The Definitive Location
At the end of last month, for a few days, I had my bathroom fixed. It isn’t visible in the pictures, but the metal tub was rusting through around the drawn, and there were other issues.
The bathroom had a half tile wall around, a soffit over the shower where ductwork ran from the building heating system to the exterior vent, and a few other challenges.
The renovation gutted the bathroom down to the studs and the cement, where I discovered there was none under the drain…just dirt, and the source of one of the problems. There was leaking from the bathroom above, which had to be fixed as well.
The bathroom was original to the building, built in 1976, while the blue was a nice enough color, it made it hard to replace easily. I had no spare tiles. So, in replacement, I opted to only retile the shower stall itself in white subway tile(something easily to get for years to come), and just replace the sheetrock elsewhere, so it could be repainted in a few years as needed.
I’m too tall for the bathtub, so hadn’t really used it, so went with a shower pan and doors.
This is a small bathroom, so I also had the floor retiled in black slate, and replaced the toilet(which was last replaced in the 90s) with a dual flush toilet…which was illegal in New York City till 2010, and a mechanical bidet toilet seat. I previously had added a mechanical bidet attachment. While some people have issues with bidets…I save a lot of toilet paper by using it.
Mechanical bidet seats, or attachments work by splitting the cold water intake on your toilet. The fancier models may branch off your hot water, or may have electric features, but that was unnecessary for my purpose.
The biggest change to the bathroom that I’d wanted for years was electrical.For one, I have an outlet inside the cabinet over my toilet, which allows me to charge my shaver and electric toothbrush inside.
There was originally a single light fixture over the sink. That is gone, replaced by three ceiling lights. These are disc lights, which are the latest replacement for traditional recessed lighting. A hole is still cut in the ceiling, and a junction box placed inside to convert to the appropriate voltage, with the disc light being connected and clipped into place. This allowed for one to be inside the shower itself, which was always dark, one in the middle of the room, and one over the sink. They are also temperature adjustable, if you remove them and adjust a switch, if I wanted.
Finally, the switch for the exhaust fan was replaced with a timer switch with a built in humidity sensor, so it can be safely left on till the humidity returns to lower levels. I previously just used a timer switch, this gives it a little more intelligence.
I think the final result turned out well. Nothing I bought was particularly expensive, individually, and I tried to pick things that I thought would hold up. I even got them to run a network cable through the wall between the rooms on either side, for future proofing, before they sealed it up.
Mr. Asner starred on the TV comedy “The Mary Tyler Moore Show” and later on the spinoff series “Lou Grant.”
A 96-year-old who fled the Holocaust finds a new way to be heard.
First he discovered a long-forgotten rail tunnel. Then he spent decades trying — in vain — to revive Brooklyn’s trolley system.
When I initially heard about dark mode support, I decided to wait until there was more support, then I just didn’t get around to it. It became a thing for applications to have dark modes, then dark modes that would activate based on a global system prference.
So, now my site, if you set your system to prefer dark mode, will show you a dark version of my site. Otherwise, it will show you a light version. I took a lesson from Jeremy Keith, who did this two years ago, and used something called CSS Custom Properties…another thing I haven’t used.
My WordPress theme is based on the original Twenty Sixteen WordPress.org theme. I ported back select improvements made from _s, the starter theme it was based on, as well as subsequent WordPress.org themes, such as Twenty Seventeen through the present.
There are a lot of other little tweaks I had to make in both this, and the plugins I develop for WordPress to support this. Style improvements, filters to add for additional functionality, etc.
It is still a work in progress, and I have other ideas and plans, but it is live. See if you can find all the other little tweaks.
Last summer, a conversation on the most promising at the time, AutoAuth, prompted a new contender Ticket Auth. Ticket Auth turns the relationship in the other direction.
Let’s use our favorite two example people, Alice and Bob. Alice has a post on her site which she doesn’t want to be public. For most sites, the default is public. Alice wants to share her post only with Bob.
AutoAuth doesn’t get into the idea of how Bob, or the client Bob is using, decides he wants to get access to Alice’s post. Ticket Auth, by comparison, puts the onus on Alice. Alice, when she decides on her audience, sends a ticket to those she wants to have access. Bob has to have a ticket endpoint…the place he received tickets.
The ticket is a code that is available for a limited time, that can be exchanged for a longer term token to access the information. It is, essentially, an invitation you are free to accept or ignore.
In trying to develop more, this is a good place to start. Once we start sending and receiving tickets, we can iterate on this and figure out the next questions.
But first things first. Let’s build something.