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Latest Quilt
I just finished a baby quilt for my brother and brother-in-law. John’s friend Richard picked out the great material. I’m fairly certain I would have gone with more plain, solid colors. So it was great that he picked such great colorful ones.
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Ruby Gem Error
I’ve been doing a bit more work with Sinatra and I got the following error. I’m just documenting how I fixed it.
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A Toy for My Nephew
My nephew really likes light switches, so I made him this toy out of junk that I found in my house. He does know the word “hot”, so I think he’ll understand not to touch the bulbs. If he doesn’t, I may have to cover them with something or use a different bulb. He’s a smart kid, so I’m not too worried about it.
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My First Sinatra Project
I have a wufoo form that I’m using and I want to automatically see the results on a webpage. One of the hangups of this process is that I can’t put any script on the webserver. But what I can do is embed an iframe. So I could download the information that I wanted from my form to another server and then display that page in the iframe. My question was what to run on my second server, which I’m going to call my results server. All it really needed to do was get the results and then show them. So using a ruby on rails app for this seemed to be overkill. After reading about it, sinatra seemed to be the perfect fit. I could still use ruby and just show the results I wanted. This seemed to be the perfect project to test out sinatra.
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Quick Baby Quilt
After the success of my Dr. Seuss quilt, I was in the mood to make another quilt. So I used only leftovers from my previous quilts to make a baby quilt for a cousin who is having a baby. My original idea was to make it in 30 days, but I think I took longer than that. I’d have to check my journal to find out exactly when I started it, but I finished it on July 31st. And the baby is due the first week of August, so I’m happy with that. I’m not happy that I haven’t yet mailed it to them, but I’ll try to do that soon.
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Connecting to a Windows Remote Desktop from Linux
Our linux systems have xfreerdp installed. We can use that to connect to a windows desktop from linux. The command to use is:
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My Latest Big Project
My cousin retired and she really likes Dr. Seuss. I came up with an idea for a gift and then I came up with the idea of me making a movie of me making the gift. And then it sort of evolved. This is the final gift.
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cmake
I haven’t been doing much with writing/compiling c programs of late. So I didn’t really notice the move from using make to using cmake for the build environment. We’ve been having some issues at work with this, so I’ve spent a few days trying to learn it. I’m not at expert at this at all, but I have picked up a few things. So I want to document them here.
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Getting RPM names only
I can’t remember where I found this on google, but it’s something I’ll use a lot. If I want to just get the names of rpms installed on a machine, use this:
<br /> rpm -qa --qf " %{name}\n"|sort|uniq > list.rpms<br /> -
Ideas
It’s weird. I’ve just spent the past two hours making myself a calendar. I was wondering how to design it and it just popped into my head that I have pictures from the early 2000s to now. Why don’t I use some of my own pictures on my calendar? And then find some quotes I like and put them over the picture. It’s a really simple idea, but I love it. I’m going to get a calendar that has motivational or inspirational quotes and I can look at pictures of things I’ve done which brings back those memories. Totally going to make me happy.
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Successful Gifts
Using my fancy new sewing machine, I made these bags for my cousins for Xmas.
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Happy 2019!
Got a decent amount of sleep last night, so I’m starting the year off right. Just went for a short walk to the mailbox to pay some bills and now I want to think about things for the coming year…and beyond.
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2018 Year in Review
Another year has gone by. It was a fine year. I have no complaints. Took Jack and Annie to Europe and I turned 50. I think those were the highlights. This is also the year that I’ve put the ‘pay off the mortgage’ idea into overdrive. For the past few months, I’ve basically been paying two payments each month to get it paid off. If I make a big payment tomorrow, I think I have around 18 months to go. This makes me very happy. There’s really no reason that I need to pay this off so quickly, but I like the idea of being completely out of debt. Financially-speaking, the year has been good. I’ve saved 37% of my take-home pay, which is good. Not great, but good enough. I’d like to say that I’m about 15 pounds lighter than I was at the start of the year, but I’m exactly 1/2 pound lighter, which is basically a wash. I had been doing good up until my birthday, at which point I proceeded to regain all the weight I had lost throughout the year. Oh well, I’ll try again. Let’s take a look at my goals for the year and see how I did.
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Project Time
I’m getting back into doing DIY projects at home, which makes me very happy. In general for the past few months, I’ve been thinking way too much about work and not doing things that make me happy. I’m shifting things back into proportion that will make me happier. The other day I finally bought myself a new sewing machine. It will get delivered soon, which makes me happy. And I’m going to use it for a big new project, which should be fun. I’ve also made a few stools for my brother’s pub, which was fun. I still wouldn’t call myself a good woodworker, but I’m improving which is all I can ask for. Still haven’t done much welding though and I would like to get into that. But today I spent a good chunk of money on supplies for my new hush-hush project that’s going to be a gift for someone. I’m looking forward to working on that for the next few months.
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Living Life
I just realized that this website has been down. I’m not sure how long that’s been true. Probably since I had to reboot after the last round of updates I installed. Is it a big deal to me? Nope.
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Getting Started with the Google API for Reading Public Calendars
I have a few public calendars at work that we use to show events taking place in various departments. I am creating a digital sign for one of our buildings and I’d like to be able to grab the events for the current day and display them on the digital sign. I’m most familiar with ruby right now, so I’m writing a ruby script to do this.
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Root Logins with Key Required
I love the fact that I still have so much to learn. I was thinking that I should set things up so that root can ssh in to a computer but only if they have keys set up. One very quick google search and I had my answer.
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Splitting a PDF File
I had a pdf file that was too large to email, but I needed to email. So I quickly broke it up into two smaller files. I used this command:
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Cost Per Mile
I have some time to kill before podcast recording tonight. I was balancing my checkbook and took a quick look at the report it generated for last year. I noticed that all my auto expenses for last year were $2532.10. It breaks down like this:
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Low-Carb it is
About a week ago, I went to the library to return some books. Since I didn’t have any other books on hold to pick up, I head over to my usual aisle (the last one with books about learning different skills) to see if I could find anything to read. Luckily for me, pretty close to the books on making stuff are books on gardening and cooking. I wasn’t looking for anything in particular, but totally based on their covers, I grabbed the book “Unbowed” about an environmentalist in Africa (which I haven’t started yet) and “Why We Get Fat”. After I read the second one, I thought because you eat more calories than you burn. How could there be an entire book about that. I was going to put it back, but I didn’t see a more interesting gardening or woodworking book, so I kept it.
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Let’s Get It Started
The weather has gotten unseasonably warm and melted all the snow. It’s supposed to get cold again, but I couldn’t pass up the opportunity to bike to work a couple of days this week. The second day was in the rain, so my backpack, jacket and pants all had a huge muddy streak up the back. Fortunately, that came on the ride home, so it was good.
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Starting Off Right
When it was below 0F last week, I saw some people out biking and admired them. I thought if it got above 15-20F, that I would ride too. So this morning, I had a nice, slow ride to work to start the year off right. It’s around 27F, so a little chilly, but pretty nice compared to last week. I felt good, though, a second thin pair of socks would have been helpful. But that’s ok. I want to start riding to work more and this is part of the process.
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2018 Garden Planning
Now that it’s 2018, it’s time to start preparing for my 2018 garden. The last two years, I’ve had plenty of success with tomatoes and peppers. Last year, I also got a ton of beans and some great flowers that took no work. I also got some spinach and lettuce. And I got a single pumpkin, watermelon, cucumber and two zucchini. That has pretty much hooked me on gardening. Aside from the food, which is fun. I found it incredibly relaxing to come home after work and pick tomatoes or flowers in the garden. So I want to keep it up.
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Installing Rails 2.5.0 on Mac OS High Sierra
Since I’ve just switched to my new laptop running High Sierra, I thought it would be good to update my rails software. The latest version is 2.5.0. I downloaded it and compiled it and got an error message when I tried to install rails.
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Happy 2018!
Happy New Year! It’s 2018! This is the year that I turn 50. I feel like I should mark the occasion somehow. I have a pretty good idea of what I want to do the week of my birthday, but I’m not sure about the rest of the year.