The previous post described how a hot water recirculation pump solved a problem with a shower that took a long time to get hot water. One problem that was mentioned is that the included dial timer to control the pump was prone to problems of getting out of synch if there is a power outage and the dial stops turning. Also the settings of the dial timer aren’t real accurate given that they are in 15-minute increments:

We recently moved to a new house in Las Cruces, New Mexico and are working out a few minor issues. One thing we noticed is that the shower in the main bathroom takes a long time to get hot water. That is not very convenient and not cool to waste water in the Chihuahuan Desert by running cold water until it heats up. The reason for this problem is that the master bathroom is a long run from the hot water heater that’s in the garage and the hot water has to displace all of the cold water already in the pipe.

In the previous post I showed how I painted some sneakers for our grandson Austin as a tribute to Kobe Bryant. This time I wanted to paint some sneakers for my wife Cheryl in the style of Van Gogh’s “Starry Night” painting. Step 1 - Prepare Surface, Tape, and Base Coat We bought some Air Force 1 sneakers but Cheryl didn’t like the way they felt as they’re somewhat heavier than what she’s used to.

In the previous post I discussed how I got into this hobby of painting sneakers by painting shoes in the OSU style to wear for the bowl game. I also mentioned how our grandson Austin is a big fan of basketball and sneakers - in particular he wanted shoes that would honor Kobe Bryant. Step 1 - Design Kobe Sneakers We went to Dick’s Sporting Goods to buy a pair of white Nike Air Force 1.

Our grandson loves basketball and is seriously into shoes and I thought it would be cool to paint him some custom sneakers. I saw some videos on YouTube that gave some tips and tricks for painting shoes, as well as some videos about which paint to use and how to prepare the shoes for painting. First Project - OSU Shoes Before diving in too deeply I thought it would be a good idea to practice by painting some shoes that I could wear to the Texas Bowl where my alma-mater Oklahoma State would be playing Texas A&M right after Christmas.

DJI Pocket 2 Camera and Built-in Microphone Earlier this year we bought a DJI Pocket 2 video camera to capture videos of our travels and events. As the name implies it’s a pocket-sized camera for capturing video and still shots. It’s gymbal mounted and image stabilized which makes it ideal for capturing video while moving around on walks and hikes. One problem we ran into though is that the built-in microphone is poor for handling wind noise when recording outside.

My father-in-law has very limited vision due to Macular Degeneration. As the disease progressed he became unable to use email to contact us from his assisted living facility. We needed to provide a way for him to contact us to let us know he is OK in the morning and afternoon or to call him if needed. For serious issues he has a button on his wrist to alert the local staff.

We bought an area rug for the living room and it caused the Roomba to hang up while it was doing the cleaning. Basically it would stop in the middle of the rug because it couldn’t enter areas where there were dark patterns on the rug. After reviewing what might cause this I found out it was due to the “cliff sensors” under the Roomba seeing the dark areas and it was interpreting it as a ledge and to not go over it.

I had a need to edit a batch of PDF files to remove some sensitive information such as account numbers and replace them with asterisks (*). When looking at some of the programs that are available to edit PDF’s they seemed to be mostly paid programs that didn’t have good batch options. Writing a program in Python seemed like an interesting option and I did a quick survey of some of the existing packages.

While setting up a Go project for database access using the PostgreSQL database I was looking for an efficient way to quickly unit test different database access functions without a lot of extra setup or time for each test. Also to make the tests more useful it helps if the actual Postgres drivers and database is used. For this purpose I found an interesting Go package called txdb that’s described as a Single transaction based sql.