Posts on A Day In The Woods

Sauna Framing

Sat, 25 Jul 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Next on the Sauna Build series is framing! The plans for this build are based on these 8x12 Shed Plans I got from a seller on Etsy. I ended up making some minor modifications, like moving one window to another wall, and using a pre-hung exterior door, but all in all these plans got me 85% of the way to what I needed and were a great foundation to apply modifications to.

Sauna Foundation

Fri, 24 Jul 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Finally a post for the sauna build! At the time of writing this, I’m working on putting up the tongue and groove board for the interior of the hot room, but I’m going to make these posts in rough chronological order, so we’re going to start with the foundation.

First, a high-level overview of the sauna. It’s a detached structure from the house with 8’x12’ exterior dimensions. There will be an 8’x6’ hot room where the actual sauna is, and the other half is an 8’x6’ changing / cool down room, so you don’t have to go out into the snow in between rounds in the sauna. The important part here is the exterior dimensions for the foundation.

Popup AC Conversion

Sun, 28 Jun 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Last year we got a popup camper. It’s been great for car camping with a kid, it’s easy to tow, and still feels like you’re camping because it’s still tent adjacent.

For some reason I don’t have any pics of the popup itself from our last few trips, but here it is in front of the house fully set up.

As far as RVs go it has a pretty simple electrical setup basically it’s

Judo Testing Prep Website

Tue, 16 Jun 2026 00:00:00 +0000

I’ve got a couple of friends who are getting ready to test for their Yodan rank in Judo. This is a fourth degree black belt and a pretty big deal IMO. For each higher rank you test for you can be asked about any of the prior content for each rank, so by the time you get you Yodan it can be quite a lot of techniques.

When testing for my Shodan (first degree black belt) I had made a pretty scrappy website to help me with test prep. I decided to iterate on that and make improvements to support up to Yodan.

Camera Upgrades and DeGoogling Or: How I Learned to stop worrying and love Reolink

Mon, 15 Jun 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Our gen 1 Google Nest video doorbell was starting to have issues after years of being outside subject to the weather. It had a good run but when looking for a replacement I was more conscientious about where the footage around my home was being stored and what companies had access to it. Historically I’ve been very pro Google, but with my recent homelab build, and companies updating their TOS to allow them to train models on your personal data I wanted to see if I could keep this data as local as possible.

Chuck Box Prototype

Sun, 14 Sep 2025 00:00:00 +0000

For car camping I’ve had several variations on how to organize and store the camp kitchen. For the past several years I’ve been using a not so well constructed version of the REI Camp Kitchen Chuck Box.

My primary complaint was that it was far too heavy. The 1/2 in plywood give it considerable weight empty, and when fully loaded with all the gear is was unwieldy to the point where moving it more than 10 or 20 feet from the car was arduous. Additionally I hadn’t taken the time to define an organization system so in the end it was a glorified box that I could open from the side on a table.

Problem Solving

Mon, 03 Nov 2014 00:00:00 +0000

One of my friends approached me with an algorithm problem the other day. Here’s the short version of it.

Given an undirected weighted graph where E=V find the minimum spaning tree in O(V) time.
E = Number of edges.
V = Number of vertices.

Now my friend had tried a few different things relating to finding an MST. Prim’s and Kruskal’s algorithms were brought up, but both couldn’t be modified such that they would solve the problem in O(V) time.

Blog init

Sun, 26 Oct 2014 00:00:00 +0000

$ blog init

As it seems that the focus of most first blog posts are potential topics, I suppose that I’ll cover what I’ll be writing about.

Topics may include

Programming
Backpacking
Sysops
Hardware
Hackathons
Rock climbing
And much much more!

So check back in, I might end up writing something interesting.