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WEEK 29 2016

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Saturday 16 July 2016

Saturday - Hot again. Swamp cooler on high type of hot.

I did various chores around the house & yard, trying to get things organized. Still doing maintenance and repair rather than improvements though.

I went by Home Depot and the library, picking up a couple of books - one the successor to the amusing Enslaved By Ducks, and the other the official Apple book on GarageBand, because I assumed it would have a section on how to set m4a metadata. It didn't, but GarageBand on iOS is pretty amazing. I haven't taken a music class since the mid 1970's, but this looks neat, I may just play around with it.

In all my free time.

My neighbor was being noisy across the street with loud music and violent and profane lyrics, there was a wedding or Quincineria going on down the street, and some event with amplified stuff going on at the college across the way, so I just stayed inside with the a/c on in the afternoon and evening. By 11pm it was quiet enough to go to bed.

I went ahead and actually ordered an iOS/OSX media book from Amazon. It'll be here in a day or two. I went through all my texts here, and other than brief descriptions of higher level functions that wasn't anything of use to me for what I wanted to do. Amazon lets you peek into the book, and the table of contents and the index both seem to have useful references to what I want to do.

And it's all tax deductible, should we ever actually ship a product and make some money....

Friday 15 July 2016

Friday - Hot again. But relatively (heh) dry.

Worked on the app some more. No luck with the metadata thing... There is an easy and short hack I could use...but I am trying to avoid using 'short and easy hacks' as a means of not learning more Objectional C and Cocoa. I may have to order a book on iOS and media, there doesn't seem to be anything too useful in the Los Angeles County Public Library system.

Broke from work a bit early, mid-afternoon, the hands were hurting and I was feeling rather frustrated with it.

Book #29 was Don't Make Me Think, Revisited (3rd edition), by Steve Krug.

This is an excellent little book on the design of user interfaces for the internet (UX, or UXD). It's a brief but very compelling look into how people use the web, and how to design for them. Well worth reading.

Jimmy, blissfully sound asleep. I wish I could sleep like that...

Thursday 14 July 2016 Thursday - Another average hot day.

I did apply the fertilizer and fungicide stuff, in the morning, so maybe that will help. The mites do damage fast, but I'm hoping to save all the plants this year.

Working on the app, not a lot to say there. Well, actually, I should say that I am unable, as of yet, to set metadata for media tracks in iOS. It is, even for iOS, convoluted and strange...

Which I expected. When I had to do some rework of some inspection videos a while back I ran into this - what a pain. What the industry calls "standards" I would call random BS that someone happened to write down, which isn't the same thing.

From Apple's documentation, some enumerated values...

Book #28, actually read some time ago, was Into The Storm, by Larry Correia. Meh. Military/steampunk/fantasy. I enjoyed the Monster Hunter International books a lot more.

Wednesday 13 July 2016

Wednesday - Hot(ish). Only about 100F, which the swamp cooler can easily handle if the humidity is low.

I did some yard and garage cleanup in the morning, and went to Home Depot and picked up some fertilizer, fungicide and mite oil for the plants. It was too warm to apply by the time I got home (you have to be careful not to "burn" the lawn) so I'll apply it tomorrow.

By 10am I was working on the app and had a reasonably productive day, fixed a couple of bugs and added some functionality.

Tuesday 12 July 2016

Tuesday - Warm, in the 90's.

Still dragging, sore throat and occasion sneezing fits. I guess I have a bit of a summer cold. Bah.

I did some work on the app but my brain really wasn't functioning.

Slow cooked the red beans all day. I added an onion and some chopped ham as well, and it was a bit less plain than last time. Next time I'll add some bell pepper and maybe a garlic clove.

Monday 11 July 2016

Monday - Did some chores, worked on the app a bit. Still dragging a bit for some reason.

Rinsed some red beans, I'll slow cook them tomorrow.

It looks like the tomatoes have mites, I'll try some spray oil. I hit them with Sevin before leaving last week, but it didn't do much.

Sunday 10 July 2016

Sunday - I did some light chores around the house, after grocery shopping in the morning. It was oddly busy at WinCo, but not at the 99-Cent store.

I also fiddled around trying to read a crashed hard drive for Dave. I bought an inexpensive adapter for an USB to SATA drive and booted it using a Puppy Linux Live CD on the old Windows XP box (Intel 845 chipset, only has PATA/IDE drive adapters).

We were hoping that it was just some OS corruption, but it seems the platters or electronics has issues - it's extraordinary slow, shows a lot of IO errors, and I can't even find any user data ( JPEG's ).

I tried reading it via OSX: no luck, and via Knoppix: no luck. I also tried booting it via Puppy on the old Mac Mini (Core 2 Duo internals) and got the same result.

I started a global search for JPEG's, and it will probably take all night, and if it finds anything I'll burn to a flash drive for them.

While I was fiddling with this I also figured out how to boot the Win10 laptop from a CD. It's got UEFI stuff going on, but it's doable.

I did a bit of reading at the beach last, mostly easy stuff.

I'm going to count Rosario & Vampire, Season 1, all as one book.

I read the rest of the series while I was there, so Book #26 would be Rosario & Vampire, Season 2, by Akihesa Ikeda.

Book #27 was The Rook, by Daniel O'Malley.

Picture of the Week

ahhhhh

On the balcony at Cayucos.

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