The Timeline

As the saying goes - if you want something done right, you have to do it yourself. This has never been more true than for my experience of having a crawlspace. If you don't know what that is, consider yourself lucky and smart. A crawlspace is the space between the ground and the main floor of some basement-less houses. I don't even know why they exist except for maybe giving you extra space to put things. For example, they went all-out on my crawlspace - there's an entire HVAC unit down there with flexible ductwork running to all corners, water and sewer pipes, electrical wires, and coax cables for internet. All I really know is that you do not want your crawlspace to have high humidity, because that creates a perfect condition for mold. The best way to make a crawlspace humid in a climate like southern Indiana is to leave the ground uncovered or have a big opening directly to the outside air. Well guess what? Both of those were true for me! It seems the home inspector utterly failed to mention that one of my air ducts, the thing carrying my breathing air, was sitting on wet dirt. He probably called the inspection good before making it to the very end of the space, otherwise he might have noticed some huge gaps leading right to the thick summer air. Anyways, I replaced the ducts and covered the ground according to code, then brought out a powerful anti-mold weapon I got for Christmas. You know you've become a boring adult when you ask for a crawlspace dehumidifier for Christmas, but it's been a life saver. Once installed, you can set the humidity level to the recommended 45%, and it will start removing water from the air.

This whole crawlspace fiasco also motivated me to make my home into a smart home by setting up a wonderfully user-respecting hunk of software tools called Home Assistant. Once it's up and running, you can connect all sorts of gadgets to it. For this project, I wanted the ability to remotely monitor the humidity level of my crawlspace to make sure the dehumidifier was doing its job, so I installed a humidity sensor and paired it with Home Assistant. It was so satisfying to watch as the humidity percentage in my crawlspace dropped from the level of the outside air down to a much healthier 45%. I also made a custom Home Assistant widget for my phone so I can always compare the outside humidity to my crawlspace humidity.

I can't say I ever wanted to learn this much about crawlspaces, but when it would have cost me $4,000 on the low end to have someone else fix this problem, it became necessary to learn. That's not to say I don't value professional home services, but it's not an option for me right now. Thankfully, DIY can go a long way and make significant improvements.

The plan was to make it from Evansville to Colorado Springs in 3 days, followed by Grand Canyon the week after. Oh how naive that plan was. Max distance before towing: 158 miles. When you find yourself wrenching in an AutoZone parking lot only hours after embarking, shortly followed by your vehicle shutting down mid-drive, it might be good to consider things aren't going as planned. Such is the life of owning a historic vehicle. On the bright side, they're simple to fix. Should be out again soon.

After two weeks of painful typing, bad call quality, carrying a battery pack around everywhere, and non-stop amateur hacking in my spare time, I made an executive decision to switch back to my iPhone. That being said, I was seriously impressed with how far mobile Linux software has come, and I don’t think this will be the last time I dabble in the fascinating and positive world of alternative mobile OSes and devices. I'm amazed at the communities of contributors out there working passionately towards the goal of making a viable alternative to iOS and Android.

Here are some pictures and videos that our amazing guide Pablo captured while he lead Pete and I up Chimborazo in November. Chimborazo is the highest volcano in Ecuador, and the closest point on Earth to the sun due to equatorial bulging. A six hour hike on my first glacier at 20,000 feet - it was the hardest thing I've ever done.

After deleting my Facebook account, I still wanted to have a way of making public, short-form, multimedia updates. I can easily display these posts right here on my personal website, but a great functionality of Facebook is in providing a seamless way to not only view but also create new posts. Therefore, in order to make this idea of posting on my own site something I'd actually do, I needed to fill in this missing "post creation" piece. Being a web developer, I knew one good solution was to use a content management system, referred to as a CMS. I tried a few of the leading CMS apps, but found they were either too bulky for this use case or didn't meet my editing requirements. I had a feeling that with a good agentic IDE (basically an AI-assisted app builder), I could make exactly what I wanted pretty quickly. Sure enough, two hours over the weekend and I had my own personally-tailored CMS using a powerful, rich-text editor that supports markdown. Now I can just go to this little micro-app, type in some stuff, upload some stuff, click publish, and it will automatically show up on my website. How neat is that?! The app is structured to be extensible too, so in the future I'll add an Article content type, and the ability for people to add comments.