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!

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.

James Jean has an awesome new book of removable prints, and it’s available on Amazon for only $20! Check out the preview for it over at Drawn.

Also, a huge new batch of Charley Harper illustrations has just been discovered. These were illustrations he did for Ford-Times magazine that the Harper estate didn’t know existed, until they were recently uncovered. They’re amazingly cool. Check out more over at Fab Frames

Runner up for awesomeness is Invading the Vintage by Franco Brambilla – a set of old swiss postcards gone sci-fi.

We’ve got the FUGs of baths but that can change with your help! A local bathroom renovation contest is being held by Sea Pointe Constructions. WE NEED YOUR VOTE TO WIN!

Go to http://seapointe.com/ugly%20bath%20voting.htm and scroll to the bottom. Fill in all fields (name and email) and vote for #36.

These are the rules:
(a) One person and email per vote. That means name only once and email once.

(b) All information is required for the vote to count. They want your first name, your last name, and your email.

(c) Only 2 votes per IP address. FYI, if you have a one internet line at home, you only have one IP address. This means, you don’t get 2 voted per computer, but 2 votes per internet line.

From the explanation above, you can tell it is not below me (Flathead) to ask you to vote more than once if you have the ability to; you’d need multiple emails, multiple IP addresses, and multiple names.

THANKS!!!!!!

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

Half the fun of owning a home is drooling over stuff you can’t afford.

Case in point, the Thomas Wold Block Party Book Case over at Design Public.

Clocking in at a mere $3990!!, this is one of the coolest book cases i’ve ever seen. It’s designed to partially display/hide objects in the shelf. Some of the panels slide back and forth, while others open like doors.

Meanwhile on the affordable front, Ikea’s launching their new eco-friendly PS line August 1st.

The Woven Palm Vava Lamp ($70) has been getting tons of play all over the internet courtesy of Inhabitat

Looks like it would be a good affordable replacement for the pink flower chandelier in our bedroom that we haven’t gotten around to replacing yet!

On the frustrating front is the Deneb Collection from Design Within Reach.

The frustrating part is that Design Within Reach keeps mailing us their catalog and making us drool over their awesome furniture when it’s nowhere remotely within reach. It’s $1248 just for an outdoor coffee table. I’m not even going to bother pricing out a full outdoor set… sigh.

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

Before:

After:

I know I posted a while ago that we were just about done with the pavestone patio… but 6 months later I mean it for real!

Originally we paved around the tree stumps and were going to make planters out of them, but after a while realized that the pretty much killed the space we had to work with. So the tree stumps had to come out. I did it the old fashioned way, with an axe & mattock. Had to dig down deep enough to get to the tap root, then about an hour of chopping and they came right out (i’m making it sound easier than it is)

I averaged about one tree stump per weekend, so this took most of my time (there were 6 stumps to remove). Also, after the rainy season, i’d discovered that my initial pavestone laying job wasn’t so even. There were little dips in the patio where water would collect in big puddles. So I used the tree stumps as an excuse to pull up the rest of the pavestones and re-level them.

This time I did it the right way by using a Vibra-Plate rented from Home Depot. It’s basically a machine with a vibrating plate on the bottom that flattens & compacts the bricks into the sand below it.

Here’s the final outcome

So we had a small leak in our bathtub faucet. How hard could it be to replace the faucet & handles? (Oh my naivete) My first big homeowner lesson is that you don’t EFF with plumbing..

First up, I shut off the water to the house. Then I took off the old faucet & handles & bought a new set from home depot. I was thinking all I needed to do was swap out the old with the new right? Well after a few hours & me thinking i’d done a wonderful job, I turned everything on, only to find a massive leak WAY bigger than before.

Apparently, you can’t swap out any handles- they have to have to have the same base. Also, you need to change out all the seats for the handles (another new plumbing term i just learned). I could link to all sorts of online instructions & yadda yadda yadda… but seriously, just call a plumber. (thanks to flathead’s brother Will for coming out & saving our asses!)

A while back we went up to Portland to visit the (future) MacGillivray’s.

There’s so much awesome architecture & style up there that you just don’t see in the OC (surprise!). Here’s some of our favorites:

Inspiration for re-doing our backyard fence. We think we want to go with the horizontal look.

One of the dopest & cheapest vintage furniture store we’ve ever been to – Hawthorne Vintage!

Awesome plant ideas at Pistils Nursery. First up, hanging terrariums

Next, wall art with planters built into it:

We just need to save up money for these projects ($4 apparently)

Plus, Obama says we can do it