new couch arm tables

We moved around some stuff over the winter, and my arm table going over the couch and chair arms no longer fits anywhere. But it was so handy! So I had some time a little while ago to cut some scrap into tables over a single arm; here's hoping they are just as useful with the kids and dog jumping all over the place.

Simple glued miter joints instead of kreg screws for a butt.

The trick to finishing these was finding time to well, finish them. The last one saw a lot of wear so I wanted a couple of poly coats, but can't do them when we're running on the treadmill. And tiring out the dog seems to occupy just about every spare moment I have.

What I ended up doing was giving these a quick once over when I was getting the kids ready in the morning. Take their bags to the car, stop to sand the last coat or put a new one one. A week of that and these were ready to go.

So now the dog has something else to be told not to chew on. I love her but she's kind of driving me crazy right now.

Adding xbox storage

With the SSD swapped in, now I have both an old HDD from the laptop, plus an old 3.5 inch drive from who knows where just laying around. I picked up enclosures for both of them, so why not add one to the xbox for more storage.

For the 3.5, obviously

Plus the cheapest 2.5 case I could find.

Neither of these are the biggest drive; they're both only 500gb. What the 3.5 has on it though is a decade's worth of pictures going back to 2005, which includes adopting Payton, getting married, and going literally all over the country - there are pics on there from San Francisco, multiple trips to New Orleans, Portland, Seattle, Vegas, New Mexico, even some from Jamaica and Mexico. Basically all the places you can go when you don't have kids. Looking at them was like seeing a slideshow of the last 15 years of our lives. So happy this project made me get these re-connected.

All systems are go; you can feel it spinning in the case.

Initially I was a little paranoid about immediately turning around and reformatting the old laptop HDD. But things seem fine, and I hate having an open-ended project just sitting around, so let's connect it to the xbox and fire things up:  

Ah, look at all that new space!

This was worth doing; even with just a handful of starter games I was already starting to get worried about storage space on this thing. Picking up Return to Arkham this weekend didn't help. 

So where'd this xbox come from? The wife and kids thought it would be a fun christmas present for me last year. They were right, for sure, but after the holidays ended and classes started, my gaming time hit zero. Add a puppy into that mix and it's almost in the negative. Someday I will have time to game again. Someday...when my doctorate is done and I can once again sit back and enjoy downtime that is truly downtime. And when that day comes, even if it comes for the kids and not me, we'll have more room for more games now. Good times. 

Swapping HDD for SSD

I had to leave my work-issued surface at work for a while, which meant doing homework on my 7+ year old toshiba laptop. Woof. Imagine trying to edit a pair of 20 page papers and narrate a recorded slide deck on something that struggles to run firefox at turtle speed. Things got done eventually, but it was touch and go for a while and frustrating enough that I started wondering if it was time to upgrade.

Unfortunately replacing a PC is not in the budget right now, which is why it was so nice to have a surface pro for homework. But I still wanted to do something, and a tiny budget meant the only real solution might be to switch out the old mechanical hard drive for an SSD. Having tried and failed to switch PC or smart device components in the past this was kind of daunting but in the end it wasn't too bad.

I ended up with a 500gb samsung SSD with a USB connector for about $90. The scary thing is that's about half of what I paid for the toshiba in the first place. I'm serious, this was a budget-minded project all the way around. But 90 bucks in and I'm pot-committed at that point, so the fact that cloning the old drive took 24 hours instead of the 4-5 I was expecting didn't feel like a good sign.

Paid a little more to go with samsung b/c their software got good reviews. 

Essentially 24 hours later...

But it finished, and I pulled the battery out of the laptop. Then the hard drive, which was surprisingly easy. Popped the SSD in and crossed my fingers...

Pulling the old drive

And we have boot up! Amazingly after the cloning was done the rest of the job was less than 5 minutes. The SSD fit right into the HDD bracket and was closed back up really quick. And I'll admit, it is functioning much better now. I'll hold on to the old drive for a while, but I think with some reformatting our xbox might just have picked up an external storage drive.

The only downside is I didn't get a USB-SATA connector with a power source, and I realized after the fact I have an old 3.5 inch SATA drive with vacation pictures on it I need to get running at some point. There are actually a couple of old PC's around I should probably pull the hard drives on. Oh well. Another $20 on this project for an enclosure won't break the bank.