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New Big Project
For quite a long time, I have wanted to write a book and try to sell it. For a multitude of reasons, I haven’t. As of yesterday, no more! I signed up for 30×500 to get started. I’m hoping to find out ways to determine if my idea will actually help people, thus making it worth doing. Am I sure about this? Absolutely not. Who do I think I am to write a book? I’m not an expert at anything. It will probably be the worst book ever and will sell zero copies. However, I’ve decided that this is something I want to try. I’ve decided that being afraid of failure is worse than failure itself. I want to give it a try. And the 30×500 class is a way to help me hedge my bets. It cost me $1900 and my goal is to make that back within the next three years. (Official date: March 8, 2020) Doable? I have no idea. But I’m going to put in the work on it. I’ve deleted everyone I follow on Twitter, except people that I know personally. So I shouldn’t be wasting any time there. I’ve also deleted all the bookmarks for blogs I like to read and youtube videos I like to watch. Again to not waste time. Lastly, I’ve created a new account on my laptop to use for studying and writing. So all of the programs and things that I have on my laptop aren’t available to this second account and thus I can’t have them open while I’m working. I’ve created a website for it. http://www.pickabout.com Let’s get started!
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Early Year Projects
For the start of the year, I’ve been working on some little projects that I’ve enjoyed. I guess one of the projects was big. I finished three bookshelves for my cousins for xmas.
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Compiling GEANT4
This one is strictly work-related.
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January 2017 Checkin
Based on last year, I know I won’t keep up with checking in each month. However, January is usually pretty easy. Let’s go straight to the chart.
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Awk notes
I love awk and use it a lot. Yesterday, I used it for something with multiline records. Awk on single lines is quick and easy to use, but I always have to look up what to do with multiline records. And I still don’t exactly understand everything about multiline records, but here’s what worked for me.
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First Book Down
I started it last year, but finished it in 2017. So “Thank You for Being Late” by Thomas Friedman is the first book I read this year. It’s all about how so many aspects of life are speeding up and how that’s affecting people in different ways. I’m not sure that I agree with many of his ideas, but it was an interesting read. I have to say my favorite part of the book was when he described the town in Minnesota that he grew up in. I’m sure everyone didn’t get the same sense of it that he did. But it was nice to hear about a place where different people worked together and weren’t all just looking out for themselves. I like to think that most of the country is still like that, but it’s getting harder and harder to do so. If nothing else, this book got me to go to a neighborhood advisory meeting and join the group. I’m happy about that.
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Reset a Mailman List Admin Password
I shouldn’t have to do this again. If I don’t have the admin password for a mailman mailing list, I can reset it with:
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Not a great start
So I thought I was doing a great job avoiding sugar last week and it turns out I was mistaken. I think it started with my Costco run where I thought I was buying food without sugar. I swear that I read all the labels and didn’t see sugar on what I bought. But I should take my reading glasses with me when I shop because two of my purchases have sugar. I ended up eating a chicken pot pie because I already had it in the oven when I reread the label. I wasn’t going to throw perfectly good food away. The second one was a pot roast and thanks to the chicken pot pie incident, I reread the label before I even turned the oven on. That one sort of pissed me off because I don’t think there’s any need for sugar in it. And because I love pot roast, grrr.
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Hello 2017!
Happy New Year!
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2016 Year in Review
2016 was a year of extremes for me. It didn’t start off great with the passing of my Aunt Lu, who was one of my favorite people. However, it also included my brother’s wedding which was the nicest wedding I’ve ever attended. Like most years it had good and bad parts.
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Things I’ve Learned About Myself This Year
Since I usually wrap my year up on the 31st and make my plans for the coming year on the 1st, I’ve been thinking about this past year. Know Thyself is a common saying, so I think I should take a somewhat critical look at me. So what have I discovered about myself this year?
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Adding a Windows Computer to an Openldap-Samba Primary Domain Controller
For a number of years, I’ve used a linux computer running openldap and samba as the primary domain controller for my windows computers. This works great in that we can have a single sign-on for all of our windows and linux computers and use the same account for logins to websites. I’ve had an old piece of paper in my office with the changes that are needed on Windows to be able to get it to join this pdc. Thought I’d finally put them online in case something ever happens to my paper. (#2 below is really the only required step, but I always do all of them.)
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Mariadb (Mysql) Setup
I wrote these instructions years ago, but couldn’t find them the other day. So I’m updating a few things and reposting here.
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Filtering with procmailrc
I have an email account that I forward to a gmail account so that I can use google’s spam filtering. One thing that google does is limit the size of mail messages to 25mb. If someone sends me a mail message with an attachment greater than 25mb, google will bounce it back to my server, which will then forward it to google, who will then bounce it back to me… you get the picture. I had this happen today and while nothing crashed, it did slow my server to a crawl. So I thought that I’d put a rule in my .procmailrc file before the forward to the gmail account that moves the large file to a local mailbox. This is easy to do, I’d just add a section like this:
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Random Thoughts
It’s an early Sunday morning and I’m relaxing with a cup of coffee when I thought I’d post some random thoughts I’ve been having.
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Delete a command from the history
If I run a command that, maybe shows a password in it, I’d like to delete that command from my command history. Say I this shows when I run history:
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Sewing Machines
I took the sewing machine that was given to me in to get tuned up. The repairman called and said it needed a lot of work and that it would cost around $250-$300. For an old sewing machine that I didn’t like all that much, it was too much money. So I let them keep it for whatever parts they could salvage from it. I don’t sew a lot, but it is a tool that I’d like to have. So I’ve been researching sewing machines.
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Yearly Oatmeal Update
As the weather gets cooler, I change to eating oatmeal for breakfast. I didn’t grow up eating oatmeal, so I’ve been trying to teach myself how to cook it. I like a very creamy oatmeal, often how I get at a restaurant. However, when I made it at home, my oatmeal wasn’t nearly as good. Now, after a few years of making it, I feel like I have the perfect recipe for me.
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Temp Files in RHEL7
I had an RHEL7 system that would not start mariadb server on boot. I could reinstall the server rpm and then it would work fine, but it would not start after a reboot. So I finally had some time to figure out what’s going on.
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Birthday Project Result
I took my book out of the press this morning. It’s not perfect, but it’s not at all bad for my first attempt.
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Birthday Project Part 2
My post yesterday wasn’t accurate. I hadn’t yet finished my text block. I still had to put the cover pages on it and the reinforcing paper. Before that though, I had to glue the binding. I made a book press out of a couple of pieces of wood and some clamps.
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Birthday Project
I’m on my annual birthday vacation. Just took three days this year instead of the whole week. And instead of taking a class somewhere, I decided to try to teach myself how to bind a book. Technically, I should say I’m learning how to do this from YouTube videos. First up, I folded and cut a bunch of paper. Then I had to sew them into a text block. I followed the video below:
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Certificate Notes
Every so often I have to do something with certificates. It’s infrequently enough that I always have to re-lookup all the commands because I don’t remember the exact syntax. Also, for a long time, I simply used self-signed certificates because they did the job for me. However, now that there are very inexpensive certificates, I sometimes use them. Anyway, here are my notes:
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The credentials are correct…
I had a problem where one user could not login to our windows server 2012 computer. The error message that I got was:
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El Capitan NFS Mount
First create the directory /Volumes/sharedirectory