Kellbot!

Separating personal life and hacks

January 5, 2012January 16, 2014 Kelly

It’s been super quiet over here, huh? It’s not that I haven’t been blogging, it’s just that I’ve been seeing another blog. In an effort to keep my hacking blog for hackers and leave the mushy personal details out of it, I’ve moved all posts on my huge upcoming life changes over to their own subdomain.

I wrote a longer post about the nuts and bolts of the transition over on offbeatmama.com (the only parenting blog I can stand), but the short of it is: if you’d like to keep up with my posts about cooking, home decorating, and sprouting a family, then you’ll want to add http://home.kellbot.com to your RSS reader.

New Construction Townhome

Our New Home To-Do List

December 28, 2011 Kelly

Our new house may not have a bed, but it has internet! It took us all of 10 minutes in the new place to realize that we weren’t going to survive long without it. The first thing we did in our new home was to make a list of all the things we needed (or just wanted) to do to make it move-in ready. Some of them were quick tasks, like reprogramming the garage door (omg we have a garage!), but there are some big projects as well.

After a week long ordeal with Comcast that gained me more than a few new grey hairs, we finally got broadband internet set up. After two days of scrubbing and vacuuming, we finally got the house to a point where it felt clean enough to be ours. We purchased a few inexpensive counter stools from Target so we’d have somewhere to sit. Once the holidays are over we’ll tackle some of the bigger items on the to-do list.

Painting is one of the biggest and most daunting tasks. In addition to the pretty pretty princess closet, the whole house could use a fresh coat of paint. I’ve been using the Sherwin Williams paint visualizer to try out different color schemes on a photo of the living room fireplace (omg we have a fireplace!).

Livng Room Walls — Existing Paint (White) and 3 color options

Of course, the color paint we pick out will be heavily influenced by the floors, which also need work. The house currently has some unappealing carpeting in the bedrooms. We’d like to replace it with hardwood (or something similar looking), which is a giant project in and of itself. So many choices… bamboo? solid wood? engineered wood? No matter what though, the carpet has got to go.

Guest Room — Wrinkly carpet, you are going away

And then there’s the bar. The previous owner installed a wet bar in the den, which is a little odd to me because the den is attached to the kitchen. The kitchen has a perfectly lovely island with a bar seating area, so why one would want a separate bar 20 feet away is a mystery to me. Also, only the hot water appears to be plumbed into the faucet. Overall it’s a strange little corner. But most of all we’ve got that wall earmarked for the TV, so the bar will be removed. We’ll have to have a plumber in to close off the water lines.

Oh, and of course we need to have the house wired for ethernet so we can set up our NOC in the basement. Because no home is complete without a central media server and a computer attached to every TV.

There are a dozen smaller projects, like an electrical junction box that emits a terrifying buzzing sound and a window that looks like it may have some water damage. Thankfully the floors and walls are the only things that really have to be addressed before we can move in.

It’s exciting and overwhelming at the same time, and the more we work on it the more it starts to feel like home.

New Construction Townhome

Home Decor

December 27, 2011 Kelly

RevolvingDork and I are just getting started preparing our new place for moving day. We have a fair amount we’d like to do, including replacing the current gross carpet, and I think it goes without saying that we’ll need to repaint…

This is the walk-in closet off the master bedroom, and though I’m sure someone loved this closet very much, it’s not really my style.

I call it the “pretty pretty princess closet.”

New Construction Townhome

Comcast is stupid. Film at 11.

December 18, 2011 Kelly

In news that will surprise absolutely no one, Comcast’s customer service is awful. Unfortunately Verizon DSL speeds in our area are a joke, and FiOS hasn’t made it to the neighborhood yet.

Because there will be overlap between our condo and the new place, during which we really need internet access at both, I wanted to see if I could set up the new place on our current account so as not to have multiple bills. (Spoiler: you can’t).

After a failed attempt at calling Comcast, in which I navigated half a dozen phone menus only to be disconnected, I tried their “live chat” service. It was… special.

Me: My Issue: I have two homes, can I set up internet service for both on the same bill?

analyst Nicole has entered room

Nicole: Hello [you], Thank you for contacting Comcast Live Chat Support. My name is Nicole. Please give me one moment to review your information.

Nicole: Thank you for bringing this to our attention.

[what?]

Nicole: Yes, you may set up internet service for both account however for each accountit has to have a unique user ID for security purposes.

Me: And both accounts can be on the same bill?

[a minute passes, the agent isn’t typing]

Me: Hello?

Nicole: I’m sorry but you will be billes separately for both accoutnas well.

[so, what you meant to say before is… no]

Me: ok, thank you.

I’m not particularly surprised by the answer, since Comcast accounts are generally linked to your service address, but where do they find these service reps? Given how many people are looking for work, how hard can it possibly be to find someone who can read and write?

Wait, don’t answer that. It will just make me depressed.

Family, New Construction Townhome

Leaving The City for a New Life

December 17, 2011 Kelly

Sharing the news of our pregnancy with friends has been bittersweet. While everyone is excited about our newest addition, not everyone is quite so happy about the other big change coming with it: we’re leaving New York City for Philadelphia in order to be closer to family. We’re ditching our Jersey City condo and plunking down a chunk of change on a four-bedroom rowhouse in Manayunk.

New York is an amazing city, and after three years I’ve only see an tiny, tiny fraction of it. There are amazing things happening all the time, incredible people, an infinite number of places to eat, and a 24 hour subway system that means never having to worry about a designated driver. My local fabric store is so immense people make pilgrimages to the city just to visit it. And most of all I have an incredible network of fantastic friends here; the kind of friends who come to your baptism, even though they’re atheists, or help you lug an anvil-bolted-to-a-log across town. For science. But despite everything I love about this area, I realized it’s not where I want to be forever.

Our decision to move was based on a lot of things. We want more space; our current place has so little storage I keep my bike in the bathroom. The cost of living is substantially higher in New York, and the fast-pace of living is starting to wear me down. But ultimately it’s family that’s bringing us south. My husband’s huge closely knit family is in Philadelphia, and even before we got married I knew it was just a matter of time before their gravitational pull sucked us in. Getting pregnant was just the thing that put us over the edge.

Raising kids in New York City can be incredibly rewarding, but it also comes with some unique challenges. The subway system, with its mazes of stairs, is downright hostile to anyone with stroller. A mini baby-boom over the last 5 years has made getting into preschool both competitive and expensive. And just like anywhere else in the country, if you don’t have friends with kids nearby it can be isolating and lonely.

For those with family (or friends with kids) in the area, getting a precious few hours of kid-free time is as simple as dropping them off at Grandma’s – with a bottle of wine as a bribe, of course. For those without, it means shelling out for a sitter – assuming you can find one who is both trustworthy and available. At 6 months postpartum, a friend of mine confessed she hadn’t been out at all because she still wasn’t ready to leave the baby with a stranger.

Only a few of our friends live in our neighborhood, and none of our friends with kids live nearby. I didn’t want to have to choose between wrestling a stroller up four flights of subway stairs and being a shut-in. We found a place in Philly that’s in a neighborhood a lot like the one we’re in now: very walkable, lots of public transit, good restaurants. It has enough room to have as many kids as we want. Best of all: it’s only a few miles from both my in-laws and great-in-laws.

Plus, New York won’t be rid of us entirely. We’re both lucky that we’re able to do our jobs from most anywhere, but we’ll still need to pop into the city periodically for meetings.

I don’t have any delusions of my life staying the same as it is now once the baby arrives, but I’m hoping that with a little help from the family we can sneak off to see the occasional movie or grown-up restaurant. There may not be quite as many amazing things happening in Philadelphia as there are in New York, but by moving closer to our support network there’s a much bigger chance of us being able to get out and do them.

New Construction Townhome

Shopping for Homeowner’s Insurance

December 16, 2011 Kelly

Any claim I had to “not being a grownup” is slowly slipping away, particularly with my latest task: shopping for homeowner’s insurance. Unlike renter’s insurance, which really just has to cover my stuff, homeowner’s insurance has all these strange and bizarre things it has to cover. The building itself, the stuff inside, and of course liability in case someone decides to do a sweet jump off our front porch and then sues us.

I started shopping for insurance the way I do most things: by avoiding humans entirely and filling out a bunch of quote forms online. Protip: do not enter in your phone number, or these cash-hungry vultures will start calling you do “discuss your quote.” I did use a throwaway email address so as not to continue getting insurance-related spam for the rest of my life.

The first quotes I got were in the $2000-4000 per year range. Never having shopped for homeowner’s insurance, this seemed obnoxiously expensive but probably reasonable. Then RevolvingDork mentioned that the insurance on our current place is only $400 per year. The new place is bigger than the old one, but not 10 times bigger, and the neighborhoods are comparable.

So I broke down and called some of the local agents my real estate agent recommended. I hate talking to salesmen on the phone. Or in person. Really at all. I also hate going in to purchase a product without any real knowledge of what it should cost.

Without too much headache, we picked out a plan with similar coverage to what we’d been quoted before, but coming in at just over $1000. The only real hiccup was that the tax records have the information for the house completely wrong, leading to some confusion as to just how much house we were insuring. After handing over our credit card number it took all of 15 minutes to get the proof of insurance emailed to us, which is good because I had waited until 2 days before closing to take care of the insurance. See, I’m not such an adult after all!

It’s clear that in some industries it still pays to talk to a salesman, and insurance is still one of them.

Crafting

Knitting Nesting Instincts

December 10, 2011 Kelly

I actually started knitting baby items well before I got pregnant myself. Baby items are some of the most satisfying things to knit: they’re quick, they’re great for using up the odds and ends in your yarn stash, and the fit can be pretty haphazard.

When my friend Bre’s baby was born I knit a tiny pair of baby booties, which immediately triggered a flood of suspicion from the family. The pattern can be purchased here.

Next up was a tunic/dress thing for our own spawn. I had half a ball of Chroma yarn left, which tends to look a little like clown vomit when used by itself, so I striped it with some grey.

The most recent is a Milo shirt, which I knit in pink even though we’re not planning on finding out the gender before the baby is born. Fun fact: pink used to be considered a color for boys as it was “light red.”

It didn’t come out nearly as well as I’d hoped, mostly because the varigated yarn competes too much with the cable details, so I didn’t bother to photograph it.

I keep track of my knitting on Ravelry, you can follow me there if you’re a knitter too.

Cooking

Cinnamon Rolls of Doom

December 7, 2011 Kelly

We make these when we’re afraid we’re not getting enough fat and sugar in our diets. Or when we want to make doubly sure we’re well on our way to type 2 diabetes.

My mother found this cinnamon bun recipe a few years ago, which uses nearly 3 cups of butter and 5.5 cups of sugar for 12-15 rolls. In short, these are terrible for you. But delicious.

First, you make a sugary, buttery dough, roll it into a slab, and cover it in sugar, butter, and cinnamon.

Then you roll it into a log and slice it into 12 to 15 pieces of even width. The sharper the knife, the better your results.

Then you fill a pan with melted butter and place the raw cinnamon rolls in the buttery bath.

Our pan was maybe a little too small.

While they’re still hot, slather them with the frosting you made while they baked. Frosting is, of course, made up of two things: butter and sugar.

Then you invite all your friends over to eat them! That way you can all become morbidly obese together.

Crafting

Homemade Cast-on Comb

December 3, 2011January 17, 2014 Kelly

The White/Superba 1602 I purchased sadly did not include a full-bed cast on comb, which makes casting on things wider than swatches somewhat tricky. There are a few floating around eBay, but they all seem to be $50 and/or in France, and shipping a three foot long steel comb from France to the US isn’t particularly cheap. Also, I am impatient. I’m told that a knitting machine store in Toronto also has some, but again, impatient.

So I set out to make my own. The comb consists of small metal teeth which go in between each stitch, and a rod which is threaded through holes in the top of the teeth to trap generic propecia the yarn in place. I made a 12″ long test comb to see if it would work before committing to a whole yardstick worth of bobby pins and hot glue.

I purchased 4 packages of bobby pins and some wooden rulers at the local dollar store. I then arranged the bobby pins at 5mm intervals along the ruler, since the Superba machines are 5mm machines.

I used a second ruler (they were 3 for $1!) to make sure the pins were all at an even height and that they retained their 5mm spacing. Then I ran a line of hot glue along both sides to hold things in place.

To use the comb to cast on ribbing, you run the carriage/yarn across the needles to establish a zig-zag of yarn across the bed. Then you push the cast on comb up between each stitch, and run a rod through the top of the comb. This traps the yarn between the rod and the ruler below, letting you appropriately tension the yarn for the first row of stitches.

As you knit, the comb pulls the fabric down between the two beds. A weight is attached to each end to provide tension. In this photo, I’ve lowered the front bed to make it easier to see what the comb is doing. You can just barely see the small copper rod at the bottom of the fabric.

I used it to knit a gauge swatch for a sweater I plan on knitting soon. It’s a mini-cable rib pattern. The cables are worked by hand, which is pretty tedious though I’m slowly getting faster at it.

My dollar store comb is by no means as good as the real thing, but it works pretty well for $2 worth of materials. It has a few key issues which make it a little tricker to use than a normal cast on comb. First, the end of the bobby pins are just a little bit too wide, I have to set the bed spacing all the way up to 6 in order to get them to fit through. Second, the bobby pins get in the way of the holes used to hang the weights. And my DIY comb is nowhere near as durable as the steel one. But it works well enough for now.

Crafting

I can stop whenever I want

December 2, 2011January 17, 2014 Kelly

I don’t have a knitting machine problem, I could quit right now, I swear.

While working with my Toyota 747 I decided to try and find a ribber for it, which led me to the Ravelry Knitting Machine Sales group. I did not find a Toyota ribber, but I did find someone in Brooklyn who was selling a White/Superba 1602. He was selling it at a reduced price because the electronic selector box was not functioning.

The Superba knitting machines, which were also sold under the brand names White, Singer, and Phildar, are really interesting machines. Instead of a main bed and an optional removable ribbing bed like most Japanese machines, the Superbas have two permanently fixed identical beds. This makes it much easier to get consistent, even ribbing.

Mechanically, the machine is in good shape. Stockinette stitch, ribbing, and jacquard patterning (done by manually moving the needles into place) all work well.

The selector box, which can be seen in Patrick’s photo stream, works by reading stitch patterns off mylar sheets. A photoresistor detects either a light or dark square and sends a signal to the machine which moves the needles accordingly.
In addition to maintaining a comprehensive site on Superba machines, Patrick also was kind enough to supply me with the users manual, service manual, exploded part diagrams, and logic flow charts for the electronics.

As soon as I opened up the machine and took out the circuit boards, it was clear things weren’t working properly:

I superglued the board itself back together, and then used lumps of solder to repair the broken traces. Jumper wires would have been better, but admittedly I was too lazy to get up and find a spool of wire.

Once the traces were repaired, Phooky helped me test the output voltages. Since it takes in 110V mains power, I was nervous to start poking at it by myself. But we only made the electricity arc between the multimeter probes once. Have I mentioned that mains power is kind of terrifying?

Anyway, of the four pins that connect to the card edge, two are tied together to ground, and the other two provide 24v for the motor drive (which feeds the mylar sheets) as 12v for the COP420 microchip.

Speaking of the COP420, my first instinct was to try to get a firmware dump off the chip and try to reverse engineer the firmware. Not that I have any experience doing that, but luckily Trammell does. Unfortunately, he found out that the COP420 is a mask-programmed device, meaning that the program is put into ROM when the chip is created, in contrast to something like the Atmega chips used in Arduinos. If you’re lucky, the “test mode” on the chip was initially enabled, making it possible (if somewhat of a pain) to read out the firmware.

The more I think about it, the more it makes sense just to redesign the selector box from the ground up. Most of the bulk and power of the box is related to the scanning and advancing of the mylar cards, which are adorably archaic but not exactly convenient. A USB interface would be vastly preferable, and would cut down on about 2/3 of the circuit. I need to do some investigating to see if the whole thing could be USB powered, eliminating the need for a separate power cord and bulky transformer.

Yeah, ok, I have a knitting machine problem.