The coldest winter I ever spent
Do you want a power rack or other home gym equipment? (and COVID making it both nessesary and hard to get?) A good friend and professional fabricator will be building and selling a set of about 10 power racks and other equipment in the Bay Area. He’s aiming for it to be competitively priced and (of course) local pickup/delivery.
Message me if interested!
If you need to download a video on Youtube or Vimeo or wherever, this process will often do it for you, fer free and without downloading some likely-spammy-scammy software.
The key is: most video online is HTML5. VLC can play any HTML5 video… and get you the link to download it. (via)
An important lesson about people and business:
From 2003 to 2005 I ran my own business fixing computers and such. I called it The Computer Guy,
I had just finished fixing a client’s broken email program (Outlook) and was packing up. I watched as he shut off his Windows laptop by simply holding down the power button until the computer died. My stomach lurched at the sight of it! I grit my teeth, and let out a breath to calm myself. I gently asked him if that was always how he turned off his computer. “Yes, it’s easier than finding that other way. I’ve never had any trouble.” I thought about the reason I was hired, to fix his mysteriously broken email program and told him there was a good chance it broke because of his bullet-to-the-head shutdown style. Then I started showing him how to shut down safely. He didn’t want to hear it, repeating how his current method was working just find. I redoubled my calm and told him, “Shutting down your computer that way is just fine ninety-nine times out of a hundred. That last time will break things but good. You’ve got my number.” Part of me wanted to shake him and make him do it right, instead I gave him a friendly smile, my business card, and left.
100 days later, like exactly 100 days later, I got a call! The computer wouldn’t boot. After I fixed everything, he was quite open to learning how to push the little “shut down” button instead of murdering his computer on a daily basis. When we were done, he gave me a very hearty handshake!
These are from when I was working as a QA (quality assurance) engineer around 2000 at Wavexpress.
The most important checks are the most basic. Our company created a big program for signing up for our beta program via a telephone number. I was not on this project and it was most certainly “not my job”, but I went and called the phone number on the flyer. It hadn’t been set up! I told the right people and the problem was fixed quickly. But the entire program would have been a bust AND given the company a black eye had I not checked the basics.
There was this nice guy who stayed late every Friday to swap tapes for the backup system. I liked him and wondered if the system actually worked so I put a file on my computer, waited 2 weeks, “accidentally” deleted it and asked IT for help. A day goes by and they hadn’t recovered my file so I check in. Another day. And a third. Finally, they admit to me that they had checked all the tapes and they were all blank! There were no backups at our software company! The most important checks are the most basic!
It is vital to end every meeting with an action plan. At the end of every meeting, I would always ask two simple questions, “Can I try to summarize what we talked about? [say it]” and “Ok, so what is the plan?” This was a tip I learned from some business guide. At first I was embarrassed to ask all these professionals such silly questions. If we’re leaving the meeting, “of course” we have a plan. But more often than not, (yes, like 60% of the time!) that final conversation ends up being the most important part of the meeting! That question has cleared up innumerable vagueries and misinterpretations since I started using it in 2000! I think this was the guide I read! Though I neglected to cited the original source!
The KT-88 is an electronic keyboard made by Ensoniq. I found the manual graciously left on TheSoniq.com. Hurray!
Here is This is a very good article about how not to get the ‘rona, The Risks – Know Them – Avoid Them. He talks about many actual cases as examples. All of the posts by Erin Bromage are good Covid reading.
Bread baking friends, celebrate with me the videos made by the Proof Bread company in Phoenix! I’m linking to the video that got me hooked but the whole channel is a wonderment.
I took some hints from the videos and came up with this:
1 1/2 cups of white flour, 1/8 cup whole wheat, 475 for 30 minutes covered, 12 minutes uncovered. Made a nice sandwich bread with a crackling crust :-)
Wget is a great tool for downloading individual webpages or entire websites. View the Wget manual.
When the site is password protected, you might do the following to download the site:
wget –recursive –no-parent –timestamping=on –no-clobber –page-requisites –html-extension –convert-links –restrict-file-names=windows –no-parent –load-cookies cookies.txt -e robots=off -U mozilla “https://www.EXAMPLE.COM/WHATEVER/”
I have had a little trouble with the cookies not working correctly. I’m not sure yet if it’s the cookie expiring after a few minutes and not getting renewed or Wget somehow fetching too aggressively. I successfully fetched a site by refreshing the homepage in Chrome (maybe keeping the cookie valid) and fetching from below the top level.
I replaced the battery on my Ensoniq KT-88 electronic keyboard piano today. It wasn’t hard. Took about 45 minutes of unscrewing, fiddling with connectors, and soldering. (actually, the keyboard is on long-term loan from a good friend :-) )
I bought the battery from Syntaur. Maybe I could have found it for a few dollars cheaper but it wasn’t expensive and I wanted to make sure it was a good battery and had the right tabs on it! These guys rock.
After I was done replacing the battery, none of the controls worked! Argh! I did a factory reset thanks to the internet (local archive), to reset the Ensoniq KT-88 “PRESS EDIT/SEQUENCES (PRESETS). PRESS AND HOLD THE UPPER 9 BUTTON AND THEN PRESS THE LOWER 9.RELEASE BOTH AND PRESS YES AT THE PROMPT.”. That didn’t actually fix it. But I now find that if I turn it on and power cycle it once quickly (off for about 1/2 second) controls respond perfectly until I turn it off for a length of time. It’s finicky but it works! Hurray!
One of my oldest friends is writing a homesteading book. He’s literally an award-winning author which is pretty awesome. I ordered a copy :-)
“Seven years ago I moved from the city to a farm where I taught myself to garden, raise animals & cook “farm to table”. I show you how”
Find out more about the book and pre-order it.