End the War on Freedom

We bought a brand new washer & dryer shortly before my son was born, over sixteen years ago. Sears Kenmore brand. They both served us well until recently, when the dryer motor died, and the washer bin stopped turning around. I decided it wasn't worth the money to replace the dryer motor, and didn't feel competent to work on the washer myself, so rather than pay Sears $100 for a repair guy to come out and possibly tell us the washer cost nearly as much as a new one to repair, we bought new ones.

I saw a new style of washing machine in Sears a few years back. Top loading, but with no agitator inside, just a little bump in the middle, and water jet holes. Well, we got one of those. Whirlpool brand name, though apparently Whirlpool makes Kenmore stuff. They were delivered today, after a two week wait from our purchase. And they're nice. Washed a long week's worth of clothes today. Quite satisfied.

I can't afford to buy major appliances very often, so it's nice when I can. Wish I could afford a new refrigerator.

Click the "read more" link for pictures.

I bought a Samsung S730 digital camera at Target the other day. Was there looking for a birthday gift for my daughter to give to a friend of hers, and it jumped out and grabbed me. $100. There were hundred dollar cameras from HP, Nikon, and Kodak there, but they were out of stock, and this one has more pixels. Haven't played with it enough to know how good its lens is, but it takes movies, audio, and still photos. Comes with very little memory, but $25 got me a gigabyte SD card, which holds over 700 full-resolution (7.2 megapixel) images. Nice to have a better camera than the one in my iPhone.

Self-portrait, no flash

Denali camera case

Coke machine at laundromat

Well, I finally paid the $15 that site5.com charges to install an SSL certificate, so you can now get get encrypted access to this site.

https://billstclair.com/blog/

You will likely get a warning that the Certificate Authority (CA), CAcert.org, is unknown to your browser. That's the drawback of using a free CA. There will likely be an option to add their certificate. Do it if you want to get rid of the warning (and warnings for similar certificates from other web sites).

If you say www.billstclair.com, you'll get a warning, every time you visit here after relaunching your browser, that the domain doesn't match the certificate. So don't do that unless you like the warning.

When I tried to run Skype today on my Macintosh, nothing happenned. Looking in the Console log, I found this cryptic message:

Check 1 failed. Can't run Skype

Only found one Google hit, and it wasn't helpful. Tried renaming Google preferences out of the way (in Mac OS X, those are the "~/Library/Preferences/com.skype.skype.plist" file and the "~/Library/Application Support/Skype" directory). Same thing. Reinstalled Skype by dragging from the distribution DMG to my Applications folder and clicking "Yes" on the overwrite query dialog. Back in business. Don't know why it happenned, but that fixed it.

billstclair.com/calc.html is a Reverse Polish calculator for the iPhone. I found the code for this with a Google search, and reformatted it for the small screen. Looks funny in a regular browser, but is just the right size on my iPhone. Scroll down for trig functions, the rest of the machine state, and a calculation record.

I was headed outside to give the dogs a walk at about 4pm this afternoon. Got their radio fence collars off and their leashes on, went to open the door, and, it wouldn't open. No amount of turning or pulling would make it budge. Screwdriver time. Took off the inner door handle, pushed the outer door handle out. Still wouldn't budge. Half an hour later, I'd managed to break apart the mechanism and convince the bolt to move, so I could open the door. I guess 25 years is a long time for what was likely a used part when the house was built. Off to Home Depot for a brand new Schlage locking handle set. Just $22. But it needed a little deeper hole than the old set, and I couldn't find my little hand saw, so it was chisel time. Finally got it to fit, and now we can lock our front door. Yay!

Well, the girls in my family did it. They bought a second cockatiel to keep Sunshine company. So far, the new bird has been absolutely silent. She won't be out of her cage for a little while, so that's where I took this photo. My daughter hasn't named her yet (nor are we sure that's she's not a he).

I've been very happy with NearlyFreeSpeech.net (NFS). They've been serving billstclair.com for quite a few years now. But my bandwidth has risen to a gigabyte a day, which means a dollar a day for NFS' hosting. That's $30/month. I was clued into a new hosting service by one of the guys on the Linkinus IRC channel (Linkinus is a nice Mac OS X IRC client). I can get more bandwidth for $10/month there than I'm getting for $30/month at NFS. They don't have the free speech philosophy of NFS, and I don't know yet how their reliability and speed will compare, but so far they look faster, and money is tight. I can go back pretty easily, should that become necessary.

Anyway. I hope you enjoy my new home. Same domain, same politics, different web service provider: Site5.com.

Liberty!

Found outside my house this morning:

I got a new hat at Agway yesterday. Made in China for Carhartt. I've been wearing a knit pull-over hat in the winter time for as long as I remember. Switched to a baseball cap when I bought my hoodless rain coat. Now I wanted a brimmed hat with some winter warmth.

I thought I'd never put the new hat's flaps down over my ears, but today the thermometer said 7 degrees, so I did.

Do I look like a hick, or what?

I'm spending a lot of my blogging time at my iMac Pr0n Blog these days. Don't know how long it will last, but at least until configuration of my new machine slows down.

Drupal, the blogging engine I use for this site, is very nice, but I must admit that I like the simplicity of BlogMax, which I'm using again at the iMac Pr0n Blog.

I awoke on Monday morning around 4am for my morning pee. Felt sorta funny. Felt even more funny when the "pee" came out of my nether regions. Yes, boys and girls. Your intrepid reporter had food poisoning, or a stomach flu, but by whatever name you call it, my bowels were liquid, I had one four-part purge by mouth, and I couldn't stay vertical for more than a few minutes until yesterday afternoon. Subsisted on water and Poweraide.

Feeling well enough to sit at the computer this morning, but still a little fuzzy, and still not hungry. Don't know yet how long I'll manage to stay vertical.

Got a call yesterday afternoon about bringing food to the upcoming winter fair at my daughter's school. Was told that I was one of fourteen so affected. Think it was something we ate.

I got my new iMac. Unpackaging pr0n at imacpr0n.com.

Saw this on my drive to my sister's house today.

iMacPr0n.com is my new web site for collecting pictures of my new iMac (that's eye, em, ay, see, pee, are, zero, en). Hopefully, it will eventually contain pictures of other people's iMacs, too. I don't actually have my new iMac yet, but I ordered it today, and expect to receive it next week or the week after. Right now, the site contains some text, a screen shot of my invoice, and pictures of the iLugger carrying case I got for the iMac. I'll make another post here after I post the iMac photos.

MacWindows.com has a list of emulators for running Windoze and Linux on OSX and running OSX on Windoze. Last night, I bought iEmulator, an OSX repackaging of Fabrice Bellard's Qemu, which I've gotten to know and love in Windows and Puppy Linux. It ran Puppy Linux 2.12 beta without a hitch on my son's MacBook, though it was no speed daemon. They probably didn't convert kqemu, which makes a big speed difference. I'll probably eventually buy Parallels Desktop. I'll certainly download it and get a free 15-day evaluation key, as soon as I get my new iMac, which will be soon.

Patrick J. Volkerding at Slackware.com - I spent a few hours this evening upgrading my Slackware machine from version 10.2 to 11.0, after waiting most of the day for the 1.2 gig download of the two installer CDs. There were MD5 checksum errors, but only in a couple of the included installer files, so I copied them all from the CD image to my hard drive, and replaced the two bad ones from the Slackware FTP site. The UPGRADE.TXT directions worked like a charm, and my new version came up quickly. There was only one glitch. My Grub "menu.lst" file, which worked fine for 10.2, caused 11.0 to complain about the root volume being mounted read-write. Still booted, but only after pausing to let me read that warning. Turns out I had to add "ro" to the end of the "kernel" line:

fbomb at drupal.org - this blog was showing "You are not authorized..." messages today, on every page. I discovered the cause. I must have twice posted a delete request for a disapproving a spam user, and this had the side-effect of deleting user 0, the anonymous user, from my database. This caused the "not authorized" message and also a duplicate key database error on attempting to log in. ejk posted the fix:

We knew that the right front axle on my wife's car needed replacing. It was scheduled for repair on Thursday. What we didn't know is that it was so near failing and that it would fail so spectacularly. Fortunately, it happened 100 yards from our house and she was driving very slowly. Looks like big bucks to me. Sigh... We'll find out tomorrow.

I've installed Drupal's Captcha module (completely automated public Turing test to tell computers and humans apart). This forces you to transcribe some random text, designed to be hard for computer programs to grok, to post an anonymous comment or to register. If you register, you will be able to post comments without the Captcha nonsense.

This should stop automated comment spam. It won't, however, stop rooms full of low-paid workers posting spam. We'll discover soon which is my problem.

I hate Captcha strings, since I often have a hard time decoding them. These don't appear to be too bad. Please let me know how they work for you, either by comments to this post, or via email to bill@billstclair.com (or to billstclair@gmail.com if my web hosting mail forwarder doesn't like your email server).

The captcha module is at http://drupal.org/project/captcha

The spam comments are getting out of hand. My spam filter can't distinguish them from the real comments anymore, so it's marking all comments as spam. I can still distinguish them, though, most of the time, so don't stop commenting just because you don't see your comment until I approve it.

I've closed comments on the Hitler thread. This was beginning to look like "All Hitler, all the time." Not a pleasant prospect from my perspective. So all you Hitler lovers and Hitler lover haters. Chill.