Measure twice, cut three or four times

(Almost) naked staircase

When we left off yesterday, I had just finished removing all the carpeting, step by step (right).

As much as I wish I could dispense with the carpet entirely, it's not going to happen. The treads are extremely unlovely 2x12 pine with rough bullnoses cut into both edges and riddled with staples holding down the carpet underlayment. Not only is staining them out of the question (and I don't want painted steps), but the treads are captured in rather loose mortise slots in the stringers that can only be disguised by carpet. It is possible to get thin hardwood treads to cover pine treads – and they look pretty nice – but I'd be looking at at least $600-$700 to do that, which isn't in the budget.

So... the carpet pieces will be reused to cover the treads once I've gotten the risers installed.

About those risers. Here's my plan for inserting them:

Retrofitting the staircase with risers, cross-section (rough sketch, not to scale)

I need to slice off the rear bullnose on each stair (see upper stair in sketch), then fit a board in each opening, nailed or screwed through the riser into the back end of each tread and through the tread above into the top of the riser. Then I'll recarpet each tread from the back edge at the bottom of the riser to the front edge and down around the bullnose (which isn't as long as this unscaled sketch implies). Actually, I'm going to experiment to see if I can attach the riser directly to the rear bullnose and skip the step of slicing them off – the carpet would cover the small dip at the back of the tread – but I suspect it will leave the front bullnose extending too far.

That is, I'll experiment once I get a board cut to the correct length. I measured the the distance between the stringers, which looked to be 35-1/4", maybe a tad less. I marked the length on a 1x8 board and marked the cutting line with my speedsquare. A quick pass with my handy-dandy Craftsman Nextec lithium-battery-powered 3-1/4" power saw and I took the board in to try it in an opening. It started into place then jammed. Too long, apparently. I took it back out on the deck and shaved a bit off the end. Still wouldn't go into place. Rinse and repeat... okay, this is getting frustrating. I remeasured between the stringers, and remeasured the board. It should fit, dammit.

Unless... something isn't square? I know the board ends are square. Which leaves the opening between the stringers and steps. I got my speedsquare and set it flush against the bottom of the tread, with the top corner against the stringer. And there's the bottom of the square, almost 1/4" away from the stringer.

               

Just a bit out of square

Checking the other side confirmed it: the opening is a parallellogram (right) instead of a rectangle. I haven't checked every step yet, but so far it looks like the whole staircase is slightly racked to one side (but not as much as the parallelogram pictured, thankfully). If so, then I'm going to have to cut each board a couple of degrees out of square on each end to match the openings; the discrepancy is way too much to solve by simply cutting the boards short.

I think I need a miter saw...

Downstairs, Downstairs

When I bought my house, I didn't think much about the fact that the coat closet was two rooms away from the front door, next to the downstairs bathroom and master bedroom. Or that the only linen closet was upstairs. I put up a peg rack by the front door for a couple of in-season jackets; crowded the rest of my coats and jackets into my bedroom closet, along with bedding, blankets, and bath towels; and put free-standing shelves in the coat closet to house hand towels and washcloths, backup toiletries and my toilet paper supply, the vacuum cleaner, and assorted hats, scarves, and gloves.

That was almost twelve years ago. I long since started hankering for a coat closet near the front door to take the pressure off the bedroom closet, and I decided several years ago just what I wanted to do about it: close in the space under the stairs. As you can see in these photos I took before moving in, there's a ton of space there. The coat closet will go in the high end, and there can be more storage under the lower end – a dedicated cupboard for the vacuum cleaner (my current one won't fit in the old coat closet) comes to mind.

I have never used the "breakfast bar", and want to at least partially close off the opening from the kitchen so I can install some normal-height upper cabinets to replace the short, high cabinets that are nearly useless. So walling in the section behind the staircase fits right into my plans for the kitchen.

Open risers

Something that's hard to see in the old photos, but is clear in a current one (at right), is that the staircase has open risers, with the stair treads individually wrapped in carpeting. This, unfortunately, is not conducive to using the space for a closet, as dust and debris from the stairs drops into the space (not to mention that you wouldn't want this view into a closet). The need to close in the risers is one of the many circumstances that have so far kept my coat closet from making the transition from wish list to reality.

Until now. I have finally taken the first step toward modifying the staircase: removing the carpet from the stairs so I can install risers. The photo at right shows the staircase with the carpet removed from two treads in the middle of the run. (They were the easiest to get to.) This was a fairly strenuous procedure; the carpet on each step was secured underneath with two rows of staples along the cut edges, requiring the vigorous application of a small prybar once a corner could be located to start the process.

Carpet fastened on bottom side of stair treads

I couldn't just slice the carpet off with a utility knife, because I'm going to need to use the pieces to recover the treads once I've installed the risers. More on that in the next installment.

Screwed and unscrewed

So, it looked like I should upgrade the poor old eMac in hopes of getting somewhat better performance and facilitate the conversion/preservation of my brother's genealogy files. Adding RAM is a simple process, illustrated in the User's Manual. The eMac has two slots, each of which can take up to a 512MB chip. I decided to add 512MB to the second slot, leaving the original 128MB in place. 640MB would be plenty for OS X 10.4, which is as high as you can go on an eMac.

I found the chip I needed on Other World Computing for a grand $14.95 (back in 2002, when this computer was made, a 512MB chip was $99, which probably explains why my brother didn't upgrade it back then), and while I was at it I ordered a new backup battery ($4.95) for the PRAM. Might as well replace that while I had the case open – it's in the same compartment. In a few days, I had my RAM and battery, and set out to install them. Should be, oh, a 15-minute job, right?

My favorite version of Murphy's Laws comes to mind here:

• Anything that can go wrong, will.
• First corollary: Nothing is as simple as it seems.
• Second corollary: Everything takes longer than it should.

I made it through the first two steps of the procedure before Murphy raised his ugly head, and then the main law and both corollaries came into play.

1. Turn your computer off... Disconnect all cables except the power cord from your computer. [That amounts to the keyboard and mouse. Think I can handle it.]
2. Place a soft, clean towel... on the desk... Slowly lift up and turn the computer so the screen is facing down on the cloth. [Not quite as easy, given the weight of the monster, but doable.]
3. Use a Phillips screwdriver to loosen the captive screw on the memory access panel.

Hah. Easy for them to say. Since it didn't specify what size Phillips screwdriver to use, I tried every size in my considerable arsenal. While a plain old #2 seemed to be the best fit overall, nothing would budge that damned screw, which promptly stripped its head. I tried every trick I could dredge up on Google for loosening stripped screws, from placing a rubber band over the slots to give the screwdriver something to grip, to covering the screwdriver with duct tape, to wedging a straight-head driver in the stripped slots. The screw has a very thin flat head that recesses into the cover, so it was impossible to grip it with Vise-Grips. And it's too small for any readily-available screw-removal tool to work, even if I had one, which I don't. "Captive" screw, indeed – I was almost convinced that it had been super-glued in place.

After about three hours or so of screwing around, or, more accurately, not screwing around, I decided the only remaining option was the brute-force method of cutting a straight slot across the screw head that would take a large straight-head screwdriver. That left only the problem of what to use to cut the slot. As far as I know, I don't possess a hacksaw, and even if I did, the recessed screwhead meant I couldn't get at it with a hacksaw. I do, however, have a Dremel rotary tool, which could simply cut into the plastic surrounding the screw. A quick check of the kit revealed that it did not contain any cutting wheels. A road trip was in order.

A short time later I was in the tool aisle of the closest orange big-box home-improvement store. I did peruse the drill-bit section for screw-removal tools, but as I feared, there was nothing intended for small electronics screws. So I moved on to the Dremel display, where I snapped up a package of 10 cutting wheels.

Back home, I installed a wheel on the Dremel and carefully started cutting a slot in the screwhead. It took longer than I expected, given how soft the metal appeared to be to strip the head so easily, but finally I got enough of a slot to give a screwdriver some purchase. (The screwhead was so thin, I was worried about cutting straight through the outer edges.) I inserted my large straight-head screwdriver, applied pressure – and it started to move! At last, I removed the screw (which was not, it seems, "captive" after all) and pulled off the user access panel.

In short order, I completed the remaining steps for installing the RAM, and replaced the PRAM backup battery. I briefly got hung up in step 7 of the latter procedure, which was "Locate the PMU reset button inside the computer." The drawing clearly shows the button below the RAM slots on the right side of the opening. There was no button in evidence in my eMac... until I noticed a small button in the corresponding location on the left side, which I duly pressed for one second as instructed. (At least, I assumed that was the PMU reset button, and so far the eMac hasn't shown any signs that the PMU isn't operating correctly.)

I reinstalled the access panel – tightening the screw barely enough to keep it in place – set the Mac upright, plugged it in, and booted it. It recognized the RAM, and I reset the system date/time once more.

The next step was to upgrade the OS. I put that off to another day, seeing as how I just killed an entire day completing a 15-minute RAM upgrade. But, as of now, I have an eMac with adequate RAM and OS X 10.4.11, with Word: Mac 2004 and iWork '09 installed. It remains to be seen what I have to do to get those documents converted, but at least the memory and the OS shouldn't bog down in the process.

Lost in translation

OK, so I now have my brother's electronic genealogy writings. But they're not much good if I can't read them. And this where I ran smack into the issue of technological obsolescence.

The email archives actually were easy. Both the older ones, in an ancient version of Eudora, and the more recent ones (i.e., circa 2002-2005), in early Apple Mail.app, were in a standard mailbox format that I could import directly into a more recent version of Apple mail. So they're readily readable.

The word-processing files, apparently a mix of AppleWorks 5 and Appleworks 6 formats, are another matter. When Apple declared "end of life" status for AppleWorks in 2007, they intended that the new iWork suite would replace AppleWorks, and iWork Pages was supposed to be able to open/convert AppleWorks Word docs. Furthermore, AW is supposed to be able to save files in Microsoft Word format. Finally, some versions of Microsoft Word are supposed to be able to open AppleWorks Word docs.

That's an awful lot of "supposed tos". The reality, I have found, is that there is no simple way to convert an AppleWorks Word doc into a modern word-processing file – at least, not with formatting retained. And, in the case of my brother's files, formatting can be pretty important; they tend to include embedded images; differing paragraph styles/font sizes/bold and italic styles to distinguish generations and types of information (formal and informal); footnotes; and even heavy use of a glyph font (WingDings) as a shorthand code for genealogical terms (born, died, married, divorced...). Poor translation of formatting can have results ranging from confusing to incomprehensible.

Let's start with iWork.Turns out the latest version (iWork 2013) won't have anything to do with AppleWorks. Fortunately, I have a trial version of iWork '09, which is the last version that can read AppleWorks. I copied one of the AW Word files (definitely AW6, per the tell-tale "[v6.0]" that AW inserts in the file name when it converts an earler file) to my MacBook Pro and attempted to open it in Pages. No dice. Whether I went through the File>Open menu or Ctrl-clicked on the file and told it to open in Pages, all Pages would do was give me the remarkably unhelpful message that "The file could not be opened."

OK, maybe it had something to do with the MacBook Pro running Mavericks. It wouldn't be the first time some process went totally wonky with an updated OS. I fired up my long-dormant MacBook – still comfortably running 10.6 Snow Leopard – installed the iWork '09 trial, and tried again. Same result. Can't install iWork on the old eMac; it requires at minimum 10.4.11 (Tiger), and probably more RAM than the old beast has.

How about Microsoft Word? Well, Word 2011 certainly doesn't recognize AW, but Word 2004 is supposed to, and that's still installed on the MacBook. Sure enough, it had an AppleWorks 6 file selection in the Open menu. Unfortunately, it seemed to believe that my file was not an AppleWorks file, and refused to open it.

Maybe I needed to go back even further with Word – I still have the install disc for Office: Mac 2001. It's only for PowerPC, so I couldn't install it on the MacBook, but I could install it on the eMac. Unfortunately, it turned out to have an import translater only for AppleWorks 5, not 6. I could scarcely believe I had a version of Word too old for my purpose! And I couldn't try Word 2004 directly on the eMac, because it needed 256MB of RAM.

(I should note that Word can in fact "Retrieve text from any document", including AppleWorks docs, but that strips all formatting and images, converts all special characters and fonts to plain text, and leaves a considerable amount of garbage at the beginning and end of the file. It's a method of last resort.)

Maybe I should try this from the AppleWorks end and export in .doc format. Since I didn't have Word on the eMac to open an exported document, I copied the AppleWorks app to the MacBook (AW won't run on anything higher than Snow Leopard) and opened my test document. The result? Pure gibberish, mostly consisting of the little boxes that signify unprintable characters. I suspect that AppleWorks, unlike most modern Mac applications, may require actual installation rather than just dropping it into the App folder. I was probably missing some crucial components that the installer package would have provided. I do not, unfortunately, have the eMac's install discs.

Exporting a .doc from AppleWorks on the eMac and transferring it to the MacBook, I opened it in Word 2004. Well, the text was there, but the formatting was dreadful, most of the images were missing, and the fonts were... erratic, to put it mildly. Some of the WingDings symbols appeared as they should; others were converted to symbols such as ≠; and still others to accented Roman letters. I even downloaded a demo version of an application that purported to convert AppleWorks documents to RTF, and opened the RTF in Word. No images, dreadful formatting, and more erratic translation of WingDings.

Some additional Googling suggests that the WingDings issues stems from differences between the Microsoft, Macintosh pre-OS X, and Unicode character maps; in brief, when the modern version of the font is used on a modern Mac, it doesn't necessarily display the same characters as the original. Which leads me to believe that, in order to correctly display (and possibly print) these documents, I need to do it using AppleWorks, on the old eMac. And I may even need to edit them in AppleWorks to change anything in the WingDings font to the plain text equivalent of my brother's "code", before converting them to Word docs.

The trouble is, the eMac's measly 128MB of RAM and elderly OS make it both sluggish and erratic; the system froze and had to be either Force Quit or hard-booted several times in the course of backing up the files, subsequent attempts at conversion, and installation of Word. So it seemed like my best bet might be to upgrade the RAM and the OS.

To be continued...

An antique computer and a digital legacy

Not my eMac, but it looks just like this.

When my younger brother passed away ten years ago, he bequeathed me all his genealogical research, including the contents of his 2002-vintage eMac. While the estate was settled long ago, the whole mess (I'm talking 30 years of research here, and "mess" is the operative word) had remained in the "custody" of my older brother, and had languished in a storage unit until two and a half years ago, when I finally had the time (i.e., had semi-retired) to make the 600-mile trip to New England to fetch it.

I filled the back of my (very spacious) Scion xB with boxes upon boxes of the most important-looking papers and reference books. I didn't come close to fitting everything in. The computer didn't make the cut. So a year later I made a second trip. (Neither of these trips were solely to pick up the research materials, but were just my last stop on vacation trips before returning home.) Once again I filled the back of the car with more papers and books. Once again, there was still plenty left over. Once again, the computer didn't make the cut.

Last year, I didn't have the time to make a trip north. But after sifting through much of the reams of paper I had hauled home, replete with marked-up drafts of various research reports, presentations, and possible journal articles, I had concluded that in most cases I did not have the final versions of these writings on paper. Ergo, they must be on the computer. Retrieving it became a priority.

This spring, when I decided to attend a genealogy conference in Providence, Rhode Island, I realized I would be close enough to my brother's house to make it feasible to stop by for the computer after the conference was over. The arrangements did not proceed without incident – he didn't know I was coming until I called him the night before (not one, but two, emails from me had inexplicably ended up in his spam folder), and Google Maps decided to to go AWOL from my phone just as I was leaving the hotel for my brother's – but eventually I found my way there. He had his visiting son lug it out to the car ("It's heavy," said my brother), where I wedged it in with a duffle bag full of dirty laundry, along with the keyboard, mouse, and power cord.

A couple of days later, I was home. When I unloaded the car, I discovered what a whopping understatement my brother had made about the weight of the eMac. I barely managed to get this behemoth into the garage and onto the folding table that I wasn't sure could take the weight for long. I've been using laptops and LCD monitors exclusively for so long I had completely forgotten just how much a CRT, even a fairly small one, weighs. (Later I looked up the specs online and found that it weighs an even 50 pounds.)

About a week later, I heaved it off the groaning table and staggered into the house with it, where I deposited it on the coffee table, which now has another dent in its top. I hooked up the keyboard and mouse, attached the power cord, plugged it in, held my breath, and pressed the power button. Look, this computer is thirteen years old, and hasn't been used for ten years (aside from my brother booting it up once some years ago just to see if it would). For all I knew, I might have just hauled home a 50-pound doorstop.

Lo and behold, it came on and booted up with no fuss whatsoever. OK, there was the minor fact that the computer firmly believed it was January 1, 1969, but what else can you expect with a thirteen-year-old onboard battery? Minor problem. I called up the System Profiler, and found that I was running Mac OS X 10.2, aka Jaguar. (For those of you who aren't Mac aficianados, the latest version of OS X is 10.10, aka Yosemite. Jaguar is, to put it mildly, ancient history.) More alarmingly, the beast possessed a grand total of 128 MB of RAM. Not what you would call expansive.

Still, it was running. And there, spread across the desktop (literally, every slot in the "grid" was occupied, with multiple files stacked in some locations), were a myriad of folders and loose files. (Evidently, my brother did not believe in the Documents folder concept.) With any luck at all, at least some of them would be the "final" versions of some of those research reports I was looking for. The first step would be to back up the files before the computer decided to, say, experience a catastrophic drive failure – which, given its geriatric status, was not at all far-fetched.

After resetting the system date and time, I started copying files onto a USB flash drive. The first problem I encountered was the glacial copying speed. In the time it took the bits to stroll through the USB 1.1 ports found on this very earliest of eMacs, I could almost have copied the files in longhand. On top of that, the OS apparently had allowed the creation of filenames containing characters like /, <, >, and & – and my brother had taken full advantage of this – but drew the line at copying said files. Every time it encountered one of these it would stop the copy operation dead. So I ended up going through directories and manually renaming all such files so they could be copied. In addition, the copied files all had their creation dates set to the current date instead of retaining their original date stamps. This seemed a bit ominous, but I figured I could always check the dates on the originals if I needed them.

Well, so far, so good. I finally had a copy of all my brother's files, including his email. But I still needed to be able to open, edit, and print these files. Did I mention that my brother's word processor of choice was AppleWorks, which was bundled with the system software (i.e., "free")? AppleWorks reached "end of life" status in 2007, and it won't run on anything higher than OS X 10.6 (Snow Leopard). My MacBook Pro is at 10.9 (Mavericks). I still had some work to do.

To be continued...