I have recently been getting more and more into the topic of home automation. It find it to be a very family-suitable topic, since once setup, it is easy and fast to integrate another sensor or add a new automation. This allows to also maintain and enhance the system if one only has rather short amounts of time.

A year or two ago, our 36 Euro vacuum cleaner died. While I managed to revive it a few times with self-built filters, tape, and some rewiring, we eventually decided to abandon the zombie cleaner and go for something nicer: A Dyson handheld vacuum cleaner. We went with the V8 as it was the first one with the additional filter after the motor and a lithium-ion battery. As this was already an older model, we managed to get it used for a good price with a number of accessories from a classifieds platform. We bought some more accessories we occasionally use (Car Cleaning Kit), of course from a classifieds platform as well. However, as probably every Dyson owner knows: Storing this vacuum with its fancy charging station and all the accessories is not quite straight-forward. Even when screwing to a wall, there is still no nice way to store the accessories. In this article, I will show the stand I built from wood scraps I had lying around from another project. Here the final setup for motivation:

Improvements

Here are a few things I have been thinking about, but discarded to make sure I reach at least an initial first version. Maybe I will extend this concept later, or someone else might take on the challenge to develop it further.

I have recently come to know the concept of a “learning tower”. This is a slightly more stable stepladder for toddlers to reach the counter top in the kitchen or the sink, long before they have the height to do so. With my son always requiring a lot of attention and wanting to be involved, I thought that would be just right for him. When I started looking up the prices of these, I was quite surprised: Apparently something so simple can turn out very expensive. I guess it always depends what the target group is willing to pay. A second though led me to Ikea and, after discovering there is nothing suitable available, to Ikea hackers. One of the most common DIY learning towers you find out there is constructed by bolting the Ikea Bekväm ladder and Oddvar stool together. At the time of this writing this comes up to some 36 Euros material cost (plus screws) and ends in a construction which is likely not very stable, not looking nicely. After searching for a little while longer, I stumbled on this post which is still based on the Ikea ladder, but adds a custom frame on top. This already looks much better. However, when already going custom, I thought I might just go all the way and built a fully custom learning tower. That kept me busy for the day. I think the final result looks great and for one day work at less than 19 Euros (plus screws) material cost, this is a real bargain.

As I switched my website from the Kirby 2 to Jekyll (see also here), I needed to convert the pages. I did that in a a fairly manual way, with the help of some simple macros. This was acceptable since I did not need to convert many pages. In the following, I describe the required changes, based on the features and plugins I have used.

Since my server provider is upgrading his systems, this means I will have to move to a newer server. Since the old version of Kirby will no longer run without problems on the newer PHP versions (7+) of the new server, I decided to go with a new website instead of re-licensing the new version of Kirby.