Granted, I used a blower fan as instead of the box fan the canonical design uses.

Due to a series of unfortunate events, we've found ourselves with a reasonably clean basement. One of my wife's biggest complaints about the basement had always been dust. Dust from my very infrequently used wood-shop. Dust from the litter box. Dust from... well, dust.

The new basement seemed like a good excuse to take a crack at the dust situation and this design sprung into mind.

I built it with four 16x25 MERV 11 filters, some plywood, some 1x4s, some plumber's tape to hold the fan in place, and the aforementioned blower fan. I could have gone for a higher MERV rating, but I didn't feel the need to go super overboard. I can also crank the fan for multiple consecutive passes. That's the whole idea of the design after all.

The box itself is only held together with tape and the weight of the fan. Now that the basement is more together I might model and print some brackets to make the box more solid.

One cheap motion sensor plug later and the air down there is honestly pretty fresh

A small update from a few days ago. To save you a click, it turns out that if you apply PVC cement and don't push the pipes together you won't actually make a good joint. Who knew.

I'm honestly impressed it lasted so long without issues. We've lived in this house over 10 years and the PVC run predates our purchase.

As a side note, PVC repair couplers are a massive PITA. I am glad I didn't have to dig a fresh trench, get the old pipe out, and put a new one in, but it was quite the dance getting the coupler on while fighting with 2" OD pipe that's firmly lodged in clay. My nice small hole grew a bit longer to get some wiggle room.

I was surprised the lemongrass overwintered. The flowers were a second nice surprise. And then like all flowers in our veg garden it turned out that bees really like them.

Picking up where the title left off, I was rudely awaken by the high water alarm from my sump pump. This was odd, as we have an electric pump and a venturi backup that's powered by city water.

The electric pump wasn't running when I got into the basement and the backup hadn't been triggered yet. I guess the radon folks messed with the sensor's height when they were here. I'll address that later.

Manually triggering the backup resulted in turbulence in the sump pit, but no change in water level. Maybe the backflow vavle and the electric pump have both failed?

I finally put my hand in the pit to feel for backflow. There wasn't any. I felt around for the float for the pump, found it, and pushed it down some. The pump turned on, but sounded like it was working hard. No real change to water level. I'll need to figure out why the float going too high results in the pump turning off. Maybe overtravel turnoff is intentional? Seems odd. I put this on the back burner too.

I went out into the rain and popped the cap on the alternate outlet. Water shot out. It was 12:45 AM and I was now wide awake.

Today I found roots chasing the line with a snake. Rather than just clear them out, I figured I would address the source of entry so I wouldn't have to clean it out again. I'm very pleased in how well I located the hole. I was afraid I would have to be digging around for a while, but the snake told me how far to go and I had a pretty solid guess where the line ran.

Not the best angle, but the fam would not tolerate my shenanigans for long

This bush is usually crawling in bees for a month or so while it blooms.

Its bloom cycle might have been a bit shorter than usual due to the drought, but the bees were happy while it lasted. They're off to the rose of sharron, which is one of a few plants exerting the energy to bloom right now.

I have no idea what this bush is called, but for three or so weeks out of the year it smells fantastic. Very sweet smelling.

A few days back, I wondered if I could achieve focus stacking doing the macro rock-your-camera-to-focus trick. For the uninitiated, the idea is that slight movement of your camera toward and/or away from your subject is an easier focusing method than using the focus ring on your lens.

I thought my logic was straightforward:

1. Focus breathing means that even if you're using a tripod photo stacking software will still have to deal with shot-to-shot variation in framing/perspective
2. My body does not support focus bracketing
3. My body does have high burst rates

Put the three together and here we are. The daisy in the post is 39 images fed into helicon focus 9. I've now spent a total of 10 minutes with this software and it's super easy. Here's one of the photos in the stack to give you a feel for how thin the depth of field was:

For kicks, here are two more stacks. They're not super compelling photos, but they do show that the concept is viable.

Everything in this post was shot at f/4 on a Sigma 35mm f/2 with 26mm of extension tubes in the great outdoors with no additional lighting.

Hopefully this will be the first of many I take this season. Hopefully^2^ I'll even take the time to break out my "real camera" at some point and go 🐝 hunting

Well, almost. I didn't give myself enough tolerance in the cutout for the speaker and it doesn't fit well. On to v1.01!

It will be a 240x280x70ish speaker stand. The first go ground with it flat and support free resulted in warping despite a 60°C chamber, so I stood it on its end, cut print speed by a third, and added the breaks to reduce stress.

This will take a while...

Note that the bottom has a chmafer, so although there's a shadow it's not warping.