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Gadget

Clean at last

September 12, 2019 by Lloyd 9 Comments

Well, for years now, Lauren has been coming home and saying that, “Our house smells like an old house.” Personally, I don’t smell it, but I have a pretty poor sense of smell. A poor sense of smell comes in handy when you teach middle school, but isn’t much use in diagnosing OHS.

Now, there are only so many years of hearing Lauren express a desire for something that I can take before I feel that it is my duty to do something about it. And so, about 2 months ago, I began to research air purifiers intensely.

The research took about a month, and the conclusion I came to was that the amount of money that it would cost to buy an air purifier that would have even a remote chance of doing anywhere near the job that Lauren wanted was way out of her price range. Not so much out of her price range in the, “I can’t afford that” sense. More out of her price range in the, “No way I’m going to pay that much” sense.

But I also learned that basically all we needed was a ordinary pre-filter to catch the dust and cat hair, a HEPA filter to catch basically anything down to your medium size bacteria and an activated charcoal filter to catch any remaining smelly molecules. Okay, the real reason for the activated charcoal filter is to make people say, “Dang, Lloyd, that thing has three filters.” I decided that we could do without any negatively charged ions fields or ultraviolet light nonsense.

The basic design was going to be 2 inch prefilter -> boxfan -> 6 inch HEPA filter -> box fan -> 4 inch charcoal filter. Naturally, the filters and the box fans are 20 inches by 20 inches, which would give me a 20x20x20 cube of air purifying goodness.

So I ordered my charcoal filter and my custom made HEPA filter online and figured we could pick up the pre-filter anywhere. In fact, we picked it up a week or so ago at a thrift store. My charcoal filter had arrived after about 2 weeks, but I hadn’t seen the HEPA filter yet and we were going on a month of waiting.

Now, as cruel fate would have it, there were a couple of air purifiers at an auction I went to last weekend. They were nice, but they were going to be the last thing to sell and I couldn’t stay until the end. So I asked my auction buddy Matthew if he would bid on them for me. I told Matthew to bid up to $250 and I would like to get at least one air purifier and one of the replacement filters. Matthew called me three hours later and said I got 2 of them for $50.

With a little help from Sam, I got them home and in place without Lauren seeing them. I present you, as I presented Lauren, with the RxAir 3000 Air Purifier:

“Rx3000 is used in over 400 hospitals and is FDA-cleared as a Class II Medical Device. Priced at less than $5,000 per unit to service a 1,500 – 3,000 sq. ft. area, Rx3000 is very cost effective… The Rx3000 combines powerful germicidal ultraviolet (UV) light with a patented 5-stage HEPA filtration proven in independent EPA- and FDA-certified laboratory testing to destroy on first pass over 99.97% of airborne viruses, bacteria and other contaminants.  

Needless to say, Lauren was absolutely thrilled –once she learned that they were only $25 each. I believe that in less than a month, our house will go from smelling like an old house to smelling like a hospital.

Oh, and my 6 inch HEPA filter arrived today. Does anyone need a HEPA filter?

Filed Under: Gadget, Home 'Improvement', Lloyd, Prototype

Sundays with Samith

October 4, 2015 by Lloyd 9 Comments

Samith brings Brighton into Seward on Sunday evenings to play basketball at Concordia’s youth basketball program (there’s some other name for the program, but, yeah). While Brighton is basketballing it up, Samith has been coming over to our house for what we have affectionately been calling, Sundays with Samith™.

We mostly just sit around, eat dinner and talk about things. But this time Samith came bearing gifts. Sometime ago, Samith was lucky enough to purchase a Bag of Crap™. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve tried to purchase a Bag of Crap at the end of a Woot Off™, but I’ve never been quick enough.

One of the items in the Bag of Crap was a TruGuard (presumably also™) screen protector for an iPhone5. Samith knows that I like to live dangerously and don’t keep a cover on my phone, but this is just 0.3mm thick. He thought I could maybe live with that.

crap1

The instructions were so brief that we did a lot of assuming about how we were to do things, but it all turned out okay. Their selling point is protection, but the most amazing thing is that there doesn’t seem to be any fingerprint smudges on the screen anymore. That’s really pretty neat.

Thanks Samith, and thanks Bag of Crap.

Filed Under: Gadget, Journal, Lloyd, Nerd Tagged With: cover, iphone, samith, screen, sunday

Keysmart

July 31, 2015 by Lloyd 6 Comments

Lauren got me an early birthday present. It came in the mail today. Here’s the before picture:

key15

The during picture:

key1

And the after picture:

key3

I tried putting my keys in a number of different ways and in different combinations. Lauren had a USB drive that fit very well, but I ultimately took it out in favor of putting my new school keyfob at the end. I had two more keys that I’ve been carrying around for years, but only use once every 3 years or so. They are now in locations around the house that I won’t remember 3 years from now.

If you’d like one, you can get one here. I think Lauren would like one for her birthday.

Filed Under: Gadget, Lloyd Tagged With: keys

Thanks, Uncle Rich!

July 13, 2015 by Lloyd 5 Comments

While we were at Lauren’s family reunion in Branson, Uncle Rich showed me an iPhone app that I had on my phone, but had never messed with before. It’s called Health, or something like that, and I don’t know what all it can do, but it does turn your phone into a pedometer (sp?).  It didn’t show any information when I first opened it, and I thought that because I hadn’t opened it before, that it wasn’t counting my steps. But after a bit, it made some nice graphs. it turned out that it had been counting my steps for years. Or maybe year? Or since October at any rate.

You can see by the graph above that I walked more in second semester than in first semester. I don’t have any idea at all why that would be. I believe the graphs are logarithmic, so changes in steps are more pronounced than you might expect from looking at the graphs.

Here’s the last month with a couple of annotations that I added:

walk it off

I think that the dashed line is the “recommended” “ten thousand” “steps” that “you” are “supposed” to take in a “day.”

Filed Under: Gadget, Lloyd Tagged With: Gadget, health, iphone

A post only a mother could love.

May 27, 2015 by Lloyd 8 Comments

Speaking of mothers, it was my mom’s birthday yesterday.  It was also my dad’s birthday three days before that, but he doesn’t believe in the internet, and doesn’t want Al Gore to know when his birthday is, so we won’t mention that.

Lauren said that I had to write a post, but what she doesn’t know is that I already wrote one. One that is guaranteed to put you all asleep. I hope you enjoy your naps; there is a summary at the end.


We are replacing 30 computers in our PC lab at school. The current machines were built by students six years ago (to save money and also as a learning experience) and I thought we would do the same thing this time for the same reasons.

Here are my goals for these machines:

  1. They should be relatively future proof. That is to say, they will probably be in service for 5-6 years and so I have to build them a little faster than they really need to be for today’s use. They will be used for Microsoft Office, some Adobe Creative Suite, and for a little programming. No CAD classes.
  2. There should be a little “nice” factor when students see/use them. I am not above having students think, “Oh, they updated this lab, what we do here must be a little important to them.”
  3. They should be fairly easy to maintain. I’m looking for quality parts that seem to last (at least in my price range). I need a case that spastic 7th grade boys won’t idly break pieces from. I will have to remove the hard drives occasionally to reimage them, and would like that to be fairly painless.

I have about $350.00 to spend per machine. I would be happy to spend less than that, because that money would be used for other technology projects at school, and I could probably come up with a little more money if that would make the machines significantly better. I’ll be purchasing these in the United States.

One of my concerns is finding good prices for parts. I really can’t do rebates (MIR prices), because I don’t have 30 people to purchase these. I could have 6 people, so limit 5 offers are okay. Maybe someone knows more than I do about getting bulk discounts.

Here are the parts I’m considering and why:

CPU:
It didn’t look like AMD had anything better than Intel in my price range, so I didn’t really look at AMD processors closely. I don’t have anything against AMD (current machines have Athlon X2 4850e), so feel free to point me toward a comparable AMD processor. I do not see us doing any overclocking.

  • $58 Intel Pentium G3250 (I am strongly leaning this way)
  • $110 Intel i3-4150

GPU
Onboard graphics only. I can’t see any reason to put a graphics card in these machines.

  • $0.00

RAM:
It seems to me that 8GB is better than 4GB if I’m aiming 5 year out, but memory is easy to add, so I’m not above starting with 4GB and adding another 4GB in a few years if that seems reasonable. My preference is to use Crucial. I have had memory from them go bad over the years, but they have always been very good about replacing it.

  • $27 4GBx1
  • $52 8GBx1

Storage
I would really like to just put a smaller SSD in these. My current school disk images are about 64GB, so I’m looking at a 120GB SSD. These drives are not used for storing student data. I don’t know much about SSD reliability, so could use any help picking a good brand/model.

  • $56 120GB SSD Silicon Power S60[1]
  • $80 120GB SSD Intel 530 Series SSDSC2BW120A4K5[2]

Motherboard
I’m leaning strongly toward a mini-itx motherboard, because I’m leaning strongly toward some mini-itx cases. I would not be opposed to another size motherboard, but you’d have to sell me on another case as well. I really don’t know what to do here. I usually buy an open box mother board for my own computers, but that won’t work with 30 of them. reliability is probably my highest priority here. Other than that, I really don’t know where to spend my money. There was some talk of wanting the computers to be wireless, but that’s not necessarily a requirement. I’m going to just throw out the ones I’m currently looking at:

  • $68 ASRock H81M-ITX/WIFI [3]
  • $88 ASRock H97M-ITX/ac[4]

Case
I’m a little up in the air here. I could save some money by buying a case with a built-in PSU or with an external PSU. I’m tempted to do that, but my impression is that those PSUs are never very good. Here are the options I’m looking at with built-in/external PSUs:

  • $65 Antec ISK 110 VESA[5] 90Watt (maybe RF interference)
  • $65 IN WIN BQ656T.AD120TBL[6] 120Watt
  • $50 In Win BP655 [7] 200Watt

I actually like the cases below a lot more, but pairing them with a decent power supply raises the price. Notice that they don’t have any external drive bays. Apart from liking the looks, I think they will continue to look good longer in a lab setting.

  • $40 DIYPC HTPC-Cube-BK[8]
  • $55 LIAN LI PC-Q01B[9] This is the one I’d like to get.

PSU
The cheapest, reliable power supply. I think I would like an 80+bronze PSU, but I could certainly be convinced that that’s not a good place to spend money. I think my absolute max load would be 138Watts. I would be very interested in knowing the difference between the various Seasonic PSUs listed below. I couldn’t find that information.

  • $34 SeaSonic SSP-300SE[10]
  • $37 SeaSonic SS-300ES[11]
  • $38 SeaSonic SSP-300ST [12]
  • $38 SeaSonic SS-300ET[13]
  • $40 CORSAIR CX series CX430[14]

My current thoughts
Below are the choices that I would currently make from the above options. The prices shown here are a little low, because lots of these are special offers that I wouldn’t qualify for with 30 units.

PCPartPicker part list[15] / Price breakdown by merchant[16]

Type Item Price
CPU Intel Pentium G3250 3.2GHz Dual-Core Processor[17] $55.99 @ SuperBiiz
Motherboard ASRock H97M-ITX/AC Mini ITX LGA1150 Motherboard[18] $87.98 @ Newegg
Memory Crucial 8GB (1 x 8GB) DDR3-1600 Memory[19] $50.99 @ SuperBiiz
Storage Silicon Power S60 120GB 2.5″ Solid State Drive[20] $50.44 @ Amazon
Case Lian-Li PC-Q01B Mini ITX Tower Case[21] $54.98 @ Newegg
Power Supply SeaSonic 350W 80+ Bronze Certified ATX Power Supply[22] $39.98 @ Newegg
Prices include shipping, taxes, rebates, and discounts
Total $340.36
Generated by PCPartPicker[23] 2015-05-26 23:43 EDT-0400

Any thoughts you have about any of the choices would be greatly appreciated.

TL;DR
Need to build 30 reliable school computers. Money is an object. Obviously looking for help in quality parts, but also in getting good prices when MIR and Open Box isn’t an option.

Filed Under: Cheap, Gadget, Lloyd, Prototype Tagged With: computers, diy, geeky

Better Butter… wait, I already used that title.

January 26, 2015 by Lauren 5 Comments

A couple of weeks ago, the ‘lid’ to my ‘new’ butter system slipped out of my hand and chipped. Surprise, surprise. What did I expect from buttery glass?

I spent a good long time thinking about how to replace it. At various stores, I looked at containers for holding pencils, toothbrushes, sewing goods, fishing tackle – nothing was right. But then ShopKo had this Snapware thing in the lunchbox section.

image

Perfect. It’s unbreakable, secures my butter with four, count ’em – four locks, and the best part? When I’m running low on butter, there’s room for another stick to get cozy and start a-softening for next time.

I think I might spend too much time thinking about butter.

Filed Under: Cheap, Cooking, Eco-Freaky, Gadget, Lauren, Nerd, Prototype Tagged With: butter

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