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WEEK 39 2021
Last Week- Sun- Mon- Tue- Wed- Thur- Fri- Sat- Next Week
Saturday -Warm and somewhat clear. here. Bob says the smoke is back in Carson City.
There is a WSW wind, and it cleared enough of the smoke away to show the high clouds... I think I've said it before, but I picked a poor time to restart my amateur astronomy stuff.
The 4mm eyepiece still hasn't show up, not the senders fault, according to their own tracking the USPS has had it for a week now.
Fiddled a bit more with Gimp. The nice thing about graphics is that you can actually see results rather quickly.
Book #51 was Just One Damn Thing After Another (St. Mary's #1), by Jodi Taylor. It was okay, but not great. Time travel stuff. The protagonist is a snarky woman, the villains kind of cardboard. Also the usual christian-hate from a British author, and a silly ending involving saving books from the burning of the Library of Alexandria in 391. But the thing that burned was actually the Serapeum, a pagan temple and not the library, and it was done by troops under orders, not a Christian mob, and the way that the rescue of books is done is kind of stupid.
I have the next several on order from the library system, because why not, but it isn't all that promising a beginning.
Friday - Warm and smoky still.
I uninstalled Gimp 2.10.xx, and reinstalled Gimp 2.8.2. It had the 'permissions' issue, even when set to global read/write in OS X preference, but the solution to that is to just use a sub folder of 'Pictures', where, for some reason, it works.
I shouldn't be using the Desktop so much anyway.
I actually fiddled around with making the thing I wanted in the first place, a background for 'NAME' similar to what S has on the Google Drive. Texture using the noise tool and 'hurl', embossments and bevels, fairly straightforward, but it's been so long that I have trouble even with basic stuff.
The Linux box, which I was going to use as an advanced GIMP box, is hanging almost instantly now: I can't even get into the BIOS to see what chip set and motherboard it is before it fails: ASRock of some kind. Guess I'll see if I can find the old RAM and replace what's in there. Somewhere I have the mobo info written down.
S sent a short video of RAIN in San Diego. Weird. It's been months here.
Bob sent a picture of the lake/pond at Davis Creek, north of Carson City, completely dry:
Thursday - Warm, 98F, and extremely smoky.
The overall winds over California have changed to easterly, and all the smoke is blowing into the Central Valley and south, to Bakersfield and through the pass to the Antelope Valley. I couldn't even see the mountains to the north or south, and there was no direct sun or shadows cast.
Bob, up in Carson City, said it was so nice there that he's going to do an overnight car camping...
The RAM installation on the Mac Mini went fairly well. It turns out that the TR Torx set that I bought is only TR for size 7 and above, the smaller screwdrivers are a standard T5 and a T6. Fortunately the TR-7 had a beveled point, which allowed me to use it in the TR-6 screws on the antenna cage. All the other screws - perhaps a dozen in all - were standard Torx.
I just followed along with the guide at iFixit, and it went fine. With 32GB of RAM it is now using about 12GB, with Safari open, Xcode running, Simulator running, Gimp running, and so on.
Credit where it is due: the OS X swap system is actually very efficient, and together with the SSD the 8GB was hanging in there, but this is much snappier.
Failures for the Day:
(1) GIMP still isn't working properly, as of 2.10.24. In particular it doesn't show a SELECT, because of a bug in the new non-X version of Gimp for OS X, which no longer includes X. The guy responsible for the port is apparently MIA for several months.
This actually makes Gimp pretty much unusable: I tried for over an hour to just make a background screen with a couple of centered cut-outs and embossments, without success.
In theory one could download Xquartz for OS X, then downgrade to Gimp 2.8, but I'll leave that as an exercise for tomorrow.
(2) Google Backup&Sync is now going away, as of October 2, and being replaced by Google Drive. I was going to install on the Mac Mini, which is now my development machine, in theory, and discovered this. There is a transition process, but it turns out that all the confirmation email/text/phone stuff is in Sheryl's name (we must have set this up at her house) and she is out of town.
(3) The Linux box hung, even when running Devuan. I've been blaming Mint, but now it has happened on the "good" partition, so I'll have to figure out the reason why. The easiest thing to check in the memory.
I'm not particularly upset about the 75% attempted task failure rate, that's about right for software/hardware development, in my experience. With the 'new' system and flow it's going to be a chore to become efficient again.
Wednesday - Warm.
Hands are still sore from yesterday.
I started to disassemble the Mac Mini - I bought the memory months ago - and discovered that I need a TR-6 Torx screwdriver, jot just a T-6. The TR is "tamper resistant" and basically has a little bump in the middle of the screw's recess (think lunar crater with a mountain in the middle), meaning a standard T6 won't go in, because it hits the bump.
I checked online, and neither Lowe's nor Home Depot had it in T6 size, but Harbor Freight had a little set, so I headed over there in the evening and bought one. Two actually, a set for both the smaller and larger sizes (and at $6 a set why not?).
By the time I came home it was after 5pm and I decided to hold off on disassembly until the next morning.
Book #50 was The Hobbit, by J.R.R. Tolkien. This was the unabridged BBC audible edition. To be honest, I listen to help with insomnia...
BTW, Audible is complaining about the old iOS on the old iPad that I use exclusively for Audible and Pandora. At some point it may stop working for that.
Amusingly the spellcheck caught that I'd spelled Hobbit and Tolkien wrong, but it doesn't know the word 'naptha'.
Tuesday - Hot and dry, temps in the 90s and humidity in the single digits.
I went out and added 12 bags of base to the excavation around the steps, watering and compacting. Another three hours. I should have used 4 ibuprofen instead of 2, my hands are very sore.
Annoyingly...while sitting in the shade afterwards I looked over...and there was the wire mesh that was supposed to go under the weed block, to prevent gopher intrusion. I'd originally had it in the hole, but removed it when I decided to dig a bit deeper!
Bah. I'm not going to undo almost a half cubic yard of hand tamping, it will just have to stay as it is.
Tried to work on the app. I needed a background screen and Gimp wouldn't work properly on either the new or old machine. The old machine seems to be having the same effed up 'permissions' issue that I fixed once already. On the new machine it can open and save files - no permissions issues, but seems to have issues internally itself: for example the pen tool leaves gaps. I suspect I'm running out of memory resources, so I guess I better upgrade the 8GB to 32GB.
I researched it a bit, found a step-by-step guide: 22 fiddly little steps until you reach 'insert the memory and press down'. Then another 21 fiddly little steps in reverse to reassemble the Mac Mini. Gah.
If that doesn't work I'll remove Gimp and re-install.
It was still and warm and somewhat clearer than it's been (still smoky & hazy) in the evening - and windless, but I got something in my 'good' eye earlier in the day, and it was gummy and sore, so no observation.
Bummer, because I'd cleaned the new-to-me eyepiece with cigarette lighter fluid, which is naptha, and it looked nice. I've ordered the official cleanser stuff, ROR, but apparently naptha or acetone is actually better for fingerprints (tho acetone will dissolve glues and materials in eyepiece casings if used in overly copious amounts).
The people at Televue themselves say they use acetone, so worries about petroleum distillates dissolving the coatings are probably unwarranted.
Monday - Hot. Still windy from the northeast, though not super high winds.
Finally realized that I had a bit of a head cold, so it wasn't just being tired from the walkway construction the other day.
Did some reading, a bit of work on the app, more chores that didn't get done yesterday.
I've also bought a BST Starguider Planetary 4mm eyepiece from someone on CN. It is a used $40 eyepiece, think Toyota Corolla as compared to the Nagler Type 1, which is kind of like an (older) Mercedes. Still, it should allow me to max out any of my scopes, in fact it's too powerful: I've never seen skies clear enough here to use it. But maybe in the mountains or desert to the east.
Which reminds me, I need to join the local astronomy club still.
Sunday - Hot. A weird northeast wind.
I went with S in the morning, picked up more cat food and kitty litter. Because of the reports of supply chain issues I'm getting a bit more than I need for the week, though not trundling out pallets of stuff.
I am still pretty tired and sore, didn't do to much.
It was annoyingly bright and smoky, no telescope stuff. I need to visit the mountains I guess.
If I do that I will probably need dew shields and warming strips - they aren't necessary here in the AV but in the mountains you can sometimes hear the dew falling (and no, I'm not joking, heard it myself)!
