What did you do today?

[zannej]

I'm about to find out how easy it is to use. Downloading it now.

I don't feel dizzy anymore but I feel a weird pressure in my sinuses. No pain. But I associate the feeling with barometric pressure changes. Happens when it rains sometimes. Been having it last few days because we've had thunderstorms. I still feel a little off, but I think I'm also tired from staying up too late.

I really like Sketchup. I followed some tutorials on things. To draw the larger brace I made the sketchup window smaller to have it side by side with the image that had measurements written on it. I have a wide screen so I have room to do that. I first drew a rectangle to the widest & tallest dimensions. I used the measuring tape to mark where to have the lines go inward. Then I drew the lines to form the shape (a lot of guesswork & changing around of things when I wasn't happy with it). I then erased the stuff I didn't need so I had the shape. I almost forgot about the lower middle cutout that goes up to the fold line. I measured a certain distance from the corner, drew a line, and then made circles to get the arc at the top. I deleted the bottoms and overhangs of the circles so I had that shape. I fudged the part where there's a piece of metal that sticks out & you hammer it in to the wood. Other better drawn strong tie models have it sticking out and more detailed. I just did mine like it had already been hammered in. Used 2 circles side by side and drew lines to connect them for the longer slots. I used the Push/Pull tool to give the brace some depth-- but I did that before I made the holes. I went back and drew them in & then used push/pull again to make them go away (if you push/pull all the way to the edge, the faces for the circles disappear & you get a hole.

I just fed mom and ate some chicken with broccoli. I'm about to take a nap again. This weather makes me sleepy.

 

[highup]

Is it easy to use?

That was a program that Jim mentioned to me back when he started the floor pro. I've been using it ever since. When I make drawings of my layouts I just create a file called flooring layouts. I have other ones for photos and lots of other stuff. IrfanView is the tool I used to go into my computer and look for virtually everything.
It's kind of a free Photoshop program. No, it's nothing close to the power of Photoshop but it still has way more bells and whistles than I would ever learn how to use.
I really love it for resizing and cropping images. It's quick and painless.
It has a toolbox with the typical tools in it for drawing lines and circles and such. If you want to add text to a photo you have to click away the toolbox. Took me a while to figure that one out. You can choose the size and style of the font, the color and wether the area behind the text is opaque or invisible.
I use a combination of Ms paint and IrfanView. I make some of the basic shapes with Ms paint then save it to a file. Thread at the bottom you just unscrew then I'll go to IrfanView and do the rest. When drawing layouts, the worst feature of IrfanView is the eraser for cleaning up layout lines. But still, I love the program.

 

[Mark Brown]

What you drawing layouts for highup?

 

[highup]

The fun of it. I've always had a habit of sketching out crappy drawings on site with a lot of measurements, then cleaning them up later. I'll draw them up using Ms paint and IrfanView so I can print them out for the shop and let them deal with what material goes where and how much to order. sometimes when the customer hasn't figured out what shop they're going to buy from I'll give them a printout. It's more impressive than a handful of measurements.
I've had customers or the shop hand me sketches where a 15x 26 ft room is smaller than the 10x14 room. Seeing that kind of crap makes me question the measurements.

 

[Mark Brown]

I do all my takeoffs and the like in rfms measure but it is much pricier than ms paint lol

 

[highup]

I don't need to spend a couple hundred bucks or more for something I don't do on a daily basis.
I'd need to dig up a win Xp confuzer to put the program on. I hate w10 and it's constant begging (demanding) for updates.
I have a 2015 laptop with w10. It sucks. I dropped my land line and internet when I got my cell phone. I can't afford to have it all.

 

[Mark Brown]

I do do it on a daily basis, usually multiple times a day and man alive i cannot believe people still do takeoffs with printed plans. I couldn't imagine half of these things like that.

 

[highup]

By takeoffs, you mean cuts taken off blueprints..... or worse yet, a salesman's measurements.

 

[Mark Brown]

just estimating in general. No paper for this kid, that **** is for the birds.

 

[Floorist]

My grandson was cleaning out my old truck that burned. He found a new alternator. Any way to figure out what it fits? I have all the numbers from it, but that has been a dead end.

 

[zannej]

Highup, as a customer I would be much more impressed with a printout like that instead of just plain measurements. Reminds me, I still need to print out the barn sketches for the store & ask about the prices. I never got back to talk to the hardware store owner. I despise windows 10. It constantly forces updates even though we selected the option to NOT do automatic updates. It will shut down the computer without asking and without saving any of the things that were open. Then it will take forever to reboot while it it is "applying changes". The biggest issue for us is that we have a finite amount of bandwidth and the windows updates can put us over our limit which results in our internet being throttled so badly that we can't watch videos, download files, or play online games. Can't even load FB (although, that's no big loss).

Rusty, sorry to hear the truck couldn't be fixed.

My brother and I got our 2nd dose of the vaccine today. No pain again, but this time I felt a little pressure. I saw the length of the needle so I'm surprised I didn't feel much, but then it's very small diameter. The pharmacist was highly aggravated and stressed out, but he still gave the shots very carefully. He said they are training a new employee who keeps screwing things up. Our appointment was for 2:20 (but we ended up being taken in around 2:30 or 2:45). There was a black lady who was scheduled for 2pm but the new employee forgot to put her in the system so she got skipped-- and she was not happy about it. She grabbed the door before it could close (there is a little room for vaccinations) and asked why she didn't get her vaccine yet when she'd been waiting and why were people who came after her getting taken in. She said her name and the pharmacist asked her to please step back as there were already people in the room and he'd talk to her in a bit. He then looked at some paperwork, swore, talked to other pharmacists & found out about the mistake. They had her paperwork. I felt bad for the lady because it looked like it might have been a racist thing (and possibly could have been with people around here) but I suspect it was just a mistake. I offered to step out so he could vaccinate her first but he said we were already in there and he'd apologize profusely to her when she came in. Said he knew she was going to be angry, but that people make mistakes. We were both telling him we understood. The room has to be disinfected between patients. I briefly talked to the lady who got skipped & she said she didn't blame us at all for it & knew we weren't jumping ahead of her on purpose or anything. I told her what the pharmacist said & that he wanted to apologize to her. She said she was irritated but she understood. We sat there waiting for awhile and a dude who had an appointment for 2:45 started getting irate because it was 3pm and he still hadn't been called. He was told there were a few people ahead of him as they were running behind. He was starting to get nasty so I reminded him they had a trainee who was making mistakes and that it was only human for someone new to make mistakes while being trained. He still had some attitude, but we had other things to do. Grabbed some Tylenol and some chocolate milk (my treat to myself). Grabbed some mail and Mom wanted something from McDonalds.

I took a nap as soon as I got home. The night before my brother made some chunky chicken soup with baby bella mushrooms, bok choi, collard greens, kale, rutabaga, and zucchini. I normally don't like collard greens and zucchini but all the veggies absorbed the flavor of the broth and were nice and mushy (just how I like my food).

Talked to my friend online for a bit. He had said he was deleting FB but I saw he was still using it and had lied to me (I think bc he hadn't felt like chatting). I teased him about having reinstalled it & he said he had done it recently (although I knew that wasn't true since it showed how long ago he'd been active when I checked- like 4 hours after he told me it was deleted it said he was active 2hrs ago). He blew me off again saying he'd gotten very bad news. I was worried something happened to his gf (pretty sure he's back with her again and thought he wasn't talking to me bc she was manipulating him to push me & my brother out of his life-- which she did with other friends). Turns out her adopted dad is dying. My mom called to see how things were going and he told her. Then he started talking to me more on FB and I talked to his gf. I'm not going to be a dick to her when she's going through this. My dad's death was sudden so I didn't have to deal with watching him linger & die, but I watched other people who were like family to me go through that & it sucked. Earlier the gf said she wanted to join in on computer games so there can be a shared activity. I suggested to both of them that maybe we can use his refurbished laptop hooked to a monitor so she can join us in EverQuest. It's very low graphics requirements and is free to play. Then we can all group together. My friend has a tank (takes the damage & protects the group), my brother will likely have a rogue to do melee damage, and I have a healer. So the girlfriend could be a ranged fighter.

Still need to remember to do productive things. I swept up the hallway a few minutes ago. My arm is just now starting to get sore where I got the shot, but it's not bad. Mostly feel it if I touch it or put pressure on it. Just took a naproxyn for the inflammation.

 

[Jon]

I kinda thought once you got the shot you were pretty safe
Apparently not but the shot helps
Auckland Airport COVID-19 case: 16 close contacts, locations of interest revealed

 

[Floorist]

I kinda thought once you got the shot you were pretty safe
Apparently not but the shot helps
Auckland Airport COVID-19 case: 16 close contacts, locations of interest revealed

With Moderna, 5% can still get covid. With J&J it is 33%

 

[highup]

My grandson was cleaning out my old truck that burned. He found a new alternator. Any way to figure out what it fits? I have all the numbers from it, but that has been a dead end.

Visually, GM alternators should be fairly easy. Ford had a habit of making a different part and a different engine for every car they ever made . I would Google separately, GM alternators, Ford alternators Chrysler alternators Bugatti alternators etc. Should probably include the word identify in the search.
I googled, how to identify GM alternator by year.
https://alternatorparts.com/how-to-identify-your-gm-alternator.html

 

[highup]

Kind of freaked out this afternoon. Plugged my phone into the charging cord in the truck and a couple hours later and I came back I figured it was all charged up. It was actually lower.
Brought it into the house and plugged it in and it didn't start charging.
I have another charging unit in the bedroom and I plug that one in and it didn't start charging.
I'm glad I was still at 26%, long enough for me to use Google to ask a question.
There's a number of options and the only one I could try since my battery is not removable, what's the simply restart the phone.
I'll be darnd. Plug it in and it started charging immediately. Never had to reboot a rotary dial, so that's not something I would have thought of.

 

[zannej]

I don't ever want to get a phone where the battery can't be removed. Sometimes my phone freezes & won't shut off and starts getting warmer & the only way to stop it is to pull the back off and remove the battery.
Oddly, sometimes when my phone is off, the display will say it's charged 100% but when I turn it on it says 80%. Half my apps no longer work on it now. Even though it's not supported anymore, they forced some update that broke a lot of things. I was told I'd have to do factory reset to get it working again. Not doing that until I get all my data off of it first.

I got in some good sleep. Didn't wake up until afternoon. Mom was a bit salty because she'd wanted me to drive her somewhere but didn't communicate that to me & didn't wake me up. I was tired from the vaccine though.

I have a mild sinus headache but otherwise am fine. Dizziness is gone. I was able to do some light cleaning and assembled a rolling cart thing for Mom. It had been sitting in a box for months and I finally got the motivation to put it together. I'm going to move some stuff around- need to open and set up the NuWave coffee maker that has been sitting in a box for a couple of years now. I already cleared a spot for it in the kitchen.

Played with Sketchup working on my bedframe plans until 3am. Posted a thread on the houserepairtalk forum about it. I like how it turned out. I also uploaded the brackets I made.

I created everything but the joist hanger and bolt heads (although I altered them to get them to the right size):
The back of the triangular brace is a little messed up but it's hidden so I don't care. LOL. I made faux screws (basically little plugs) for it.
The angled gold leg is the one I'm the least happy with. I could not for the life of me figure out how to divide it so the upper part could be black and lower part could be gold like in the photos. Would you say that is 1/3 or 1/4 or a different fraction of the leg?

 

[highup]

Zan, it's normal for a battery to get warm when using most likely more when charging it. the phone knows how warm the battery is and knows when to shut off charging or turn the phone off because it's overheating.
I read something about 6 months ago and it's confirmed by an app that I put on my phone. charging to 100% all the time or leaving it plugged in all the time decreases battery life. 30 to 80% extends the battery life.
That's really neat stuff you do with SketchUp. It's probably good that I don't have it, because if I did, when laying out dimensions for floor plans I'd probably be adding a chair or coffee table or an oak planter with a jade plant in it.
I guess roughly 1/3.

 

[zannej]

Highup, the issue was that my phone wasn't charging and it was getting a LOT warmer than it should have gotten. It was actually getting hot to the touch and it was just frozen on white screen & wouldn't shut off or let me interact with it. I let it sit for 10 minutes & didn't stop. That's when I pulled the battery out.

Sketchup is a lot of fun to play with. I haven't added stuff that isn't necessary to my designs thus far. I'm still trying to perfect the technique of moving objects where I want them to go. The leg is 32mm diameter at the top, 19mm at the bottom... If I can figure out the progression in sizes to have it be the right size about 1/3 up I might be able to make 2 separate parts as one leg. I believe the short end of the leg is about 7.8" and long end is 8.2" (the descriptions mix mm, cm, and inches). I wish Sketchup would let me switch between those types while in the program, but you have to select which measurement form you want before creating a file. I had to use mm for the center leg and then imported it into the one using imperial measurements. One of the nice things is I can type in the decimals or the fractions depending on which info I have on hand.

For my bed plan I'm currently trying to decide the best orientation of the center leg.

I've drawn it perpendicular but there is a chance it might conflict with the small angle brace's screws. I also need to find the right size screws since I don't want to use the bolts and nuts that go all the way through that come with the leg.

Would it still support efficiently if the center leg is parallel to the center support?

 

[highup]

First on the phone issue. I think the thermal sensor is inside the battery pack, not inside the case of the phone. I might be wrong but cordless tool batteries like drills, have a thermal sensor embedded in the cells so I assume phones would be the same way. I would be taking a stab in the dark saying it was the battery sensor that was faulty and would not send a message to the phone to stop charging.
My Motorola phone had a 5000 milliamp battery. It sometimes got pretty hot but that's normal because it's a fast charge battery. It charges until it gets too hot then it shuts off then it charges a little more than it shuts off, etc, etc.
That center leg support..... You're asking if it would be as strong if you gave it a quarter turn one way or the other? If so then it won't make any difference because the other four legs will allow any movement. You could almost put it in place with velcro and would probably work just fine.
Can you draw some Velcro with SketchUp?

 

[Floorist]

Found an old flash drive from my first computer. Over 300 pictures of my grandkids when they were little.