Tag Archives: clever

Invention

Posted on by
Reply

I may or may not have just invented something new! I’ve been pondering for a while how to feed all my apple trees. Specifically this came about when I looked at my Weather Underground app and noticed a rather beautiful but dry week ahead for us here in southwest Michigan. The problem is, how do I water the trees where I don’t overdo it, where I don’t spend a while outside being a buffet for mosquitoes, and where I can water my trees on days that won’t have any rain without having to fuss any.

As I was walking home from taking the bus today it struck me as I was looking at all the lawns and gardens that I pass on my way home from the bus stop on East Main Street. Why not repurpose gallon-sized water bottles? I buy pure water for my cats drinking and food-additive water when I go to the market anyways and after I scrounged around the house I found three exhausted one-gallon jugs of purified water. Usually I just crumple them up and throw them in the single stream recycling bin where they go to be recycled, but as I was walking it struck me, why not poke very tiny holes in the water jugs and then I could put them out by the trees base and let the jugs drip-water my trees. It works wonderfully well! I keep the plastic from the recycling stream and I can fill them up in the morning with exactly one gallon of clean water and then cap them. One teeny hole at the top lets in air while there are two teeny little holes at the bottom that slowly let the water drip into the tree’s base. I don’t have to screw around holding the hose, wondering how much water I’m delivering and exposing myself to those nasty little bloodsuckers, at least not any more than I have to in order to water my trees. The only trick was figuring out what to make the holes with. The perfect tool is a thumbtack but I don’t have any at home, no application for them, so I tried the next best thing – flair-button pins! We’ve got a decorative glass bowl full of flair buttons. I grabbed a worthless one that nobody would care about and pulled it’s pin out, turning it into a kind of funny looking thumbtack. It did the job perfectly. Poked a next-to-invisible hole at the top, then two or three in the base and that’s that, all done! I went outside, filled the jugs with water and walked them over to the trees. Over the span of maybe half an hour the jugs will lose all their water. I know I have delivered one gallon of very slow drip-drip-drip water to my trees, not flooding them and not having to worry about how much or exposure. In the mornings when it won’t rain I can go outside and with the hose fill up each jug lickety split. Cap them and walk away.

It’s free, easy, and I think at least a fair bit clever. I think this could also work really well for our garden once we get it going. No more having to worry about how much water, how frequently, or any of that. And no more buying stupid “watering hoses” that disintegrate or don’t work properly when you get them home. This way it’s free, active recycling, and for four apple trees, that’s four gallons of water. Bam. I could even sneak some fertilizer in there and shake the devil out of them and dissolve the fertilizer or food and walk away.

If you find this useful, please comment here, Facebook, Twitter, Tumblr, or Google+ as I link-dump on all those other services as well.

TIL In Action

Posted on by
Reply

This evening we sat down and were about to enjoy New Years Dinner and a nice bottle of Chenin Blanc. The wine-puller accidentally ruined the cork halfway and so half of the wine cork was in fragmented bits and the other half was in the neck of the bottle. I looked for ways we could enjoy the wine and without any tools handy I decided to use a skill I picked up years ago. How to uncork wine when you don’t have any cork-pulling tools.

You can eject a cork by placing the bottom of the wine bottle in your shoe and then smashing your shoe against a sturdy vertical surface. I took the bottle and one of my shoes and went to the garage. The exposed concrete footer was perfect. A good few solid whacks and the cork was ejected smoothly with only a few drops of lost wine. No cork in the bottle, no straining out cork, and no need for tools we didn’t have.

The next time you have a bottle of wine and no tools, look no further than your shoes and some sturdy vertical surface that can take some abuse. Wham! Wine!

Sharing

Posted on by
Reply

I ran into an inconvenience with the current way I share socially
online. I have established a new workflow. Short messages still end up
going to Twitter, and if I feel like they are worth sending to Facebook
I use “Selective Tweets” to push that single tweet forward into
Facebook. For longer entires I write them up in Day One no matter if
they are public or private and then save them there and then share them
via email if they are public with my WordPress blog. If they are private
matters, they simply get shared with Facebook with a default stringent
security setting so only the right people can see those posts.

The email routine actually has been hit and miss to start but now it’s
working out quite nicely. First I migrated my blog from WordPress.com to
Wordpress.org. This is just me moving stuff from a companies site (.com)
to the domain that I own with Scott (windchilde.com) and I figure since
I’m paying for it anyways I might as well use it. Plus the switch over
to the windchilde.com domain also allows me unlimited storage and
unlimited bandwidth so I can share photos and videos without having to
worry about running into any storage caps or having to pay for extra
storage when I’m already paying for a pretty good deal with the host
that runs windchilde.com. I originally started with WordPress.org and
figured that Jetpack, which is a feature crosstalk package between
Wordpress.com and WordPress.org, extending some of the things that I
liked about WordPress.com around my installation of WordPress.org for
free. One of those options was “Post by Email” which gave me a
gobbledegook address at post.wordpress.com. That feature never worked
for me. It was supposed to be turn-key but it fell on it’s face. So I
turned to plugins, which are how you can extend WordPress.org sites, but
not WordPress.com sites. The company keeps a tight lid on things like
that where the “DIY” system is far more flexible and accommodating. I
downloaded the plugin called “Postie” and configured it to use a POP
account that I created on the windchilde.com domain and got that all set
up. There were a wee bit of growing pains regarding how to set
Categories and Tags in the email posts that I was making out of Day One.
What I had was a rather clunky Evernote note with the copied text from
my WordPress Category page so I could refer to that to pick and choose
which category I wanted the email post to go into. This was a mess. I
thought about it for a while and when I was done working out at Anytime
Fitness it struck me in a eureka moment; Why not just use TextExpander
to do the heavy lifting? So I started TextExpander on my MBP at home and
it came up, loaded the settings from my Dropbox (neat) and I created a
new snippet, called it “Categories” and set it’s trigger to be “;cat”.
Then I loaded all my categories from WordPress into a bracketed
pull-down list that TextExpander enables you to make on-the-fly so once
I’m done with Day One editing, I can save the entry (also is stored in
my Dropbox, yay!) and then click Share, Email, and then with the open
email I can just type in the trigger for each category I want to add and
I don’t need to remember to go to Evernote to get the list, or risk a
typo screwing everything up. Using Categories this way is really
convenient and tags are a snap to add as well.

Every once in a while I like to plug software that really works for me.
I plug the tarnations out of Mac, of course, as it’s the platform that I
can actually get my work done on. The apps that run on the Mac make the
rest of it work oh-so-well. Day One is a magnificent personal journaling
app. It’s private and password protected on all my devices and stored on
my Dropbox so I don’t have to screw around with backups or restores or
worrying that my entire Journal may just flit off into nothingness if my
MBP or a flash drive decides to play dumb on me. Plus Day One has
in-built sharing features, so I can share via Email, Twitter, or
Facebook if I want to. WordPress.org is not really software that runs on
my Mac, but instead runs on a host. The host I use is iPage.com and they
do a competent job. Setting up a WordPress.org site is embarrassingly
easy, mostly just a handful of clicks and you get a starter email with
the address you should use and your username and a temporary password. I
started to use WordPress because I left LiveJournal when the Russians
bought SixApart, the company that runs LiveJournal. Not that I have
anything against russians, but I’m not a huge fan of my words in that
place, it’s a personal thing. WordPress.org also enables commenting and
stats collection and automatically publicizes on it’s own to Twitter and
Facebook and Tumblr so I don’t have to futz around and create links to
my blog posts after the fact – WordPress does it for me.

Day One stores everything, WordPress stores my public lengthy stories,
Facebook stores my private lengthy stories and Twitter and Facebook
handle the rest – the tiny stuff. It’s all held together by Dropbox,
TextExpander, Day One app, my host, WordPress.org, Twitter, Facebook,
and Tumblr. It seems complicated and it is rather too-involved, but this
way I can write freely without having to concern myself with
self-censorship or exposing the wrong people to the wrong kind of
information. This way it’s all compact and interrelated and convenient.
So far, this is great for me and it’s how I am able to “have my cake and
eat it too”, which I’m a huge fan of in general.

All these products that I mentioned are either cheap or free. Nothing
cost me an arm or a leg, even the host, when you spread the cost over a
whole year is a pittance. I could even help friends and family set up
their own WordPress.org blogs on my host if they, and Scott, agreed. So,
if you think some of this would suit you and Scott’s good with it, just
let me know.

 

Superpass Password Hasher

Posted on by
Reply

Superpass Password Hasher.

This site has a rather novel approach to dealing with passwords. I see this a lot in both my personal and professional life, especially when people lose their computers. The question looms ‘Did you… ?” and usually the answers aren’t very good at least from a security standpoint.

One of the biggest things that people can-and-should do is keep individual passwords for every single site they access. Most people could approach this via tools like my beloved 1Password but this may be another approach that might also work. It uses an encryption staple called a hash to generate a multi-character password based on some simple password, a salt (which is used to increase the randomness that is added to the encryption routine) and the domain you are working with. It’s quite elegant in that it offsets the need to store individual passwords because it, supposedly, relies on stable domain names to provide password reproducibility. Each time you enter your simple password, and the domain name hasn’t changed, you should get the same hash over and over again. I still think that 1Password is still the best choice for everyone, but this might be a good starting place especially if cash is tight and you can’t swing a 1Password license.

UPDATE: After trying this out I discovered that it only really works well on plain sites like Google.com. If you go to any other sites, like Apple or nytimes.com the code breaks down on Safari. I couldn’t get it to even work on Firefox 13 on the Mac, so perhaps this isn’t as robust as I had hoped. The idea is still good, however. For what it’s worth.

Let There Be Light!

Posted on by
Reply

What a busy day! I racked up some serious accomplishment tokens today, just around the house. We’ve had two lights and an electrical socket that have stopped working. The socket sizzled and popped sending chunks of old bakelite and ceramic out into the computer alcove on the second floor of my house. The lights, oh god, the lights. The wall light on the wall of the alcove has been broken for about a year and a half. The hallway light on the ground level has been dead for about two months now.

The socket was just old. I turned off the house power at the mains because I don’t trust that this house I live in was built with any kind of zone-idea when it came to the electrical distribution network here. So instead of risking my life to fix this outlet I just turned the entire house off at the service entrance. I undid the outlet and of course this is the one outlet where they snipped the wires good and short. Any pull out? None whatsoever. On the positive side the house is wired with solid copper wiring, on the negative side, the house is wired with solid copper wiring! That stuff is very stiff and once I got the old outlet out of there (some cussing and swearing) I tried to apply the new outlet and of course the posts for the wires would not stay in an up position, so I had to use a pair of scissors and a screwdriver and a needle-nose plier working with absolutely no give to the wires whatsoever. I did this at sundown of course because I’m a glutton for suffering. Scott held the flashlight and offered moral support while I went on a blue streak against the bright bulbs who built this house. Who the hell trims the wiring to fit exactly in the service box and not give any slack?!? This place does! Gah! I wished very very unpleasant things on the wire-monkey who put the upstairs wiring together. I was finally successful in getting the new outlet installed and I tested it several times and there aren’t any shorts, both plugs in the outlet work fine and that was a solid win on Saturday.

The next deal was our regular going-to-Lowes and fighting over lights. There is something about the lighting department at Lowes. It doesn’t matter which Lowes, they are all the same. When we walk in it’s like we’re both possessed by jilted lovers bent on mutual annihilation. The minute we leave the lighting department everything is fine. It’s a lot like the scene in Transylvania 6-5000 when Doctor Frankenstein goes in and out of his lab, the personality shift is that profound for us both. We needed to replace the light in the hallway on the ground level. Those that have visited us, this light is between the kitchen, bathroom, and two ground floor bedrooms. The bulb was fine, but the fixture was shot. It was my top bet that it was in the fixture because there is no reason for the switch to go bad suddenly and there isn’t any way that wires in walls can have a failure unless they’ve been nibbled on by rodents. We don’t have rodents. So, while we were at Lowes, in the lighting department, wishing we could drown each other with giant sacks of sledgehammers we came across this very neat fixture. It’s a wall-mount fixture with a oiled-copper base (that’s the color name at least) a clear glass bowl and an old style Edison lightbulb featured in the center. These bulbs really are quite awesome. They have multiple filaments and their bodies are clear so you can see the light the glowing filaments make. The bulb is designed to run at 60 watts and only give off 350 lumens of light. It’s dimmer than a standard incandescent bulb and the light is warm and very yellow. To me it’s exceptionally romantic and is a far more appealing choice than standard CFL bulbs which either put out a bluish light or a really white light. The yellow light throws off the color of the hallway, but I really like the look of it and if someone really doesn’t like it, swapping it out for a CFL while they are visiting us is not a problem. Taking down the old fixture was not a problem, the distribution box in the wall was circa 1945 and finding the right screws to fit that was a challenge. The new fixture came with a bracket, and I saw how to assemble it together. I got the old fixture out, cleaned the distribution box as best as I could and installed the bracket, routing the hot and neutral leads through the center hole in the bracket and found the right screws to attach the bracket to the distribution box. An electrician would of course have suffered a full Raiders-Of-The-Lost-Ark facemelt if they were to witness me doing the installation but I can say the damn thing works. Once I got the primary fixture up, the rest of it went very easily. In went the test CFL bulb and that worked fine so I opened up the Edison bulb and it was big and fat and beautiful. I screwed the bulb into the base (it uses a standard bulb base too) and turned it on. The six parallel filaments are glowing and I can see them from here. They throw off a very 19th Century glow.

The upstairs fixture is another matter altogether. Nobody makes fixtures like that anymore. Everyone makes vertical wall fixtures that attach to distribution boxes and in-the-wall wiring. The fixture upstairs eschews all of that for a simple fixture hung with a nail in the wall and an electrical wire running down the wall and plugging into the outlet directly below. This fixture hasn’t worked for years and I’ve been searching in vain for a new one. Several days ago it struck me that something so simple couldn’t be permanently attached and likely could be serviced. So on a previous trip to Lowes I went to the lighting department on my own and found a replacement lamp base with a brass pullchain. I bought the new base and took it home with some replacement incandescent bulbs as this fixtures shade actually attaches right to the bulb itself making CFL’s useless in that application. I grabbed the fixture, and immediately saw how the old base was attached, I pulled it apart, unscrewed the leads and put the new base on, put it all together and tested it and it worked like new! So now when you walk upstairs and turn to the computer alcove you aren’t stumbling around in the dark searching in vain for my desk lamp, the light on the wall is right there and usually will be left on when people are in the house.

Altogether I have to say I’m very pleased with my relatively low-brow DIY accomplishments. New fixtures bring a bit of freshness to this place and repairing the other fixture really pleased me as I no longer have to search in vain for a replacement fixture any longer.

Hooray for tiny accomplishments!

The difference between iPods and iPhones

Posted on by
1

Now that I have my new iPhone, I’m thrilled to have it and using it is wonderful. While I’ve been working with it I’ve run into a strange oddity and a workaround for it. The oddity came when I tried to create my own iPhone-compatible ringtones. The creation of iPhone custom ringtones are in themselves needlessly fussy procedure. First you find the music you want, trim it to 40 seconds, then convert it to AAC format. Then you tear it out of iTunes, change the extension from m4a to m4r and then insert that back into the device for assignment.

What gets me about the ringtone creation is how involved and outrageously fussy it is. It wasn’t meant to be this way, the design clearly points to strict control. When Apple makes something easy, it’s ridiculously easy. This is something different. This is capitalism. Apple went a long way to make this obfuscation stick and the proof is in the obnoxious lengths that you have to go through if you don’t want to buy a ringtone from the iTunes store.

I ran into another issue with my new iPhone. I plugged it into my MacBook and tried to add the newly manufactured ringtone to the device. Then I discovered a rather new and odd limitation. An iPhone apparently fixates on the iTunes library that it first sees, it is with this library that you can turn on “Manage Manually” mode with an iPhone. Any other library locks the phone out but offers you the option of continuing by wiping your device and re-fixating on a new iTunes library. I quickly came up with a great way to beat Apple at this oddity, I created a new iTunes library from scratch (just the directory structure and some key files) and placed it on my Dropbox. Then using the option-key goaded iTunes to start from a different library, pointed it to my Dropbox-iTunes folder and now I have a work-on-any-machine-Manual-Manage iTunes skeleton that allows me to insert homemade ringtones into my new iPhone.

What a long way around for something that should be simple. Apple, if you are listening, the solution is only lengthy and annoying. It’s been paved by your own software and the only piece missing is either a USB memory stick or Dropbox. How easy would it have been to design this with the same vigor that you designed everything else? Eventually your customers find ways around this sort of thing, doesn’t that inevitability mean it’s not worth pursuing in the first place?

Humph.