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December 06, 2021

   We burn wood at a fairly high rate now that the temperatures are cold and we have so much wood available.  This pile should last the winter, but I think I will need to get a second pile started in early spring if I want to have dry wood for the entire summer.

December 05, 2021

Morning Twilight

Morning Twilight

My experience getting my gallery script working with Vue.js made me decide to get back to work on updating my gallery scripts. I am not going to use Vue.js for the actual implementation as it is meant for a complete solution and I need the gallery to be a component that can drop in other sites.

Today I finished getting full functionality to the gallery browsing. I have routes working as well so locations from the gallery can be copied/pasted. Templates are fully implemented so the layout of the gallery can be customized. Because it was easy, I even added image search. 

With the ability to view a gallery setup the next step will be to port the existing gallery.  There is a lot of work to make that happen.  The photo gallery is over 16 years old and the sources of the pictures in it started off fairly random.  I didn't switch to full-size images for galleries until much latter so the first several years of photos do not have the initial full-size image.  The new gallery scripts uses this as their base.

December 01, 2021

Happy December!

Alien Humidifier

Alien Humidifier

   It is December but we still haven't had any accumulating snow.  It is been too warm for snow and we have been getting rain instead.  
   With the lower temperatures have come the need to heat my basement work area.  However, the humidity was just over 20% and my sinuses were protesting.  Last year I tried to humidify my work area but the small humidifier I used wasn't nearly large enough for the task.  So I went in search of a humidifier that could.  One of my requirements was it have a large water reservoir as I didn't want to refill it more than once a day.  I found this odd alien looking device and the specification were exactly what I had in mind.  It claims 800 mL/hour which I was sure was exaggerated, but one of the few devices that actually listed a number.  What sold me on the design was that one places it on a water container.  In this case I'm using a 5 gallon (22 liter) jug.  That beat the capacity of all but a few the of largest devices I saw listed.
   The device had to run continuously for a couple of days to build from 25% to 45%.  The device can consume about 3 gallons (14 liters) a day at full output (about 560 mL/hour).  Now that the humidity is at a reasonable level it only runs periodically.  Also seems I haven't needed to run the space heater either.  So a win-win all around.
 

November 30, 2021

   Picked up another new keyboard.  My last keyboard had a poor design in that the left control key was too shallow.  That meant I would often press it but it didn't register as being pressed.  This, I ended up replacing a lot of paragraphs with "c" rather than copying them.  This new keyboard will have no such issues as is nothing blocking the keys.

November 28, 2021

At work we are looking at project work that requires a single-page-application and Vue.js was mentioned as one of the possible frameworks. I didn’t know anything about Vue.js and decided to learn by creating a quick application with projects parts I already had.

My photo gallery has a long history of attempted rewrites. The last dates from 2020 but I didn’t finish it. It was a combination of PHP and Javascript. The database had been relaid out and the user interface for constructing the gallery was mostly function, and the gallery view was fairly complete. As usual, I got busy with other things and never finished. However, it did leave me a nice template for trying out Vue.js.

I started by exporting the test gallery I had setup to a single JSON object. This was fairly simple as the gallery worked on JSON objects and the back-end was already setup to export JSON. I had to flight with my scripts that created thumbnails and restore the database a couple times because I couldn’t remember how things were setup.

Since the gallery viewing was already functional and styles, I just needed to rewrite the navigation using the Vue.js framework. That went quickly. I spent maybe 10 hours on the project, mostly getting my partly finished scripts running. I was pleased with the results.

I gained sufficient experience with Vue.js I can talk about it for my work project. Will I end up using Vue.js for the future photo gallery of DrQue.net? I don’t think so. It wasn’t meant to be part of a site—it was meant to be the entire site. Still, there are parts of the setup I will likely bring over, like routes. This allows a single page to change the path when navigating to different areas. This is useful for the gallery because one might want to share a link. Since the pages are currently generated dynamically, sharing links works fine. This has always been a problem with my Javascript implementation.

November 27, 2021

Got a letter from my health insurance provider telling me my e-mail address isn’t working. This is partly true. These people love sending me e-mails all the time, and none of them are relevant. Most people would call that SPAM. Now it seems they are upset because they can’t SPAM me and even gave me a number to call so I can get this all straightened out. Well, I don’t want to waste the time of some sitting who has to sit behind a phone all day. Instead, I’ll make a post on my blog no one will read and complain about it.

Dear Big Business,

Just because you provide a service I use and that services requires an e-mail address doesn’t mean you have the right to SPAM me. Giving you people an e-mail address is like inviting a vampire into your house. I think most people would agree it is unprofessional to go into a business and start telling people that work there your life story without being asked. So why would I be any more interested in your companies’ story? I don’t care about your new whatever, sales coming up, or reminders of services you provide. If I give an e-mail address to a business, I just need messages related to business transactions. Period. Now take the marketing guy who says otherwise and run him down the garbage disposal.

Thanks you,

Damn Near Every Customer.