leviticus.me

thermo

So, I finally broke down at Target and spent the 15  bucks on a thermometer with a corded thermocouple so that I could monitor the internal temperature  of things in the oven. It features a removable cable with a two-conductor phono jack, presumably for the purposes of cleaning it.

It’s a nice little sans-frills unit from a company called Taylor.

We got around to using it the other night on a meat-loaf, only to have it have a weird readout:

Weird Readout

The readout would flicker between ‘LLL’ and the actual temperature as I twisted the connector round and round in the plug. I could get it to stay, but as soon as I turned away from it, it went back to ‘LLL’ – making the alarm feature worthless.

Not that I’ve ever had a problem returning anything to Target, but I wasn’t really ready to put up with the hassle of taking it back – besides, I needed it to work THEN, not two days from then! I said to myself: “I can fix this, I’ve worked several jobs [as an audio technician] fixing just these types of problems!”

So I took it into the office and fired up the soldering iron – I basically assumed that I was going to have to cut the connector off the thermocouple and solder it directly to the PCB. To hell with being able to disconnect it…

Once I got it apart and took a closer look, I began to wonder if the jack was the actual problem… it seemed sturdy enough.

Cable and jack

Partly out of curiosity, partly out of ‘this wire seems extraordinarily loose’, I took the display portion completely out of the housing (BTW – SIX screws to hold the PCB to the housing?! It’s only two square inches!)

So, once flipped over, the problem was annoyingly obvious:

The problem

The caption says “No Solder Here”  Seriously – possibly the most critical solder connection for a thermocouple based thermostat (The connection to the thermocouple) was not even soldered! It hadn’t just broken, it hadn’t cracked, it wasn’t insufficiently soldered – it was never soldered!

So, a few seconds later, it was fixed. And I didn’t have to connect the wire directly onto the PCB – I can still unplug it if necessary.

I wonder if I broke the warranty…

Thermometer Fixed

One of the blogs that I follow is Cool Tools – always a neat resource for items that you may not have heard of. They did a good job of explaining the benefits of using Google apps (even the free edition) for your custom domain’s e-mail needs.

I know this personally, but they did such a good job of breaking it down for the lay-man, I had to re-post it:

Cool Tools: Google Apps Mail.

(FYI, I actually use Google apps for leviticus.me’s mail).

When we first got Axel, we knew we’d now be a part of some class of people that end up at a dog park on the weekends.. turns out we go every day we can!

We found a wonderful off-leash area at the Liane Levetan Park @ Brooks Run. Liane was the first Dekalb CEO, and apparently played a large hand in saving this facility, which as best we can tell used to be a middle school and a few other county facilities, all closed now. Now, there is a [nice] skate park, a huge childrens play area with a massive jungle gym, etc, and in a wooded area in the back, at least a few acres of fenced in happiness for the dogs.

It’s maintained by an organization called ‘Just a Walk in the Park’. They coordinate with volunteers and donors to make the park nicer. Their web site lists details about the park: http://www.jawitp.com/

He thoroughly enjoys it:

Here he is taking on a doberman (dogs really are amazing creatures and shouldn’t be lumped into their stereotype – this was one of the nicest dogs there that day):

Just thought I’d share… if there’s any dog owners in Atlanta looking for a new cool place to come wear your dog out, this is it:

liane levetan park overview w/ addresses

Park outline

You can actually zoom in on it and see the walking path that rings the park – the building next to it is abandoned – no idea what it used to be.

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I was updating my blog with several links to resources around the web that require your attention in the near future (yes, visit the links on my page… it’s the basis of the internet), when I realized I needed to plug my sister’s soap!

http://wherewatercomesdown.etsy.com

It’s actually really good stuff – we have several bars of it, and keep it on the bathroom sinks for hand soap. It smells wonderful, is true artisanal stuff, and feels a lot more cleansing than a lot of other soaps I’ve used.

Go take a look – it’s cool stuff.

One of the common inquiries I’ve been getting since I changed my blogging platform is concerning comments – namely “where are they, and how do I contribute?”

Given the theme that I am using (Pyrmont 2), the comment count is kept at the top of the post (not the best place), along with the categorization and tags, right below the title.

In an effort to make it easier to post comments, I have duplicated that small section (MetaData) at the bottom of the post. (Again, another amazing feature of wordpress – the ability to edit the PHP page templates.

To add a comment, simply click on the comment count, and you’ll be taken to the individual post page (permalink page), and your browser will navigate to the comment section. (The comment section only appears on the individual post pages, so if you came here via a permalink, it’s at the bottom.)

Fill out your comment, and enter your name (or alias you’d prefer), and your e-mail. Your e-mail address is secure, and will never be accessible to anyone. There’s also a check-box below the submit button that will toggle the system to e-mail subsequent comments to the address you entered.

Hope this clears up any confusion!

After this:

and this:

(Don’t move to AMLI, North Briarcliff)

and Axel’s latest hobby of tearing up the floormat/back of the passenger seat in my Civic, it was time for this:

And this:

Yes, I bought a car (a Honda CRV) based upon the requirement that my dog’s (second) crate would fit into it. Axel gets to go everywhere with us, just cause we love him so… and despite more toys in my back seat than at home, he still chose to destroy my car (he had started working on a seat belt as well).

Regardless of the crate requirement, I love it – I’ve always wanted an SUV, and it fits my life right now. I wish we had had it on our trip to Ohio, but it will work perfectly for next time. It’s also nice to have a larger vehicle when Andy and I are out gallivanting on the weekends – who knows when we’ll find that perfect chair, huh Kathy?

Well, I’ve been on the Wordpress platform for a while now, and I’ve posted a few posts. Meanwhile, my old blogspot blog was still up and running, although I’ve imported all that content into the new site.

That’s just another cool feature of Wordpress… you’re able to import your content from a different platform with a few clicks! (comments and all)

Also, the theme control and plugin options make it well worth while. (more on that later)

One issue I’m annoyed with is migrating out of blogger… given the permalink structure at blogger and the inability to edit any real code on blogger, migrating out of a non-custom domain blogger blog can be a little difficult when it comes to permalink redirect.

Given the (low) age of my blog and finite following (not to mention the surprising re-indexing speed of Google), I’m already not worrying about it. (site:viiiwonder.blogspot.com is already returning nothing on Google).

Back to those plugins: One I’m particularly excited about is called WP to Twitter, which automatically posts notifications of new blog posts to twitter on my behalf. In addition to that, there’s also Google Analytics for Wordpress to provide better analytics, without having to add code to each page. There’s a host of other plugins that can make your site do just about anything you want!

Anyways… it’s going well, and stay tuned for more tech, family updates, and kitchen antics (trying to do my own sourdough…)

In a previous post, I demonstrated how to use folder redirection and offline files to automatically sync documents and settings between computers on a network without a domain controller or group policy (along with some other basic networking stuff). In that post, I specifically mentioned redirecting the ‘Application Data’ folder within the user profile path. I have changed my mind about doing this.

Many applications (Firefox and MS Outlook for me) have problems when using a network redirected Application Data folder:

Firefox stores the profile information here, so depending upon when you last synced if using offline files, you may get your profile, you may not…

Outlook can perform slowly in this situation as well (Mostly just with Outlook 2000 though).

I’ve heard of other apps having problems as well (autodesk products, , and don’t want to find out the next one.

This also apparently explains the difference between ‘Local Data\Application Data’ and ‘Application Data’ – Makes me wish I could tell certain programs which to use.

So, in short – I copied the network instance of ‘Application Data’ back over to the local location and put the registry key back to default. This still achieves my primary goals of making documents available on the Desktop and in the My Documents folder. Application data would be nice if offline files sync weren’t so sketchy (On the laptop that I use as my primary machine).

Now that the local profiles.ini for firefox is stable though, I may point it to a network share for one profile across all machines (This was really the only reason I did this in the first place, as Firefox stores shortcuts, etc. in the user profile).

If you’re one of the people that has yet to bring windows Vista and 7 into your mainstream life (and have to reinstall windows XP on a regular basis) one thing you might be asking yourself is: What exactly, does that ‘(Quick Format)’ option during windows XP setup mean exactly? (Other than that a regular format takes significantly longer.)

The Microsoft Knowledge base describes the difference thusly:

When you choose to run a regular format on a volume, files are removed from the volume that you are formatting and the hard disk is scanned for bad sectors. The scan for bad sectors is responsible for the majority of the time that it takes to format a volume.

If you choose the Quick format option, format removes files from the partition, but does not scan the disk for bad sectors. Only use this option if your hard disk has been previously formatted and you are sure that your hard disk is not damaged.

Bad sectors contribute to a number of problems having to do with the operation of a computer, and can be the cause of many a BSOD (Blue Screen of Death). So, if you’re re-formatting after one of these problems, take the time to do the regular format – it will help in the long run.

Megan (Andy’s niece) has a dog of her own, so she’s familiar with them. She was not afraid to tell Axel to sit down or leave something alone, or go up and give him a bear hug. The funny part was when she did the former: