Everyone loves the sound of water trickling: its relaxing, soothing, and transports us to a warm, sunshiny place out in the woods near a stream where we can get away. The trouble is: recreating this feeling and sound at home while at the same time not spending a fortune. I’ve wanted a fountain at our house for a long time, and I finally bit the bullet and built a small pond in the backyard (click the link to see the article on how to build that) but I also wanted …
Predator Proofing the Chicken Coop
Last Christmas, my wife and I had a two week long run in with a predator. Still unsure if it was a Possum, Raccoon, or Fox, but either way, I was getting more and more frustrating to losing chickens to it. We’ve had run in’s in the past with predators, usually during the winter, and we’d lost a chicken or two, but this time we lost 5 full grown, laying hens, and 5 rabbits. Our perpetrator managed to get over a 6 foot wood fence, through a gap somewhere in …
Building A New Computer : Part 3 : BIOS, Drivers, and Software
Welcome to Part 3 of the series – Building a New Computer : In this section we are going to look at what happens when we turn on your brand new computer for the first time. If you haven’t yet read Part 1 : Picking Parts and Part 2 : Putting It All Together, check those out first. Now we get to the fun stuff: Turning it on. If everything in Part 2 was done correctly, it should turn on. But you won’t be greeted by a familiar scene just yet, because …
Chickens : A Complete Overview
My wife and I started our flock of backyard chickens about 4 years ago. Each year has been a different adventure with different challenges and new things to learn. I wanted to write up a long, detailed list of as much stuff I can remember so that you, a reader who is likely interested in starting up your own flock, can benefit and hit the ground running with some new knowledge. Keeping chickens is a fun, relatively easy livestock keeping experience and is generally the recommended animal for starting out …
Building a New Computer : Part 2 : Putting It All Together
Building a new computer feels like a daunting task: What if I mess it up? Install something incorrectly? Can’t make something work? Break everything? I know it seems scary if you haven’t done it before, but I promised it’s really just like a grown up set of Legos that becomes something useful. There are thousands of online sources for information about computer building, and in many circles, its like a techie right-of-passage. You get a certain amount of nerd-clout if you’ve built your own computer. So now that you’ve read …
Countertop Gumball Machine
Growing up, my grandpa had a wooden gumball machine that he built in their kitchen that would be the first place my cousins and I would run to when we got to their house. We’d grab a gumball and then go about our business, but that was always the first stop. I wanted to recreate that magical device and discovered its much easier to do that I had thought when I was a kid. Let’s get down to it. Here’s what you need: Start by cutting your pieces to size. …
Building a New Computer : Part I : Picking Parts
I’ve been running my life on a 2013 Macbook Air for a while now. Blog posts, research, work, gaming, etc…. and its been alright, but there’s only so much you can do on a laptop when it comes to more demanding things like video editing and gaming. Even just opening 10 tabs on Chrome while doing research for a blog project tends to slow everything down, so I started the process of building my own monster desktop, and this post is now the result of that endeavor. So below I’m …