Author: chris

Refinishing Our Floors, a DIY Sanding Adventure

Posted on by chris

The past few days have been spent staring at the floor. Prepping them with the help of a friend (thanks, M!) and then so much sanding with another friend (thanks, K!).

Here’s a portion of the floors before we did anything:

What we started with

What followed was a lot of prep. The previous owners had carpet everywhere which meant staples and nails (they also had pets they didn’t take care of, but that’s a whole other issue). Even with no furniture in the house this took forever. Every time I thought we were done there’d be something else I’d overlooked (“got all the doors off, check. Oh, right, closet doors too…”).

Friday was supposed to be the first big day of sanding. The plan was to use a large orbital sander instead of a drum sander. Slower, but easier to handle for someone who didn’t know what they were doing. I got the sander got home and realized that I wasn’t nearly as ready as I thought. More prep and moving things ensued. By the time I was actually ready to start the sander it was 4 hours later than expected. Managed to do one pass just to prove I could and then left for the night.

On Saturday K came over and we clocked a twelve hour day of sanding, vacuuming, and running to the hardware store. If he hadn’t come I don’t think I would have finished this. Three cheers for K! We did stop for lunch, dinner, and ice cream. I’d rented a fancy powerful edger which proved to be more trouble than it was worth (YMMV). We returned it and bought a hand-held orbital sander that took longer, but gave more even results.

It took four solid passes with different grits to get to the finish we were looking for (36, 60, 80, 100 for future reference). In retrospect we probably didn’t go deep enough since there are still some scratches here and there. Oh well!

We wrapped up after 11pm and left exhausted. Here’s the only progress picture I have because it was a frantic day. This was my view the entire time:

Progress Sander

Here’s a few sanded pictures:

Sanded segment

Sanded

My wife helped vacuum out the place on Sunday and then I put some polyurethane in a discrete location for testing. It looked not great. Here’s the test spot:

Gross. Unstained with Poly

This is admittedly the worst spot in the house, but still was deflating. If we were doing this “right” we’d be replacing the bad planks throughout the house–each room has a handful. Our goal isn’t perfect though (for a lot of reasons, but mainly cost and also because we’re trying to not be too precious about these things). We talked it over and decided to try staining.

Stains all have great names. It’s like paint colors but aimed at dudes. There was one called “Gunstock”, which is just like…come on. Here’s a few test strips. The left is Minwax’s “Early American” and the right is “Provincial” (the far right is the unstained poly test):

Stain Options

We opted for Early American with the thought that it’d blend all the wood we had in the house together well. Fingers crossed I went and bought a gallon and a quart of it.

That lead to another grueling late night of staining. Hands and knees wiping it on and wiping off the excess with cloth rags. Again finished after 11pm and just managed to shower before collapsing into bed. The result though exceeded expectations:

Just the stain

Then on Monday I put the first coat of poly down (we went with Varathane’s water-based floor finish) and it started to shine (I mean, yes, that is sort of the point of poly, but you know).

Here it is right after application:

One Coat of Poly

And here’s the second coat drying:

Two Coats of Poly

Tuesday morning I put the final coat on and now we wait for 48 hours before we can walk on it:

Three Coats of Poly

And here’s the worst corner and what it looked like with 2 coats of poly on it. It’s night and day from what it looked like when we started:

The corner stained and with a few coats of poly

Update on the thursday after: here’s a few more pictures after drying for a few days. It’s a lot glossier than I thought it’d be. Some bubbles and small bits of things here and there. We’ll sand out the egregious ones or just live with them:

Dry and Up Close

Dry in the entry room

Would I ever do this again?

Maybe.

If you’d asked me right after the sanding I would have said absolutely not. Now that we’re seeing the results I am appreciating the “why” behind each of the subsequent steps more.

If we were to do it again I’d be more aggressive with sanding from the start. We started with too high a grit and had to go back to a lower one which added hours to the project. I’d also split up the sanding to 2-3 days rather than trying to cram it into a short a time as possible. I’d also probably have someone show me how to use a drum sander and use it well. The orbital sanders were good enough for this project. I don’t know if I’d have the patience to use them again though.

Lessons learned!

House Stuff We Need

Posted on by chris

We’re closing on our house on Wednesday!

That’s terrifying so I’m combating the thought of draining our savings accounts with planning and packing.

We’re looking for a lot of things that are not the sort of things one needs while renting. Do you have any of the following you no longer need?

  • 8 foot ladder (attic access)
  • 16⁄20 foot ladder (for getting to the roof)
  • 2 foot-ish step ladder (for getting slightly taller)
  • Lawn mower
  • Shop Vac
  • Miter Saw

Oct 12, 2018 update: we have all of this and so much more now. So much.

Headshots

Posted on by chris

My wife and I are opening up a few spots over the next month for corporate headshots in or around Ann Arbor, Michigan.

Generally speaking this is for those of you who need to update the headshot on your website, your social media profiles, your business cards, or to have a photo on hand for any upcoming presentations or publications.

You can see a portfolio of our work over at our website.

Why You?

What we think we bring to the table is a focus on kindness. When someone sees this photo of you they should get a sense of you. We don’t prescribe you wear certain clothes, or that we do your headshots in a specific place. We’ll work with you to find a good natural pose, but you should be you and sometimes that means we won’t clean up your desk (entirely), or we might go outside because outside is where you feel more alive.

We’re not going to do crossed arms.

We’re not going to do angry looks (although we might for fun).

Gently put, if you need to be intense or intimidating we’re not the right photographers for you.

Money Stuff

We’re not the cheapest photographers (nor the most expensive) and we’re wholly comfortable with that. Our rate these days for one location and one person starts around $225 and goes up from there (rarely down, but let’s talk if you’re working for a non-profit).

Where does that money go though?

There’s a lot that goes into a good headshot and only a small fraction of it happens during the shoot itself. What you usually don’t see is all the work before we take the photos and all the work after we take the photos. There’s packing and setup and travel, then the shoot, then the hours spent afterwards managing files, deleting the bad ones, obsessing over the good, and generally making it as easy as possible for you to be very happy with the results.

Conclusion

All that to say, let’s talk. Send Chris an email or find us in person! If we’re not the right fit we’re extremely happy to point you in the direction of any of the other amazing photographers around Ann Arbor.

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Cleaning NES and SNES Consoles

Posted on by chris

NES Console

72 Pin with four different choices: Boil, Clean Bend, or Replace

Clean

You can clean the connector somewhat by putting isopropyl alcohol on a clean cartridge and reinserting it a few times. Clean the cartidge between insertions. Or, dismantle the console and clean the connector itself off of the board.

Boiling

While this sounds like it couldn’t possibly work, it looks like it does.

Bend

I’d really recommend against this. I’ve tried it. It’s hard to do and I did more harm than good. If you must, get some quality dental tools. If cleaning or boiling didn’t work you should replace it.

Replace

You can get a replacement for between 10 and 30 dollars on the internet. Here’s what 10 gets you.

I’ve tried one of these before and didn’t like it. Super stiff and felt like it was scratching the pins of the cartridge.

The Blinking Light Win, on the other hand, looks very promising.

Go more expensive if you can. The cheaper ones are often not built to nice tolerances. Replacing it is a matter of unscrewing screws and careful popping off the old one. If you’re reasonably handy it’s extremely doable.

SNES Consoles

The easiest way to clean the connector inside is to clean a cartridge, then wet the cart, insert it, clean the cart, and repeat that process. An alternatively is to, very carefully, use a microfiber cloth and alcohol. There’s a lot that can go wrong (snag on the pin because you delved too deep) so be careful!

The design of the SNES is such that the pins will rarely go bad, which is good because replacing the pins is more or less impossible without a lot of soldering.

Note on replacing batteries

Games with save systems rely on a battery backup to keep the save stored on the cartridge. That battery will eventually go bad. The batteries are a standard CR2032 and is–relatively–easily changed. You’ll need access to the insides of the cartridge. After that, you disengage the battery from the cartridge , replace it, and secure the battery back in place. This might require some soldering, although there are tutorials for ways to do it without soldering. You can also buy battery replacement kits

Cleaning NES and SNES Cartridges

Posted on by chris

Your NES or SNES is likely not broken. The problem is almost always do to a poor connection between the console and the cartridge. Over time either the pins inside of the console, or the pads on the cartridge, get corroded and encased in funk. Get rid of the offending materials so a proper connection can be made between the two and everything magically works.

How do you do that though?

Don’t blow into it

Really, don’t do that.

If you’re able to get a game to work by pulling it, blowing on it, and reinserting it, all you did is either seat the cartridge in a slightly different place, scraped off some of the gunk onto the internal connectors. Or, worse, the moisture from your gross mouth is facilitating a connection. Whatever the cause, later on the moisture is not going to be your friend, which is why you shouldn’t do this.

If you must force air into it use compressed air. However, unless there’s an obvious bit of fuzz in there, the problem is likely something that’s not readily removable.

Opening things up with Gamebits and Pens

Picking up a set of gamebits–really an inverted torx–for cleaning and repairs is advisable. There are two that you’ll need: one for the console itself and one for the cartridges. If you get a good set it’ll be universal across almost every game system that accepts cartridges. Plus, if you have a good game store nearby, like the excellent Get Your Game On in Ann Arbor, they might have them available. Alternatively, you can order a set from amazon or an ifixit kit that has them included.

My feeling is that if you’re going to do this more than a handful of times it’s worth getting a set. It’ll speed up cleaning since you have more surface area visible to you without trying to peer around plastic.

On to the cleaning

Whether or not you get the gamebits cleaning is about the same: scrape off what you can with dry materials then get the rest with wet materials until it’s squeaky clean.

Here we have a shockingly gross looking copy of Final Fantasy. I’m honestly not sure where I got it, but, yikes:

Front of cartridge

Side of cartridge

Interior of cartridge

Dry Process

I’d suggest loosening anything on the plastic part of the shell with a toothpick if it doesn’t come off with a dry q-tip. This is surprisingly effective at gently scraping away offensive stuff. On this Final Fantasy cartridge I was able to remove most of the sticker and a chunk of the whatever it is from the casing.

If you can open the cartridge you can use an eraser on the pads as well. Just be careful to clean up the leftover eraser bits after you’re done. If you use one, I’d recommend a separate eraser (the trapezoidal pink ones work well) not one attached to a pencil. You’re liable to slip at some point and you don’t want to gouge the PCB with the metal eraser holder.

Wet Process

Q-tips and isopropyl alcohol. Go with 91%. If you need it fast, it’s easily found anywhere that has a pharmacy. I’d recommend a small bottle if you can. You’re unlikely to run out and a smaller bottle is easier to handle.

Wet one end of the q-tip in a small amount of isopropyl alcohol. Then rub that on the pads inside of the cartridge. Continue to do this until the q-tips stop coming out with any amount of blackness, or brownness, or grayness. Just white wet q-tip, please.

Depending on the cart this can take a lot of q-tips. Throw on something on netflix and scrub away.

Clean front

Clean Side

The detritus

Once you’re done, put it all back together and try it out!

The definitive guide to cleaning is from hardcoregaming101. I haven’t tried Brasso yet, but am planning to on at least one NES cartridge I can’t get to work in any other way:

Retrowaretv recommends against brasso.

As a point of interest: cartridges have different pins!

Jekyll to Hugo Along with an Updated Deployment Script

Posted on by chris

I moved my blog from Jekyll to Hugo because I can’t leave well enough alone.

Jekyll is wonderful, it’s also slower than it should be for building a site. Not like “go get some coffee” slow, but building felt sluggish. I also needed to reconfigure my workflow for publishing anyway. My earlier workflow involved running Jekyll client-side, keeping the resulting _site folder in version control and deploying that.

Trust me, it made a lot of sense when I was setting it up. However, it quickly started to show its fragility.

My primary goal was to have the server generate the site itself so I needed to start from scratch anyway. This seemed like a good opportunity to try Hugo. I also wasn’t running ruby on my webserver yet and, frankly, installing Hugo was a lot easier than the full ruby setup:

sudo apt install hugo

And that was about it for setup on the server.

Hugo and Jekyll both use markdown files to generate the site and their frontmatters are similar enough that the transition to Hugo was incredibly simple.

Fast forward through a lot of futzing with config files, themes, and testing builds.

I eventually landed on this: I keep the project in version control and .gitignore the exported site from the repo. The site can still be built locally if needed with hugo serve but when the project is commited it ignores the exported site. After the commit is pushed to the server it runs the following post-recieve hook:

#!/bin/sh
#Checkout the repo to a temporary build folder
git --work-tree=/var/repos/hugoblog/tmpbuild/ --git-dir=/var/repos/hugoblog/ checkout -f
#Build the site
hugo -s /var/repos/hugoblog/tmpbuild/
echo "\n\nBlog has been built. Moving it to chrissalzman.com/blog\n\n"
#Then move the public folder to the right place
rsync -r /var/repos/hugoblog/tmpbuild/public/ /var/www/chrissalzman.com/blog

Nothing terribly fancy and this will likely get modified into the future. It checkouts the project to a folder, runs Hugo, tells me it worked, then moves it over with rsync.

Note

I did run into a theme issue with git that stumped me for a bit. The theme was cloned in using git. Since it had its own git repo it wasn’t getting tracked by the project’s git repo. After pushing it to the server hugo was generating a blank site since the theme was blank.

My fix was to copy/paste the theme into a differently named folder, update config.toml to that theme folder, and then add another commit. After that it worked. I’m sure this is the sort of thing that could be solved leveraging git in some way I don’t quite understand, but this was easier for me. I also anticipate designing my own theme.

The Peripheral

Posted on by chris

I was talking to a friend a month or so ago about when and why we put books down. Sometimes it’s not grabbing you, or the author seems to be wasting your time, or any number of other reasons, but it happens. I’m a completionist at heart, but steadily learning to stop feeling guilty about not letting an author waste my time.

I didn’t finish The Peripheral the first time I picked it up. I almost didn’t the second time either, but I pushed on because, frankly, Gibson had earned my trust through his other work, his interviews, and–a new one for me–his endlessly fascinating twitter presence. How Gibsonian of him. I’m so glad I did, because this is a new favorite novel for me.

The Peripheral takes about 100 pages to make any amount of sense. It’s an incredibly engaging 100 pages despite this seemingly major deficiency in a novel. You struggle against the frenetic pace, the vocabulary, the mystery until parts and pieces start to coalesce into something you can hold onto. This, in turn, makes you appreciate how the main characters are also muddling their way through. You rarely feel like you have more information than them, which is a very neat trick.

I think you should read this book, and give it at least 100 pages, but go into it as cold as you can and relinquish the need to know what in the world is going on.

This review is cross-posted on GoodReads.

Deep Work

Posted on by chris

A few days ago I went on a self-imposed twitter break. This book showed up the next day and I proceeded to read it in a handful of days because apparently I do have free time, it was just being eaten up in tiny increments of distraction. To say I was primed for Deep Work is an understatement.

The thesis is pretty simple: you need to train yourself to do solid stretches of focused work on important career-advancing problems. Both for your personal fulfillment as well as to be rewarded in our changing economy. If you don’t agree with that premise you’ll hate the book since it’s stating that over and over, giving examples of why this is important, and then details on how to actually do that. The first half is the defense of the premise, the second half is how to do so. If you’re really strapped for time you could skip the first half, but it’s well-written and enjoyably written.

If, like me, you’ve been feeling like your work life is mostly batting emails back and forth I’d highly suggest reading it. I have a big list of things I’m going to attempt from it and immediately after finishing reading this morning I mapped out the rest of my day.

This review is cross-posted on GoodReads.

Canon Lenses for Sale

Posted on by chris

We’re selling a few canon lenses. All are mechanically and optically sound, but are more or less going unused. Rounding them up here for easy sharing and if we know you in person we’ll cut 10% off. Really though, make an offer:

  • SOLD: Canon EF 20-35 3.5-4.5 – $90
  • WITHDRAWN Canon EF Macro 100 2.8 USM – $350
  • SOLD: Canon EFS IS 18-135 3.5-5.6 non-STM – $150
  • SOLD Canon EFS 10-22 3.5-4.5 – $290

Screenshots on the Mac: An Exhuastive Guide That Probably Didn’t Need to Be Written

Posted on by chris

If you do any amount of work on the web you likely need to share screenshots now and then. Or, more likely, you need to do it five times a day. Apple’s official documentation on screenshots is a bit dry, although relatively complete. There are also a billion and one tutorials about various aspects of this around the internet. They’re all mostly good too. I’m writing mine mostly so that I have my own I can reference and add to over the years. osdata.com’s is probably the most complete guide to screenshots on the mac I managed to find, although is outdated now.

If you know of something I missed, drop me a line about it.

The Basics

The foundation of a screenshot is the command+shift key combination. On top of that there are two basic actions: “Entire Screen” mode and “Selected Portion” mode. On top of those we can add additional modifiers for other results.

To screenshot the whole screen (or actually all of your screens as separate images if you have multiple desktops):

cmd+shift+3

To grab a selected portion of the screen:

cmd+shift+4

You then click and drag to make your selection. Release and it’ll take the screenshot.

Both methods will save the screenshot to your default screenshots folder. At the bottom of this page will be a way to change this location to something more sensible, like ~/Desktop/screenshots.

Modifiers

Most modifiers are only for cmd+shift+4’s selection mode. cmd+shift+3 grabs the whole screen and that’s it. The only modifier it works with is control and it must be pressed alongside the other keys (cmd+shift+cntl+4), which is awkward to say the least. (Unless you’re an emacs user and then it’s like a nice hand warmup.)

Control

Add in cntl to the chord and it will copy directly to your clipboard instead of saving it to your screenshots folder. This is useful if the lifespan of the screenshot is to share it for a one-off use. Slack, the program I’m in most of the day every day, plays nicely with pasted images. So do most email programs.

Space (before dragging your selection)

If you hit space before you start drawing, it will allow you to instead select the active window (or menu dropdown if it’s already open) and take a screenshot of that with a nice drop shadow around it. This looks extraordinarily professional while saving you time in photoshop. Thanks to @jboonstra for the tip that this exists!

Space (after dragging your selection)

After you have begun drawing your window you can reposition it by holding down the spacebar. This will save you so much hassle over the years. I usually get the cursor close to where I want. draw the box, and then reposition. Once the combinations are in your fingers its easy to fly with this.

An important thing to know about your computer is that this trick also works in other applications where you have a selection (notably photoshop). You’ll feel like a wizard the first few times you do this.

Option

Will scale the box from the center out proportionally. While neat, I have yet to have a great reason to use it.

Shift (after you’ve begun drawing)

Hold shift again to constrain the box’s height or width. start moving vertically and it won’t let the box go wider or narrower and vice versa. Very useful for locking in an exact width/height. You can chain this with option to scale those dimensions proportionally as well.

Escape

If you’re so lucky as to still have an ESC key (ha! Courage!) you can hit it to exit out of selection mode and walk away without taking a screenshot.

Basic setup for extra happiness

Change the default location for where your screenshots get saved. Out of the box your mac has that set to the desktop. This is a recipe for having a very cluttered desktop. If you make a folder then whenever you ask “where did that screenshot go?” It’s in that folder.

If the lines below don’t make sense to you this tutorial spells them out in more detail:

mkdir ~/Desktop/screenshots
defaults write com.apple.screencapture location ~/Desktop/screenshots
killall SystemUIServer

Replace ~/Desktop/screenshots with whatever folder makes most sense to you.

Change the Naming Scheme

If you want to modify the way the names are you can do this:

defaults write com.apple.screencapture name -string "a very good screenshot prefix"

If you’re working on a particular project and want to keep all your screenshots tidy you could change the prefix while you’re working on the project and then change it back. Or, do what I do and personalize it a bit because of vanity.

What about that date and time stuff?

The date and time at the end of the naming syntax is harder to get at. You could, if you were brave, try to modify the appropriate strings in this file to whatever you wanted it to be:

/System/Library/CoreServices/SystemUIServer.app/Contents/Resources/English.lproj/ScreenCapture.strings

This is, however, locked down by System Integrity Protection. You could turn it off, change the appropriate string in there, and then turn it back on. If you’re about to turn off SIP that’s usually a good sign to investigate writing a script instead. This was buried in an answer on an apple discussion board

Change the default filetype

.png is a very good file format for images, but there are reasons you might want to change this to something else. This will set your preferences:

defaults write com.apple.screencapture type [format]

And your options are:

bmp
pdf
jpg
jp2
tif
pict
tga
png

For example, if you needed a screenshot as a pdf:

defaults write com.apple.screencapture type pdf

And turn it back to png

defaults write com.apple.screencapture type png

Drop-shadows are bad?

The following will disable the drop-shadow when you use cmd+shift+4 and then hold down space to select a window:

defaults write com.apple.screencapture disable-shadow -bool true

To put it back on:

defaults write com.apple.screencapture disable-shadow -bool false

tekrevue.com is where I found this

Mute That Shutter Sound

I looked and looked for a clean way to do this. There’s no way to specifically mute the skeuomorphic “cha-chunk” for screenshots. There are a few ways around it if it’s onerous to you though.

This mutes all system audio effects

defaults write com.apple.systemsound "com.apple.sound.uiaudio.enabled" -int 0

Turn it back on:

defaults write com.apple.systemsound "com.apple.sound.uiaudio.enabled" -int 1

Alternatively, there’s a setting in Preferences->Sound called “Play User Interface Sound Effects”. Tick that off to do the same thing.

Or, you could replace the file that gets played with a blank audio file instead. It’s this one:

/System/Library/Components/CoreAudio.component/Contents/SharedSupport/SystemSounds/system/Grab.aif

Again, this is locked down by SIP, so ymmv.

The Command Line is an Option Too, Nerd

You can also use the CLI version of screencapture to script tasks you don’t want to do manually. screencapture is available on the command line with additional options. Read the man page or go here to dive in.

The two flags that were most obviously useful on a scan of its options were the following:

-T will do a screencapture after a particular timeframe. 10 is the default, you can set it to whatever:

screencapture -T 10

-M will take a screenshot and add it to a new email

screencapture -M mailme.jpg

Oh, also, -x will mute it.

Timed Screenshot using Preview

If you don’t want to use the command line to delay a screenshot you can open up Preview, then File->Screenshot and then “Timed Screenshot”. It’ll show a nice pie-chart countdown while you get your desktop ready for the screenshot.

BONUS TIP

If you’re a designer or a front-end developer you often need to check the sizes and placement of objects. Assuming you don’t have a grid or rulers in the program you’re using you can use the selection mode screenshot to do rudimentary aligning and checking. Activate it, draw a box, and then reposition with space to check edges. You’ll also have noted by now that there’s pixel dimensions alongside the crosshairs. Those are dead useful for checking pixels.