category: Projects

Toggling the Touchpad in OpenBSD on Lenovo X250 to Address Palm Rejection Issues. So, one of the challenges I encountered with OpenBSD is that the touchpad does a really bad job of rejecting motion from my palm. While writing in Emacs I’d often find my mouse jumping around and my writing not where I expected it to be. After some digging around I found a solution: How to setup OpenBSD in i3 to toggle touchpad Create a file in ~/home/bin/ called “toggle-touchpad.sh” ...

My Wife Always Wanted to Marry a Pilot A Bit of Background I became interested in drones in the spring of 2021. My wife was preparing to retire from her teaching gig and considering a new career in real estate. After 15 years in our relatively small town in the mountains of North Georgia, we were planning a move to a little larger town with fewer challenging hills and more conveniences. We were building a new home in our soon-to-be new town. This was, I thought, a great time to explore my interest in drones. After all, I could document the progress of our new home and, if she did go into real estate, I would be positioned to do some of her photography. Win! ...

Updates to Technology Projects I’ve had several technology projects running for a while now and thought it was time for an update. Nextcloud, OnlyOffice, and the Like Back in February I set up a Nextcloud server and incorporated OnlyOffice. The concepts are pretty cool, but I have abandoned both of those projects. In all honesty, having completed my dissertation, I write so little that requires a word processor that I’ve not yet found a need for OnlyOffice. And when I do need such services, I have LibreOffice available on all of my computers. MS Office is on its way out since I no longer need to power of a word processor for my writing and my licenses are beginning to expire. (I still have a couple of licenses that will be expiring soon.) ...

Nextcloud, OnlyOffice, and the Like Every once in a while I get this notion that I need to move my data off of sites like Dropbox, OneDrive, and so forth. When I do, I start playing around with self-hosted services such as NextCloud, OwnCloud, and so forth. I’m currently in one of those cycles and have been playing around a good bit with Nextcloud. I’ve even coupled it with OnlyOffice so that I can edit documents in the ...

Moving to a Self-Hosted Bookmarking Service There’s a hint that bookmarks are going away. Services like Delicious that used to provide great web-based book marking services have closed down. In their place are the likes of Instapaper and Pinboard and the like that break stuff into different types. Instapaper to store sites that you want to read later, Pinterest for images you like, and so forth. That doesn’t work well for me, though. I want everything in one place. That’s also why I decided to try a ...

Learning the Challenges of Jekyll So a few days ago I decided to use Jekyll to generate a static website to host all – well, most – of my writing. Jekyll, I’ve learned, is a different beast from most applications used for these purposes. I’ve found several themes that I really liked, but they all had some sort of quirks that made them less easy to use. I’m finding, though, that “easy to use” and “Jekyll” probably don’t belong in the same sentence. Each of the themes I’ve looked at require slightly different structures, use categories differently, and just generally appear rather finicky. I’m sure for people that have played with it for quite a while, these quirks are just part of the landscape. For people like me, who haven’t really spent much time with the software, it’s a challenge. ...

Getting Started with Ham Radio One of the goals on my bucket list has been getting my Ham radio license. I don’t remember, really, when it first landed on my list. I was a teen and it most likely was the result of some movie I saw or book I read that extolled the use and excitement of reaching out to the world through radio. The desire wasn’t helped, I’m sure, by having an uncle that got into it after he retired. ...

Weewx on the Raspberry Pi I’ve always loved gadgets. When the first Raspberry Pis came out a few years ago, I was pretty confident that eventually, I’d get one. About three years ago I decided I wanted to build a media server and the RPI seemed the perfect tool for the job. While it works, it didn’t do all that I had hoped. It wasn’t the device’s fault; the software just didn’t quite match up with my particular use case. So, the device sat idle for a while. 5} ...

Changes in my Weather Station For the past 8 years I’ve managed a personal weather station consisting of a Davis Vantagse Pro and a Windows computer running the excellent Weather Display software. Last December I decided that the inexpensive computer I was running the scripts on may well be coming to its end-of-life and went looking for alternatives. Another goal of this move was to lower my cost of operations. The Jetway computer I was running didn’t use a lot of power, perhaps 25 W, but if I could do better, I would. After all, at 25 watts, that’s about 219 kW or $26.25 annually. With the growth of small computers such as the Raspberry Pi, I knew I could do better. ...

Blogging with Jekyll Over the past nearly 10 years I’ve tried numerous times to maintain a blog. I enjoy writing and figured it would be a good way not only to practice the skill, but to share my thoughts with others. I don’t really care whether anyone reads my work, to be honest; I just want to write. The problem is that, while I don’t care so much if I’m read, I do want to be able to keep my files and refer back to them from time to time – something of a journal (which is what the blog was originally conceived to be). That means that I need the writing in form that is easily saved and retrieved. Another concern has been that I be able to write from essentially any computer, any where. I started, as most folks do, on Blogger, then moved to Wordpress, each time abandoning my work and the platform, as I moved to another. That’s not what I intended. Making the process more difficult is that the writing is stored in a database. This makes retrieval of the raw data difficult, particularly if you’ve forgotten the password, or the database is corrupt, etc. And, to be honest, those platforms are simply more complex than my needs. What I needed was a simple, easy to use platform that allowed me to maintain a file of my work. ...