JEB:LOG

Retaining Wall Graph

2010-03-13T18:02:55Z

Stuck in traffic on the access road to 85/75 coming up to 14th street, I spotted this long retaining wall painted white with a graph. The data point labels may be causing wrecks. This photo is about a 10th of the entire wall.

Comment Spam on Increase

2010-01-10T16:17:37Z

Maybe it is related to the holiday season, buy the comment spam on Mac5 blogs has increased. In the past, automated spam was blocked with some special code I installed. I know there are businesses in poor countries that have rooms full of low-paid labor doing all kinds of things to manipulate Google searches. Manually posting comments with links is one such strategy I have made some changes in the spam protection settings that will, I hope, intercept this new wave of spam. The example shown here was a spam that was caught in early December. It was caught for two reasons: 1) Too many links in the comment and 2) the IP address of the commenter was listed on a spam notification service. I have turned up the scoring to be more aggressive. Our friends and family should not get blocked when we are not including links. And even if we include links will typically get posted because we get positive credit with a known email address. Let's hope the spammers don't figure out our email addresses.

iGroove for the iPod Touch

2010-01-09T15:05:05Z

After much research, I decided to get the iGroove SXT by Klipsch. Someone described it as "Bose at half the price." The iPod Touch has become a well used device in our household. It basically acts as a small wireless tablet that floats around the house but mainly lives in the family room. I've been watching a growing collection of games that the kids download. Other apps used frequently:

Mail - quick way to check Gmail
Facebook - ditto
Time - why subscribe?
USA Today - I read in the morning
Music : Podcasts - NPR Market Place and News from Lake Wobegon
Pandora - streaming music based on channels you build

The challenge was keeping the Touch charged. It has long battery life, but it is awkward to hook up to one of the other computers in the house to charge, in part because each Mac wants to sync the iPod. I went looking for a docking station, perhaps one that could sit next to our stereo and plug into it. I had a hard time finding a solution. There were mixed reviews on whether various docks would work with the newest "Gen 2" iPod Touch. So when I read about the iGroove on Apple's website, I decided that was the one. I was able to pick an iGroove up at Best Buy for the same price as the Apple Store. Now we have a great sounding, compact speaker system that can play streaming music from Pandora. Listening to my "Banjo channel" right now. (Bluegrass.) Order yours today on Amazon! Note: Also works fine with the several Nano's in the house as a charging / play station.

Write Like an Architect

2010-01-01T15:30:24Z

I couldn't believe the author used a square to draw every vertical of every letter. He must only do this when doing formal notation on projects. The quote at the end begs the question, "Why not use a computer?" In memory of John Horky. Wherever you are...

Stagecoach Takes Over ATM

2009-12-27T15:30:54Z

It has been a year since Wells Fargo acquired Wachovia. This showed up on my Wachovia statement for the first time....

Edit link

2009-12-26T22:05:36Z

I inserted this code in the Entry Meta template to show an edit icon next to the Permalink and Comment links. Allows for quick access to re-edit a published article.

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Good Day Citizan

2009-11-29T04:12:07Z

Found this in the Notepad app on our iPod Touch. Snapshot.... Weee!!!!

Five Forks Food

2009-09-27T18:25:04Z

Introducing (or really re-introducing) Five Forks Food, a recipe database that is a special "community blog" format supported by Movable Type. In theory, any member of Mac5 can contribute recipes or add comments. I'm still figuring it out. You will find a link titled "FOOD" in the upper right corner of Mac5. These are recipes Kathy typed into our Macintosh many years ago in a Hypercard Stack. She references them all the time. Later I converted them from HyperCard to a Lotus Notes Domino database that could be used on the web. (It is still here for the moment.) A random set of recipes is published on the home page every 10 minutes. Lost in translation are the 1 - 5 Fork ratings. I likely will have to key those by hand. You can look by category, look by name under the "All" link, or do a search on a word using the search field. For example: Search for bourbon. If you make any of these, take a picture and send it to me. I'll embed the photo in the recipe!

New Office (Mac's view)

2009-09-10T12:24:23Z

I've moved out of the legendary "Sam's office" and into an office around the corner. I needed to let Heather take the helm and oversee grand central station. My MacBook has a built in camera. This is the "Mac's view" of my office. I have my desk against a bare wall for now. As you can see... I could use some color. Kathy's "401k" is the most I have so far.

Movable Type 4.3

2009-09-10T04:18:24Z

Upgraded mac5 to Movable Type 4.3 primarily to support a random entry plugin for Five Forks Food. Looks like Image::Magick (default thumbnailer) is working with this upgrade. I had mt-config set to use NetBPM. Image test:

Mac5 on Touch and BlackBerry

2009-08-15T14:42:02Z

In 2006 I wrote about getting my first BlackBerry that enabled internet viewing. My current BlackBerry 8830 is brighter and crisper, but internet browsing is put to shame by the "free" iPod Touch we got with Kathy's new MacBook Pro. The ability to scroll, pinch-zoom in/out, and navigate is amazing. (An iPod Touch is basically an iPhone without a camera or phone capability.)

BlackBerry 8830

iPod Touch

Hello astronaut Carol!

Getting Movable Type To Use 755

2009-08-01T05:20:36Z

Claire's new entries in a new month would not display. Movable Type is storing entries in archive directories by month, and when creating a new directory in her blog, it was setting to 777. Since her banner uses php to randomly display photos, the JustHost.com server did not like running anything through the php parser in a wide open directory. It wants a minimum security of 755. I found an article that described adding the following to the mt.config file. Solved the problem. HTMLPerms 0775 DBUmask 0022 HTMLUmask 0022 UploadUmask 0022 DirUmask 0022 The odd thing is other blogs were creating as 755 already, so not sure why Claire's behaved differently.

VW Gas Charts

2009-07-19T21:56:12Z

Move to JustHost.com

2009-06-29T11:15:31Z

Moved mac5 to justhost.com. No longer running on a Mac. (This is a test.)

iMac Goes Terabyte

2009-06-15T00:53:55Z

The iMac Aluminum 20" started misbehaving. Claire and Kelly reported, "it has been on a gray Apple screen for 5 hours trying to start up." I found the computer did not want to boot up properly and when it would, it would end up going into a sluggish state after a short period of time. I was worried it would be another logic board problem which would cost upwards of $500 to replace. (I'm now out of the 1 year warranty.) After several experiments of testing the drive, fixing errors, reinstalling the software, etc. I decided I was getting nowhere fast, and would need to make an appointment at the Apple Genius Bar. Before that, though, I wondered if I could create a boot drive with one of the external Seagate drives. I didn't think you could boot off a USB drive, but I couldn't find anything that said yes or no on the web, so I tried. I consolidated the contents of the two Seagates onto one, and went to install OS X on the empty drive. The install software said I needed to format the drive as "GUID" to make it bootable. It told me to do that with Disk Utility, so soon I was off installing OS X. After the install, I was prompted if I wanted to copy existing software, settings, and documents from another Mac or another disk. Wondering if I could pull the contents off the internal drive, I prompted it to look there. After a couple of hours, all of the data, software, and settings on the internal drive were on the external drive, and we were up and running as if nothing had happened. (Still lost the wiki, though.) USB is a bit slower, but for the most part, the iMac acted normal. I decided I had a failing internal hard drive since errors were found that could not be repaired and the drive would no longer mount. Guided by a video of how to upgrade an iMac Aluminum hard drive, I was off to Best Buy to pick up a Seagate Terabyte (1,000 Gigabytes) drive on sale for $112. Twice the size of the failed drive. I also picked up two shower suction cups and a torx screwdriver set (always wanted one.) Claire and I went into surgery following the video. The suction cups worked great for pulling off the cover screen that is held in place with magnetic strips. (The suction cups in the video are overkill.) Only one step was missed by the video-- a sensor cable on the left side that is tucked behind the fan. It was easy enough to disconnect. The video really made it all so easy to do. We had the brain transplant complete within an hour, and then it took several hours to reverse the install / copy process from the external drive. Claire was a great helper. She was partially motivated by her mechanical engineering interests, but the truth is she was really motivated to get back to playing the new game she and Kelly bought, Sims 3. The two of them have missed not having the iMac for a week. They even took up sewing like two Mac-less pilgrim children.