To answer my own question, a couple things. Today my wife and I mounted two cat shelves to give our boys a way to get to a high and inaccessible place - my wife got a couple of carpet squares from her workplace and glued them onto two shelves, which we mounted today.
i also recently built a really basic compost bin. baby steps, right?
i think it's a Trek 950. it's a 90s Trek mountain bike anyway. it's been pretty cold so i haven't done anything to it yet really, and that includes looking at it closely, ha!
finally finished my compost bin - just three pallets in a U shape, but it worked! added PiHole and Unbound DNS to my home server setup to keep ads and other nonsense as out of our lives as possible. more to come!
just wanted to update that i've added PiHole and Unbound DNS to my running stuff. thinking about doing a Wireguard VPN now... but that's a 2024 project now.
good night and happy new year!
this is rad. i live in western Colorado, a desert part of the state that has a lot in common with the climate of the Middle East. if i could afford to build a house i'd definitely try to do one with these features. how gorgeous, and relevant!
i am not sure - that's why i installed Rustdesk, which is remote help tool. I'm IT in my daily life for an organization and also IT in my personal life for friends and family, so it's helpful to have something like TeamViewer for personal use.
lol, fair. we did Thanksgiving this year so Christmas is at my mom's. ha!
i have two old PCs refurbished as Ubuntu servers running the latest LTS version.
machine the first: - Taskwarrior - Taskserver - Docker and Docker Compose - local media and stuff on a 2TB NAS
machine the second: - Docker and Docker compose - Jitsi Meet server - Rustdesk server
coming soon: - PiHole - Unbound DNS - Plex (maybe) - Mealie (possibly with a dedicated ancient iPad that will live in the kitchen) - BirdNET-Pi
also possibly a home weather station built out of a Raspberry Pi 4B that is on order; i love the idea of having one of these in my backyard to track our microclimate.
from my wife and i: we relatively recently received some free bikes from a colleague of mine. i'm fixing one up myself to be an ultimate commuter, but my wife said she didn't really want the other one - so we're fixing it up to give to a fifteen year old we know who needs reliable in-town transportation. it should be done this week, and he's getting it on Friday. i hope he likes it!
also, we're decorating for the holidays but in a sustainable, old-fashioned kind of way. my wife is a really good fabric artist and has crocheted a long holly vine that wraps around our living room. it's well off the ground, and so that's where we hang our ornaments so our two energetic kitties don't succumb to temptation and danger. we did hook up house lights this year, powered by rechargeable batteries that i recharge using our Jackery and a solar panel. it's small things, but it's a start.
i've mentioned it before but we're still planning on our community building chili feast, we've just had to move it to January due to our schedules. and we still host weekly zazen (Zen Buddhist meditation) at our house. we have four folks outside our family who come almost every weekend, and last weekend we did our first all-day sit on Saturday, from 8am to 5pm. i just launched a website for our group, in the hopes that anyone in our rural western Colorado locale that searches for "meditation", "Buddhism", or "Zen" and our city name will find our site and, if they feel like it, join us.
i've been looking at Surly's on Craigslist for the steel frame factor. and Shifter on youtube also has a studded front tire - i don't usually need one here in western Colorado where i live; i mostly deal with the cold and a bit more precipitation than any other time of the year.
I wish I had a photo of my setup but I apparently never did that, how odd! Anyway, it's a series of pallets tied together with zip ties to make bins. I keep a seal-able five gallon bucket with lid in the kitchen, and we toss any organic scraps in there. We don't have much yard yet so there are few grass clippings, but we have added some from neighbors before. Plus woodchips, leaves, etc. The smell issue came from unloading the buckets weekly in the pile - I would gag from the smell, though it was pretty mild all things considered. The pile itself didn't reek really, but the bucket did. I just need to clean it more but with my brain sometimes a tiny challenge becomes a Mighty Challenge and it's easier just to stop.
dang, cloth diapering is no joke. good for you!