Non-volatile Memory

It seems like there’s always long times between my posts here. Sometimes the purpose they served for me has had a limited time, and other times not so much. This is one of those posts that may be subject to the chopping block for very much being almost a “Dear Diary” post that is public. Recently after having some major issues with memory and other issues I went to start working with a counselor to find out I have ADHD.

When I made this website and blog so long ago it was meant to be something I could share personal projects publicly. Sometimes while working on different things I would get ideas of what I wanted to share or write about, but the ideas were often times gone as soon as they were formed. Typically if I wanted to make a post about something if I didn’t have or make the time to do it right then and there it just didn’t happen. I guess this clears up the why.

Recently I found myself exploring what all this could mean and trying to think of things that I can do to help myself. I find myself wanting to look at journaling but I’ve always ran into a few problems:

  1. I need something that won’t run out space, be lost, and also easy to navigate and search. This led me to needing an electronic journal.
  2. It needed to be device agnostic. What good is a journal that I can only use on my phone or only on my computer?
  3. I wanted something that ideally had rich text formatting, editing, and the ability to handle pictures/drawing when I felt the need.

This of course is a lot to ask for an app. Unfortunately the only thing I found that is acceptable is Microsoft’s OneNote application. While the mobile app has a lot of features missing it has enough of what I want out of it to work for me. Furthermore it has page templates which is a huge benefit that I hadn’t even yet thought of. Not having to remake the same formatting that I want on every single page is a major bonus.

However this comes with some cons. Obviously it is a cloud hosted solution (because otherwise I couldn’t access it on say my phone). In this case I will overlook it though.

Joplin is my runner up. It is free, open source, and can be securely set up on a WebDAV server (make sure to use Basic authentication. If you don’t know what that means go with a different tool). Another tool to consider might be Diarium but it loses points for being a bit cumbersome, paid solution, and closed source. However setting up access to it might be easier for the less technically inclined if you use a tool like Google Drive or something (otherwise stick to OneNote).

Really this is probably just me yelling into the void. I think there might be more value in that than I think though. Emptying some of the noise in my head is probably more helpful than I think.

New Starts

I recently started taking the time to clean up my desk. For a long time it was used by another member in my household. After moving her to another part of the house it took me a while to go beyond using it for storage. I consider it a work in progress. The beginning of which you can see below:

I was satisfied with the results for something I did last weekend. I have a long ways to go. I will state that I have found a way to alleviate more desk space later. I will be moving the two computers featured on the left of the desk to my closet after I get a 20U Networking Rack. This will give me greater control of this space, and more room to work.

It won’t be completely computer free at first. I have an old Apple Mac Mini that I want to turn into an SSH server, and I will use the pictured monitor, keyboard, and mouse to work on that. However I didn’t wait to get these things cleaned out to begin working on my first electronics project.

I got an old Gameboy Advance at a swap meet years ago. It iddn’t even have a backing plate for the batteries. I bought several modifications for it and you can see them here:

Featured in the image includes:

  • New modified shell (white)
  • IPS back lit screen
  • Glass protection cover for the screen
  • Pink (of course) buttons
  • Sound amplifier, speaker, and signal cleaning board
  • Lithium Ion battery pack

I did find when I began to work on it that I needed some consumable supplies I just didn’t have. (Mostly double sided tape. Kind of embarrassing.) As a result my desk is actually already quite messy again:

In the next few days though I should be able to solve this problem and make further improvements and adjustments to the desk. I look forward to sharing those and the finished modded Gameboy Advance.

Simpler Dynamic DNS

Since the last time I talked about defying Comcast and running my own Dynamic DNS the Windows Service I had relied on has passed away. The author’s website is frequently unavailable, and the service now crashes with some sort of run time on the latest version of Windows 10 (if it ever worked for Windows 10). I had been running the service on an old computer that had kept Windows 7 on it for a long time, but when I finally retired it from that and made it an unRAID server I had no success setting it up on the computer that replaced it.

A per-requisite to this solution was downloading wget or curl for Windows. I chose wget. Finding up to date versions of these traditionally UNIX derivative software for Windows can be tough but I eventually found a seemingly up to date (at least compatible with SSL) at this site. I dropped the binary into the folder where I would keep the rest of the files.

On afraid.org’s “Dynamic DNS” files you can download wget or curl scripts. I downloaded the wget links, and then I took the urls from each script and pasted them one per line into a text file.

Once I did that it was just a matter of using Windows Task Scheduler to setup a process. I’m not going to cover the specifics but I will share an example of how I set this up.

c:\path\to\binary\wget.exe -i c:\path\to\binary\"text file name" -O c:\path\to\binary\log.txt

I have this command running every 15 minutes to be safe. I rely on dynamic dns so that many of the services I run (like this website) can stay afloat. Making sure I have ways to easily access my home network through a domain name is important. I hope that if while trying to figure out a simple solution for this you may have found this helpful.

Point Defiance Park

On April 16, 2019 I took my foster rabbit Snowy to a vet that was out of my hometown to get him neutered. Since the vet was more than hour’s drive away and I had to spend 8 hours waiting for his vet appointment to come to an end.

One of the places I chose to visit was Point Defiance Park near Tacoma. I thought it would be fun to share some of the photos from my visit and walk alongside the beach. I sadly wasn’t able to walk the entire way around the park by the beach because of the tide, or see more of the park because I ran out of time.

New Tab Tools Layout

A while back I was looking for a way to organize tiles and such in Firefox to be more aesthetically pleasing to me. I also decided I wanted a background that I liked and to accomplish this I found out I would need to use an extension. I was okay with this because the same extension allowed me to customize the tiles for website links to whatever image file I wanted to use. If the image below looks appealing to you; then you can try out New Tab Tools for Firefox or yourself. I spent a lot of time fussing about to find appealing and recognizable images for the sites, but by the end the only one I didn’t have a tile picture for was for this site! Kind of funny. I eventually played around in Pastel Girl until I could crop an image I liked enough to use for this blog.

Especially as I start to go forward I want to become more active on social media I decided. Share more things I learn, and my experiences. I think it would be good for me to practice expressing myself, and to just generally talk to people more.