science, technology

Meanderings about science, technology, computers, networking, space, energy … anything techno (except techno music).

Google Console and searches

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It occurred to me a while back that my websites were not searchable in Google, Ask.com, Yahoo!, Duckduckgo, or anything else.  Why?  Didn’t people search for seaweed soup or ESL classes?  Weren’t people interested?  I was hurt!  Not really, but it was weird nonetheless.  Back in the day, when static HTML pages ruled and students logged in, my website was searched for many times.

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Way Back Machine

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Has anyone heard of the Way Back Machine?  It’s a set of archives from websites.  Mine is in there.  If you ever want to go way back in time, this is a way back to what my website used to look like.

allansplace.ca

You can even go back to how it started as allaninkorea.net.

allaninkorea.net

It takes a few moments to get the archives to come up as this is … well … archived.  Interesting nonetheless.

dismantlement of Alpine Sprite

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I began this afternoon the dismantlement of the Alpine Sprite 400 caravan (camper trailer).  I didn’t use it last year and haven’t this year either.  Its contents; two 6-volt deep-cycle batteries (12-volt in series), 140-Watt solar panel, 2500-Watt inverter, 3-stage charger, fresh- & gray-water tanks, water pumps (pressure & draw), 16,000 BTU propane forced-air furnace, on-demand propane water heater, 1000-Watt microwave oven, stereo & speakers, two propane tanks with auto-switch-over regulator, sink, faucet, shower, LED lighting, and a few other things; will all be used somewhere else.  The shell of the trailer will be up for grabs.

  8/9/2018  3:38 PM     96051610 Sprite Alpine 1965 20180809_153453 dismantlement.mp4
  8/9/2018  3:41 PM      3365771 Sprite Alpine 1965 20180809_154127 dismantlement.jpg
  8/9/2018  4:23 PM      4155610 Sprite Alpine 1965 20180809_162349 dismantlement.jpg
  8/9/2018  4:23 PM      4500010 Sprite Alpine 1965 20180809_162353 dismantlement.jpg
  8/9/2018  4:23 PM      4180302 Sprite Alpine 1965 20180809_162356 dismantlement.jpg
  8/9/2018  4:24 PM      5571340 Sprite Alpine 1965 20180809_162359 dismantlement.jpg
  8/9/2018  4:24 PM      5313196 Sprite Alpine 1965 20180809_162403 dismantlement.jpg
  8/9/2018  4:35 PM      3636103 Sprite Alpine 1965 20180809_163557 dismantlement.jpg

the exciting world of new old printers

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I found a new printer – at a yard sale – for twenty bucks.  Yes, I know, it’s not new.  It has the same printing mechanism as my old HP Photosmart C5150 except that it has no scanner and it has different letters – D7260.  Not sure if it’s the D or the higher value numbers that make it print in all colours, but this one does.  As Aaron would say, “How dope is that!?”  It print didn’t when I tried it at the yard sale [error – error – does not compute], but I was confident I could repair it, and I did.

What about the old one?  (A freebie from work a hundred years ago!)  Try as I might, I could not get the C5150 to print blue.  The weird thing is that there are two blues in it (actually, cyan) – a regular blue and a light blue – but neither of them printed.  If it were just one type of blue, I’d say the ink suction tube was faulty or the print head was damaged, but the two blues use different ink streams – cartridges, tubes, portions of the print head.  So what gives?  Short of replacing the print head (which I did for the HP Offiejet 7610, a wide-format printer), I can find no way of getting the blue to print.

Doesn’t matter now.  The D7260 prints nicely.   Happy happy joy joy.

Holy heck.  In writing this Ongoing Letter entry, I nodded off like three times.  If I find it lacking adequate excitement so as to fall asleep this many times, I can imagine how you might feel reading it.  I think it also has something to do with the heat.  It’s hotter than Arizona asphalt out there, and it’s making me dopey.

spring begins, as do corrections

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It’s sunny, warm, pleasant.  Yesterday I met TB & RH (my bamboo research group) to talk about our submission to the ASET Capstone project.  We all wrote blurbs about ourselves, and TB will organize it all and submit it.  I trust Ty to catch all the goofinesses such as font sizes, placement of images, etc.

I worked on the Architectural class group project.  CE, a teammate in the Stan’s Stuff – Auto Parts and More, said he could meet up and work on it with me.  It’d be a good portfolio item.  It turns out he was too busy with flooding in his house and preparing to travel.  Se, the other teammate, rarely shows up for any length of time to help.  Very helpful when he does, but it’s rather seldom.  So I’ll continue to work until it’s absolutely time to wipe the drives on the computer.  Work on what?  Corrections to assignments.  All those red marks on assigments – I’ve paid for them.  I paid money to have the instructor put red all over my paper.  I’ll be damned if I’m gonna let that go to waste.

All students’ computer drives need to be wiped at the end of this course.  They have software on them that’s only licensed to the college.  We get a deposit back when we allow this.  I forget how much – like a hundred dollars or so.  No wipe, no deposit back.  So, we’re all told repeatedly to back up our stuff and save anything we want to save on another drive.  I’ve got my server (the one you’re reading this on) to store my stuff.

In case you’re wondering, I rarely use real names here on the ongoing letter.  I don’t imagine people would want their names, faces, etc. online.  So, rather than names, I use initials.  Are they real?  Who knows!  Ha!

perspective

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As I’m finishing my education and getting ready to search for jobs, I know there is so much for me to learn still.  We all come out of our course thinking that we’re qualified, have got the knowledge, will run out and do great things.

I saw a video tour of New York City from 1911 on YouTube.  They had traffic management with electric, petroleum, and horse powered vehicles intermingling.  They had trains being driven several storeys over the street, buildings so high that an engineer these days would take seemingly forever to design and build.  They had so much already back then.  We think we’re doing something new – and we probably are – but we may be forgetting that these things have all been done without the technological help that we have today.  Damn amazing.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aohXOpKtns0   Keeps it all in perspective.