Day 4 of 30
Challenge #4 was pretty straightforward: Follow five new topics in the Reader, and begin finding blogs (and bloggers) you love. So I tried a few of my hobbies and found that these 5 gave some...
View ArticleGarden expansion
The Accidental Farmer has an eye-opening post on how much to plant for one year’s worth of vegetables. The numbers are daunting, but I think they’re accurate. We already grow most of our own tomatoes...
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Green commuting
One of my resolutions for 2014 is to make at least half of my commutes “green”, i.e. bicycling or mass transit. I live in Sacramento and work in Davis, about 40 km (25 miles) away. Amtrak offers an...
View ArticleTiny Arduinos
I’ve been playing with Arduino boards for the past year or two. These were designed as micro controllers for the masses — easy to program and simple to wire up. You need only the most rudimentary...
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blog software updates
Wow, I had really let this blog fall by the wayside! When I started the 30-day challenge earlier this month, I knew one of the urgent things that needed to be done was a full update of the blog...
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Cranberry-satsuma relish
The 2012 Thanksgiving issue of Bon Appétit had a cranberry-orange-mint relish recipe that looked pretty good, except that my wife can’t stand mint. So I left out the mint, substituted satsumas for the...
View ArticleiOS7, battery killer!
I finally upgraded my iPhone 4S to iOS7 the other day, plugged in my charger that night, and started the day with a shiny new OS. But in less than an hour, my battery was dead. WTH?!? In hindsight, I...
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Let’s Make something at Hacker Lab!
Earlier this month I became one of the Facilitators at Hacker Lab in Sacramento. As such, I’ll be working in the Maker Space once or twice a week, helping users with the plethora of tools and equipment...
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ISS Above installation via Mac OSX
I recently backed the ISS Above wearable project on Kickstarter, which got me thinking about (and tinkering with) my first ISS Above. What is it? Just a super-cool little widget that you can build on...
View ArticleViruses and OSX Time Machine
Argh! I did a full scan of my Mac and discovered a virus on the Time Machine volume. I wrote about this a few years ago, and the tweaks to my mail/anti-virus/Time Machine work flow have served me well....
View ArticleFinally moving to https!
I haven’t been using my blog lately because I’ve been trying to find a reasonably-priced service that offers encrypted web connections, i.e. https://example.com. A few weeks ago my current hosting...
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Coffee roasting
Last year my wife bought me a countertop coffee roaster, and I’ve been hooked on home-roasting coffee ever since. Lately I’ve also been roasting in our convection open, which works great for medium- to...
View Article‘vagrant ssh’ errors
I picked up a copy of Learning Puppet 4 shortly after publication and went through some of the examples and exercises. Pretty straightforward, although there were a few glitches in the examples, as is...
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