The Workshop & Myself

The trees have been taking care of themselves, I've been taking care of myself and the workshop.

Hello, it’s been a while.

Back in March I left the job at Treeschool so I could once again return to technology as a income. That’s happened, but not as I expected it. Long story short on that, modern recruitment is vile and apparently impossible (at least for me) and “getting a job” didn’t happen. However, the wise rabbit always has two warrens and so I was able to turn to my own business as an income where I’ve been hard at work as a software developer / programmer contractor. A man must provide and so I’ve spent the last six months dusting off my programmer chops (and typing skills).

I have a long way to go. but I’m at a “functional” 28 words per minute with 80% accuracy. Thats a nice base to write code from, but I remain aimed at 70 words pm at 95% accuracy.

I’ve also started a new substack related to my programmer life. You’re all here for the trees and the last thing I want to do is turn some of you off with programmer talk. If you want to go subscribe to that, you can find it at below.

Part of the reason I’d never really posted much here over the last few months was that I’ve done precious little tree work or woodland work. However, I have been hard at work in my spare time in the workshop (a.k.a the garage). In early September we had some car break-ins around the street. Nothing professional, just some skeevy smackheads looking for their next fix. They took a woodland key, about six pounds in loose change and most irritatingly my mora knife. I reported it to the police on the grounds that knife was razor sharp and ideal for murdering. It did get me thinking about security though.

It’s a garage, but I call it the workshop.

This is how my workshop appears to the outside world. It’s a single leaf garage, kinda next to the house but not connected to it. To get to it, you have to walk over the neighbours drive. We had Velux windows installed 15 years ago when we had neighbours who refused to allow me to run an electricity cable to the garage. It’s a single leaf brick structure that I’ve spent nearly a decade making way over the top improvements to.

The workshop is largely responsible for me getting into tree world. It was the call of the woodworking as a means to escape the bits and bytes and get my body moving again. I started converting the “gym” (a.k.a the garage) into the workshop in 2017.

Inception. It always had a plywood floor for lifting weights.

At first it was a lick of paint, a bench and a cabinet.

But then things escalated. Single leaf structures are damp in autumn and spring, freezing in winter and boiling hot in summer. So I insulated the ceilings and walls.

Thanks to the lockdowns I inherited a load of ikea desktops that I used as a cover on the walls. I painstakingly cut shuttering plywood into boards and used them to make the ceiling nice.

Then it escalated again. I decided to build a timber framed structure inside the garage to give me a storage space above my head. Fast forward three years and I’d made it.

But then I bought a woodland, chainsaws and started filling it with more stuff. Oh dear.

I was writing on here at this point but I started to get very freaked out about security and that brings up back to the recent break-in and how these two tales dovetail. You see, I’ve actually been making a load of progress in the workshop over the last few years, but the problem was sharing it. It doesn’t take a genius to get my actual physical address and I was (rightfully) concerned that talking about and showing pictures of easily stealable things was a silly thing to do. Remember, it was always just a single leaf, el-cheapo garage door protecting my gear.

I wanted very much to share this picture of a seriously neat garage. There’s a lot going on here (everything from above is below except the drumkit which turned into a chipper), but I always feared thieves.

If you’re observant, you’ll notice there’s no doors on anything in the above. The theme continued until June, when I realised I had to wage a war on dust. So I started putting doors on stuff.

Door one. It took me eight years to get this door on.

Being super frugal, I glued up all the scraps of plywood to make these doors.

It is amazing how much less dust is kicking around. I’m getting way off track. Security, yes that’s what I was trying to write about. It was about the time I finished these doors that skeevy smackheads took what was not their from me. So I upped my security game.

First thing was installing two cctv cameras. Not ring, not low grade things, but mid-range Hikvision commercial grade cameras. I got them connected up two Raspberry Pi 5 with 16gb of ram and a hailo 8 AI chip for object detection. I’ve now got 72 hours of rolling 4K footage and all “events” are saved in 4K and uploaded to “the cloud” (S3 for the nerds out there) where they are stored for one year.

Next I went to town on the Velux windows. You can buy locks for Velux windows but you can make your own version, so that’s what I did. Two M10 bolts and length of plywood. No one is opening these windows from the outside. I also placed material over the glass to prying eyes from seeing in.

This next bit was overkill probably but I built some grilles from rebar and plywood.

They went over the windows and attached themselves into the roof structure. They’re not going anywhere. So now the windows don’t open from the outside, no one can see what’s inside, and even if they chance it by breaking a window they’ve got to get through 16mm rebar spaced at 70mm. Not happening in a hurry.

But the final upgrade was at the front. The big single leaf aluminium garage door was always the weak spot. So yesterday I got the commercial grade thick, noisy bullet lock shutters on the outside. The internal door is still in there, so even if you did get through the shutters, or pick the locks. I’d hear them going up. They are loud and rattly. That kicks the cameras into capture mode and kicks me into “where’s my reasonable-force-with-a-bat mode”.

Getting through this is gonna make some noise, which I will hear. Then I will break your arms, face and legs.

So basically that’s what I’ve been doing. Securing the workshop, upgrading the workshop storage whilst at the same time getting myself set back up with an income. It’s been a funny few months, but I thought it was time I posted something in case you all thought I was dead or something.

I’m not dead, just once again reconfiguring my life.

Thanks for reading - I appreciate your attention.

Cheers,

Jamie