Pleasant Weather

Been cool and rainy the last day or so, a nice break from the 95* days and humid nights we were having.

I'll only mention Mr. Epstein's passing in passing. He was a scumbag in this life, and will be judged by a much higher authority than I.

So life goes on, and there's a touch of Fall in the air.

Small Victories

The little Zotac "Z-BOX" PC running the weewx software has been running rock-solid for over a week now. Even with the console located down in the basement, my Davis Vantage Pro2 has been reading 96% or better Received Signal Strength on the 900 MHz radio link. Granted it's only a packet radio burst, and it's Spread Spectrum, but considering it's 100% solar-powered, and about 100' away, and it runs something like a One Milliwatt transmitter, I'm impressed.

Success #2 is that I got "Shockwave Flash" up and running as a Firefox plug-in. Since Adobe is discontinuing support as of December 31 2020, most Linux distributions no longer include it. I'm not sure what kind of Open Source ,if any, replacements are around for it, and Adobe is "Strongly Encouraging" web designers and other developers to stop using it. Maybe they'll open the code up like other companies of orphan products have done, but since it's Adobe, I doubt it.

Then I hung some of the local metal art we bought at the Larimer County Fair on Sunday while the wife was at the Doctor's today.

Yesterday I "officially" sited where the two wood posts are going to be planted for the antennas, and cleared out the gravel and cut the anti-weed fabric that was under the gravel. I'm going to try and get the holes dug and the posts set this week. That will get the two 4x4x8' posts, and the 5 bags of concrete out of the garage, followed shortly after by the autocoupler enclosure and mounting planks. It's more than just "Pick A Spot And Plant The Post" for this. I made sure that the new holes are at least 30" from any existing set posts because I want "undisturbed earth" for the new poles, and I wanted to move the 20 meter vertical so it was at least a half-wavelength from both the house, and the steel support mast for the wire antenna. I know the house distorts the radiation pattern for the vertical (duhhhh!), and I'm sure the metal mast for the wire antenna will have some effect, but it's what I have to work with.

The important thing right now is to get the doggone posts in the ground, and get the antennas transferred to them. Winter will be here faster than I know, and I don't want to get caught flat-footed like I did last year.

A Day at the Larimer County Fair

We had a blast.

The Little Guy had fun sitting on some of the tractors, going to the petting zoo, watching "Twiggy The Water Skiing Squirrel", going on some rides, playing in the bounce houses, watching the "Extreme Stunt Dogs" show, going down a BIG slide, and lots of other things.

The pix are from my wife's cell-phone because, as you just guessed, I FORGOT my camera.....again!

Most of the tractors on display were at the Greeley Farm Show a couple of weeks ago, and signs for the "Longs Peak Tractor Club" were on display.

The smoke in the background is from one of the half-dozen or more BBQ/Grilled food vendors that were there.

Here he is checking out the newest in ATV's.

He *might* grow into it....

And since there's a carnival, gotta go on some rides...

Not sure who enjoyed the slide more, TLG or Gramma.

Bouncy, bouncy, bouncy!

The Larimer County Sheriff's Department had their "Mounted Police" out, and TLG even got to pet a horse, which he had to be coaxed to do, but then laughed.

One of the things that really caught his eye, and he wanted to do but he's still too small, was a pedal-powered tractor pull. The kids would pedal like crazy, and as the little tractors dragged the sled along, the weight would move forward, making it harder and harder to pull the sled. ONE kid did a "Full Pull", and the crowd went crazy. Pretty cute to see a kid-sixed pulling sled connected to a small John Deere pedal tractor!

And there was live music with local bands. I'd never heard a country version of the BeeGees "Stayin' Alive" before, but they played it extremely well, along with other "countrified" songs, including one by Steely Dan, but I can't remember which song they played.

Oh, and country versions of Foo Fighters, Guns 'N Roses ( ! ) and several other songs I've heard on the radio, but don't know the name of the group.

Yes, food was everywhere! The winner of the fried food category (for me.....) was the Deep Fried Oreo Cookies.

No, I didn't try one. Deep fried foods and I don't play nice, so I wimped out and had a gyro salad from Kosta's, a Fort Collins favorite.

And on our way in to the fairgrounds, we signed the "Recall Jared Polis" and the "US citizens ONLY allowed to vote" petitions. The petion people were still at their posts as we left, and every single person they asked to sign said either "Sure!", "You Bet!", or "HELL YES!!", which pretty much describes how people think about Emperor Polis outside of the Big City/Elite-Only areas.

Even my wife busted up at the guy who said "HELL YES!!".

And we bought some local hang-on-the-wall 'metal art', and a few other little items from local "artisans". We'd much rather keep our money in the community for stuff like this than buy some 'Chinesium' junk from Amazon or eBay.

So all-in-all, we had a wonderful day at the fair, had some good food, saw some cool stuff, and TLG conked out *completely* on the drive home.

Headin' Out to the Larimer County Fair on Sunday

I haven't been to a "County Fair" since I was knee-high to a married grasshopper. Well, maybe a couple, but I swear I went to see the Tractor Pulls.

And yep, we're taking The Little Guy.

The Larimer County Fair is held in the same complex as the Budweiser Events Center, known around here as "The Ranch". It's in the complex where the local radio club has their yearly Hamfest/Swapmeet, so I know the shortcut to avoid getting off at Route 34, and having to go through those $$@@##!! traffic circles immediately off I-25.

In the old days they'd have called it "County Fairgrounds", but these days it's the "Larimer County Events Center".

Oh, well.....

And being that we're going on Sunday, I'm hoping it's not too crazy-crowded.

We'll just be doing the free stuff, not going to the carnival or the rodeo, and I'm sure we'll get to try some County Fair food!

"Once Upon A Time In Hollywood".....

Well the wife and I had a nice little outing today to go see a movie, Quentin Tarantino's latest.

I don't write movie reviews unless it's about a movie I enjoyed, and this one is a good one.

It's well crafted, well cast, beautifully filmed, and has a great late 1960's soundtrack.

It basically concerns the lives of two buddies, an aging actor western/cowboy actor played by Leonardo DiCaprio, and his best friend and stunt double, played by Brad Pitt, and what happened on the night of the Tate-LaBianca murders.

It runs a bit long, but not quite a 'bladder buster'.

If you enjoy Tarantino movies, this one is a must see.

Up and Running Solid.....For Now.....

Geez...I used to be soooo good at this stuff.

Anyway......The replacement wireless adapter is running rock-solid, the weewx software is pretty much configured the way I want after going through a few oopsies, and I cleared up a communications issue between the little PC running the software, and the Davis Instruments console. Turns out the "Archive Interval" has to be the same in the software and the console, or you get gaps in the plots that make them look pretty strange.

And after running it for a few days testing, tuning, and tweaking (the software, not me) it, I enabled the section in the "wwewx.conf" file to send the data to the Weather Underground website. I used to send it to the Citizen Weather Observer Program (CWOP), but that's when I had the station connected to the APRS network back in Long Beach. Since I'm "antenna poor" here, I'll just send it to the Interwebz for now. I can always enable the section that sends the data to the CWOP, but I'll probably have to set up a new account, as my callsign and location have changed from when I last had a wx station online.

Since I'd really like to get the console for the weather station back up here so it's viewable without running down to the basement, I'll have to clear an area near the wife's PC to set things up.

GROAN.....This Is Getting Irksome.....

The brand-new Netgear "Nighthawk" WiFi adapter I bought last week just went casters-up.

The used one for this computer arrived this morning, installed easily, and gives me the full 250+MB download speeds I get with an Ethernet connection.

The one I bought a year or so ago for the wife's PC is also working A-OK. I tried both of them on the weather server and it popped right back up on the WLAN, and the one from the weather server is dead as doornail on this PC. No blinky lights, and it's stone cold while these normally run warm-to-the-touch.

Time to box it up and drag it back to Best Buy......

Hello?....This Thing Working? Can Ya Hear Me In The Back?

Well, we're up and running on the hot-rod PC from Long Beach with the fresh installation of Kubuntu 19.04.

And I'm slooowly migrating all the data I've accumulated on the laptop in the last year and a half from the laptop to here.

Now that I have a running, apparently stable, system, I reconnected the other drive in here, and now I have all my music back, so I can update the music on the memory stick I use in the Jeep.

Busted out my last brand-new keyboard ( a "das keyboard" from Newegg), and had to run out to Best Buy and get another mouse and a cheap set of speakers.

I still have the IBM Model M "clicky" keyboard I was using in Long Beach, and as soon as I get that one scrubbed up, I'll swap out this keyboard with that one.

And even though the laptop is a YUUGE one, it still has a smaller footprint than a full size 'desktop' PC with a 24" monitor sitting on top of it. I just might buy a "tower" case  to put this hardware in, and that could sit on the floor next to or under the desk here in the sunroom, freeing up some very valuable real estate on the desk here.

But that's a project for another day. Right now I still have to make sure I can get back into all the websites I need logins for.

Murphy Shooed Out, Weather Station On-Line, New Linux Distro for Me

OK, now where was I........

The whole thing with Murphy starts with the weather station. Since I want to put it on-line, I need to use the Davis "WeatherLink" data logger/com port. The one that was plugged in to my old system console was incompatible with the new console that came with the new weather station. I'd read some rumblings about this on some of the weather forums, but didn't give it much thought until I plugged the old data logger into the new console, and it displayed an "Incompatible Device Attached" warning. Sigh....went out shopping for one, found an 'open box' special on eBay for a great price, got it, plugged it in, and all is happy.

The software I'd been using to collect, display, and archive is still available, but it's not supported very well any longer, some of the specialized graphics libraries he used are difficult to find, and in general, the software is withering away.

After searching for a while, I settled on a package called "weewx", written entirely in Python, great "customizability" for adding things, and well supported. So I dusted off one of the little Zotac "Z-Box" mini-computers I had dedicated to this project, and proceeded to install the newest, latest, and greatest, version of OpenSUSE on it.

I couldn't get it to run right........and I've been using the various versions of SuSE since 1990something. This is also the same distribution I attempted to install numerous times since we arrived here on the hot rod desktop PC I was using way back in Long Beach.

Hmm....wonder what changed? I wasn't sure if it was a hardware problem on the desktop, but when two other PC's had problems with it, I starting thinking it was time to jump ship and find a new distro.

After going to Distrowatch and seeing what's out there these days, I settled on the Kubuntu distribution. I've used Kubuntu (Ubuntu with the KDE desktop environment) before, and liked it. I prefer the KDE desktop over the Gnome desktop for a variety of reasons, and it's nice to have your distribution 'built' from the start with whatever once you like.

Well, all three of the PC's are now happily running Kubuntu, after chasing my tail for a couple of weeks trying get OpenSUSE to run properly.

One of the rabbit-holes I fell into concerns getting the little PC on the network. Since I pretty much can't run Ethernet cable(s) willy-nilly here like I could in Long Beach, I'm stuck using wireless. For this PC, connection speed isn't critical as it'll never be downloading or streaming huge chunks of data, and the uploads it makes are HTML pages to maybe a handful of visitors. Not exactly a bandwidth hog! Well......I have this Linkys USB wireless dongle, and it should just plug in and run, right? WRONG.....it's a "Windows ONLY" device, and drivers don't exist for it. Turns out this particular device can be made to work, but it's a PITA, and after several days of frustration trying to make it work, I threw in the towel and drove over to Best Buy to get a USB WiFi adapter that was "MacOS Compatible". Since MacOS went to a Unix-based core, if it "Works With A Mac", it'll work with Linux. It still required a driver download, but that was painless compared to my attempts at trying to get the other one to work. And it's a "Dual Band" device, meaning I can use the 5GHz portion of our modem/wireless router, which supports the "n" standard of the 802.11 WiFi spec, meaning it can really pump data through. Even though I don't need it for this PC, it was available, it works, and we already have one for my wife's PC. It works so well, in fact, that I just bought another one today for the hot-rod desktop that will be coming back up here and relieving this laptop of duty.

Here's a screenshot of the server down in the basement as seen over our network on this laptop.

Works a treat, the little mini-pc only draws 10 Watts, and since it's fanless and has a solid-state drive ("SSD"), it's dead silent.

It's still limited to our internal LAN here until I get the router configured, the firewall on the little PC configured, and figure out some kind of 'Dynamic DNS' arrangement set up so it will be reachable by name from outside.

So that's why the Supra isn't finished, the antenna posts aren't set yet, and the big Yaesu is still in the OR. I get sidetracked too easily at times!

Rutger Hauer Passes......

Great actor, and he'll be missed.

Fun Day, Murphy Visits, Good Food

The wife and I took our Little Guy to the Greeley Old Time Farm Show today, and we had a blast. We drove up to The Kids' new digs in Laporte, checked their new place out now that the move-in-mess has been dispatched, saw The Dogs; Diamond, Coco, and Obie, the three we had back in Long Beach before The Kids moved out here and brought them, and picked up The Little Guy to head out for the day.

Photo courtesy of VisitGreeley.org

 
On the way there, Murphy paid his first call, distracting me as we left, and leaving the GPS unit on the counter. No problem! It's in Greeley right off Rte 43, East of town, at a YUUGE RV campground that's on both sides of the road, and it's on the South side. How hard can that be?

Uhhhh......well......

I finally got it hammered in to my Local Wetware Database, that "Crossroads Blvd" is NOT "Rte 34". For some reason, I got off I-25 at the Crossroads, instead of going a mile or so further South, and getting off at the correct exit.

Long story short, the GPS "guidance" (note the lower case "g" and quotes...) took us about 30 minutes out of the Best Way from where we were, but we made it there.

And it was great! An astounding collection of tractors from the 1920's up to the 1970's, all in pristine, operating condition, with friendly owners willing to talk your ear off about them. I saw names I remembered from childhood, and learned some new ones. We missed the Really Cool Stuff that happened on Saturday, like most of the demonstrations, but we're definitely going back next year. The 1800's operating sawmill was down due to a warped blade (yep, there's a place in Montana that still rebuilds those blades!), but the 1840's wood-framed Drill Rig was set up, and I got to learn a new type of drilling: "Percussion Drilling" vs modern "Rotary Drilling" ( cue up the Howard Hughes footage..). This rig "just" picked up a specialized piece of pipe (the "Chisel"), and dropped it down over, and over, and over again at several hits per minute. Depending on the soil, they could go up to 300' deep, many times deeper than a hand-dug, stone-lined well.

And the only Hit-and-Miss engine  still there was out of commission with some kind of gremlin. One of my best friends in high-school was really into these, and they're a riot to see in operation.

And The Little Guy got sit in the seat of a 1920's Farmall "Cub", that probably looks better today than when it rolled out of the factory, and is still in use! It's the same little "Cub" that was pulling a wagon with 4 car-type bench seats in it, loaded with people.

Just incredibly neat

Well, wow, Jim, that's really cool, but where are the pictures?

Murphy had me distracted enough before we left that I also forgot the camera bag on the kitchen counter.........I just don't function very well at 0830 without coffee!

And my cellphone was in the charger.

And for some reason, my sweet little wife, who's normally snapping like crazy with her phone whenever TLG is around, didn't take any pictures today......

Oh, well.........Murphy again, I guess!

So we stopped at Freddy's Frozen Custard and Steakburgers on the way home, and other than the place being more crowded than I'd ever seen, we had a pleasant lunch. Freddy's is pretty good, and is the first "Good" burger place we found out here. Great fries, very good frozen custard, shakes, and malts, and great burgers. Probably a Good Thing it's all the way on the other side of town, or my diet could be in jeopardy!

More about Murphy later. I'm bushed......