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WEEK 4 2017

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Saturday 28 January 2017

Saturday - Beautiful weather. My hands hurt, so I'm just cleaning up around the house and yard.

Went to the gun show at the fair grounds with friends. I didn't buy anything, but it was interesting. I think the last time I went was before they opened the new fairgrounds. I don't recall there being such a vast amount of people selling AR-15 parts. I'm not sure what 'uppers' and 'lowers' are, but there were certainly a lot for sale.

Friday 27 January 2017

Friday - More nice weather. Lots of snow on the hills still.

Computer work, interspersed with cleaning/re-arranging things in the house. I have several real-life things I have to get done soon, but hate to even face them....

Book #1 was Game Programming Patterns, by Robert Nystrom. This was fun and straightforward, mostly. I really need to get a 'state' pattern going, but can't quite seem to get it working right - this was a help. There's also some stuff on speeding up a game - not an issue with Task Mechanic apps!

I re-installed the Xamarin stuff, but I can't log in and emailing them hasn't resulted in a response. Not encouraging, but I guess I'll just create another account and use that.

Thursday 26 January 2017 Thursday - Nice weather, for winter.

Not much to say, programming stuff, kind of boring and annoying.

I gave up on trying to 'fix' Apple's defaults, people are probably resigned to the stupidity, I know I am, and am just going to try to get something out. It's almost working....

I installed minGW on the Windows 10 laptop, and together with the working copy of STARS made some progress on helping SG get a working model going. It's nice to have a decent unix environment, though Vim isn't as well behaved on Win10 as it was on WinXP.

Wednesday 25 January 2017

Wednesday - Warmer yet. I had the southern blinds open in the morning, but closed them mid-afternoon when it became overly warm in the office upstairs!

More cleanup.

Working on the app, trying to get the switches to act in the way I want. If Apple wasn't so da**ed determined to "help" me with unchangeable defaults I'd be done by now.

Met with Dr. Gupta, my old boss at NASA, for an hour or so in the evening, talked about some STARS things, and people we knew. He had a nice new laptop, said that his MacBook Pro with the Windows partition had gotten corrupted, same as happened with me. The new one was a nice Dell XPS, a good Windows rival to the MacBook.

Went to CostCo with a friend and picked up a few things - batteries mainly, I was just about out of AAA's, and completely out of C's and D's.

In case anyone wonders - I gave up on finding a decent file transfer program for OSX. I just use sftp from the command line. Stupid, but there it is...

Yikes. Saw this in the morning when I went to 'wake' the laptop.
I cycled the power and it came back OK, but...
I should back stuff up.

Tuesday 24 January 2017

Tuesday - Warming up, sunny all day.

I did a bunch of house cleaning in the morning - with the wind and rainstorms the January cleanup is taking forever. And I'm trying to do a bit more thorough of a job. I found that I have 9 desktop PC's for example. The old cluster, the Linux Mint, the Linux Kubuntu, the Windows Xp. I have a Mac laptop, a windows laptop, a Mac tablet and a windows tablet. I have 13 loose keyboards of different types and styles. I even have an entire tub of old internal and external hard drives.... I evev found another in the evening, the drive I took out of the old Vista laptop the other day, just sitting under some papers on my desk. And so on.

Monday 23 January 2017

Monday - Cold and rain.

Not just rain - we had a brief snow flurry at about 10am. Nothing stuck, and it was over quickly, but it was nice to see.

My friend Roger is still up at June Mountain. It snowed so much there that the lifts were closed for a couple of days, and the roads, so he's going to stay for at least one more day, just to get his money's worth of fun out of the trip up.

I'm working on the app, or at least a trial switch interface. In theory you can use a 'long press' gesture with an external blue tooth switch, but I couldn't get it to work. Apple interface? My coding? The switch hardware? Hard to say. I'm not inclined to pursue it - it's a bit complicated for our target audience anyways.

iOS9 and iOS10 have a bunch of new accessibility features, but if they are too fiddly to work with they aren't much good. My understanding was that there was no extra programming for the long press, just some switch options to choose under Accessibility in the Settings.

Anyhow, there was some progress in the base switch activation stuff. Essentially I'm shooting for a layer that goes over the base app, and simply passes instructions and reactions to/from it.

No word from Steve G about working with a smaller model.

Sunday 22 January 2017

Sunday - Rain again. Good to have it. Glad I don't actually have to go out in it.

I guess the various leftist's and whacko's are protesting Trump's election. Glad I don't get network TV...

I didn't do much, my hands were hurting. I did start inquiries about getting a newer version of STARS. Someone also suggested I also get the free version of FEMAP/NS-Nastran. I'm not sure my laptop is up to it though.

Picture of the Week

Suzy, cardboard box, and fireplace

Suzy in heaven: a cardboard box and a warm fire, December 2016.

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