WEEK 10 2019
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Saturday - Still winter/spring type
weather. A bit of drizzle now and again.
I needed a bit of Romex, so I went to Rosamond and Karl's Hardware.
The local hardware would have it, but is out of wood stove pellets and I
figured Karl's would have some. They were out as well:
apparently the cold weather this year has really caused a run on stocks on
the west coast. They were trying to get some from a supplier all the
way up in Oregon...
Propane prices have also spiked, up to $3.69 a gallon, which is about a 25%
surcharge on what they were charging in January. The help said to come
back on the third Monday of the month, it's when they have their scheduled
delivery and sale, but to come early as they sometimes sell out all of their
700lb supply tank!
Costco generally has the best price around, but it's nice to know I can get
it in Rosamond.
Technically I can get tanks refilled at the little local market, but people
had told me it's a pain. I went in and asked the owner, and his reply
was that he only fills tanks after 11am. I pointed out that was also
lunch time and busy for them, and his reply was "Yes, you'll have to wait".
Which is what people told me, up to half an hour.
Um, so unless I'm desperate, no. Their prices aren't particularly good
either.
Books Read : Week 10 : 2019
And yes, I know the text background and cell background in the table doesn't
match: Blue Griffon is kind of broken and I can't fix it without a bunch of
text editing of the source.
I was surfing Amazon, looking at Swift books, then realized I had a couple I
bought quite a while back on the Kindle...
I dug out the C++ book as well.
Friday 8 March 2019
Friday - Cool,
but not too unpleasant. I did run the heater for a couple of hours.
Neighbor dog was oddly quiet.
Stars: I did another ten lessons in the Zed Shaw book on
Python. It's pretty simplistic stuff, but I might as well do them,
since I paid for them.
Nope: Read some more swift stuff. I was hoping for
lessons, and cocoa, but the next free book was pretty much on how to
inter-operate between Obj-C and Swift. Very useful, but I'm not really
ready for it yet.
Perhaps I should get another book? They are so pricey and the language
is changing so fast that I hate to. Did I mention that there's already
a Swift 5.0 out from Apple? I just finished the 4.2 book this
week.
Amusingly I found an example of someone using X with Swift.
Apple doesn't make the Cocoa libraries available on any platform but its
own, though the compiler is there. So someone wrote an app on Linux
that brought up an X dialog! I suppose you could use Qt, or OpenGL as
well.
Budd caught a mouse in the garage, his third. A tiny little thing, the
size of the end of my thumb. He was happily batting it about, tossing
it in the air, and so on. I felt bad for it, but not bad enough to try
to catch it and take it away myself.
When I let Budd into the house an hour later he was very proud of
himself. Did he eat it, did it escape?
Sad news: In the evening I heard that my neighbor's wife's mother had passed
away. It wasn't entirely unexpected, she'd been declining and was in
hospice care, but of course it's still a painful and sad time for them.
Thursday 7 March
2019
Thursday -
Mixed weather, reasonably warm. Misting rain in the morning, then nothing
else. I did turn on the heat for a few hours.
Hip seems about the same, sore if I don't take the ibuprofen. I'm
trying not to sit for too long, that seems to aggravate it where standing
and laying down doesn't. I can now sleep in my bed again.
Neighbors dog barked for three hours straight in the morning, then for
intervals of an hour or so in the afternoon.
Book #7 was free book The
Swift Programming Language 4.2, by Apple. I actually read all
492 pages of the book proper, but not the appendices. The ACL and optional
chaining stuff was a bit cryptic. I suspect it will make sense once I
actually start using it.
I did a bit of Linux stuff. The stable PPA puts its stuff under
/usr/lib, but doesn't include the source. The unstable does include
the source. I watched a couple of video's on PPA install, and as far
as I can tell I was doing it correctly. Maybe I'll try removing the unstable
and re-downloading/installing again next week.
I had to add external speakers to the little mini-itx unit to hear the video
audio, then a new power strip because the old one had issues and the power
brick to the speakers wasn't getting voltage. Nothing is a
one-step process...
The standing desk works pretty well. But if I put a couple of cushion
pads down for my feet then it's too low. Eventually I want to replace the
proof-of-concept item with real (stable) legs and such.
Suzy loves the desk, btw. I guess because it's high up it feel secure.
In reality Budd would have no problem chasing her up there and they would
probably wreck both monitors by fighting and knocking them to the ground.
I didn't see Budd with a mouse in the garage today, btw. But the
attic's traps - with dog food glued to the trap triggers - didn't work, the
dog food was gone. Sticky traps next I guess.
Wednesday 6 March 2019
Wednesday - Rain.
It must have poured buckets overnight, the road was mostly covered for a bit
at about 6:30am, and I could hear a bit of a leak inside the chimney box.
But by 8am it was just regular rain and there was no sound of a leak.
I lit the pellet stove, since it will keep the house warm (it isn't a
particularly cold rain) and dry out the chimney box. I have more
weather sealing gunk to spray on the chimney cover, but it's been high winds
for days (gusting into the 50's supposedly) and I couldn't apply it.
By noon I turned the stove off, house was plenty warm enough.
In the morning I worked on the Stars stuff, practicing my Python
programming. I have a kindle edition of Learn Python the Hard Way,
and opted to use the Kindle Cloud through the Firefox browser to read it,
while I worked. Text open on one monitor, editor and terminal window
open in the other.
I've been using the Atom editor, and a terminal window to run the python
programs themselves.
I also did a quick check to see if anyone else was having trouble opening
the daily Gui version of FreeCad, but no errors really matched mine.
It looks as though there are issues with dependencies on older libraries and
such going on. Mine seem to be related to X, but I know that
Xscreensaver works, so it's some sort of interaction.
After lunch I worked on Swift. Essentially this is the part on objects
and structures. Pretty straightforward, though the bit on optional chaining
is kind of abstruse. I guess if you have something that interacts with
the web or a network database you can't be sure of the existence of things,
and so there is this elaborate checking behavior. Not really of
great interest to me for a small self contained app, but I read through it
all anyways.
Budd caught another mouse in the garage, and was happily playing with it in
the early evening, tossing it into the air and catching it in his
mouth. It was dark and wet out, and the critter looked dead, so I just
left him to it. I'm not sure if he eventually ate it or what.
That's two down.
They are ignoring the kibble glued to the traps.
The neighbor's dog is going nuts. I'm going to have to complain.
Tuesday - Overcast.
Mostly just worked on Nope and Swift programming stuff.
I had been looking for a good book on it, and one of the reviewers said that
the free book The
Swift Programming Language, by Apple, was as good as any of the paid
books. So I've been working my way through that. So far it's
pretty decent, though it's only Swift, not Cocoa or Xcode. But that's
how I taught myself Objective-C, so no big deal.
Book #6 was Lies
Sleeping (Rivers of London #7), by Ben Aaronovitch. This was
enjoyable, particularly as it was a ebook loan via the Libby
app. I would say a bit less of police procedural than the earlier
books.
There are actually a couple of comics, er, graphic novels in the
series - I should see if they are available for free as well.
Monday - Overcast.
My hip hurt again - I shouldn't have spent so much time standing up
yesterday. Stupid of me. I have a bunch of cleanup to do in the
garage, but it will have to wait.
So I mostly just read documentation and thought about Swift and programming
stuff.
Sunday - Coolish.
S said she was under the weather, no no grocery shopping today.
I did a bit of shopping in town, basically a quick trip to
Walmart. I was trying to get some propane bottles exchanged, and
the local place was out of full bottles.
I also wanted some more pellets since they are predicting a storm this week,
but Lowe's and Walmart and Van Damm's had none. Perhaps the hardware
store in Rosamond, but I do have several bags left, so it isn't too urgent.
I worked in the garage for several hours, trying to rearrange an clean
things up. There is a lot of stuff in there that can go into storage,
actually.
