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WEEK 9 2019

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Saturday 2 March 2019

Saturday - Still too warm to even need heat in the mornings. It feels strange.

Stars: Mostly just worked on setting up the Ubuntu box some more. I gave up on the fancy install of the PPA of FreeCad-Stable and just downloaded it and installed it from the download. It works fine, including the GUI, but the mesh generators and FEM solvers aren't included...

There was a bit of a tussle with .profile and .bashrc, because I didn't realized that I had to reboot to get the system to recognize new paths there (and I'm still not sure that should have been needed) and it reminds me that it's been a decade and a half since I did and really shell scripting on Unix. Oh well.

Nope: I also got the Swift download working, again after battling stuff, but the compile and the REPL environment seem to be working. I am actually beginning to like Swift, odd as it is to say. All the weird, obsolete, complicated and broken issues in Objective-C and C++ and C seem to have been addressed. It's certainly not perfect, but it's actually a pleasure to read the documentation and tutorials. The one place it seems a little backwards is string handling complexity - and thats because they support all of Unicode, not just ASCII, so I don't know that it could be done better.

I'm looking forward to programming with it.

I probably shouldn't be standing/sitting as much as I have been doing this stuff, but I'm very tired of being an invalid...

Friday 1 March 2019 Friday - Warm, but cooling down.

After all the money & work I put into fixing the pellet stove and chimney I find myself kind of wishing for bad weather. Some is predicted for the weekend and next week.

Dog was quiet. I heard it once or twice, but just for a few minutes. Since historically it generally barks more in a morning than every other dog in the neighborhood put together in a week this is a huge improvement.

Couldn't find the glue, the mice are safe for another day.

Nope news: Reviewing the Swift stuff. I also got an email from Apple about the two-factor authorization. Didn't have the mental energy to deal with it yet. Swift isn't iinstalled on the Linux box yet either.

Stars news: I was finally able to get the PPA downloaded, I think, but it didn't install. This took much longer than it should have.

Prototype of a standing desk.

Book #5 was Merchant & Empire (Merchant and Empire #4), by Alma T.C. Boykin. This is the fourth (and last?) in the series. The Emperor drags our somewhat reluctant merchant along with him in a procession through the countries under his control, and there is a bit more magic than before, particularly at the end. Still mostly about traveling by foot and wagon through a medieval world.

Thursday 28 February 2019 Thursday - Warm. Broken clouds.

The cheese is gone from the traps, which did not go off...

Not a peep from the neighbor's dog.

I "built" a standing desk in the west bedroom, because my hip still aches if I sit too long (which since I'm on a prescription of steroids and ibuprofen isn't a good sign). It's just an old door, up on blocks, as a test. It's about 42" to the top, which is roughly correct, according to diagrams on the internet which suggest 44". The monitors tops are at about eye level. I need some cushions for the floor, and a chair tall enough to sit in, on occasion.

Nope news: I have been coming up to speed on Swift, at the sit-down desk in the east bedroom. It turns out that Apple has open sourced the language, and it's available and working on Linux, so that gives me another option. I guess there is something called REPL, which allows you to run interactively from terminals, because the Playground and stuff hasn't been ported (and probably never will be).

Stars news: I have the current unstable version, 0.18, of FreeCad, but not the stable, which is in a PPA repository. As I understand it the PPA should have everything in it, including the older dependencies, which are of course always changing. I haven't quite figured out how to get it, the directions are clear but rather incomplete. And if I do download it, where does it go, and how to I run it, and does it overwrite anything? Basic stuff.

Book #4 was Imperial Magic (Merchant and Empire #3), by Alma T.C. Boykin. Enjoyable. Essentially a primer on trading with Russia in the medieval ages, slightly changed for a bit of "magic" stuff.

Wednesday 27 February 2019

Wednesday - Another nice day.

The hip ached a bit, I guess the shot has worn off, but it's not like it was last week and weekend. I was able to do a few small chores around the house, but tried not to overdue it.

Maybe I'll build a standing desk.

The darn mice ate the walnuts right off the trap triggers. Maybe I need to oil the triggers? I can't find my hot glue gun, but I borrowed some large dog food pellets from the neighbor and will glue the darn stuff to the trigger.

I put cheese UNDER the little V shaped retainer clips for now, but I have no great hopes. I suppose it could be bugs, cockroaches or something, but I've never seen them on this property.

Texted the neighbor with the barking dog - it's been barking every morning this week for hours. And he was snippy, said he didn't believe in muzzles or barker breakers... So I sent him a stern reminder that it wasn't optional to take care of it, that a call to Animal Control on the table . He was apparently furious, but it's been two months and we are pretty much back to where we were before December when we met face to face and he agreed in a friendly manner to take care of the problem.

My father always said that a man will either take care of a neighbors problem with a dog immediately, or not at all. I guess it is the second option here, which is too bad, he seemed like a nice guy otherwise.

Went into town and helped S with her computer setup, it seemed to go well enough. After a complete replacement of hardware from Dell, and a couple of complete system re-installs... A quad core I-7 machine...I'm jealous! It seems very very fast, even running that hog of Windows 10 and some Adobe software.

It didn't have a VGA port however, so it couldn't use the big (but older) external monitor, which is an issue for me with my old eyeglasses prescription. Fortunately I had brought my reading glasses. But since I had to go by Walmart anyways I picked her up a HDMI to VGA adapter and dropped it off on my way out of town, so she can use her external monitor.

I read recently of someone using a 40" 4K TV as a monitor, displaying four complete windows at a time, crisply and clearly. It'd be awesome for video editing and I suspect her Nvidia card in the laptop could actually drive one of those. They are down to $299 at Walmart.

Book #3 was The Scavenger's Gift (Merchant & Empire #2), by Alma T.C. Boykin. This was, at best, a novelette, but interesting. Sort of a side story from this years Book #2.

Tuesday 26 February 2019

Tuesday - Warmish. It feels weird not to be running the heaters constantly, but I just needed an hour or two in the mornings.

The leg felt great - probably because I was so tired I didn't move while asleep. I'm back on the couch, BTW.

Read up a bit on Swift, using the Apple free book (ver. 4.2) , and used the terminals on the MacBook to run it from the command line, rather than messing with the playgrounds and such. It's such a pleasure using terminals on the Mac, which runs BSD under the hood, the terminals work correctly, vi works correctly, and each can individually be customized, which is a lot more than you can say for Windows 10. Messing with terminal windows and vim last year on that was horrible.

Monday 25 February 2019

Monday - A nice day.

Neighbors dog was barking at me when I went out to my car in the morning. I was talking on the phone with S and she could hear it...

My hip was hurting seriously - I pretty much had to bail on S, because even with several ibuprofen it took me hours to get dressed and ready for the dentist. And when I got there I sat down in the chair and had pain running up through the entire leg. I had to cancel on the spot - I'd thought it was a few minutes for a short crown fitting, but they said they needed an hour or more. Impossible.

So, instead of going home I went to Kaiser Urgent Care, and spent most of the day there. Lots of sitting and standing in the waiting room, with the masses. Only one vending machine, which supposedly would dole out granola bars, but it was broken.

I was there from 10:30am to about 1:30, when they brought me back to see the doctor. It turns out to be, after an exam and some x-rays, probably bursitis, so they gave me some stuff for that and said to take it easy (hah!) and come back in a couple of weeks.

I went home, after 4pm, and crashed.

Book #2, mostly read on the iPhone in the waiting room, was Merchant and Magic (Merchant & Empire #1), by Alma T.C. Boykin. I didn't remember buying it, then realized it must be one of the free monthly books from Amazon Prime.

Anyway, surprisingly well done. Magic is an element, but apparently the author was really interested in the trading practices of the Hanseatic League and the book really reflects what merchants did and experienced in the middle ages, transposed to a mildly different world. The magic is mostly used to ensure against bugs and disease, and to ensure coinage wasn't adulterated, and to seal contract documents...not flaming swords and dragons and evil spells. I might actually read the sequels.

I watched The Incredibles II with the neighbors on teevee. It was pretty good, for a sequel. Unfortunately there was a bit too much male-bashing for me - Mr. Incredible gets sent home to watch the kids while his wife saves the day, for example. Their boy child is the source of many of the problems. It's not as bad as some shows, but it's irritating. The mail villain is a woman, so is that good or bad?

Sunday 24 February 2019

Sunday - Warming up.

Hip hurts like fire, I guess I overdid it in the last couple of days. Spent most of the day laying down on my left side - it hurts to sit, and I can't stand all day.

I did a bit of shopping in town with S. I still haven't tried baking potato's in the convection mode in the oven..

S is trying to install some software, so I'll stop by her place on Monday, tomorrow, before going to the dentist and see if I can do it.

Picture of the Week

water tank & fence shadow

Interesting shadow of the fence top rail making
an curve on the round side of the water tank.

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