stop writing for a bit. Then when I go back to what I was doing to try and concentrate on it to try and stop it. Sometimes it works and sometimes it doesn't.
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