Photo dump: mystery switch, window perch, bathroom, sun

When my main machine was the 17″ laptop, I had a great system for pulling pictures directly from my camera, almost immediately after taking them, then pushing them to Flickr with FlickrExport for Aperture. The new (well, not terribly new now) MacBook Air does not meet the system requirements for Aperture (I got the low end one), so I offload photos into iPhoto as a temporary buffer until I remember to move them over to Aperture. It is a system that should work pretty well, except for that “until I remember” bit, where it all falls apart. I end up with days like today, where I import into Aperture and Flickr the past month or two of photos. I then dump the highlights into one mega-photo-post.

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As I tweeted the other day[1][2], the cassette player in my car broke. That fact alone should tell you about how old the stereo is. If you want solid numbers, it is almost 11 years old, and is the stock stereo that came with the car. Ordinarily, this would be no big deal, as I own no cassette tapes, but given that a good chunk of my podcast listening is in the car and all of my drive music listening is via iPhone/iPod, and the only acceptable way to get that audio into the car is via cassette adapter (I refuse to use those FM radio transmitters), this posed a national emergency in my eyes.

Car stereos these days are almost little computers. The replacement I picked up is a JVC. The Sony stereos looked nice, but I refuse to get Sony, for reasons beyond the scope of this blog post. It has USB ports, one in the back and one in the front. I guess there is enough of a USB stack in there that you can plug in a Bluetooth adapter. (I’m still trying to figure out why I’d want to.) You can even plug in a USB thumb drive full of MP3s and it will play directly from the drive. Additionally, if you plug an iPhone or iPod into the USB, it treats it as a first-class citizen and lets you control things from either the radio buttons or the iPod (so you can have the iPod hidden away in the glove box or, like I do, have it on a dashboard mount.) Although I have yet to use it for a commute — just a short trip out to an electronics surplus supplier in Beavertron — I am quite happy with it.

One thing I did have to deal with is its size. The old stereo is a double-height one. The new one is single-height. I bought a dash kit that has a coverplate for that purpose, but it was this cheap-ass thing that did not fit right and looked pretty bad. You would think they would have standard interchangable coverplates, like on desktop PCs. Or maybe not. The more I think back to the days of building tower PCs, the more I start to remember three or four different styles of coverplate that were certainly not interchangeable. I ended up fashioning my own and adding what I now call “the mystery switch.”

New stereo and mystery switch 4
New stereo and mystery switch 1 New stereo and mystery switch 3

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A while back, the Make Magazine blog posted about a cat window perch [1] [2] you could make from PVC, wire, and suction cups. I tried my hand at it and have the main body, but have yet to sew the hammock part. It has been in this state for a few weeks, and yet I’m married to a seamstress. Go figure.

IMG_5380

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I do not yet have before and after photos of the bathroom remodel, but I do have a picture of Ebenezer asking for water from the bathroom sink. In the middle of kitchen. Not hooked up to anything.

Ebenezer wants water from the disconnected sink

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And, of course, the post would be incomplete without adorable sunny cat pictures. I have no idea what happened to the sun over the past few days, but a few weeks ago, it was sweltering.

IMG_0045 IMG_5346 Ebenezer in the sun

Posted in: Dear Diary Pictures

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