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Lousy Sweatpants
I bought these sweatpants in October from LLBean. Usually I like their clothes, but $50 for a pair of sweatpants that didn’t last four months is ridiculous. It’s not like I’m a mechanic working in these. I’ve been using them to sit in front of a computer all day. I hope I get a refund. Otherwise, I’ll have to find a new place for clothes.
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Can't Believe It Worked
I’ve been very slowly trying to learn more electronics for a few years. Recently, one of my brothers let me know that he’s getting into electronic synth music and showed me a bunch of youtube videos of different projects. One of them looked to be something that I thought I could do. So I ordered a bunch of parts, some bench equipment and decided to give it a go. I’m writing this post because today I finished the oscillator and it actually works. I’m quite amazed that it works, but it’s giving me a huge amount of confidence to try to do more things with electronics.
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New Tools/New Project
My brother is getting into electronic sythensizer music (which is what I think it’s called). I mentioned that I was trying to get back to learning electronics (yet again) and he suggested I look at some of the music stuff that he’s been reading/watching. He wasn’t sure what to buy to get started. I wasn’t sure either, but this seemed like a relatively simple way for me to get back to learning electronics. He gave me a bunch of youtube videos to watch. One guy who seems really good has a bunch of videos for making different boards. So I decided to start with his Synth Voltage Controlled Oscillator.
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First Repair of the Year
My brother gave me a cable for his Wurlitzer keyboard that was broken.
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Hi to 2021!
I’ve decided that 2021 is the year I’m going to try to get organized. I’m getting pretty good about doing lots of projects around the house, but I spend too much time looking for things. And even the stuff that I know where it is, is basically just in a big pile of boxes. So my “system” works for me, but if anyone else uses or moves anything, I get frustrated by not being able to find things. If I could make it more obvious where things should go, I think it would work better for everyone. So 2020 is the “Year of Organization”. How exactly this will work remains to be seen. But even if I just gather like things together, I’ll be making progress. Hopefully this will also clean off some of the horizontal surfaces in my house so I’ll have more workspace.
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2020 Year in Review
2020 has been a year like no other in my life. And I know it’s popular right now to describe it as a dumpster fire, but it hasn’t been that for me. I got two new nephews this year and my first grand-nephew. So personally, it’s been a good year for me. And I’m one of the fortunate ones who has a job that I can continue to do without much risk and my family has stayed pretty safe. Most of the people I work with are working remotely, so when I go to the office to take care of some things, I’m one of the few people around. So I feel it’s pretty safe. I wear my mask a lot and generally try to avoid people as much as I can. I feel like people have an understanding of how the virus spreads, so we just need to follow the rules. I’m pretty happy that, for the most part, the people in my neighborhood are good about this. And I’m a rule-follower, especially when I understand the risks involved. So limiting physical contact with people hasn’t been that difficult for me.
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Downgrading MacPorts Packages
I use macports (not homebrew) as my package manager on my mac for some software that I need to use with Ruby on Rails. From time to time, I’ll get an error like this when I try to start a rails server.
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Earliest Xmas Ever
Another post today just because I’m still so pleased for having upgraded this site over the weekend.
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Finally Done
It basically took all day today to sync the files from my laptop to my new coldandheartless server. It took me a bit longer than it should have to create the new linode because I was stupid. I forgot that I had used letsencrypt to get certificates for the files. And I forgot to open the https port and then spent way too much time wondering why the websites didn’t work.
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It's Up!
I finally finished editing all of my old posts that had absolute paths to images in the urls. And I edited all the paths in my image galleries, which thankfully had relative paths. So it was pretty easy to fix.
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Welcome to Jekyll!
I’ve changed my website from basically a wordpress blog to a jekyll site. Wordpress has a lot of extras that I just really don’t need. The main one being a database. I’m pretty comfortable with html, css, etc. and I can learn markdown, so I think jekyll will be pretty easy.
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Sewing Desk
I’ve been trying to use a bunch of old scraps to make a new table for my sewing machine. I had a lot of great plans for how I was going to do this. And I can also tell you that I failed at most of my plans. But I do have an acceptable table that seems to work. Most of the things that failed were part of my plan to make it easily disassembleable for moving. So that’s ok. I did learn a lot from these failures, so it’s not a big deal. Pictures below. I like it though I haven’t yet done any sewing on it. But it’s a definitely improvement over what I had been using.
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No Idea What I'm Doing
I bought an old house, which I love, but which needs a ton of work. And I tend to put things off until they’re really a problem. A few months ago, it rained a lot and there was a lot of water in my basement. After taking a closer look, I’m pretty sure that the problem is due to a leak in my gutter that lets water drip down the side of the house. And this has been happening so long that it has pretty much worn away a lot of the mortar between the bricks. So, my plan, fix the gutter and then repoint the bricks. (*sarcasm)Easy peasy.(*sarcasm)
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Nice Windows 10 Trick
To find the info about a motherboard in a windows computer, open a terminal and run this:
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Still Not Square Part II
I made another box and it’s still not square. Again out of boards I found in my basement. I tried to be a little more artistic with this one. Not perfect, but I’m happy with how it came out. My intent was to have a box to put my off-season clothing in. I’m not planning on going into the box very often. But I found an old hinge in my basement, so I used that for the top.
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Still Not Square
In addition to not being able to make a square quilt, I also can’t really make a square box in woodworking. However, that doesn’t stop my from trying. I had some cedar boards and some old oak floor boards, so I decided to make a box. I wanted to have a box to store out-of-season clothes in, since I’m currently using a garbage bag in my room. I thought it would be good practice to try to make a nice box. Sadly, I didn’t succeed in making it square. Nor is it level. I’ve ordered some casters for it, so I should be able to use them to make it level. As for the lack of squareness, it’s not a big deal, except for the fact that it bugs me that I can’t make a square box.
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Newest Quilt
Just finished my last quilt. I made a very short video of me making it. I would have made it longer, but my laptop is out of disk space and it was too much trouble to go through and delete a bunch of stuff. I also wanted to keep it under five minutes because I don’t know that quilting is all that interesting to watch. The quilt wasn’t done in time for my niece’s shower, but it was finished before the baby arrived.
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Squirrelmail Certificate Issues
We had a certificate update at work that screwed up my ldap system. I fixed that by creating becoming my own CA and creating some self-signed certificates. This fixed everything except squirrelmail, which was still referencing the old certificate which had expired.
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Congrats Em!
My niece graduated from IU, but didn’t have a ceremony. So her Mom solicited videos from a bunch of people and we put them together to make a video for her.
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RHEL7 Server and mod_ldap Missing
I have an RHEL7 server that uses mod_ldap. When I ran updates yesterday, I got this error:
<br /> ...snip...<br /> --> Finished Dependency Resolution<br /> Error: Package: mod_ldap-2.4.6-90.el7.x86_64 (@rhel-7-server-optional-rpms)<br /> Requires: httpd = 2.4.6-90.el7<br /> Removing: httpd-2.4.6-90.el7.x86_64 (@rhel-7-server-rpms)<br /> httpd = 2.4.6-90.el7<br /> Updated By: httpd-2.4.6-93.el7.x86_64 (rhel-7-server-rpms)<br /> httpd = 2.4.6-93.el7<br /> ...snip...<br /> -
Making a Windows 10 Bootable USB Drive
I’m trying to update some computers to Windows 10. I have an iso file with windows 10 on it. I could write it to a dvd, but most of the computers I’m updating no longer have dvd players. I’d like to write it to a usb drive and boot from that. Over the past few days, I’ve found that this is a problem with windows 10 because there is one file, sources/install.wim that’s over 4gb. My systems will only boot from a fat or fat32 partitioned drive. On those drives, 4gb is the maximum file size. I also normally work on a mac, so I was trying to find a way to make these bootable usb drives on my mac. I was not successful. The key to making this work is to use a windows program called split-windowsImage. Here’s what I did, though making the NTFS filesystem on my usb drive was not necessary.
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2020 Projects #1 & #2
I’ve written more about these in my journals, but I thought I’d post a picture of my first two projects for the year. I made a new house number for my Mom and I made a calendar for my sister. I actually added a calendar hanger to this, but forgot to take a picture of it before I gave it to my sister.
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On to 2020!
I worked yesterday and have a somewhat pressing deadline for a server and website I need to have up soon, so I didn’t think much about it being the last day of the year. We’re also waiting for the arrival of my brother’s baby which could be any time now, so my thoughts were elsewhere. And one of the things I wanted to do last year was do more with physical objects. I’m going to call that an unquestioned success. And the idea of continuing to do these blog posts is not as appealing anymore. I may switch over to doing them in my journals which I’ve been using a lot more. For the first time, ever, I think, I even ordered a planner. It should arrive in a few days and I’m going to try it to even more organize by thoughts and days.
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Network Cards and Device Names
I know there’s a page on the Red Hat website that explains the new network device names and how they’re created. But, for me, a concrete example that I worked with is always much better. I set up a new server yesterday and had some issues with a fiber network card, so I thought I’d write up what I learned.
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First Mitered Corner Attempt
Since my corners are not so good, I’ve decided that I need to make around 50 napkins with mitered corners for practice. I found a YouTube Video on Sewing Mitered Corners to try to follow. The pictures below are from my first attempt. It’s lousy. Though I thought I was very careful to iron and measure things. I also took my time and sewed as instructed, but when I tried to lay the seam flat, the mitered corners just didn’t line up properly. So perhaps I need to find a book or something with more detailed instructions. Or I just need to practice and come up with my own system. Anyway, this is why I’m practicing. The other problem I had was that I must have mismeasured something. My intent was to make a 16″ square napkin. I wanted the edge to be 1/2″. And according to the video, I also need an extra 1/2″ folded under first. So I think that means I need an extra 1″ all around. I cut the square at 18″. But when I measured the final napkin, it’s more like 15″ square. So I guess I didn’t measure as perfectly as I thought. Oh well.