Last weekend, Mary Ann and I used directions from the internet to build a pair of self watering tomato planters called EarthTainers. They are made from big 31 gallon Rubbermaid containers, the directions can be found in PDF form at TomatoFest’s website. The bottom of a donor container is cut off and holes a drilled in it to let water through. A plastic perforated basket of dirt acts as a wick and and the whole thing goes in upside down in the intact container. The rest is filled with dirt and now you have a great little device that holds ~3 inches of water that continuously wicks up into the dirt of the container for what ever is planted inside.

It took us about an entire day to build because there is a lot of cutting with a jig saw and there was a lot of learning involved. Now that we understand the process, I bet together we could build one in just a few hours. We’ve got two tomato plants in each of the two containers. You can find more pictures in the Tomato Planters album.

Bharat (the benevolent dictator for the Gallery project) and I went to the colo where it is hosted and did the swap last night from ~8:00P to 1:00A. We started with an rsync to catch the box up to current w/o impacting the site, then brought it down and did another final (smaller) rsync followed by bringing up the new server. This went very well and we did a few tests to make sure everything was working right such as rebooting via serial console, dropping to init 1 and a few other things. Since it went so well, we also went ahead and updated all the software on the box while we were there just in case we had problems. That went great, so Gallery is on some nice new hardware.

I’ll leave you with a nice picture of the new server.

I recently started messing around with my Vex Robotics stuff again. I went as far as purchasing the RobotC compiler which is much nicer than EasyC which it came with (and would have cost $50 to upgrade to the latest EasyC). I wrote a couple simple programs to learn it and started building various chassis. It turns out, Jesse likes to play with robots too. It started out innocently enough, but then I ordered some new parts and we picked up a wireless video camera as well.

It is strapped to the robot on a turret that can rotate left and right as well as elevate up and down. I need some longer wires so that it can rotate 360 degrees, but it works reasonably well now. The best feature can be seen below though!

Perfectly normal robot with the addition of an aim-able camera

STEALTH ROBOT!!1!one!1eleven!exclamation point!

Somehow I had decided that it would be cheaper to move ourselves, rather than hiring a moving company. Renting a big truck only cost about $800, three nights of cheap hotels is negligible and how much diesel could we use? Probably not much, right? At the first gas stop I realized the error of my mathematical calculations. Going 2400 miles on ~$300 of fuel would be an average mileage of 32 MGP. Perhaps not extreme… for a motorcycle or something. On the other hand, a big ass diesel moving truck that gets ~8 MPG is going to use *way* more fuel. It turns out that to go ~2375 miles we used 304.75 gallons of diesel and it cost us $1300. That is about 7.78 MPG, paying about $4.27 per gallon. We paid about $1000 for the moving truck and spent probably $300 on hotels and food. I am not sure I want to know if it would have been cheaper to be moved. Of course, we also brought our car on a trailer so that also might make up for some of it.

Originally we had planned on taking 5 days to do the drive, stopping near the end and doing a little bit of touring of some interesting sites in Arizona. Fate was against us as we left about 1.5 days late, so we had to settle for driving through the Mojave Desert. It was reasonably interesting, but not worth doing in a moving truck. We had to drive up some pretty steep hills that would have been nothing in a car, but we were forced to slow down to about 35 MPH (that was floored). We did get there right around sunset, which was pretty neat. After about 15 minutes, we were ready to be done. Unfortunately, we had about an hour or more left to go of scenic Mojave Desert.

So upon removal, we discovered a few things. The installers were not very good, it didn’t meet any sort of code and it was rotting out. Keep in mind, the tub was never, ever used. If it had ever been filled with water it probably would have collapsed through the mounting. The drain in the concrete is in a bit of a weird place, hence the pedestal instead of relocating it (expensive). These are the things I believe we can do to resolve this problem.

1. Replace with similar tub and shower assembly, but do it right. This will involve a reasonable amount of cement removal to relocate the drain to the proper place. It will also cost the most, probably between $5,000 and $6,000. Seems like a lot of money for something we’ll never use, but if it were to increase the sale price of the house or make it sell faster, it could be worth it.
2. Replace with full size shower stall, hopefully with the drain located closer to where the drain is now. In theory, less cement removal should be cheaper, but finding one of these 60″ shower only units is a little harder. Google only found me a couple and none of Lowes/Home Depot didn’t seem to have anything like it. Not sure how much it would cost, it might only be $500 or so cheaper.
3. Don’t replace with a shower or tub, perhaps with a big utility sink instead.

In any of the above cases, we are going to swap the side that the washer and dryer are on so that we can make the bedroom an official bedroom. Since the dryer, heater and water heater all draw air from that bedroom it isn’t legally allowed to be a bedroom. We humans like our oxygen, but so does fire. To solve it, we can flip the washer and dryer into the bathroom, wall (or door) off the heater and water heater and then ventilate the room they are in to the outside (can’t draw combustion air from the garage, gasoline fumes are very inflammable).