Last week I made a big change in my life. In 2008, I switched off of using Windows (and even Linux) as my main Operating System for my laptop and haven’t looked back… until this year. Last week I finally made the jump and bought a Microsoft Surface Pro.

I wanted something like an iPad, but that didn’t feel like a crippled version of a computer. Instead, I wanted something that was a powerful computer that could double as a tablet (touchscreen and removable keyboard mostly).

Note: Some, if not all, of this guide may be deprecated with the release of the Windows 10 Fall Creators Update in 2017.

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Last year, I covered the beam that runs in my bedroom with pine. This year, I decided to cover every other beam that was in my main living room with dark stained pine to match.

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Last year I built a Faux Beam with Recessed Lights for my bedroom. I love it so much, I decided to build another one (well, actually 3) for my living room!

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Dedicated Music Site - http://music.daveeddy.com

Three years ago I released my first album Memories. This album was recorded from 2008 to 2012, and contains songs written from as early as 2006. The recordings were resurrected, mastered, and finalized in 2014. Most of these songs were composed in college, with a few done in high school and some after college as well.

I uploaded this album to BandCamp, SoundCloud, and iTunes. Since then, I’ve made a lot more music that I’ve uploaded to SoundCloud, as well as randomly to my YouTube channel. While these sites and services have been great, in the last 3 years I’ve identified 3 main issues I have using them.

1. Cost

I pay a yearly fee to have my album hosted on iTunes as well as other services (spotify, etc.) using TuneCore. I pay a yearly fee to SoundCloud to have as many tracks as I have uploaded to them. And, while I don’t pay a yearly fee to BandCamp, I do pay a percentage of any of the proceeds I make from my album sales (which has been nothing in the last 2.5 years). In the last 2 years I’ve made around $3.00 from my music, and have paid over $100.00 in hosting fees.

I don’t mind paying for good service - and these services are great! But when it comes down to it, I’m just not that popular of an artist, and I don’t make much money off of music - certainly not enough to cover these costs. Part of the cost, of course, is for them to store and serve my music files over the Internet, which brings me to my next point:

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Last year, I put up a Tongue and Groove Ceiling in my Bedroom. I liked it so much I decided to do the rest of my upstairs (referred to collectively as the “Living Room”). The process was almost identical, the only difference being that I had to do a lot more ceiling than I had previously done.

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When I moved into my house, the closest thing to a railing it had was a folded piece of cardboard that just stood by the stairs. My Mom always complained to me that I needed a railing, and that someone could seriously hurt themselves… it just took me a couple years to do anything about that warning :p.

I decided to build a railing myself with a dark stained wood and black metal balusters.

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I moved the Mug Rack I built recently which freed up some wall space. I decided to build a CD rack to hang on the wall so I could have a place to display my collection instead of hiding them in a closet.

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My sister Jaime broke the glass to one of her favorite tables. I took the legs home, gave them a new look with some Burnished Amber spray paint, and created a brand new wood top with some pine scraps I had lying around stained with a coat of Provincial pine stain from Minwax.

Right before I moved, I broke the glass to what I thought was my favorite table. It was gold with a glass top. I was going to throw the base away but my brother took it home. I forgot about it, he brought it back like this to me today. NOW it is my favorite table! He got the bark deer head too. Thanks @bahamas10 !!! #hermano #deerhead #woodwork #handmade #table

A post shared by Kjaime (@madam__spooky) on Jun 3, 2017 at 1:43pm PDT

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If you have a Raspberry Pi on WiFi then you are probably aware of the struggles with it randomly disconnecting. If anything goes wrong with the WiFi (access point restarts, IP address changes, you look at the pi the wrong way, etc.) the WiFi will drop and never fix itself. I’ve written a script called net-dev-kick to kick the network device if a ping check fails.

https://github.com/bahamas10/net-dev-kick

There are a lot of small scripts floating around forums that do what net-dev-kick does (albeit, poorly and with a lot of assumptions) so I decided to clean it all up and make a simple yet robust program to deal with this situation.

This script attempts to ping a server that should always be up (use your router or something similar) and if it fails, it restarts the interface given as $1.

net-dev-kick is intended to be used on the raspberry pi to fix wlan0, but can theoretically be used on any machine to fix any interface. It’s best used as a cronjob that runs every 5 or so minutes.

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I bought a patio set of furniture from Ikea when I was living in California around 2011/2012. I was using it up until last year as a desk for my iMac that I replaced with a DIY Computer Desk. My mom gave me the idea to make a wood top for it and turn it into a dining room table - so I did!

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