Snowblower fixed, truck ready for inspection.

I got the new drives for my Drobo last week.  Turns out the issue was not the drive (or at least not only the drive, since neither of these surprisingly well packed drives worked.  Neither would spin up.  This would imply it is the Drobo that is the problem not the drive.

A couple of other things I did during the week.  Jess wanted to try some stuff with ground chicken, so I picked some up and ground it.  

I also played around a little with the GoPro.  I figured out how to use its time lapse video mode.  I would rather set it to take pictures on an interval and then turn it into a video myself, but I didn't see a way to do that.  That would allow me to take full resolution stills, instead of just grabbing a 1920x1080 video frame (it will do 4K, but I would need to make sure the microSD is large enough), and it would allow me to manually remove things like being stopped at a rest area, or the umpteenth gas stop because my truck sucks.  It would also allow me to concatenate the two days of driving into a single video.  This is such a basic feature I really expected it to be there.  All the stuff online just says use the time lapse video mode.  Another problem with video mode is battery life.  I got a big block battery for it, assuming that would be enough for it to wake up every couple of seconds take a picture and go back to sleep.  In time lapse video mode, the GoPro never sleeps though, so that extended battery probably won't last a day.  It is something I will definitely have to keep an eye on, and I might test it on the trip down to KY.  

Saturday I didn't really do too much.  I relaxed and sorted through a bunch of stuff on the Drobo, since it is now clear that it is at least part of the problem.  I also went and picked up a stationary bike, though I didn't get it set up, I had to clear out the corner first.

Sunday I got the bike set up.  It is probably too little too late for this trip, but hiking down into the canyon and back out can kick your butt even if you are ready for it, which I am definitely not.  It is small enough to fit in front of the TV when I am using it.  

And it folds up nicely in the corner when I am not.  

It had been above freezing for over a day at this point, so I gave the heat pump another shot.  It sounded really really awful and screeched when it first turned on, but it did turn on and it was working.  The second time it cycled on it sounded normal, so I got lucky and it was just frozen, I didn't burn up the motor.  This is good since heating with the space heaters really kind of sucked.  It turned out their "thermostat" was actually just a duty cycle, not based on temperature, so I had to look up the temperature before I went to bed and set them for that, which would make it warm when I went to bed, and if I guessed wrong, either I would wake up sweating or freezing.  Both had occurred in the previous week.

The big project on Sunday was getting the truck ready for inspection.  I had intended to swap my back tires to the new rims, but it turns out one of them wasn't holding air anymore, so I only got one swapped back and I will have Bob's take a look at it.  The tires are in the back of the truck now, as is the new bumper.  

While I was swapping around the tires, I also bent my fender back out.  It got caved in a little, and it is pretty close to back where it belongs. 

Unfortunately while I was crawling around under the truck, my cheapo flanel decided it had enough.  since you can't get them at this point (all the stores are in summer mode already) I might just put a patch on it for the rest of the season.  I think I still have some iron on patch somewhere.

I also went up to the shed.  The roof is mostly cleared off, so I moved the boards and stuff out of the way.

After that I decided to fix my snowblower.  I started beating on it to get the auger free, but there is a reason that screwdrivers say "do not use as a prybar or chisel" on them.  This was one of my nice big ones too.

I got the chunk of shear pins out though.

Turns out there was also a big rock in the way, which is probably what caused the issues in the first place.  

The snowblower is fixed.

I also found out something interesting about the NAS I bought from Mike: it has a "recycle bin" built into it that doesn't integrate with the Windows.  The way it allocates space from this is that it takes space out of the total size of the array, so the array looked like it was only 12.8TB when I bought it, but when I found this out and deleted the recycle bin files, all of a sudden the mapped drive was 15.8TB.  So that means most of the work I did during the week removing stuff since it wouldn't have fit was unnecessary and it means I have a bunch of stuff to download next time I visit someone with a big library.  Oh well.  The large transfer off the Drobo has begun though. And yes, it was warm enough Sunday that my window is open.  One positive note: I never saw above 40MB/s on my old tower transferring to/from the Drobo, but it is holding steady at full speed Gigabit, even while playing media from it at the same time.

Snow coverage: about 50%.

It is pretty unlikely I will work on the projects at all this week since I will be preparing for my trip at the end of the week.