Ness' Outpost

I found out that my Motomaster 5-Gallon Twin-stack Air Compressor (#58-7949-6) compressor is too small to run the Mastercraft ½” impact wrench (#58-8413) that comes in the Mastercraft 100-Piece Air Tool Kit (#58-7872-0).

After lugging the beast of a compressor out of the basement plugging it in and hooking up the 50′ 3/8″ hose with 1/4″ quick connects all I could get out of the tool was a steady hiss of air – no impacting as expected on the lugs of the Vibe. I was able to get one nut off after fiddling around with the compressor regulator and cranking up the PSI to the max but the tool specifications say the max is only 90 PSI not the 120 PSI I was trying to feed it to get off the lugs.

Lugs were put on by a tire shop so they were probably at 90 ft/lbs. I torque the lugs to 80 ft/lbs when I change the tires myself on the steelies unless the vehicle says more or less.

Returning to the specs again the air compressor delivers 4.1 scfm @ 90 PSI while the impact wrench requires somewhere around 5.0 scfm according to the tool manual – not the Canadian Tire website.

Dang. I guess I’ll need a garage with a bigger air compressor some day or a better air wrench. ;)
For now the electric impact gun is a lot lighter and easier to use in the driveway.

Never use a gun to torque on your lugs – do it by hand with a proper torque wrench.

Working from home today as the roofers are working away stripping the old two layers off, hammering down the decking and reconfiguring our vents.

So far so good — no headache yet. We’ll see when they start laying shingles. I may have to disappear for a while.

Bought a 8.7 cubic feet Danby Chest Freezer for the house today. Finally the DQ Dilly Bars will be frozen and we can buy BBQ meat on sale and consume it later!

More importantly we can now defrost our fridge freezer to try and stop the unit from peeing all over the floor.

My uncle donated his old 2 stroke gas string trimmer to me when he found out I was looking for one. I finally got sick of dragging out two extension cords to try and reach the front and the back of the lot.

He had a Weed Eater GTI-16 sitting in his shed for the past 2 or 3 years. It looked like it was in pretty good shape, the starter rope extended and the trimming line turned as the starter rope was pulled out. I didn’t try to start it since I wanted to check and lube the shaft first before it got up to speed. The engine probably would have fired up without any work though.

This time my adopted small engine came with an owners manual that covered the GTI-15T and the GTI-16. I had some basic instructions to work off of – how to tune the carb, replace the starter cord, etc.

The basic plan was to:

• Lube the drive shaft
• Rebuild the carburetor since I was going in to see how the diaphragm and pumper valves were anyway
• Replace the fuel lines and filter
• Clean everything up and lube the air filter
• Check the spark plug

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Sunday we went down to a little restaurant called the stockyards and had brunch, apparently they haven’t done brunch very often but are starting it up on the weekends.

I had a smoked green chili burger with cheese. It was really good.
I need to try smoking some chilies this year in my smoker for use on my own burgers and in my chili recipe. I recently watched a Bobby Flay green chili cheeseburger throwdown which gave me some ideas. Apparently refrying the green chili mixture on a griddle is a must.

Then we were off to the Wychwood seed exchange to try and find some heirloom tomatoes to sprout into seedlings and then transplant into the garden in late May. The place was packed! Probably because they made the Posted Toronto’s things to do this weekend list. There were all kinds of “crunchy” and “granola” types and then us. Grant and Chantelle would be proud! ;)
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This long weekend between a Birthday, family visits, Valentines day and Chinese New Year we were able to do some work updating the guest bedroom.

First I ripped off all the old trim and mouldings in the guest room. Ended up having to chisel off the old door mouldings as they were stapled onto the finished frame pretty tightly (with glue).
Then we did a lot of sanding of the ceiling and walls.
A fresh new coat of ceiling paint went up.
Then a coat of prime went on the walls followed by two coats of paint.
A new dome light was installed to replace the 1970′s style builders light.
Lastly I got to test out the new 18 guage brad nailer and drag out the old mitre saw by installing the new mouldings – which we painted on saw horses in the basement.

Still need to caulk the space between my poorly mitred joints – it probably doesn’t help that the walls aren’t square. Next time I’m going to try to “cope” the inside corners of the baseboards. Then install some doorstop to connect the baseboards to the floor. Fill all the nail holes and call it done.

Then I can set my sights on the master bedroom for more of the same.
I’ll see about getting some before and after pictures up. I think we have some old ones from when we ripped out the carpet.

My back definitely hurts but it is amazing the difference some paint and sweat can make.

Tonight I was picking up some groceries on the way home from work at the Superstore on Dundas and Trafalger. On my way in with my green bins a guy was standing with a shopping cart that had a computer with a touch screen mounted on the handle. He showed me how to flip through the current flyer and how to search for products in the store and off I went.
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I purchased a Canon PIXMA MX860 printer after the holidays during the boxing week sale. I have been looking for a printer/scanner/fax for the house for a while. We’ve lived without one for 3 years but every now and then I want to print or copy a document and it has become annoying enough that I’ve decided to do something about it. A co-worker made fun of me for wanting a fax in this day and age. While I agree with him, every now and then a fax comes in handy – like dealing with realtors.

I was looking for a laser all in one, but the cost of those with wireless network and a fax is north of $400 CAD. Way more than I was comfortable paying for a home office machine.

This device has great reviews – there were a few negatives concerning the print quality but for $100 CAD on sale from Best Buy I can’t see how it gets much better than that.

The big issue I found after unpacking it and loading in the print head and inks is that there is no way to configure the networking of the device from Linux. I had to use the packaged window application to get the device set up on my LAN since I have secured my wireless network. But once the device joined the network I haven’t had any problems printing. I haven’t tried scanning with the Canon drivers (europe location) yet but will up date when I have to figure that out. Sane might already have the drivers set up to go.

For those looking for something to do, you could probably try to sniff the communication of the printer on the USB port. Another thing that would be great is to sniff out the communication of ink levels and other admin tasks between a windows machine and the printer. My install of cups doesn’t seem to handle the feedback.

I haven’t tried the fax, scanner, or media readers yet but the copier and printer work as expected.
I modified our PPD file to do grey scaling by default to save on colour ink. If you want a colour copy you have to change the advanced setting. I can post the change to the PPD file if anyone needs it but you can find them online.

• Canon PIXMA MX860 Print and Scanner Drivers – choose linux and then your language
• OpenPrinting.org Canon PIXMA MX860 Info
• I found this discussion on OpenPrinting.org to be very helpful

My neighbour had an old snow blower in his side yard just sitting there basically uncovered except for a wooden shelf above it. I asked him if it ran and he said it didn’t – I figured that might have been the case as we both were shovelling away last year in the winter and there was a lot of snow last winter. I asked him if it was ok if I had a look at it to try and figure it out. We’d both have a much easier winter!
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Our Yak High Speed Internet has been down since August 1st. That’s 11 days of not having a network connection at home.

For most I suppose it may not be that big a deal, but then again. How long do you think you could live without the Internet, email, online banking, working from home (telecommuting)?

The network is fine from our side. The router is ok, we are getting Username denied because Yak moved away from Teksavvy and tried to handle the tech side of being an Internet Service Provider (ISP) on their own. Previously they were a 3rd party reseller of Teksavvy, which resells Bells DSL bandwidth. The transfer over must have dropped lots of customers ID’s on the domain because apparently we are joining a long list of those affected.

As an IT professional I know a bit more about the issues they are talking about and the bits and pieces of facts I can get out of the tech support group. Yak should be ashamed of themselves. 11 days of downtime in a month is ridiculous, it is 1/3 of the month. Even worse, it happened on the long weekend while we were actually home and wanted to use the network.

Yak is legally covered by their Terms of Service (TOS) and doesn’t owe us anything, but if they want to keep us as a customer I am expecting the issue to be resolved shortly and a refund of the entire months service fee, not just refunding the days of the outage.

We may have to look for another company to be our ISP, and take our phone business with us. Right now Teksavvy is leading the pack. At least they were able to provide us with the services we were paying for.