Blistex posted:

He crawls into the crawlspace, through the insulation, and finds the pipe. . . that was apparently just venting everything into the attic. It literally just ended about three feet from the roof. A trip to the hardware store, an exterior vent, another length of pipe, and some heating and cutting of the shingles and plywood and he had a properly vented exhaust fan.

Papercut posted:

This is another good one from work. They must have convinced the architect that floods were really common in the area:

Zhentar posted:

Cracking the window when it's -10 degrees out is quite effective at controlling bathroom humidity, actually. I've barely used my fan all winter.

Motronic posted:

You should be able to y-into that vent and use it, unless you think both fans will be going at the same time regularly.

Every bathroom fan I've seen has a flapper that closes when the fan is off (it's just blown open when the fan turns on) so blowing air from one bathroom to the other shouldn't be a concern.

neogeo0823 posted:

All this talk of computers and emergency stops reminds me from a story that I think I remember reading in one of the "A ticket came in..." threads. IIRC, some guy inherited a new workstation at his job. The workstation's computer was a standard affair, except that the tower had a single wire running out of the back of it to a switch that was located into the desk. One side was labeled "magic", and the other side was labeled "more magic". The switch was flipped to magic, so the guy flipped it to more magic, and the monitor flashed and the computer restarted. The guy concluded that it was used as an emergency stop for whenever the boss decided to walk by.

quote:

Some years ago, I (GLS) was snooping around in the cabinets that housed the MIT AI Lab's PDP-10, and noticed a little switch glued to the frame of one cabinet. It was obviously a homebrew job, added by one of the lab's hardware hackers (no one knows who).

You don't touch an unknown switch on a computer without knowing what it does, because you might crash the computer. The switch was labeled in a most unhelpful way. It had two positions, and scrawled in pencil on the metal switch body were the words ‘magic' and ‘more magic'. The switch was in the ‘more magic' position.

I called another hacker over to look at it. He had never seen the switch before either. Closer examination revealed that the switch had only one wire running to it! The other end of the wire did disappear into the maze of wires inside the computer, but it's a basic fact of electricity that a switch can't do anything unless there are two wires connected to it. This switch had a wire connected on one side and no wire on its other side.

It was clear that this switch was someone's idea of a silly joke. Convinced by our reasoning that the switch was inoperative, we flipped it. The computer instantly crashed.

Imagine our utter astonishment. We wrote it off as coincidence, but nevertheless restored the switch to the ‘more magic’ position before reviving the computer.

A year later, I told this story to yet another hacker, David Moon as I recall. He clearly doubted my sanity, or suspected me of a supernatural belief in the power of this switch, or perhaps thought I was fooling him with a bogus saga. To prove it to him, I showed him the very switch, still glued to the cabinet frame with only one wire connected to it, still in the ‘more magic’ position. We scrutinized the switch and its lone connection, and found that the other end of the wire, though connected to the computer wiring, was connected to a ground pin. That clearly made the switch doubly useless: not only was it electrically nonoperative, but it was connected to a place that couldn't affect anything anyway. So we flipped the switch.

The computer promptly crashed.

This time we ran for Richard Greenblatt, a long-time MIT hacker, who was close at hand. He had never noticed the switch before, either. He inspected it, concluded it was useless, got some diagonal cutters and diked it out. We then revived the computer and it has run fine ever since.

We still don't know how the switch crashed the machine. There is a theory that some circuit near the ground pin was marginal, and flipping the switch changed the electrical capacitance enough to upset the circuit as millionth-of-a-second pulses went through it. But we'll never know for sure; all we can really say is that the switch was magic.

I still have that switch in my basement. Maybe I'm silly, but I usually keep it set on ‘more magic’.

1994: Another explanation of this story has since been offered. Note that the switch body was metal. Suppose that the non-connected side of the switch was connected to the switch body (usually the body is connected to a separate earth lug, but there are exceptions). The body is connected to the computer case, which is, presumably, grounded. Now the circuit ground within the machine isn't necessarily at the same potential as the case ground, so flipping the switch connected the circuit ground to the case ground, causing a voltage drop/jump which reset the machine. This was probably discovered by someone who found out the hard way that there was a potential difference between the two, and who then wired in the switch as a joke.

Ashcans posted:

At this point he has to be praying that someone will see his story and set fire to the place for him.

Raised by Hamsters posted:

In doing this exact thing with a door right now, in my living room. It hasn't been a full year yet, so that's cool, right?

kastein posted:

god dammit

what have i done

e: from an article I found on the data breach - the 3000 stolen credit cards for sale from the home depot branch (they're pretty sure there are more, but that's all that has made it out so far) had these billing ZIP codes. If your ZIP is among them, check with your bank and check your statement for suspicious transactions.
http://krebsonsecurity.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/09/hd_rescator_zips.txt

FISHMANPET posted:

24 hour notice thing scares the crap out of me, but that's just me I guess.

Terrible Robot posted:

My buddy who runs a small construction company is constantly having problems with poo poo like this because lazy/drunk/high employees.

Leperflesh posted:

I have a fair amount of IKEA stuff and some of it has been fine. Of course, I own my own power tools and allen wrenches and stuff, and I never try to put together more than one piece of furniture in a weekend.

cakesmith handyman posted:

Why go to all this effort for so little? If you're going to do this go whole hog, gently caress everything up to the point people get nauseous just looking at it.

kid sinister posted:

kid sinister posted:

Secure storage.

Blindeye posted:

In modern construction, yes! But exposed brick is en vogue so you find lots of loft type spaces converted to bars and the original, grandfathered-in brick walls preserved.

The 2010 Christchurch earthquake is a good example to use. One historic neighborhood of the kind of old-style mixed use buildings and rowhouses had many of the brick facades collapse into the street, killing a fuckload of people.

Darchangel posted:

Oh, now that's just cruel.


The fun part will be getting *back*.


They're not bad in and of themselves, if you like the style, but why all identical? Not even different colors...

Ashcans posted:

I'm going to start calling my house artisan distressed, because that's way cooler than 'a 100 years of deferred maintenance and upkeep'