Home security system projects are fun because everything about them screams "1980s legacy hardware design". Nowhere else in the modern tech landscape does one program by typing in a three digit memory address and then entering byte values on a numeric keypad. There's no enter-key -- you fill the memory address. There's no display -- just eight LEDs that will show you a byte at a time, and you hope it's the address you think it is. Arduinos and the like are great for hobby fun, but these are real working systems whose core configuration you enter byte by byte.

I'm starting to do more on a raspberry pi I've got in the house, and I wanted it to survive short power outages. I looked at buying an off the shelf Uninteruptable Power Supply (UPS), but it just struck me as silly that I'd be using my house's 120V AC to power to fill a 12V DC battery to be run through an inverter into 120V AC again to be run through a transformer into DC yet again. When the house is out of power that seemed like a lot of waste.

Last weekend we bought two Rodd lamps at Ikea for the guest room, and it struck me how amused I'd be if each one switched the other. Six hours and a few new parts later, and it came out pretty well:

The remote action is especially jarring because the switches are right next to the bulbs they would normally control:

I really lucked out with those lamps. The switches aren't integral to the bulb sockets as is often the case, and they're not even soldered. I was able to fit two extra wires through the lamp's main tube without going to a wire gauge that felt scarily thin -- LED bulbs helped there.

Last year I read about home carbonation, and looking at the amount of club soda Kate and I buy it made sense. The only unknown was where to put the ugly tank that would be out of sight yet still convenient to use.

Months later coworkers and I were at the Red Stag, which carbonates their own sparkling water, and talked about doing the same at the office. I still didn't act until a friend got a soda club machine as a gift.

My favorite book in the Wren Hollow Elementary school library was The Gadget Book by Harvey Weiss. I must have checked it out a hundred times during the second and third grade and tried to build most of the half-practical projects it detailed. The best among them was the burglar alarm. It used wooden blocks, a door hinge, and a strip of metal to make a simple normally-open contact switch. It was the first electrical work I ever did and almost certainly shaped my interests and career path.

This one's dumb. We've got the same trash can that everyone who shops at Target has. The inner removable pail is handy for keeping spills from pouring out the foot pedal hole, but its air-tight nature creates quite the vacuum when you're trying to pull the bag out.

|http://www.target.com/gp/detail.html/sr=1-11/qid=1169524414/ref=sr_1_11/602-0868447-3796659?ie=UTF8&asin=B000JT7N7A|

After ripping the handles off yet another Glad bag trying to get it out of the pail I went to get a drill to poke an air hole in the bottom -- leak proof be damned. Next to the drill I saw a piece of 3/4" plastic tubing, which I ran from the top of the inner pail to the bottom.

This weekend I put in a Honeywell 360A whole house humidifier. The instructions said it should take an hour, and it only took me four. Nothing went wrong, which what you hope for when a project means cutting holes in your duct work, tapping into your water, and some wiring. Now when we wake up our throats don't hurt.

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Update: If you don't tighten down the compression fittings on the water supply line it will let go and you'll drain water into the floor drain all night. d'oh

We've got an old lighting fixture for our front porch, which we didn't want to replace with an ugly motion light. I tried putting a socket adapter in-line with the bulb, but it wouldn't fit in the globe.

More time spent staring at the lighting offerings at Home Depot turned up a workable, if convoluted, solution. An external motion detector sends a wireless signal to a replacement indoor light switch, which then turn on the external light. To make what should have been a ten minute project even sillier, I should be able to control the remote switch from the home link button in my car. Heh.

When I don't post here in a while it either means I'm not building anything new or that I'm too busy to write about what I am doing. This time it's the later. Not that any of it's been exciting, but almost all of it involved using a saw, which totally counts.

Gwin, our eldest cat, has always kicked toys into the basement sump for the joy of watching humans pick them out later. Milo, on the other hand, likes running into the muddy sump and then running up stairs. To keep the cats and their toys out I built a little wooden frame to fit and covered it with chicken wire. It's ugly but functional.

This weekend was full of discoveries involving ivy and stucco and removing the former from the later. Summarizing them we have:

1. Don't. Keep them away from one another. If you have a stucco home and your neighbor plants ivy secretly poison it.
2. If there is ivy on your stucco, just leave it there. Removing it is not worth the pain.
3. If you do remove the ivy, remove it completely. If you pull it off and plan on getting the residual debris later, you're going to find it's dried to a state where it can no longer be pulled off in strands like it can be when green.
4. If you've let residual ivy dry to the point where it's brittle, plan on a day full of power washers, long handled brushes, and ladders. Try to drink a lot. Expect to repaint.