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Ubuntu 2 1/2 month review, etc.
I’ve been using Ubuntu now for about 2 1/2 months. The verdict so far: I like it. When I initially installed it, I was looking for a Linux distro with a reasonably well-integrated and user-friendly desktop environment, and Ubuntu (with GNOME) has lived up to those expectations. I really like the GNOME file manager with…
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I hate Microsoft
So, I’m trying to find a nice, easy, seamless way to access data on my home Linux fileserver from XP. The goal is to have drag-and-drop access to files using the Windows GUI, as opposed to using sftp, which I’ve been doing pretty much forever and am finally getting tired of. But of course, with…
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Our weird house
Just when I thought I’ve seen it all with our house, I find more weirdness. I’m working on relocating the clothes dryer circuit, in preparation for our new washer and dryer. In the process, I noticed some disconnected copper tubing hanging down the wall behind the dryer. It’s the standard 3/8″ stuff that you might…
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All’s not happy in the land of calendaring
Well, it appears I spoke too soon about backwards compatibility with the new Oracle Collaboration Suite and the old Calendar API that I’m using for my iCal downloader stuff. The first bad sign happened a couple weeks ago, when I noticed that a bunch of my Oracle Calendar entries had mysteriously disappeared from my iCal…
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Subpanel replacement work continues
Wednesday, I took the day off work and moved the bulk of the circuits off our old FPE “Federal Noark” panel, to the new Square D QO panel. There are three circuits remaining to be done, all of which are connected via conduit, so I’ll need to reroute these before I can rip the FPE…
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Weird mp3act streaming problem solved..
When I switched my desktop Linux box to Ubuntu recently, I was able to get everything working relatively easily except for one thing: For some reason, I couldn’t stream MP3s from my mp3act server. The playlists would download properly, but nothing would play: xmms would just ignore everything in the playlists. Well, today I finally…
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2006 Pool Season: Short but Sweet
That about sums it up. Tomorrow we’re putting the winter cover on the pool and officially sticking a fork in the 2006 swimming season. For all intents and purposes, it was really over before the Labor Day holiday, although we did sneak one post-Labor Day swim in, during a warm spell where I was able…
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Sump Pump fun
So, the float switch on the old FloTec sump pump in our basement office died a while back, and I’m just getting around to doing something about it. This particular sump gets very little water in it, even with a dehumidifier draining into it, so my solution for the summer was to just manually pump…
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Retro coding
’tis been a while.. but I’m currently writing some code (the Student Parking Registration rewrite) that communicates directly with our system of record for SIS, the HP3000 mainframe. I haven’t done this for 6 or 7 years (although I’ve made tweaks here and there, this is the most I’ve done with it since 2000 or…
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FPE panel replacement project underway
Today I officially began my project to replace two Federal Pacific circuit breaker panels in my house. I’m starting with a subpanel in the boiler room, and after that’s done I’ll move on to the house’s main panel. Ironically, the first step to doing this was to replace a perfectly good Square-D QO subpanel in…