CI Project Blog

2011. Not much to say really. Projects have been mostly on hold because of the holidays. PC work has been slow because of the holidays. I suppose the one important thing we did figure out worth noting is that AnyDVD HD along with RipBot264 is a great combo to rip BluRay and convert to a BD9/AVCHD Disc.

With the holidays over, there are a few new projects in the pipeline. Here are a few, in no particular order: The minibar in the living room at grandma’s, Renovating the laundry room at grandma’s, Hanging up the tool cabinet above the work area in Kyle’s room (including mounting cupboard lights,) putting up storage shelves in my garage, trying to turn two Kodak ZI8 camera’s into a 3D camera (using http://www.3djournal.com/001/artic37.php or similar,) and making the new test PC out of spare parts. Nothing overly computer related, but I am sure there will be some of that in there as well. I would like to see Kyle’s iPhone get AirPlay to a Windows Media Center. Or Russ’s Windows Phone 7 to PlayTo his Windows Media Center or even the Xbox. Who knows what will happen?

The furniture still needs taken out and sanded, but everything is functional and we are working out the wiring for hooking it all up. The front speakers are missing in these pics, but they are there now and sound great.

Our next project is actually not the MiniBar, but to build a Mantle for the fireplace heater you saw in the pictures above. After that, we are going to try to fix the back barn doors, then comes the MiniBar that Kyle posted. In a side note, you may see some extra helping hands in some pics now because our uncle moved into Grandma’s for the winter to help her out, so he may be involved in some projects to a degree.

The lockers have been built, and while very rough, they are functional. When Malachi gets the time, he is going to come out and sand them down to make them a bit nicer. With the lockers being done though, that means the lounge is complete! We have to hook back up the electronics, but aren’t doing that until our uncle’s stuff arrives in a few short weeks. Kyle has a picture of the current setup on his camera that he should post.

The laptop bar in the living room ran into one very fundamental problem: leg room. We designed the bar and the stools before we put the trim around the edge of the bar. We had 10 inches of legroom, but with trim, we are closer to 6 inches. To solve this, we we will simply either raise the bar top or shorten the stools. This project is on hiatus until the living room is finished being cleaned though, which is a work in progress.

Since the living room is on hiatus and the lounge is done, next on the projects list are two smaller items in the barn. The first is to clean off all the furniture in the side of the barn where grandma parks her car and take the furniture to Kyle’s mom’s house to set out in the yard for free. It will also be listed of craigslist for free. There are also 2 console TVs sitting that don’t work quite right that we will drop off at the local Good Will. With that cleaned, grandma can park her car in that side of the barn again. The second barn project is to take the back door off the barn and replace the rotted and weathered wood and rehang it on the track so it slides open easier. Neither of these should take too long.

Other things of note to wrap it up include a possible project to wire a new breaker to an outlet to run a dedicated heater so grandma doesn’t use a gas brick heater, running workshop lights in the barn stalls, continuing to clean the barn, cleaning out my attic, cleaning out my basement, and finishing Kyle’s hanging tool cabinet for his room.

Well, as Nick said, we are working on reorganizing and cleaning up the house, hopefully everything will be an improvement over what it currently is or used to be.  So anyway, the lounge still has to be finished.  The lockers (aka the shelves) still need to be built, and the drawer now works on the tv stand, we are just waiting on the sand man chi to sand it really nice.  Once these things are finished, the lounge will be ready for its new beginning, which is coming in just a couple of weeks.

After the lounge, comes the living room.  I am pretty excited about this one, because as Nick said, we are building a mini bar for laptops.  The mini bar will be 16′ long, so we will have a decent amount of room.  I have been trying to work on the design of the mini bar, and the stools in sketchup, so here is a sneak peek:

Well, I think that is all I have for now, and hopefully as we make progress, I will remember to post pictures and quick updates.

Construction, renovation, and cleanup. That’s the current project for the rooms listed as the title.

First, we cleaned out the barn at Grandma’s where the center is open, the arcade cabinet (more on that much, much, much later) and pop machine are in the back and out of the way, but still accessible, and with the pop machine gone beside the saw, we cleaned that out and moved the grinder and drill press over. Beside them, the tools that used to be in the house in the lounge got moved out to the barn where they belonged in the first place.

In the lounge, we cleaned up the junk, rearranged the furniture to accommodate some new  equipment coming soon and changed out some wiring. We strung coax and ethernet wiring through the attic down to the wall behind where the TV will sit. We had to tap into the Dish Network splitter to replace their wire so it would work for the new TV placement. The TV stand is removed for now and in the barn to get fixed so the drawer works better (it was a bit crooked.) Shelf locker things are going to go on each side of the TV stand, but those have to be built first.

The living room has had a massive cleaning, mostly getting rid of old/nonworking computer parts and monitors that got dropped off at the local Goodwill store. The old, ripped chair is also gone (it’s in the barn) and the idea is to build a mini bar for a laptop cafe so we can take down the folding table for good (except when we need it for family events.)

In my own house, I tackled and cleared out a bunch of boxes in my own bedroom, I am currently weeding through computer parts to take to Goodwill, and then I will tackle my attic. I also have to get my box fan back from Dirksens and remove my Air Conditioner. It’s getting chilly at night! I also tackled the porch and it went from storage room to living area. There are still some small items lying on the floor, but those will be picked up all in good time.

And now for a picture of the barn:

You may have caught our lovely Youtube video and Facebook posts about our woodworking projects and how we were going to turn them into a video series, starting with Kyle’s room. In case you missed it, here is the video:

Anyway, after a while it disappeared off the radar. What happened? Well, we were going to shoot the segment after Kyle’s room got cleaned up to do a before and after, as well as explain what we made and how we made it. That is where the problem is, as Kyle’s room is still not completely put together to this day. There was a lot of stuff in the room and outside the room, and sorting it and consolidating it is taking much longer than the initially planned two weeks. Some of that is lack of motivation on our part, but a lot of it is busy-ness. When it does get sorted and cleaned, we hope to record the segment and post it online.

And now you know the mystery of what happened to This Old Room!

Not gonna say much, but if the cards are played right, we will have a BluRay capable Windows 7 media center, second Xbox 360, BluRay Player, and a 40+ inch HDTV to play with mid-late October. Coming sooner in a different location is a Canon Rebel EOS 720p capable camera, a Quad Core 27″ iMac with Final Cut Express, and a Dual Core iMac driving a Matrox TripleHead2Go running at 3072×768 resolution on about a 100 foot screen. Fun stuff. Hopefully once Illumination winds down, we can do some video or something on YouTube about our latest “toys.”

First, I did get OS 9.2.2 running alongside Mac OS 10.1 with a bit of fanagaling. I still have to install a few games, but I do know that Nanosaur, Tomb Raider III, and Max Payne all work fantastic despite the age of the PowerMac (almost 10 years old.) I did not get to test these or anything for that matter on my sister’s iMac yet.

Not much tech stuff happening right now because I am gearing up for Illumination, but also because I have become more involved at EUM Church (eumchurch.org) working on pamphlets, logos, and a sub-site blog/daily devotional for their youth. I am also getting a bit involved on the media team, which is currently being revamped to train for a switch to Mac OS and ProPresenter (excellent software.) I think all the changes are going to make media quite a bit of fun.

While the month of August has mostly been occupied with Illumination (IlluminationFestival.org) related items as well as the Darke County Fair, I have managed to line up a project or two for the upcoming month of September. The biggest of these is Retro Mac Gaming. I currently have a iMac DV 500mhz G3 and a PowerMac 400mhz G4 that I want to boot OS 9 and OS 10.4 on for playing games like Unreal, Marathon, Oni, Max Payne, and others but still use the latest Firefox and security updates for the web.

Simple Fixes are things that we have come across working on computers or various projects that we post here and share for our reference as well as to help others.

If you are having problems with iPhoto slideshow export failing or iMovie movies encoding (or any type of video encoding related errors on your Mac,) try temporarily uninstalling Perian in your System Preferences. Perian is a great add-on for Quicktime that adds missing video format support, but it sometimes interferes with QuickTime encoding in applications. After you are finished, you can reinstall Perian through the System Preferences Panel.

If you do a lot of video encoding and run into this issue often, you may consider ditching Perian all together and using VLC instead for QuickTime’s unsupported video formats.