CozyNet Blog

General Update v27

These past few days here I've been preparing for a road trip to Tennessee. Since I'll be away from the house for a solid week, I've been making arrangements that can sometimes feel unending. New tires for the car, oil change, situating pet feeders and water, organizing the house, buying things for the trip, etc.

I suspect it'll be blasting hot out there since I'm going to an out door agriculture fair, so I bought these little fans and plan to bring my umbrella with me. Hopefully I won't bake alive!

There's not much else to share on the topic for now, but I'll try to take a few pictures for a future blog post. I'm looking forward to the event and pray it all goes well.

There's been some slow progress on the house project. I paid a friend to setup the plumbing for a washing machine, including a temporary drain line and dryer vent. It's all straightforward stuff, but between work and keeping up with daily chores around the house, I haven't had the time to do anything. I figured I should just hire someone to do something in the meantime rather than nothing ever get done at all.

There are still some things I want to do my self, like the windows, if I can ever get around to it... But there are plenty of things I would gladly pay someone else to handle too.

The house came with an old washing machine from the 80's, having a wood grain panel and sturdy electro-mechanical switcher knobs. If it works, I intend to restore it and use it because I've had the misfortune of using modern washers and would rather use a 50's ring washer before wasting my money on the junk rolled out in appliance stores today.

With the ability to wash my clothes at home, this should save me from having to go somewhere which means I get back a little more time for other things.

Slowly but surely, I've been intentionally scrubbing any and all YouTube channels in my RSS feed reader for being highly negative, cynical, political and consumerist. I have 14 channels remaining in my feed now, coming from some 35+ channels a few years ago which I believe isn't a healthy way to pass the time. I do want to clarify that I didn't consistently watch all of those channels, so don't mistake me as being obsessive.

Of these 14 channels, only two of them seem to post consistently while the rest might post something every once in awhile, which I find to be an acceptable pace. This has been an effort to reduce the amount of time I spend on screens, specifically for entertainment and exposure to bad or negative influences.

I recently got an HP 4350 DTN LaserJet printer that was being thrown out at work. I've always wanted one of these old HP printers since they're simple to setup, repair, well supported by any operating system on the planet, have a network card, toner, and work like none other! They're the best printers you could ever get, and just for the record, I would never recommend an HP printer today. If you want a modern printer, then I'd suggest something from Brother, but if you can get your hands on a free HP 4000 series printer, then go for it; they're the best.

Here soon I'm thinking of setting up a cron job to auto-print short news segments and headlines in the morning pulled from my feed reader. How cool would that be!?

I also will soon be getting an IBM Wheelwriter that has a wonderful Model M keyboard built into it. It all works, but needs a little fixing. You can still buy the ink ribbons for them and parts online. I don't really have much a purpose for a type writer, but it's too cool to pass up for being free. I wish it had a serial port on it to make into a teletype, but it has no such functionality. I did find this Hackaday post though that indicates it is possible to convert the type writer into a teletype with a few hardware modifications. That might make a fun future project!

Thanks for reading my blog!

Date: 2026-06-01