Will's Blog (Posts about home)

Stamp values

Will Kahn-Greene — Sat, 06 Sep 2008 14:51:07 GMT

The United States Post Office increases the cost of postage periodically. They do faster than I use the stamps that I've bought. In the process of this, I ended up with first class stamps that have no value listed on them, so I had no idea how much they were worth.

Buried on the USPS web-site is this quick service guide that lists the values of all stamps that have no value listed on them.

Home improvement projects

Will Kahn-Greene — Wed, 29 Aug 2007 03:58:07 GMT

Since I got married and since we decided to stay in the current apartment for another year, I've been involved in a bunch of home improvement projects to neaten things up, clean some stuff out, re-organize, and build some furniture to make better use of space. I've finished a set of shelves to replace one of the desks I had. I'm in the process of building a small set of shelves to go above the counter to use some vertical space in the kitchen for storage. I'm thinking about building another set of shelves.

My brother-in-law uses Google Sketchup to do his drafting. I had a look at it a couple of days ago and what he's done with it and it's pretty wild. My problem, however, is that I'm running on Linux and I have a preference towards Free Software and Open Source. Partially because I'd like to share my plans with other people in non-proprietary formats and partially because I stand a better chance of fixing things when they go wrong.

Does anyone know of 3-d modeling/drafting/basic CAD software similar to Sketchup that works in Linux?

As a side note, it turns out I have the same estimation problems with home improvement projects that I have with programming projects. Irritating.

backups with arnie

Will Kahn-Greene — Fri, 19 Aug 2005 15:41:33 GMT

I finally got around to re-doing the backup system on bluesock.org. I'm using arnie this time around. Previously, I was just rolling tarballs of things. arnie allows for incremental backups and it handles some more of the minor inconveniences that I had with my did-it-myself system.

Anyhow, so I decide that my backup script with arnie is working nicely and that I should remove all the test backups I've done so far. Inadvertently, I remove one of the directories that I'm backing up. DOH!

So I got to experience first-hand how difficult it would be to restore from backup. It went pretty smoothly and did what I expected it to do.