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Here we go

Only a year after buying our chunk of land we are building a house. The dream we came to pursue in Vermont is finally happening, 4 years in (we had planned on 2). Vermont felt right going in, there simply could not have been a better place, better people, better circumstances to surrounds ourselves with to make it happen. These 4 years were more than necessary to make the adjustments needed for such a lifestyle change. We are extremely appreciative and in debt to everyone who helped a couple of flatlanders get acquainted with all the awesome skills we wanted to develop. To this list of skills that is so nicely summarized in the “categories” of this blog, we are adding “building”.

house

We spent all Winter learning how to build a house & designing it. It completely blows my mind that we live in a time where all this information is available online. I spent countless hours reading and watching videos on building techniques. Not only is information ubiquitous, so is stuff. Every specialized tool or object referenced in these videos is available to purchase online, with reviews, and unboxing videos…

Preparations in no particular order

  • septic permit, the only paperwork/requirement
  • Sketchup design
    • extensive reviews by multiple trusted builders
  • research & acquire needed tools
    • skill saw
    • clamps
    • rip & plywood blades
    • generator
    • run generator and charge devices with it to avoid surprises
  • create guides for sawing
    • 2×6 with 22.5 angle
    • plywood 4′ & 8′
  • find cheap recovered windows & fix them up
  • visit local lumber yards to get material pricing & delivery fees
  • buy portable shower & potty
  • emptying our current house of superfluous things we’ve accumulated to get ready for downsizing
  • budgeting
  • scheduling
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Duplogrifier

I’ve been wondering for a while if I could represent a picture with Duplo pixels in a way that would do it justice.

Introducing the Duplogrifier!

Duplogrifier will take any JPEG and turn it into an arrangement of 2×2 Duplo bricks. Now truth be told, the answer to my original question is “no”. There are not enough colors available and it would take a obscene amount of bricks to build something visually acceptable. However it leads to some fairly cool results.

2015-04-15: added 6 more “pixel” colors.

You can play with it here:

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Resilient SSH Tunnel

#!/bin/bash

tunnel_entrance_port=13306
tunnel_end=username@re.mo.te.ip
destination=127.0.0.1
destination_port=3306

# Use netcat to connect to tunnel entrance port. If its exit code is not zero, the tunnel needs to be brought up
nc -w1 localhost $tunnel_entrance_port > /dev/null
if [[ $? -ne 0 ]]; then
        echo "creating new tunnel for MySQL"
        /usr/bin/ssh -f -N -L $tunnel_entrance_port:$destination:$destination_port $tunnel_end
        if [[ $? -eq 0 ]]; then
                echo "  tunnel to $destination through $tunnel_end created successfully"
        else
                echo "  an error occurred creating a tunnel to $destination through $tunnel_end"
        fi
fi