Adam@SheekGeek

Matching your Flight pictures with Google Earth

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Recently we flew out of state to visit family. I’m a huge nerd so I like to stare out the window and look at all the cool stuff. On this particular flight, I had driven the path in the past and kind of knew what to look for (BTW flying was about 1.5 hours, driving it was about 10 times that). As we passed interesting views; an oxbow lake, rivers, larger cities, mountains, lakes, windmill farms, etc. I took pictures with my cell phone. I had an idea of where we were and what I was looking at, but I wasn’t 100% sure.  I have the geotag feature turned off on my phone (as should you!) so I couldn’t figure out the locations based on that.  I found a neat way to answer my question. If you have an upcoming flight, you can try to find a similar flight path of a recently arrived flight and plan out what to take pics of, but note that actual flight paths vary with weather and traffic patterns of the actual day of flight. You can get in a good ballpark though.

As soon as you land and/or get home, visit flightaware.com and look up your flight number or city to city.  (This is where you can plan future flights as mentioned above). From here you can find your exact flight based on arrival times and all sorts of neat info about the particular plane you were on. Look for the “View track log” link in the right-hand column. It is easy to miss if you aren’t looking for it. 

 

Once here, you can see your flight, track it as t went along using GPS as well as altitude and speed date. The thing we are looking for is the Google Earth file download.

This will download a google Earth file. I recommend installing Google Earth Pro application on your PC, but you can use Google Earth through your browser to open this file.  You can then simulate your flight by adjusting the time bar located at the top left of the screen.

This will “draw” the path of your plane. You only have a couple of days maximum to get this Google Earth data for free. Otherwise you’ll have to use another service online and pay for it.

If you look at the timestamp of your pictures, you can get an idea of about where in the flight you were and move the camera there.  The timestamps didn’t match up perfectly for me but they were within about 2 minutes of when my pictures were timestamped. By knowing which side of the plane you were on you can move the camera to the planes position at that time, and look in the right direction. I then added a pin in google earth at that position, saved my perspective view and added the images from my computer to the description.

Here’s a great example of Knoxville from the air and in Google Earth (Click the pic below to see it bigger. you can see the river and landscape align in the picture and screenshot):

 

If you’ve been lucky enough to have clear skies on a day flight you can match things pretty easily. At night it can be harder to see some of the landforms and taking pics from the airplane window introduces more glare.  However, sometimes you get really lucky and you can catch things like Disney’s Firework Finale from 30,000ft like this:

You can even write a quick description in the Pin’s description tag. You can save this KMZ file and send it to friends and family who can also view it as well as the photos you linked.  (A KMZ file is actually a zip file containing the files you linked like pictures as well as a text file with the GPS coordinates which links to those files. It is kind of like a webpage). However, this makes your KMZ file pretty big (because it contains all your pics, make sure you squishify those images so they aren’t massive).  If you don’t want your grandma to have to download hundies of MB to see your trip journal you can drop all your images to a web shared folder like dropbox, googleDrive, Box, etc. and then instead of “Add Local Image” in the description, you can “Add web image” and paste the share link.

What cool pics or vids did you get from a plane? Post them in a comment.

Build Plate Adhesion on a 3D Printer

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I finally got a 3D printer of my own Spring 2018 and haven’t really had time to learn all the tips and tricks from everyone on great prints. For the couple of hours I spent with this thing, it prints well enough I suppose. At first I just didn’t have luck at all. In the past I had good luck with Painters tape, and even glue sticks on the old Printrbot Simple kits I used to use in summer camps I taught, but my RepRap Guru has a heated glass build plate. 

20190303_153217

For ages folks have tried recommending different materials to have your 3D prints stick to the build plate and all of them fall short in my eyes. I think I came across the perfect solution (pun intended).

First, here’s what I’ve seen and issues I had with them

  • Gluesticks: This makes a mess and in my experience doesn’t work well.
  • Painters tape: parts don’t come off of this easy and it’s expensive to continue to replace
  • Sugar: Sticky and messy.
  • Expensive build-plates:  Expensive…

The best solution I’ve come across which gives amazing results is salt water. The parts stick to the glass really well, but then when the print is done, the build plate cools down, the part comes off without any effort whatsoever. In most cases, I pick the part up without having to pull or pry at all. 

For cheapness, I make my own solution usually, but recently tried premixed saline solutions.  To make your own, get a small glass of water, warm it in the microwave until it’s as hot as warm tea, then slowly add salt to it until no more will dissolve. Use a cotton ball, cotton swab, or paper towel dipped in this water to smear a layer of salt water on the glass build plate. Wait until it dries and forms a nice crystalline layer. You can see in the pic above that the build plate looks dirty, but it it’s just salt.  You can heat the bed to help the water evaporate quicker if you are anxious.

While looking for a better or quicker application method, I tried NeilMed Nasal wash. This sprays out in a good even mist and coats the entire plate in literally 1 second. Then I warm the build plate to evaporate the water and print.  The one in the image is “hypotonic” solution, which doesn’t have as much salt as the “hypertonic” solution.  The hypertonic solution might work better, but the standard solution works great.  I usually don’t wash it off between prints unless I notice a clean spot on the glass. Then I’ll rinse the glass, dry with a cloth, then sprits it again with the spray.

Master Bedroom and Bathroom Flooring Nightmare

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We had painted our subfloor in the master bedroom and treated it as a art studio/office for a year or two, but then we could finally afford flooring (as long as we did the work ourselves).  We had already done one bathroom which had been easy and were working on the downstairs open floor plan which had its own challenges but was also relatively easy, We had no idea what laid in store for us on this one though.

The bathroom had linoleum laid on top of luan.  On our other bathroom this was great. We just laid COREtec Floor tiles on top and everything worked out beautifully.  Since I hate thresholds in houses, I was determined not to have a step up from the bedroom to the bathroom. That luan had to go.

The destruction was only somewhat fun, I have to admit. but the cleanup was a nightmare.

First remove the shoe moulding. Then rip up the floor starting with the end at the doorway. The luan was stapled down every 6 inches or so. It took quite a while working with the hammer and pry bar to get it. Some staples just wouldn’t come out, so I dug the luan out from under them and hammered them flat. Make sure not to get distracted and forget one of the staples because your shoe or toe will shue as hell find it when you’re walking around and it’ll trip you. Once the destruction phase was over, we had to clean up. 50 gallon trash bags worked OK, but the sharp edges of the wood sliced right through a couple of them so I suggest double-bagging it.

Now that this was finished we could lay the floor. Which direction you lay the floor planks depends on your taste. some people say to lay the planks based on the position of the sun through the windows, some say you want to be perpendicular to the room entryway, etc.  I just laid out a bunch of planks and figured which ones I liked better. Because it would be easier to not have any issues with the bathroom threshold are, I started laying the floor long-ways so that it ran straight into the bathroom as several pieces. In other words, perpendicular to the bathroom door.

Again a band saw and junior hacksaw are infinitely helpful on the intricate not-so-straight walls, cabinet, and under the toilet areas. The toilet was another challenge. In or other bathroom, we used a foam ring seal for the toilet. This worked fine because we laid our CORETec on top of the 1/8″ luan and linoleum floor. This time, I had ripped all of that up, so I had a big gap when  I tried to screw the toilet to the floor. The gasket was just too fluffy. It sealed well, however sitting on the toilet felt like you were trying to balance on an exercise ball.  To fix this, I tried two approaches. I got some commercial “toilet shims” from the hardware store, but these honestly sucked at this task. I ended up using them as wall spaces in my downstairs while installing the COREtec floor there.

The solution that worked best to fix the toilet was to take the toilet up and cut some COREtec in the shape of the toilet base, then sit the toilet on top of this. This gave stable support the the entire bottom of the toilet, and I was still able to get a good seal on the foam gasket. The foam gasket allows repositioning, unlike wax rings so it was good to go when I tightened the bolts. Cut the bolts to length with a dremel and put the caps on and the toilet is affixed.

While this fixed the wobble on the toilet issue, it looked bad. I decided to caulk the connection between the toilet and the floor, covering and hiding the spacer I had cut with white caulk. Now, there’s different perspectives on whether this is a good idea or not. Some people say it looks great, other people complain that if there is a leak, it’ll just go into the subfloor instead of leak from the toilet and you won’t know it until it’s really expensive to fix (like entire tens of thousands of dollars since it’s an upstairs bathroom). I waited a couple of months of use to make sure there weren’t any leaks before I caulked it. To get the cleanest lines, I masked around the edges with painters tape.

Once the floor was fully down, I went back and installed the shoe moulding. You can see in the pic above of the toilet, I messed up the moulding on the sink unit and had to flip it around, leaving a weird gap. I filled this in with brown caulk which matched perfectly.

Seamless Carpet to Hardwood Floor Transitions

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I love details and precision in design. When laying the CORETEC flooring in our house, one thing I really wanted to avoid was a threshold between the kitchen tile and the vinyl planks. Thresholds look bad, are typically used to hide flaws, and are easy to trip over in the dark. I was determined not to have a threshold anywhere, even when the tile met the carpet.

This is bad:

This looks much better:

Our project started first with our bathroom, laying CORETEC vinyl planks on top of the linoleum went well. You can read all about it here.  I got a comment about how I made the transition from carpet to the bathroom.  I hate seeing those metal clamps at these transitions and wanted to just have the carpet end and tile begin at the doorway of the bathroom.  The way to do this is with a little thing called a carpet Z-bar.  You can get them pretty cheap at any bigbox store They cost less than $2 for a 4-foot section. You can cut them with a regular little red hacksaw and then nail them right into the subfloor. It’s basically a little metal piece about an inch wide that is pressed into the shape of a Z. What you do is take the carpet and wrap the loose end over the top of the Z and tuck it under the top lip of the Z, then hammer it to the subfloor. Then go back with the hammer and crimp all along the z bar so the carpet will be squished into place for a tight hold. This prevents it from slipping out over time.

The first step it to remove the previous threshold and carpet clamping thing. This is the thing I want to avoid using when I finish laying the floor and it MUST go. Using a flathead screwdriver and tiny hammer, you first pry back the metal to reveal the end of the carpet, then pull the carpet and any padding back until you can get to the nails below.

carpetStrip1     carpetStrip2

Once this piece is removed, you can install the Z-bar. I used much smaller nails that the illustration and image shows here.  The goal is to have the nail disappear completely. I put a nail at each end of the Z bar, then I hammered the Z-bar flat.  In places where the carpet wouldn’t lay flat enough, I added a nail there (a couple of places in the middle of the threshold area). When done, it looks like a manicured golf course. Roughage that has a clean and clear transition to the green.

Hardwood to Tile Transitions

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When we bought our open floor plan house, it already had tile in the kitchen and terrible pet-stained carpet in the living room. When we replaced the carpet with CORETEC plus “hardwood” I was determined not to have a threshold where the tile and hardwood met. Now CORETEC isn’t actually hardwood, it’s a engineered vinyl material made to look like hardwood. The core is made of some kind of foam I was told is derived from bamboo, and you can get an optional cork padding (about 1/16″ thick) as well. This was a good thickness for our needs as it is about as think as the tile in the kitchen.  The tile is the run of the mill 1/8″ thick “engineered” ceramic material. The tile had been laid on top of sheet vinyl flooring, and of course the mastic thickness made it a little higher still.

I can’t stand a bump in the middle of the room like you see in many homes where wood meets carpet or tile. I think that transition moulding is a sign of poor craftsmanship. In order to prevent this from happening when we laid the CORETEC, I had to first remove the carpet and all the tack strips. Something I learned is that when you pull out the tack strips, which were nailed to our concrete pad foundation, it leaves a crater.   In most cases these are around the edges by the wall and can be ignored, however the transition to the kitchen was more obvious.

To fix both problems (craters and height difference between CORETEC vinyl “hardwood” planks and the tile I used floor leveling compound.  For the entire area from the tile itself to about four or five feet back from the tile, I gradually feathered the thickness of the leveling compound so that the height difference between the middle of the hardwood floor and the edge by the tile was imperceptible.  When this dried, we laid the vapor barrier, then the vinyl floor tiles. Traditional wisdom says to begin laying flooring at an exterior wall. I made sure to measure the entire width of the room so I wouldn’t end up with a tiny sliver of CORETEC butting up against the tile.  In retrospect, I probably should have started laying the hardwood at the tile side instead of the wall in case there’s shifting or uneven walls.  In my case everything worked out great!

To fill the tiny gap between the tile and the vinyl planks, I wanted something that would look good and not prevent the floating CORETEC from having a little “breathing room”.  I went with a tinted and sanded silicone caulk.  Since we had recently painted our grout, color matching wasn’t hard at all.  This stuff is great because it stays flexible enough not to impede the floor, and makes a very nice transition to the tile. It was also very easy to use and clean up.

We’ve had this floor for three years now and it still makes me happy every time I look at this transition. The type of silicone grout we used does make it slightly tough to clean if it gets dirty (because silicone if grippy and the sand in it gives it texture) but it isn’t really a problem.