Front Yard Landscaping pt 1

Our front yard has been a forest of jade plants. They seem to be the only plants that do well under the eucalyptus understory. Of course, we hate it. It’s nice in a pot and kept tamed, but it’s pretty boring and uninspiring as a shrub.

Socket and the forest of Jade when we first moved into the home in 2008.

 

We’ve spent the last month ripping out the plants, a fairly easy task as they snap in pieces easily and have very shallow and thin roots. Our poor neighbors have had to deal with the dust but they’ve gotten a kick of watching Flathead in her soiled jumper and ratty Nike’s. Socket and the neighbor kids have had a good time digging and rolling in the soil, too. We’ve also discovered that we have tons of space…like hide-and-seek, space-cadet-exploring, dinosaur-bone-unearthing space! The possibilities are endless…actually, they’re not.

Current conditions of said yard.

 

After a few rounds of thinking we could landscape the yard ourselves, we enlisted the help of Rob Moore at California Native Designs. He’s put together a design that utilizes drought tolerant native plants that will hopefully coexist peacefully with the eucalyptus trees, and give our yard a more natural flow to it (plus some fun places for Socket to play).

We got our first delivery of rocks/boulders last week & will have photos of stage 1 of the installation soon!

Before and After: Office in the Den

The office and guest/grandma’s room shared the same space for a long time. We finally came to a realization that the office could be taken out to the den (aka. the television room).

The corner of the den was always an armpit. It was originally a shingled wall that Philip’s daddy-o took out.

Then it became a catchall of shoes and in-limbo furniture that would never be used. We finally were able to make the space functional with two filing cabinets and installing an L-desk (thank you Ikea’s as-is section and Home Depot’s lumber department for cutting). Magnetic boards were also from Ikea.

We found the vintage hanging light at a local lighting store that has been advertising an out of business sale for over a year. There’s no maker marking on the light but the retailer wrote “Mobilite 8193″ on the receipt. We haven’t found any info on this model of anything similar to it and would love to know it’s year and maker history. If you have any idea, please send us an email.

Watching TV online + encoding DVD’s for Apple TV

We recently joined the big kid world & got a new 50 inch plasma TV!

It’s been about 3 years since we’ve had cable or a TV that didn’t require bunny ears. However, even now that we have a legitimate TV, i’m still reluctant to plunk the money down for a bunch of cable channels that we probably won’t watch, when we can watch our regular shows online or on DVD.

Right now we watch TV by hooking up our Macbook to the tv with the apple remote, but pretty soon we’re going to hook it up permanently to a Mac Mini so it can be a full on wireless media center. The Mac Mini is a little more expensive, but it can do a lot more than an Apple TV. With the iPhone Remote app we can even wirelessly play our music throughout the house.

Watching TV Online:

Here’s a few resources for watching TV online:

• Hulu Desktop – Hulu has a new desktop application that you can run on your Mac & control with the Apple remote. It’s still not perfect (sometimes, the streaming hangs, and they don’t have all tv networks online yet), but it’s a pretty promising start. It definitely feels like cable tv’s future replacement.
• ShowsRSS + Transmission – I used to use the TVShows app (which let you subscribe to shows and would automatically download new episodes), but when their rss tracker went down, the application stopped working [EDIT - TVShows is back up!!!]. ShowsRSS is a good substitute. It lets you subscribe to your favorite shows, and creates an rss feed letting you know when new episodes are online. If you use Automatic, you can configure the episodes to download automatically, similar to the TVShows app.
• If you can’t find the show you’re looking for on ShowsRSS, check EZTV or Mininova – probably the two best resources for TV torrents out there.

Encoding DVD’s in Apple TV format

There’s a few tools you need to digitize your DVD library. I wanted to make sure mine were actual DVD quality and would play full screen on our plasma tv. There’s a few tricks to it, and here’s what I learned:

• Handbrake – First up, you need Handbrake to encode the DVD.

  

  • Presets – The best way to ensure DVD quality is to use the AppleTV preset (.mp4 format/2500 bitrate).
  • Deinterlace – Make sure to set the Deinterlace to Slow or Slower. To learn more about what Deinterlacing is, you can read about it here, but if you don’t deinterlace, you’re going to see a lot of annoying lines every time there’s motion in the video.
  • Picture Settings – In order for the video to display full screen on a Plasma/LCD tv, the Anamorphic resolution needs to be 854 x 480. Many movies are already in this resolution, but most TV shows are 640 x 480. If that’s the case, you’ll see black bars on the side of your TV screen. If it’s 640 x 480, go ahead and encode it that way & we’ll come back to that later.
  • Cropping – some movies in widescreen format are burned on the dvd with the top/bottom black bars as part of the video. To get rid of it, go into Picture Settings and set Crop to Automatic

  Encoding with the above settings in Handbrake will get you DVD quality video, however, if the resolution isn’t the full 854 x 480, it won’t be full screen on your TV. The only way to get it full screen is to ’stretch’ the video (which is what most DVD Players do when they play back on your TV). Some people like this approach since it gets you true fullscreen, but others don’t since technically, it’s distorting the video to stretch the image taller or wider. I prefer it stretched, so here’s how you do it.

• Quicktime Pro – In Quicktime, open your .mp4 movie.
  • Go to Window > Show Movie Properties
  • Click on Video Track
  • Uncheck ‘Preserve Aspect Ratio’
  • Set the Scaled Size to 854 x 480
  • Make sure the ‘High Quality’ box is checked in the lower right corner
  • Click ‘File > Save As’ – it will force you to resave the video as .mov format

  

  Once this is done, you’ll have your video in fullscreen! Now the only thing left is to add the movies to your itunes library so you can play them in FrontRow with the apple remote. I use the Set Video Kind iTunes script to easily organize my movies/tv shows in my library. Saves a ton of time.

  Now all you need is a big enough external harddrive to store all your movies, and say goodbye to all those DVD’s cluttering up your bookshelf

Before & After: The Office

One of the last rooms we got around to finishing was the guest room/office.

Before:

After:

Before & After: Fireplace Room

Now that we have the house on lockdown with baby gates, the Fireplace room is now safe to put all the breakable & low to the ground things that Socket loves to try to eat and/or toss on the floor.

Before:

After:

As you can see, we gave up on the earlier idea of stripping the paint off the fireplace. It’s just too big to deal with, and once we got the walls painted, decided the white didn’t look so bad anymore. I’d still like to do something about restoring the ceiling to a natural wood color, but that’s still a far-off project…

Also, we had a friend come over and take some pictures of baby Socket, so here’s a few more finished photos of his room:

Living Room – Before and After

Posts have been slower lately as it’s taking time to decompress & get each room organized. We’re getting close and will be posting rooms one by one as they’re finished. First up: the living room!

BEFORE:

AFTER:

Furnishings courtesy of Room and Board, Salvation Army, Irvine Antique/Flea Market, and Miss Melis

Socket’s Room

Sorry we’ve been slow on the post. We’ve been busy. Here is a fruit from our labor.

Socket’s room is the most complete. Everything’s been child proofed which is good now that he’s got the military crawl down.

Here are some details. The last one of Soc’s in the crib is esp great. Firstly, yes, his crib is a mess. And, you’re right, I’m using the elephant blanket to cover up all the drool that really can’t be contained. AND, notice Arlo’s Socket’s hatha roots; That is Vasisthasana.

Before & After: New Floors

Been meaning to post the final before and afters for the new floors for a while, but moving’s been a bee-yatch! Here they are finally:

Fireplace Room
Kitchen
Office
Baby’s Room
Master Bedroom (sorry mike)

New Floors!

Home Depot started installing the floors today. It’s only half done, so this is just a preview. More pictures soon.

Waiting Game

Aaag!

It’s been over a month since we’ve gotten the keys to the house and we still haven’t moved in! I’d be convinced that it wasn’t going to happen in the near future if Home Depot didn’t call to schedule floor installations next week.

It’s probably a good thing as I have repainted, and now hate again, the master bedroom. The initial colors were too dark and sophisticated for us. The new color is borderline ComiCon . Sorry there are no pics. I’m too embarrassed to concede to the color I chose. I’ve relinquished creative control to Philip for now.

On the upswing, I’ve started to look for furniture on Craigslist. It’s fun to find cool stuff for cheap but it’s funnest to find ridiculous furniture for a lot. Cases in point:

(a) This guy was called “stunning” and at $135.

(b) These were originally $45, now down to $40.

(c) This one breaks my heart as I know he/she paid way more than $75 for it.