A commitment to innovation and sustainability

Looking at “event” listings for my area and it’s depressing. I feel like an alien. And it seems like it’s only getting worse, not better. There seems to be an increasing amount of things that are not what I want, and fewer of what I would want. We should live in a world where there’s…

Failing hard drive. Need to rescue system. The hard drive in my home server system – a somewhat older Dell Optiplex 7010 which is a good, reliable box – started giving SMART errors which usually indicates impending drive failure. My initial reaction is always to boot the system from a rescue disk. Nowadays rescue disks…

Years ago my Dad taught me how to tie a the one type of most useful knot. If you only know how to tie one type of knot other than a standard overhand knot this is the one because it enables you to bind things together very tightly. It allows you to pull the string…

Somehow the permissions on my Windows home directory got messed up so I decided to write a script to fix them.  I am not 100% sure if these are the correct permissions or not.  I used another Windows machine as a reference but my investigation into what the default permissions are supposed to be was…

Just set up the latest Lubuntu 17.10 on an older Thinkpad X301 laptop that I keep as a backup system and wow!  Lubuntu is really excellent!  Even though this Thinkpad is pretty old Lubuntu runs great on it. Lubunutu has a great interface that is very user-friendly. I highly recommend it if you want a…

Found an interesting article today about the background on Arizona’s decision to opt out of the Uniform Time Act in 1968. As I’ve written over the past months, I am really loving the fact that I did not change my clocks from Daylight Savings Time back in November. I have been able to keep my…

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At this end of 2017 the situation for humanity on Earth is grim. Over past decades again and again humanity has witnessed one sad turning point after another as humanity continues its plummet towards catastrophe. Many of these turning points are ecological, biological, or environmental in nature as species die off, habitats disappear, environments are…

This is a backup script I created in Python which uses the eminent rsync utility to perform the actual backup operation.  This script addresses a few things that are lacking from rsync’s options that I really want: One is the ability to specify in one single config file which paths (directories and/or files) to backup…

The early generals, ranchers, and governors of California were Spanish. During that time there were indigenous tribes of native Americans living in California. But California was never Mexican. Yes California was a territory under Mexico, but Mexico was a Spanish territory and the people who controlled it were Spanish. They were not “Mexican”. These guys…