J. Random Hacker

LED Light Frames

Mon, 01 Jun 2026 12:00:00 -0500

I’ve been spending a bunch of time working on finishing our basement, a project that has covered all sorts of fun DIY and home-renovation topics. This one deserves its own writeup - I’m proud of what I ended up with.

The Setup

We started with a messy concrete box and got to the point where we had a non-messy room inside the box - new subfloor, framed-in walls, a nice room inside the room. Through a combination of “we have plenty of headroom” and “I really don’t want to drywall a ceiling if I don’t have to”, we decided to install a drop ceiling. That led to trying to solve for lighting - entire ceiling tile light fixtures would have been too much, and putting can lights into a bunch of tiles wasn’t the way we wanted to go. One option that looked interesting was frame lights that sat along the edges of the ceiling grid. We liked the look of this option, but had a few complaints:

Hello World

Tue, 19 May 2026 15:16:35 -0500

First question for the new blog: is “Hello World” as a first post just “cliche”, or “cliche but also required”? I’m going with the latter.

Hi!

Hello! I’m Justin Koehler and this is the beginning of my personal blog. This post will mostly be about the whats and whys, and then I’ll see where things go from there in terms of less-meta content.

I’ve never been particularly interested in putting my writing out on the internet, but I think I’d like to try and change that. I’d like to think I’m a fairly decent writer (for an engineer) - something I credit almost entirely to my very demanding high school English department - but the only way to actually maintain that skill is to exercise it. It’s also increasingly important, in my opinion, to have places to produce and share human-authored content on this internet of 2026 and beyond, so I’m going to do my part where I can.