Tag Archives: Nerding

Using barbed wire fences to create a telephone network makes so much sense, but it was new to me until I stumbled upon this fascinating article. Always enjoy reading about rural ingenuity. Favourite fact: the barbed wire networks sometimes used corn cobs, cow horns, or glass bottles as insulators!

Lori Emerson’s website seems full of interesting projects, and I especially love the table of contents from her upcoming book Other Networks: A Radical Technology Sourcebook.

New 9V Connector

I woke up the other night to a faint buzzing downstairs, looked around for the source and finally clued in it was coming from the laundry room. The little plastic water leak detector behind the washing machine was beeping away, but thankfully there was no water, so I decided it must be a low battery level warning.

The only way to stop the noise was to remove the 9 volt battery, so found a screwdriver to pry open the detector. Still half asleep, I pulled too roughly on the battery connector and left the negative terminal stuck inside the battery. A drag, but the noise stopped, so, partly victorious, I climbed back into bed.

*Yes, I did try to push the little terminal in, and no, it didn’t just magically reconnect to the wire.*

The next day I looked up how much it was going to cost to replace the wounded little detector ($23+tax!) and wondered if I could instead buy a cheap 9V battery connector and try to fix it. Lots of them out there, but only in quantities of 5 or 10, and I couldn’t see me needing that many in this lifetime.

Didn’t take much internet sleuthing to discover what most of the world already knows: take the top of a dead 9V battery and use that. Hiding in plain sight.

*The positive wire goes to the terminal that looks like a little crown.*

*Reused the original connector top from the detector rather than the battery bottom as I liked that it was more flexible. Hot glued to the working bits of the connector.*

I’ve taken many things apart in my tinkering and puttering career – oh, the fizz of danger when slicing a golf ball in half and the rubber threads viciously unwound, or pulling the back off our ancient Panasonic television to see the tubes inside when I was a kid! – but it never dawned on me to carefully cut open a battery. That seemed a step too far, unnecessarily dangerous, the possibility of an explosion and/or toxic yuck oozing out and poisoning me. And possibly that can happen, so be careful.

A couple of Instructables later and I had a fresh battery attached to the new connector on the little detector and put it back on duty. I’m a terrible solderer and it still worked, proving yet again that good enough is good enough. A very satisfying fix.

It’s easy enough to push the detector behind the washing machine, but getting it out was a hassle involving some fancy yoga moves and banging my head on the laundry tub, so the weird reused twist tie loop is my hack to give me something to hook a broom handle onto to haul it out.

“This is a recording”

We started getting early morning spam phone calls on our landlines a few years ago (our house has an apartment for my mother). Early as in 6:30 a.m. early. My mother was not usually out of bed or, if she was, she was getting dressed or in the bathroom, and she would rush to answer the phone. As her mobility decreased, I was afraid this would all end in a fall.

To prevent a possible tumble, I started taking her kitchen phone off the hook every morning when I got up. I’d hear a dial tone followed by a ring noise and then a voice telling me to hang up and try my call again (apparently known as an intercept message). After the message was repeated twice, a rapid busy signal would start and eventually would go dead after a long period.

My mother would replace the handset when she was in the kitchen and ready for her day, and if someone called to tell her that her Windows machine was acting up or she had won a cruise, she was awake and ready to hang up on them. This was an easy solution to an annoying problem.

We have two phone lines in our house. Our copper line was replaced in 2021 by a fibre optic cable that gives us internet, television and telephone. As my mother doesn’t use the internet, and we are able to wirelessly bounce a television signal from the Bell Home Hub modem to give her television, we decided at that time to leave her copper telephone line as it was.

Until Bell Aliant sent out letters earlier this year. The first informed us that if my mother’s copper line broke, they wouldn’t fix it and my mother would have to get a fibre line, which was fair enough, I suppose. That was followed a month later by another letter saying they would be cancelling her phone service by August if she didn’t switch to their fibre service. A classic Bell passive-aggressive move.

As we already had the fibre line and Home Hub in our house, it was an easy matter of some magic person left over from Island Tel days doing some programming at the Bell Aliant office in Charlottetown and rerouting my mother’s phone number to our modem (each of the Home Hubs has room for two phone lines). We lucked out again and had a tech come to our house (another Island Tel vet nearing retirement) who was able to make things work in our basement to easily route from our modem to my mother’s phone.

The morning following the switch, I picked up my mother’s handset expecting to hear the regular pattern. As I moved around her kitchen, I heard the dial tone followed by the signal to warn that the phone was off the hook, but no gentle, helpful voice.

I thought that was the end of the voice, but a couple of weeks later I was looking after a friend’s house while she was away and remembered she still had her copper line service, so I had one last visit with the Bell Aliant voice:

Anyone know who recorded this message? It certainly sounds like an Atlantic Canadian voice, maybe PEI but could be Newfoundland or Cape Breton, too. Recorded on tape? A copy of a copy of a copy? Let me know what you know, and please try your call again.

Blind luck

I am certainly not the first person on the internet to share the hack of using old window blind slats for garden plant markers, but here’s my preferred method for cutting them so the marker has one pointy end for sticking in soil and one square end where the plant information can be written:

I think I’ve only seen them squared off on both ends, but sometimes it’s nice to be able to shove a marker in next to something you would like to remember to move when the time is right (and that time isn’t right then) and the soil is perhaps a bit hard and unyielding.

I was lucky to get metal blinds from a friend who was replacing hers, giving me what I imagine will be a lifetime supply. I only cut a few at a time as needed as I find them easier to store in their original length; I put a shower curtain hook through the holes at one end and hang them on the wall.

Bonus content: I’ve found dozens of uses for metal shower curtain hooks in the garden. They are cheap, reusable light-duty hooks; buy a package and you will be hooked.

Food/Not Food

If you are unsure if something is a food, a good test is to put it outside and see what happens (most memorably done by Spy magazine in 1989 when they put a Twinkie cake on a NYC window ledge for four days and not even the pigeons went near it!).

I found three stale rice cakes in the back of a cupboard this morning and tossed them onto the lawn, confident some creature would eat them. The crows arrived quickly, took a few bites and passed, as did their bluejay cousins. A red squirrel triumphantly grabbed one, probably excited by how large and relatively light it was, scurried up a pine tree, took a nibble and dropped it to the ground.

I gathered up the rice cakes and presented them to the hens, who have pecked at them with little enthusiasm for four hours. They will probably finish them, but it will take a while. Their diet includes grit and small stones, so they are used to eating things without obvious (to us) nutritional value.

Not food.

“*Why did you give us styrofoam? We’ll eat it, of course, but…styrofoam?”*

Another Planet

In the end, it went by so quickly. We went outside just before 3:30pm as the moon started to move in front of the sun. By 4:30 the sun was almost hidden, the temperature had dropped a few degrees, the light was odd, the birds were quiet, the wind had died down.

Then gulp, the moon ate the sun, we took off our eclipse viewing glasses, and we were on another planet, a twilight planet where a ring glowed in the sky. I had anticipated our hens would head for their coop as it darkened, which is what they do every evening, needing to get up high on a roost as their eyesight is poor in dim light. Instead they kept pecking until it was too late, and they gathered together, confused, huddled next to a shrub. They heard their automatic chicken door shut, and knew something was up. It all happened so fast.

I was anticipating pitch black, but instead the horizon glowed, there was blue sky. It felt as almost like sunrise, except we were facing west. We could see a planet, maybe Jupiter, just below the sun. The sky that had been cloudlessly clear all afternoon had wispy clouds, but that just added to the magic. We had nearly three minutes of totality, but it felt like a second.

Then the light roared back in a whoosh, the strange shadows returning, our glasses back on to see the rest of the show. I stayed outside for another hour, watching the moon move away, the hens back to their scratch scratch pick pick dance. Then I had supper, the winds picked up, the birds started to fly around again, the sun shone brightly.

Preclipse

It’s cool, bright and sunny here this morning. Around 3:30 this afternoon, we will step outside our house and watch the moon eat the sun. We should experience 2 minutes and 47 seconds of totality here. I bought viewing glasses months ago, signed up to do some citizen science, and now just have to wait for this once-in-many-lifetimes event.

If what I heard on CBC is true and a total solar eclipse only happens in a specific location on average every 375 years, the last time a total solar eclipse occurred where we live would have been around 1650, and this land would be have been covered by an ancient forest: beautiful tall white pine, red oak, birch, maple, spruce. The red squirrels, chickadees, blue jays, crows and ravens we see here year-round would be flying and running around, perhaps joined by a now-extirpated species, the black bear. My ancestors were still all in the UK, 100 years from even thinking about heading west, so maybe a Mi’kmaq family were on the river fishing when early night came and went.

When bidden, Perplexity “curated” a playlist for the event, but left off some obvious (to my human brain anyway) choices: Moonlight Sonata, Claire de Lune, Here Comes The Sun. And, of course, You’re So Vain, with its line about some pompous fella taking his Learjet to Nova Scotia to see the 1972 solar eclipse. Did you know Carly Simon’s daughter, Sally, now lives in Halifax? The media has truly covered every angle under the sun.

We won’t be blasting music here, but will instead watch and listen to how the birds and animals around us respond. I’m going to let our little flock of hens run around the yard and watch them head back to the safety of their coop as it starts to get dark, then wait to see if they reemerge after their shortest night ever. I will report.

For a total solar eclipse, Perplexity suggests:

“Total Eclipse of the Heart” by Bonnie Tyler
“Blinded by the Light” by Bruce Springsteen
“Blinding Lights” by The Weeknd
“Solar Eclipse” by YoungBoy Never Broke Again
“Moon at the Window” by Joni Mitchell
“Blue Moon” by Billie Holiday
“Starman” by David Bowie
“Space is the Place” by Sun Ra
“Eclipse” by Earl Sweatshirt
“Moonlight” by Jay-Z and Kali Uchis
“Seven” by Taylor Swift
“Moonshadow” by Cat Stevens
“The Moon and the Sky” by Sade
“Eclipse” by JACE Carrillo and Alyko
“La Noche de Anoche” by Bad Bunny and Rosalía
“Eclipse” by LOONA’s Kim Lip
“Eclipse” by GOT 7
“Eclipse” by MAMAMOO’s Moonbyul
“Eclipse” by Pink Floyd
“Gravity” by John Mayer

Quick and dirty iPad holder

From about the age of 75 up to a couple of years ago when she was 98, my mother walked on a treadmill twice a day, every day, for 15 minutes each time. After breakfast and after lunch. Not fast, not trying to break any records, just walked at a good pace. She listened to Anne Murray and John Denver cassette tapes and hummed along.

She’s 101 and in remarkable health, so I try to follow her example and keep moving. I enjoy walking, especially in our woods, but the conditions around our house the past couple of weeks have been treacherous. Ice has completely covered our driveway and we wear grippers on the bottoms of our boots to go out.

So I’ve been forced onto the treadmill in our garage. It’s an old one, but still in good shape. I know if I can watch movies or videos I will be distracted from how boring the whole enterprise is and stay longer, but there isn’t a device holder on the treadmill console. I tried putting my iPad on an old music stand, but it was a bit tippy and awkward to reach. I considered buying a holder that would attach to the machine, or trying to build something myself, but just never bothered and listened to podcasts instead.

Then today I was putting a piece of paper in a plastic sheet protector and bingo, problem solved! Five minutes later I had hung a sheet protector from a piece of dowel and attached this to the treadmill console with two pieces of duct tape. It’s not pretty, but it works (which would also be the title of my DIY book, if I ever wrote one). The iPad covers most of the display, but I kind of prefer that as I’m not constantly watching the time tick by, and the iPad can be easily lifted if need be.

Added bonus I hadn’t anticipated: the touch features of the screen are usable through the sheet, which might also come in handy if keeping an iPad clean in the kitchen.

I might replace the tape with something like conduit clamps, attaching them by drilling carefully through the plastic console, but the tape seems good enough for now.

I now hope to walk and walk and walk to 100 while watching cat and DIY videos.

thelmaphillips.ca

Always looking for connections