All posts by jah

Inner Side Yard January 2024

These plastic shelves were annoying me and taking up space in the garage. They came with the house, but they just weren’t practical nor served any purpose in the garage on top of a monstrosity of a cabinet that we’re going to be ridding ourselves of due to its unnecessarily large footprint. Because I’m not worried about them in the elements, I woke up with the realization that I could repurpose them, but I wasn’t sure how. Sort of like how I was with Legos, growing up, I figured out ways to move around topsoil that I’ve accumulated. I managed to put the shelves next to my two gardening tables, making good use of the space, even though the two pieces don’t logically fit together. I think it’s an excellent way to use that wall for storage with partial protection from the elements, but with gardening items that can withstand our mild climate anyway. I guess you could call this my outdoor man cave, kayak storage and all.

Q1 Glen Cove Community Association Newsletter

For our neighborhood quarterly newsletter, I write the President’s Letter article these days. This quarter I actually wrote a few articles in this issue about what the GCCA volunteer Board does for our neighborhood. I’m proud of how professional our team delivers this online periodical each time. Check out the dynamic slide-show version of our newsletter here!

Below is the PDF version which is less interactive. For years of archives, check out the GCCA newsletter archive.

New Year’s Day Whaleboat Row

Yes, it was hard to get up for a 7:50 am row after staying up past midnight. To boot my scooter didn’t fully charge because I plugged it into a deactivated power strip, so I barely made it downhill (gravity helped). The weather and the water conditions were optimal. We even saw a seal pop up to breathe a few times.

Geeking Out over a Hard Drive Bay

I held on to various SATA hard drives because I geek out over always protecting my data. I backup to the cloud, but I also keep at least two copies of all data on separate hard drives at home (as well as one in the cloud with Carbonite), regularly backing them up to each other, sort of as a manual “RAID.” While looking for a USB hub for the large number of external drives that I’ve amassed, I came across this 10-bay hard drive hub. This thing will pay for itself!

Instead of TEN separate external hard drive powers and USB drives, I only need one USB port and one power station (a standard one as opposed to ten proprietary ones). I literally broke open all of the remaining large denomination hard drives I have (except for one that is a logical 16TB drive made up of two 8TB drives). There is individual power for each drive, so I can actually turn some of them off for MONTHS if I want to, saving even more energy and having them at the ready for synchronizing (with BeyondCompare software) at my convenience.

Pictured here next to a printer that I usually leave covered in a corner of my home office in part to keep it from being in the sun, is the “Big Kahuna” 16TB drive on top of the ten-drive bay.