Amazon has this thing where when you submit a patient application and it is filed (so all the internal reviews are complete), you get a clear puzzle piece. Then down the road if the patient office accepts and issues the patient, you get a second puzzle piece with the patient number on it and this one is blue.
I finally got my first blue puzzle piece a couple years ago, I just got another one at the end of 2020. Given that I’m still working from home, I didn’t ‘pickup’ the blue puzzle piece until a couple weeks ago. (I had to go into the office to get something from my desk) But I did take a couple minutes to add the new piece to my ‘puzzle wall’. I know people that have so many of these that it fills their office windows.
I also just got e-mail this morning that another one of the batch I submitted several years ago was issued.
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It is odd how the process works, the two patients which were issued back in July 2019 were apart five which were filed at the same time. You tend to file them in batches when they all come out of a new project development. I got notified another from that batch just got issued, 18 months later….
The next time I stop by the office (which I’ve seen twice in the last ten months), I’ll grab a picture of the cool blue puzzle pieces awards you get at Amazon when a patient is award. You get a clear puzzle piece when filing a patient.
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Thanks to the suggestions on wetnet.net, this website is now TLS enabled. Compared to the normal process of getting certificates (which has always been a multi-step process and rarely can be done in less than a couple days), using LetsEncrypt was quick and simple. At least for the apache based system here. The big test will be in 90 days to see if the auto-update works like it is suppose to.
The next step is to figure out how to enable TSL for node-js on the DSTAR host. That is going to require more effort, no automated instructions or installation scripts.
Several weeks ago a hot water line busted in the ceiling above my office/radio shack. While I caught it quickly enough to prevent any serious equipment damage, I pretty much ripped out about a 1/3 of the ceiling finding the leak and creating enough room to fix it. I called in the pro’s to re-do the dry wall on the ceiling and decided since I had already emptied the room, I might as well replace the carpet as well. So this weekend I have been ‘completely’ emptying the room and prepping the ceiling to paint it tomorrow.
This has of course meant the relocation of everything in my office to the family room. And a massive clean out has take place over the last two weeks as this process has occurred. Today I finally got down to emptying the closet and I have found some really interesting items.
Two SupraFaxModems, one a older 14.4 and a newer 28.8
A proto-type 3Com USB 56k “Puma” modem
A stack of audio cards, covering ISA and PCI buses
A very old 3Com 305(?) ISA NIC
So many ‘spare’ wall warts I don’t know what to-do with all of them
A prototype USB ZIP drive (I am not even sure they actually made it to market) and a pile of ZIP disks
A stack of CDROM drives (mostly IDE)
A stack of 3.5 floppy drives
A pile at least a foot high of various kinds of ribbon cables
Most of the stuff went straight into the garage, I think there has been at least three garage bags take out so far. I kept the USB modem and the SupraFaxModems for sentimental reason. I am now going through the ZIP drives before tossing them. I was amazed that my Windows 7 netbook was able to enumerate the drive and read all the ZIP disks so far. To me that is actually even amazing than the ZIP drive actually working, even though it is a prototype and has been sitting on a shelf for decades. Most of the disks have been blank, so I am thinking this isn’t the first time I have gone through them. Actually all but one of the disks has been blank.
I got a Icom ID-5100 for Christmas and a couple weeks ago finally pulled it out of the box and put it on the air. There are a number of things I like about it, but there was one glaring issue, it didn’t play well with my homemade DSTAR repeater. Some Google searching reveled this is a common problem, the ID-5100 is very picky about the signal shape, which means I don’t have the audio levels set quite perfect on the GMSK modem.
So I have been ‘planning’ to upgrade my DutchSTAR GMSK modem to a DV-RTPR board on the repeater for a while. (Like maybe three years?) Since fixing the ID-5100 problem was going to require messing with all the stuff to update to the DV-RTPR board, I decided to finally just make the switch. I found the partially built cable to connect it to the repeater and finished it, then dragged everything into the repeater room to hook it up. Getting the DV-RPTR to play with the repeater was really easy, which means it was time to put the new computer I built for the DV-RTPR into place as well.
That is when the plan feel apart a little. The Ubuntu OS installation was so old, it isn’t supported anymore. So before I could do anything, I had to rebuild it. Since I have a serious issue getting USB thumb drives to boot anything, this ended up taking hours. I finally got it to boot and started the installation before going to bed. Of course it stopped a short time later needing some input and I had to un-wedge it this morning. It is still going, but at least appears to be at the stage where it is installing packages.
Since I’m stupid, I decided to check the version of Ubuntu on my desktop linux box and found it was also running the out of data version now. The thought of flattening it and starting from scratch pained me, so I just told it to auto-update itself. I figured the worst that will happen is I need to flatten it and start from scratch anyhow. So it is also now unpacking a butt load of packages.
Might have noticed that my blog (this thing you are reading) has been dead for the last couple weeks. My main server had a harddisk failure a couple weeks ago and it caused the machine to not boot. I knew the drive was going and my plan was to replace it with an completely new machine. I even had the new machine built and everything moved over to it, except the blog. So old machine died and I thought, now I HAVE to spend the 30 minutes to move the blog.
But of course moving the blog turned out to be much, much harder then it should have been. I have moved the blog several times in the past, I had directions on how to-do it and I even had a working installation to work from, but it would not work.
So after spending most of today doing everything I could think of to spin up the blog with my backup, I finally gave up and just installed a fresh blog. After much Google searching, I found a reference that said if I just restored the wp_posts table into the new installation, it would restore all my posts. This mostly worked, I had to-do a little directory hacking to get my image upload directory to be visual.
I’m done for tonight, I’ll install the plug-ins that suck in twitter and G+ posts tomorrow.
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The spinning drive in my mid-2010 MacBookPro died a while ago. I replaced the built in drive with a 300G SSD and all was good for about a month, then I ran out of space. Going up to the next size SSD was very expensive, so I bought this adapter thing which allow you replace the DVD drive with another hard drive. This worked pretty well, I had a spare 500G drive laying around. Took a little hoop jumping to move my home directory to the second drive, but it wasn’t to difficult.
Well that second drive (which was a spinning drive) started dying. Luckily the price of bigger SSD’s has come way down and I never really ended up using more than about half the 500G. I ordered a replacement drive yesterday, paid the extra $7 to have it delivered the next day and started the cloning process before going to bed last night. I just finished installing it, other then having to re-sync my Google Drive folder, everything just worked.
I have noticed two things really quick. The laptop doesn’t make any noise now, because the fan doesn’t seem to come on. And things are even faster than before, so having the system on a SSD is good. Having your home directory on one is even better.
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On the latest episode of MacBreak Weekly, Andy Ihnatko’s pick of the week is the LapWorks Amigo Folding Keyboard, which Andy finds especially useful with Apple’s new iPhone 6 Plus.
My Microsoft DSS-80 USB speakers finally died. I bought these back in the late 90's at the company store. I remember it specifically, because the sound card in my desktop stopped working in the latest build of Windows 5 (You probably know it as W2K). Rather then finding a new sound card, I decided to get a pair of USB speakers instead. Since then, I've lugged these around from one place to the next. They were really a nice set of speakers for the $80 I paid for them.
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