Category: Kentucky Fried Geek

We got a dog…

# We got a dog…
## Sun 12 Feb 2023 08:57:17 AM EST

So, we got a dog. And it’s in the house. And I hate dogs in houses.

It’s been a few days since we brought the dog home. I can’t remember what day it was.

I can’t think of much to say that won’t make me sound like a total ass.

[*sigh*]

So, the other week the Mrs. sends me a message saying that she’s going to visit with an associate of hers to she the pups that the associate has been raising. I think nothing of it because, yeah, ok, associate has pups and is proud of them and has a want and or need to show them off in order to re-home them, yada-yada-yada; we ain’t getting one, she’s just checking them out. I would say I should’ve known better, but, no, I really shouldn’t have–the Mrs. doesn’t typically do anything on a whim, nor does she usually do any of the stereotypical girly things of falling for baby animals, and so on. Well…

So, later that evening when she’s retelling her day, the pups do come up, of course. I’m asked in a kind of cutesy and excited voice if I want to see pictures. Quickly, I say no–because I really don’t care what a mess of pups that I have no connection with looks like. Yeah, well…

After two nights of having to deal with a depressed wife and us rehashing our plans to get a dog later this year, I cave and say we can go ahead and get a pup.

…and now the dog is sitting at my feet, under the kitchen table.

…and I hate having dogs in houses.

[*sigh*]

The plan was–or the *original* plan was–to perform maintenace on the fence dividing ours and our direct neighbor’s property and then construct a fence in the back yard in which to 1.) contain / restrict our kids when we’re outside 2.) keep the pack of mutts our varied neighbors have out of our yard; after the fencework was completed, we’d look for a pup to become the family mutt. The timeline for this was to be hopefully no later than late summer, so that the pup would be able to grow and be prepped for an outdoor life come winter.

Well, that didn’t happen, obviously, as we haven’t even gotten to spring yet. So, we’ve got a pup inside the house, as she’s too young to fend off the other dogs and it’s too cold outside for her.

[*grrr*]

So, we’re hoping to speed up plans on fencework once funds come available. I need to keep those murderous sons-of-bitches out of the yard. Yes, murderous. They killed our cats.

It’s kind of to be expected that a family of cats might need to take some time to adjust when moving–hey, this window is mine, that corner is mine–whatever. Okay, let me back up a second and define the plural family as two in our case. Anyway, the cats had a nice time trying to adjust to our new home and had left many markings and protesting gestures all over the house. I finally saw an end to cleaning up messes about a month or two later, and then; spring came and for whatever reason they started leaving messes for me to clean, again. One day, shortly after cleaning up a fresh mess, I get presented a new one in the exact same spot. That’s it–cats outside for the day. One came back that evening; the other scared us and came back a week later. Regardless, both did come back, and did so unharmed. The one actually began to ask to go out, which wasn’t surprising, as he’d always had an interest in the outdoors and would slip out whenever he’d gotten a chance.

Awesome; these cats are seemingly cool with being indoor/outdoor cats–something I’d loved about the cats I’d had as a child.

Well, unfortanetely, that didn’t turn out. Several weeks later, the one that started asking to be let out regularly disappeared. A week or so later I’d found a part of an animal in the yard, but didn’t connect it to my missing cat as it didn’t resemble my cat.

A month later, I’d let the other cat out–he, too, disappeared. I found him–or most of him–a couple days later in the barn surrounded by dog prints. And no, I don’t feel as though I’m not jumping to conclusions, as I’ve chased the neighbors’ dogs out of my yard and out of my barn ever since we moved in.

Anyway. I need to keep those mongrels out my yard before putting any animals out there.

[In the somewhat near future we also plan to raise a few chicks for egg production; and an interesting little thing happens whence we raise chicks–we’re given permission, per state law, to fire upon dogs that are suspected or guilty of agitating or harming livestock. I’m planning on putting a camera on our coop after we build it, and getting some sort of non-lethal weapon.]

[*sigh*]

So, yeah, we have a dog.

…and it’s in the house.

…and I hate dogs in houses.

…and I can hardly wait to be able to move it outside.

Thanks for reading;

–J

=> ../ Go back to the main site

Weechat, Mastodon and Memories

# Weechat, Mastodon and Memories
## Fri 03 Feb 2023 09:32:56 AM EST

So, I made just a quick note last night in case I forgot to write something this morning about the ways in which I wasted time yesterday. Guess I’ll touch on that now;

# Fighting Weechat:

I’m not sure what I was doing or thinking, but I realized that it was possible for me to try and use Weechat outside of MobaXterm on my Windows machine, as MobaXterm is providing Cygwin. […and I just remembered what brought me to Weechat; the other day I was playing with ZNC, and moved on to changing my laptop’s Weechat settings to reflect that.]

Anyway, that was an awesomely frustrating adventure; I discovered that I had to make a number of changes to my Weechat configuration in order to get things to display at least partially correct–the customizations I’d made to make it look all nice and pretty on my Linux machines didn’t translate well on the win-box. At any rate, I finally have something usuable. Unfortunately, I discovered that I can’t run it through a Windows terminal and then decide to launch MobaXterm without killing it; I can, however, launch MobaXterm and then start an instance of Weechat in Windows Terminal or through the regular ol’ command prompt.

Honestly, though, I’m better off visually firing up an instance of Weechat on one of the other machines.

# Mastodon:

So, while I was playing with Weechat my eyes caught a glimpse of a random tweet about Twitter killing free access to the API. I couldn’t believe it. Okay, yeah, I could. But it upset me; to think that the API was going to become paywalled after having been freely accessible for all the years. Sure, I’m not a programmer or scripter, nor am I any influential person with a need to stay on top and connected to social media; but I am someone that has made use of the API through tools and scripts created by several talented individuals. Something like eight years ago, I had managed the online media accounts for the local emergency management agency–in fact, I had created the presence nearly twenty years ago. [Dear God, has it really been that long? Is the Internet *really* that old?]

Anyway, when Twitter rolled around, I saw a great opportunity for something to be done locally–and I saw that I wasn’t the only one. Some of the first “bots” were sharing information that was important to some–if not many–users of the service; out in California people were able to get information on fires, earthquakes, road hazards and so on–so why not bring that to a sleepy little town in Kentucky? And, it turned out, I was smart in doing so. I gained a small following on twitter–and back then, part of my sell was that people could use it to sign up for SMS alerts from the EM. Sadly, the SMS gateway was eventually shut down, but by then a dozen Twitter clients were around, and even the offical Twitter app worked fairly well. Around that time also came the advancement of Facebook Pages, which initially had “official” hooks to the Twitter API; I was in heaven–two major rising social media platforms with ways to connect and share information with the public at zero cost! [Of course, Facebook began to close off some of those hooks and wall things up–but it was kind of expected, as Facebook had never been as open as Twitter was. And then came Facebook turning their nose up to Google, Twitter, and pretty much everyone that was somehow competing in the social media space.]

…so, to try and bring myself back to the point I think I’m trying to make, I took advantage of the free access to the Twitter API; I created hooks to the EM’s main site and to the EM’s Facebook Page thanks to Twitter’s API. I shared articles on varying disaster and safety topics, posted weather bulletins and alerts; I did my part to try and help make my little part of the world a safer place–and I couldn’t have done it so damned well without my free access to the API.

…and what pisses me off, to be quite frank, is that despite the (questionably) necessary reaping of bots from Twitter, I thought that what I just expressed–that safe hometown information sharing–was part of Musk’s vision of Twitter. And now, I learn that, no, money is unfortunately more important.

*sigh*

At the same time that I was messing around with Weechat, I was listening to The Best Podcast in the Universe(tm) a.k.a. No Agenda. Still internally fuming at the thoughts of my future inability to do what I’d once done–which doesn’t really matter to me, as I don’t do it anymore, but still–I hear Adam plug NoAgendaSocial.com, and I figure, yeah, sure, let’s check out Mastodon. See, while I have unplugged myself from the Internet for several years, now–at least compared to the ways in which I had been active–I knew of Mastodon, and knew that while the servers are individual and decentralized, they are also still connected. I knew that I could claim one server as a home, and explore the universe from there. I’d just not taken the time to check it out.

…so, I’m now on Mastadon and presently residing at the NAS server.

I just wonder if I’ll be able to get the same level of information I once had via Twitter in this universe. Already, I can see that it’s very splintered and untamed–untamed depending upon which server you call home. I don’t think that I will be sharing some of the things I once shared on Twitter over here–at least not yet. So, I guess my previously stated ideas of becoming more active with my personally served stuff may come to fruition.

# Emergency Management:

Okay, since I’d mentioned it… Twitter had killed the EM’s account I don’t know how long ago. I remember hearing that there had been a purge or two of dormant accounts years ago; apparently @harrisonema fell victim to one of those purges. I never saved any of the tweets–never saw a point in it as the bulk of them were links to HarrisonEMA.com posts or NWS-LMK products. If you’re curious, you can google for a Russian or Czech archive of Twitter and see if you can find @harrisonema; I’ve done it, though I can’t remember who’s Twitter archive I’d used. You can also find HarrisonEMA.com in the Wayback Machine, but it’s archive is very incomplete. At some point I moved away from static HTML and went to WordPress–which 1.) made things a lot easier to manage, and 2.) provided me with access to calling Twitter via various plugins.

…and if you’re really into Internet archaeology, one of the GeoCities archives has the pre- .com version of the site; sorry, I can’t remember which archive has it, nor can I remember the exact username or the location. I think the username was HarrisonEM (if not, add an A); if you need to browse by community, I think it was in Andes-something.

# Nonsensical and Pointless Ramblings:

…yeah, this post is definitely filled with those. Apologies for that. But, if you’re here, hopefully you expected that.

Honestly, I kind of amazed at how much I’ve written. I guess I still have it in me, whatever it is.

Thanks for reading;

–J

=> ../ Go back to the main site

Untitled

# Untitled
## Tue 31 Jan 2023 12:16:22 PM EST

So, I got ZNC up and running, and have it connected to bitlbee. For funsies I loaded Weechat on one computer, Hexchat and Pidgin on another, and then found an IRC client for my phone, and connected them all to the ZNC server. It was kinda cool watching them all scroll the same thing at (nearly) the same time. I guess my next adventure in this particular project will be reconfiguring my Weechat settings on the one computer I was regularly using so that it pulls from ZNC.

Other silly projects I wanna tackle will be trying to get a more consistant look across all of my gemini capsule, and figuring out a way of easily getting my gem posts into wordpress. I may just see about killing off WordPress altogether, honestly, if I can find an easy way of hooking Instagram into gemini, though. lol. Who knows, maybe it’s possible. I just want a way of somehow grabbing my Instagram posts, saving a copy of the pic locally, and then serving it back up. I dunno. We’ll see.

Thanks for reading;

–J

=> ../ Go back to the main site

Untitled

# Untitled
## Tue 31 Jan 2023 09:24:06 AM EST

I’m just sitting here with a little bit of extra time to write, since I’m waiting on this poor little computer to do some stuff, so I figured I’d try to write a little. What I’ve got the thing doing is generating my personal site files and trying to compile ZNC.

Generating site files:

…so, I think somewhere in this jumbled mess of a journal I’d mentioned that I discovered a little program/set-o-scripts dubbed “gemtexter”; I like it. I mean, it suits it’s purpose quite nicely; the issue is me and what I want–or think I want. Anyway, what gemtexter does is takes your latest gemlog post, adds it to an index in the reverse chron order we’ve gotten accustomed to for blogs, then goes through and creates html files for each existing gmi file. The problem–it goes through each file and processes it anew. If I were a smarter man I’d tinker with it and figure out how to tell it to only look at modified files, so that it doesn’t rewrite every file. But I ain’t got those smarts–at least not yet.

…and, well, since my hard-headed dumbass wants to have everything I’ve ever written included here… yeah; takes a little bit do do all that.

Compiling ZNC:

I dunno why I think I need it, but I want to be able to keep an active connection to IRCs and chat services and be able to log in at any time from anywhere without missing a thing. Honestly, it doesn’t really matter, as I’m not active anywhere, nor do I have anyone out there that I keep in touch with. Still, I like the idea.

So, the plan is, I can have ZNC running and connected to a couple of IRC channels to monitor (weather and news, exciting stuff, eh?) and connect it up to the bitlbee server I’ve got running (for all the instant messages I might miss from an empty friends list) and boom! I can login and switch computers and clients at any time and never miss a thing.

Poor little computer:

Yeah… I’ve got all this running on an old netbook that has seen better days. A million years ago I’d gotten an Acer Aspire zg5; nice little computer–I like it a lot, honestly. Or, I did, anyway. Now?

*sigh*

At some point during it’s life, I’d handed it down to the kids, along with another matching zg5, and… I’m not entirely sure if the HDD is the factory one, anymore–though it may be; regardless, it isn’t running XP these days. The keyboard is out of another model of the Aspire line–fully compatible, though the ribbon was routed differently. And–the painful part–the screen is busted. I could easily replace it, I know, but it’s once of those things where I can think of a million and a half other things that I should waste money on first. It just hurts to see it sitting there, broken and unloved. So, I put it into service a little bit ago to act as a simple little webserver. It works, I guess; definetely for my needs–I mean, I don’t need much of anything for those tasks since it’s just me tinkering and serving up pages and files for myself to view. I dunno.

Oh, hey, it looks like noth those jobs have finally finished, so I guess I’ll move on to trying to figure out how to get ZNC running.

Thanks for reading;

–J

=> ../ Go back to the main site

X Forwarding

# X Forwarding
## Tue 31 Jan 2023 08:31:02 AM EST

…a note for myself, mainly, as I keep having to look this up and haven’t seemed to commit it to memory…

For X forwarding, assuming X and SSH have already been installed, of course;

Edit sshd_config
“`
sudo nano /etc/ssh/sshd_config
“`
Uncomment / set the following;
“`
X11Forwarding yes
X11DisplayOffset 10
X11UseLocalhost no
“`
Restart SSH daemon
“`
sudo systemctl restart sshd
“`
…make necessary changes to commands if using different distros with different daemon/init handlers, of course.

Thanks for reading;

–J

=> ../ Go back to the main site

Untitled

# Untitled
## Fri 20 Jan 2023 05:46:10 PM EST

Just a quick note for the heck of it. I can’t think of anything terribly important to write about at this time, other than I’ve been continuin to tinker with the computers at home.

In family news, not much to report, either. The little ones have been slowly getting weened off of video games; they’d unfortunately discovered the fun of being competitive which was creating numerous fights. I’m hoping that I can bring the gaming back into their lives sometime soon, as it was fun watching them play–especially the littlest one and his enjoyment of the 8-bit world of gaming from mine and his mother’s childhood.

Speaking of gaming, the Mrs. has introduced me to the Age of Empires franchise, and we’ve been playing LAN games frequently. The latest version she’s had us fixed on is AoE-III War Chiefs.

I dunno. Not much else I can think of.

Thanks for reading;

–J

=> ../ Go back to the main site

Untitled

# Untitled
## Wed 18 Jan 2023 03:52:25 PM EST

I had a quick little epiphany a few moments ago; part of my problem is that I have too many computers.

Thing is, that’s exactly how I want it. I wants all teh pee-cees.

…but, yeah, no, I relized that part of my problems are that I have so many things available to me at the moment–and yet, not a lot, really–and I have no real idea of what I want to do with all of them, and in what order I should attack things.

Years ago, when I was more limited, it was easier to sort out what I wanted to accomplish, and what my boundaries were. Now, I’m working with more resources, and have fewer boundaries–especially considering a lot of the little things I want to play with and explore aren’t that resource heavy.

…guess I really need to stop and organize my thoughts.

blah.

Thanks for reading;

–J

=> ../ Go back to the main site

Untitled

# Untitled
## Sun 15 Jan 2023 06:48:35 PM EST

Just thought I’d pop in for a quick little post, since I’m wanting to try and take this seriously. I’ve got several ideas of things that I could try to write about, but I’m honestly not feeling the writing vibe at this moment–I’d rather toy around with a few more of my little pet projects instead. (The pet projects, oddly enough, are a few of the things I would like to write about when I’m actually feeling it)

I dunno. Until the writing bug bites me, I’ll think I’ll leave it at that for now.

Thanks for reading;

–J

=> ../ Go back to the main site