CozyNet Blog

General Update v23

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Hey there CozyNet readers, it’s about time for another General Update post!

October has been another busy month here with all this traveling I’ve been up to. One week I’m in Austin, then another week I’m out in Oklahoma. Lemme tell ya, I’m getting tired of burgers and fries. Didn’t think it would happen, but after eating em back to back one day after the next, it starts to wear on you.

The week I was out in Austin (or more like three days really), I was at the Texas Linux Fest conference hosted on the JJ Pickle Research campus. I got to meet up with a few of you, which was really awesome! It’s nice to put a face to my friends from CozyNet, of which I didn’t take any pictures because I respect peoples privacy. We probably should have taken a group photo for the old album book though, which I wasn’t thinking about at the time!

Anyhow, the conference event was alright. These use to be a lot more busier back then, pre-2020’s, and leaned more computer hobbyist than commercial corpo-focused.

The Framework booth showing off the modular laptops and mini-PC was cool. I wouldn’t mind having a Framework laptop, but I tend to use my laptops until they completely fall apart and my Dell laptop from 2019 is still holding up; and besides, this sucker was like $1200 back in 2019 when I got it so I’m darn sure going to get as much millage out of it as possible! In fact, I just recently ordered a new battery for it after the conference since the old one would only last around an hour. It’s back to a comfy 6 to 12 hour battery life now and I also upgraded it to 16GB memory earlier this year. Unless I drop it or something unexpected happens to it, this puppy has another 5 years left in it yet!

After the conference, we went to “The Domain” area across the street from the campus to poke around. It’s like a mall, but the promenade is outdoors. I think something was going on around a sports stadium down the street at the time because there were a lot of people dressed in soccer jerseys, and it was also a little India around the Domain too. Very busy...

I had fun, and it was great seeing you guys!

About a week later I went on a Elk hunting trip with a good friend of mine to Oklahoma in the Wichita mountains. Actually it was a hunting season for kids, so it was his kids that got to hunt while we watched. I’m not going to share any pictures of that here, but I did take a few in the wildlife refuge!

The hunt went well and I had a great time camping, exploring the area, and visiting with his family on the ranch. We also went to visit a neighbor of the ranch who owned a large telescope and got to see some star clusters and Saturn’s rings! There wasn’t much light pollution either, which was about the same as where I live.

I don’t usually ever get out much like this since it’s exhausting, but I’ve really enjoyed it and would like to do it again someday!

I’ve also been working hard at my kitchen windows. My original plans involved restoring the windows, but the casements and frames were just too rotted. And besides, these weren’t the original windows to the house, being installed sometime in the 60’s I’m guessing. You can actually see where the original window once was, and then this large square cut out to make a place for the new casements.

Due to the years of water damage, I covered the area with metal flashing and slowly reproduced the casements myself. I was expecting this to take maybe three days total to complete, but heck no it hasn’t! This has been an arduous undertaking to say the least because I’ve never done this before and so have to learn as I go. I didn’t replicate the previous casements, but I did reproduce them with my own design.

I want this to look good and to be good, and so it took me almost three weeks to make. You would think it’s no problem to makes some choice cuts then screw and glue em together, but that’s just scratching the surface! I had to buy a dado blade set, good quality cedar that was straight and clean for the sill, and again more good quality cedar for the casements too. You can’t have any twists or bends in it and everything has to be cut precisely when it comes to the sill. The sill has a 14 degree pitch to it and since my house has siding on top of its original wood sided walls, I had to account for it so that I could attach a “nose” to the end of the sill that would make for a proper look allowing for the window to stand out from the rest of the wall. I haven’t yet attached the trim around the window, but once it’s finished the window should have a picture framed style with a crown on top that looks proper for an old farm house.

One of the challenges I had to deal with in this was that the house isn’t perfectly level and this wall in particular is a bit warped, so the casements aren’t 1-to-1 exact in their positioning.

I’ll share more on this later when I finish it.

The next step is to make some new window frames, which so far has been an ordeal too and for the wrong reasons. I’ve been practicing on good spare stock with my window sash router set and can make a good mortise and tenon no problem with my mortiser and table saw, but I’ve come to realize that the profile and cope to the set I bought (Infinity cutting tools in case you’d like to know) doesn’t actually match up to fit perfectly. I’ve spent weeks trying to figure out what I was doing wrong since I’m just learning how to do this, but come to find I wasn’t doing anything wrong at all and it makes me angry. The profile and cope literally do not match!

It only sort of fits, which looks like junk. If I can’t return them, I’ll just throw them into the pond out back to keep from being reminded of them and buy a cheap Chinese set off of Amazon like I should have from the start. It’s very disappointing...

And that’s all I have to write about for this one, so take it easy!

Thanks for reading my blog!

Date: 2025-10-21