The TV and the Beam Gap

Earlier today I decided that it was about time for me to put my TV up on my wall above my desk. It had been sitting on blue carpet of my room, right next to my window ever since we moved in to our house. The main reason I wanted the TV up was not to watch shows or movies, but to use it as a giant computer monitor. That way I could play computer games like Robocraft on a much bigger screen. It would also allow me to put terminals on a separate screen. This way, I would not have to pull them up and switch back to Chromium when working on a complicated project or when working on multiple tasks at the same time.

I enlisted the help of my parents as well as my cat Feisty. The first thing we needed to do was move my desk out of the way. My parents and I did this while Feisty sat on the bed and supervised. I then used the stud-finder to look for the beams and mark them so that the thick long metal screws which bear the weight of the TV and the mount could be securely attached to the wall. While trying to figure out the exact position for the mount, my mom double checked my markings at the height at which we needed to drill pilot holes, but couldn't find one of the beams. I took the stud-finder to try it again and found the beam at the place I had marked. However, when I moved the stud-finder up the wall, it stopped detecting the beam. Even stranger, when I continued to move the stud-finder further up, it detected the beam again - there was a gap! If we had put the TV up, the beam we attached it to could easily have fallen, tearing a chunk out of the wall. Because it was unsafe, we temporarily abandoned our attempt to put up the TV until we figure out both the mystery of the severed beam, as well as a safe way to hang the TV.

Bonus Tech Stuff: OpenWRT - An Embedded Linux Distribution

OpenWRT is a lightweight embedded Linux distribution which is available on some routers. It uses the opkg package manager, and has 3500 available packages. The current main version is 15.05 Chaos Calmer. It is simple but highly customizable, and uses OverlayFS to overlay SquashFS and JFFS2. OpenWRT also has several available web interfaces if you do not want to use SSH. It can run on relatively minimal hardware.


Because of that, extremely cheap portable options are available from Alibaba and Aliexpress. These have a reasonable amount of RAM, but have very little flash. Products such as this (I don't have one of these - you might consider payment protection if you want to get a bunch) could be used for simplistic tasks such as downloading a large file to an external hard drive. It is also probably possible to use these for a mesh network or acting as a web cache with an external hard drive. OpenWRT routers could be fun for projects!

#slice2016