Sprinkler winterized

Posted on November 11, 2010 by arcster

Sprinkler system winterized 11/10/10 by Quality Sprinkling Systems. Use bottom nozzle. Top nozzle for backflow testing. Technician set the two water nozzles and the air nozzle at 45-degree angle for winter. Open back up in the spring.

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Hitch-22

Posted on November 6, 2010 by arcster

Hitch-22: A MemoirHitch-22: A Memoir by Christopher Hitchens

My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Thought-provoking writing from a great man of letters.

View all my reviews

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Riding mower winterized

Posted on November 1, 2010 by arcster

Winterized the riding mower 10/30/10: Added fuel stabilizer and placed battery in basement.

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No one will be interested in this but me

Posted on October 14, 2010 by arcster

Yesterday applied Scotts “Winterizer” fetilizer – 15,000 sq ft for both yards. The package said to set Scotts rotary spreader at 3 1/4. I started out at 3 1/4, and kept notching it up until I was at 5 1/2.

I think if I would have started out at 5, I could have covered both yards.

Either the yards are much smaller or my spreader needs some serious calibration

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Linux accomplishments: Samba, X11 forwarding, new NIC

Posted on October 11, 2010 by arcster

The addition of a strictly Linux box in the basement with plenty of RAM created a conundrum: how to play with it without spending all my time in the basement?

SSH seemed to be the solution, but connecting via Putty from my Windows laptop wasn’t always satisfying. (In the course of my research, I stumbled on a post on how to turn on X11 forwarding in Putty; that’s an experiment for another day.) The old Dell Latitude had an outdated wireless card that didn’t support any modern encryption standards, so I thought I would try the Linksys Wireless-G WPC54GX4 that I ordered some time ago.

A little research told me I would have to go the ndiswrapper route, which filled me with trepidation, especially since I’m running Xubuntu (7.10). However, I found some helpful sources of info:

It wasn’t easy, but I got it working.

With that working I remotely installed Samba, and, with a little more help, got X11 forwarding up and running so I could run the samba shares-admin as a gui.

Next up: Apache and PHP

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A modest proposal

Posted on October 5, 2010 by arcster

I’m just going to throw this out there, but is it possible that Stephen Malkmus’ line

The drowsy blond carouses on the avenue

is the greatest use of vowel sounds since William Butler Yeats’

And live alone in the bee-loud glade.

?

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A pleasant Linux install

Posted on September 28, 2010 by arcster

Those of you old enough to remember my previous frustrations with Linux, take heart: I’m truly finding peace with the OS.

I just installed Lucid Lynx on a Compaq Presario 6000 that just wasn’t getting it done with Windows XP. It has close to a gig of RAM, but the AMD Athlon XP 1800+ was struggling to keep up with all the antivirus and other bloatware.

Most impressively, Unbuntu 10.04 recognized my D-Link wireless adapter DWA-542 (in answer to this question) right out of the box; no ndiswrapper or any such mumbo jumbo required.

And it looks pretty sharp.

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William Gibson interview on The Atlantic

Posted on September 17, 2010 by arcster

here

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Hilarious web site

Posted on July 2, 2010 by arcster

Catalog Living

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Now running WP3.0

Posted on June 18, 2010 by arcster

Just made the upgrade to WordPress 3.0 with no problems.

How can I say no to a version named “Thelonious”?

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