Window Game & SFX Side Quest
Wednesday, June 4th, 2025 10:19 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
snoozefestaudio |
60F tonight, going down to 52F.
Having only dropped off the AC form last night, I wasn't sure if it was gonna be installed today or not.
I vaccumed the flat last night, and then sprayed a bunch of febreeze around this morning to make things presentable just in case.
And that paid off, because they did come in and install it today while I was at work!
On the right, is the exhaust fan I bought, which I installed tonight, soon as I got home!
It's running right now, and the AC unit is totally off, as it's only in the 60s out there!
This little exhaust fan is such an upgrade from the makeshift rig I had last summer!..
There it is from last July... sad little fan duct taped to a circular hole in a piece of foam board. Every two weeks the duct tape would fail, and it'd fall onto the window sill! No louvers to keep the air or bugs out when not in use.
The new one, like the space heater, is a thing I didn't realize I'd be needing here, a year ago!
Everything was a mystery back then, but entering month 12, here in 1106, all seasonal secrets have been revealed!
When I moved in here last July, with the AC installed on day one, this little flat was a sealed tomb! No air from the window, and the bathroom vent rusted shut!
Like it's predecessor, this exhaust fan is too weak to actually exhaust any air from the unit!
My cig smoke from the ashtray on the desk is still moving toward the bathroom!
The purpose of the exhaust fan is to blow on those louvers to keep them open, pretending to exhaust, but it's really only letting fresh air IN.
And now that the bathroom vent works, that's fine! The cross-breeze is maintained and the smoke is still exhausted out the roof.
And I'm pretty sure that when it gets really hot out there, it'll probably be fine to leave the exhaust fan off, let the AC run, and let the bathroom vent passively manage the air changes.
Because in the dead of summer, the wind up at the roof's gonna be next to nothing.
So the vent's not gonna be sucking out the cold air faster than the the AC can create it.
It's just gonna give the stale air a way out, while I'm gone at work.
The exhaust fan louvers will be closed, preventing hot air and bugs from coming in, but... over the course of hours, the cooled air will gradually make it's way up the vent chase and outside.
And I feel like that's fine, because if the vent were still rusted shut, then the air would just leak through the door into the hallways (which are always negative) and make it's way up the stairwells to the roof!
The only difference is... my smoke smell isn't leaking into the hallways nearly as much as it would.
Those white blinds have also been replaced, just last week, with wood-grain blinds.
I bought the white, cordless, room darkening blinds last July, from Home Depot, the day after moving in... because white was all they had in stock.
But they started to fail a couple weeks ago... because the flimsy cordless retraction mechanism began to fail under their massive weight!
The new blind set is the same dimensions, but the individual blinds are wider, which means there are less of them in the set... which translates, to less overall weight on the retraction mechanism.
That may not make sense at first, because you may think, fewer blinds that are wider is still the same amount of plastic, so how can the new set be lighter?
But it's not the same amount of plastic!
The individual blinds in both sets are the same thickness to block sunlight.
But in the old set, each blind was only 3" in hight, meaning that to overlap with the ones above and blow it, it's only blocking 2" of window... so you need a bazillion of them to cover the whole window space.
In the new set, the individual blinds have the same overlap, but an extra inch of height, meaning you need far fewer of them to cover the same window space.
And the math for the density of the plastic works out so that the new set is significantly lighter weight than the old set!
And yes, I just wasted 30 minutes of my life, writing that... and 5 minutes of yours to read it!
The point here is that, I finally have the woodgrain blinds that I wanted originally, but I don't have to fear that, like their white predecessors, they'll fail in under a year!
The new blinds should be good to go for far longer!
And that Home Depot card had been paid down to zero for several months, so it was a no brainer to use it to order them and have them delivered to the door... because I'll have forever to pay it off!
I never use that card anymore!
In summary... I've mastered my window game, in 1106!
Good blinds that match the decor at last... good exhaust fan to use over the cooling season when the AC mandates a hermetically sealed window... space heater on the window sill in the cold months when the radiator doesn't feel like working... etc.
After chatting with DeepSeek about the sound effects tapes, and the possible legal snags of using them in my work... I found my way to rediscovering the old sound effects collection that used to be available at the public library when I was a kid!
Audio Fidelity, released over 35 volumes of hi-fi stereo sound effects, on vinyl, between 1969 and 1977!
And these vinyls are out there on Ebay for five to eight bucks a pop!
Audio Fidelity folded so long ago, that their collection never even made it to cassette tape!
It's the holy grail of, "orphaned works!"
So I ordered, "Sound Effects - Volume 1 - Audio Fidelity Records Press DFS-7006" last night for $5.99, and it'll be here next week.
That turn table Colleen gifted me as a housewarming present, back in 2023, is still in my closet here, in 1103, and it has RCA Audio outs!
Last night's experiment with digitizing tapes via the MOTU M2, forced me to put together the exact combo of cables and adapters that is necessary to digitize vinyl, from Colleen's turn table!
So I'm all set!
When that vinyl comes next week, and the test ditization proves the concept, I'm off to the races!
A backup collection of orphaned sound effects is gonna come in extremly handy!
And snatching them off vinyl means no motor noise from the shitty USB cassette player!
The plan is to order one volume at a time, when I have the spare five to ten bucks, over the course of the next... forever!.. there's no rush, and no time limit!
But digitizing this collections's gonna be a lot of fun!
And at DeepSeek's suggestion, I will upload my digitized sounds to audio archives online.
And I'll credit Audio Fidelity on the album too!
Okay, that's my news for the opening day of Queen of Hearts week, 2025.
Alarm goes off at 7:30AM!
I can snooze it until no later than 8:10!
Gotta get the coffee ready to go now, before bed.
°¦}
