Friday, April 20, 2012
No CO2 for stupid people
Quote:
"Like the day Pearl Harbor was bombed by the Japanese, Dec. 7, 2009, might too be recalled by history as a day that shall live in infamy.
That was the day Environmental Protection Agency Administrator Lisa Jackson issued the carbon endangerment finding, a rule defining carbon dioxide, a gas necessary for the existence of life itself, as a harmful pollutant under the terms of the Clean Air Act."
Quoted from here.
But hey, I'm all for removing every trace of carbon dioxide from the environment of stupid people.
Dems need distractions
Dangerous Ted
Wednesday, May 25, 2011
Testing Windows Live Writer
My Windows XP computer started acting weird a month or two ago. I could see the handwriting on the wall, so I went out and bought a cheap eMachines computer with Windows 7 installed.
Windows 7 comes with Windows Live Writer, which is a WYSIWYG blog editor.
Of course, most of you probably know this if you have Windows 7.
Here’s a screen shot, taken with the Windows 7 Snipping Tool.
Live Writer seems like a pretty decent editor. You can compose and publish your blog posts from inside the editor, without leaving home.
Monday, April 26, 2010
Screened Enclosure
We have a small area back there where we have our outdoor shower .
I wanted to screen in this whole area, which is sort of an odd shape.
I wanted to spend as little money as possible. I used a bunch of scrap aluminum I've been collecting; aluminum doors, windows and various other pieces of aluminum, some of which is of the type used in screened enclosures. All of the pieces I gathered together have grooves in them for accepting the rubber beading material that holds the screen in place.
I wanted the roof to be slanted so the leaves and stuff would slide down rather than collecting up there on the screen. So I designed it as sort of a dome. See drawing below. The actual 'dome' is a round piece of convex smoky glass I came across at a flea market once. It's the highest point of the enclosure. It's mounted to a 7-sided aluminum frame which is connected to the rest of the frame.
The enclosure is connected to my workshop on the west side. On the south and east sides, it's connected to the house. And the north and north-east sides are screened 'walls' that come all the way to the ground.
The only things I had to buy for this project were a few bags of cement for a footer under one of the exterior screen doors, and the rubber beading for installing the screen to the frame. I had all the other materials, including the screen material and the hardware, in my scrap pile and my hardware bins & drawers. Junking and curb-side shopping doesn't provide you with brand new materials, but it can save you a lot of money. People throw away all kinds of good stuff.
My webpage died
Well, after a couple of weeks of trying to contact John, I did a little research on his name and found out he had died. I couldn't find out what the circumstances of his death were, but it was pretty obvious that he was gone. It was then that I realized that John didn't have any kind of backup plan for his web hosting service. Maybe the server was in his basement, I don't really know.
At any rate, without somebody to maintain things, my website continued to deteriorate until it no longer worked at all. And I'm paid up until this September so not only did I lose my website, I also lost a little money. I don't hold this against John, but it would have been nice if his web hosting business was more than just a one man operation.
The moral of this story is that if you are going to open a website, be sure you do it with a company that is operated by more than one man.
I still have my domain name and I could open my site again with another web hosting service, but I just haven't gotten around to doing that yet. I guess I keep hoping that somebody will come to the rescue of John's web hosting service, which was http://2serveu.net/.
Sunday, August 16, 2009
SATA, RAID & BIOS
On 10 August, 2009, my computer wouldn't boot up.
The RAID BIOS information failed to post, which led me to believe that the RAID setup had broken.
The Error message that appeared was to the effect that "No boot drives were recognized." In other words, the computer was not recognizing my two SATA hard drives.
After doing some reading online in one of my Linux computers, I came to find out that Windows XP doesn't recognize SATA drives unless they are set up in a RAID configuration.
So I went into the normal BIOS and made a change.
The diagrams below were copied from my pdf BIOS manual.
In the BIOS (hit the DEL key at the first beep after starting the computer) I entered into "Integrated Peripherals."

Then I hit the Enter key at the spot highlighted in red above, which got me into the next screen, shown below.

The second entry on the list is SATA Mode.
I hit the Enter key on [RAID] and changed that option to [IDE]. I then saved the changes and exited BIOS and the computer started up.
I no longer have a RAID setup but that's fine with me because it never worked right in the first place.
Note: The BIOS manual mentioned above says the following:
This option allows you to enable the onchip Serial ATA.
The Choices: Enabled (default), Disabled.
SATA Mode
The Choices: RAID (default).
That last line is incorrect. It should say:
The Choices: RAID (default), IDE.
The reason for changing that setting to [IDE] is so Windows can recognize SATA drives when they're not set up in a RAID configuration.
