game camera / knee status

My knee (injured in a fall yesterday) started hurting more as the day went on, and it made it uncomfortable to sleep. No obvious swelling today, which I take as a good sign. I noticed on this morning’s dog walk that if I keep the swing of my left leg straight down passing quite near

bringing old Pi boxes back online

While I was in Wally World my devices were updating over their wifi (repeated in the van). Two of the devices were a Pi and Pi2 I brought back online. The Pi 3 does the DVR duties and the others have just been sitting in a plastic pencil box.  They are small enough I brought

three months on the new VPS

Just got my quarterly renewal notice for the linux Virtual Private Server so it’s time for a review. You may remember I was coming from one larger (512MB RAM) American VPS, one smaller (128MB RAM) European VPS, and a share of a database server. For the same money I got one larger (1GB RAM) European

chirp, debian unstable, winxp, win7, and firefox

I use chirp to program a $20 Baofeng ham radio.  It is a native linux app but uses deprecated python-gtk2 libraries.  That was cool until debian unstable removed those libs.  Chirp no worky. Debian is a purist distro, and is the “mother” for many other linuxen.  But it’s a bit of a sanctimonious jerk, and

laptop cooling update

The thermal paste fix has made a huge difference.  I played Minecraft in 92F ambient the other day (hottest day in Twin Springs just before I bailed).  No issues. Normally I use the chromebook because of the low power consumption, but I’m getting such good sun here in Boise NF that I am running the

~12% bandwidth conservation from compressed tunnel

I am getting minimal bandwidth in this location, downloading at around 30KB/s.  So I tried proxying my web traffic through a compressed ssh tunnel to see if it would help at all. Here are the results after my morning browsing, about 1.5hrs of email, forums, texting, etc. Transferred: sent 3073844, received 49053108 bytes, in 5189.2 seconds Bytes

surprising solar output in full overcast

I was in Cloudcroft where it was raining and fully overcast. This pic shows both what I call bright overcast (area in top center) and overcast (darker areas away from the top center.  [Not shown here:  dark overcast, as might be found in a thunderstorm.]

duolingo for learning Spanish

I’ve been using Duolingo, a free app, to learn survival Spanish.  I think it’s pretty good.  Luckily I am immersed in Spanish here in ELP, where folks routinely switch languages mid-sentence. I also looked at Drops recently;  it’s really weird.  It’s got an almost-hieroglyphic approach, highly visual and abstracted to the point of inscrutability sometimes. 

watching the cowboys OTA

I watched the Cowboy game yesterday in the van.  The basic idea is my old laptop functions as a DVR, pulling OTA (over the air) programming from a OTA reciver. Here is a pic of a previous game I was watching;  didn’t pause it for the pic so it’s a little blurry:

Critter sitting, pit edition: Max and Scooby

Last sunday I came back from the Organ mountains a little early so I could get in a couple of hours at the shelter. This is Max: Pretty sure he was a fighting dog because of the scars on his face and the butchered ears.  He was pleasant, and responded some, but had a real