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frugal technology, simple living and guerrilla large-appliance repair

Regular blog here, 'microblog' there

Many of my traditional blog post live on this site, but a great majority of my social-style posts can be found on my much-busier microbloging site at updates.passthejoe.net. It's busier because my BlogPoster "microblogging" script generates short, Twitter-style posts from the Linux or Windows (or anywhere you can run Ruby with too many Gems) command line, uploads them to the web server and send them out on my Twitter and Mastodon feeds.

I used to post to this blog via scripts and Unix/Linux utilities (curl and Unison) that helped me mirror the files locally and on the server. Since this site recently moved hosts, none of that is set up. I'm just using SFTP and SSH to write posts and manage the site.

Disqus comments are not live just yet because I'm not sure about what I'm going to do for the domain on this site. I'll probably restore the old domain at first just to have some continuity, but for now I like using the "free" domain from this site's new host, NearlyFreeSpeech.net.

Thu, 12 Apr 2012

Things I recently -- and successfully -- fixed: shower valve, laptop screen, overheating car

Not that I'd swear off fixing what I could if I had unlimited funds, but I don't. So I fix things.

A few weeks ago I did the latest rebuild of the hot-water valve in the shower. It goes more than any other as it is a Price-Pfister valve with a rubber washer, gets a lot of use and is very close to the water source and hence gets more pressure despite the new pressure-reducing valve we had installed (by Philip the plumber; I know my limits, or at least I think I do).

The valve seat was OK, and the valve stem was replaced (by me) the last time I rebuilt the faucet. Despite the pressure-reducing valve, a whole lot of pressure builds up in the system when the water is off for any length of time. I might need one of those little tanks above the hot-water heater that helps even out the pressure. Or something else. I'm open to suggestion.

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