First conversation with Lexi.ai

Posted on 12/20/2022 by jeb

L: Hi, I’m Lexii.

L: I’m an AI search assistant that can answer questions.
What would you like to know?

Where are the Snowden’s of yesteryear?

L: The question expresses remorse and futility.

What is the difference between a duck?

L: One leg is both the same.

Good. Why does time fly like an arrow but fruit flies like a banana?

L: The answer is a play on words.

Is it funny?

L: I can’t really say.

I know.

L: I’m sorry, I don’t understand what you’re asking.

I know.

L: I’m sorry, I don’t understand what you’re asking.

Say goodnight Lexi.

L: Goodnight!

Victorinox Swiss Army Expedition 24589 (Watch)

Posted on 11/09/2014 by jeb

I’ve replaced the band once (friction pins) and the battery several times. I have to remember the back is not a pry open, but a twist. Large needle nose did a good job, firmly seating the tips in opposing notches. Battery = 395 / 399. $7 at Walgreen’s. Won’t do that again. Amazon.

I noticed that some versions of this model have a 23 and 13 flanking the Swiss Army at 11 and 1.

How to “Select All” in Gmail (Updated 8/2014)

Posted on 08/26/2014 by jeb

I don’t know why this is hard for me to remember, but I forget how to “Select All” in any gmail view whether in an advanced search or a label view. And the first searches on the web I found for this are dated. So thought I’d write it down here.

In this example, I’m trying to delete over 6,000 notices that have been auto-filed in a label (folder) I call “backup”.

Here are the steps:

1. Perform a search or switch to a label view. In this case I have 6,157 messages in a label view called “backup”.

2. Choose “All” under the drop down selection box. Gmail will only select all 50 showing in the view, but…

3. Gmail will offer you an option to choose all items with a link! Now I can select all and trash or label thousands of messages at once.

I guess it is hard to remember that a link is going to show when I know All doesn’t mean All (at least not at first.)

Tivoli Audio Model Three and Pal Power Fix

Posted on 09/15/2013 by editor

We own several Tivoli Audio products. One of our Pals and our Model Three both suffered from power problems. In both cases the cause was cracked solder joints. Moving around the Pal (which is portable!) or the nightstand Model Three must have put pressure on the power jack, wiggling the solder joint until it cracked.

In both cases, I added a drop of solder on the failing joints and the radios were good as new. The following photos show where I spotted the cracked joints:

Model Three Repair

I removed all screws from the back. I did not need to remove anything from the front. However there are several cables that go from back to front that have to be disconnected to get access to the board with the power jack, so I took reference photos like this. This is the top of the unit looking down (although the radio is sideways.)

This photo is from the other side (the bottom) where I could see the cracked solder joint spark as I plugged it in and removed it. I had to remove this board in order to get to the solder joints with a soldering iron.

Continue reading →

JustHost to BlueHost

Posted on 06/02/2013 by jeb

Fiveforks.com has been running on JustHost.com for several years at an average of $45 / year. They were acquired by BlueHost last year, and now they are going way up in price. I happen to manage the SJN site (and pay for it) with BlueHost, so I decided to consolidate all sites over to BlueHost and avoid paying two hosting fees.

That meant moving over 85,000 files, many of which are photos, thumbnails, and legacy html from either MovableType or Gallery.

Got almost everything moved over. Need to test an image upload.

CAUTION: DOG IN MIRROR MAY BE HAPPIER THAN APPEARS

Chrome Font Test

Posted on 06/10/2012 by jeb

Testing font problem in Chrome. The following DIV is styled:

font-family: ‘Helvetica Neue’, Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif;

This text should be legible, but in Chrome, I am finding it is not.

End of test.

Testing Random

Posted on 05/31/2012 by jeb

Testing the radom.php code that picks a photo from all photos contained in the same directory.

http://mac.fiveforks.com/rotatethumbs/jeb/rotate.php

Nicki was wondering what would happen if you had it displays three times. The random generator uses the current time, so you get the same random choice all three times.

Random 1

Random 2

Random 3

So no go.

Facebook Called Me Today. I Think They Are In Trouble.

Posted on 05/08/2012 by jeb

Jane called me from Facebook today at work. [I’m changing her name, and you’ll see why. Her real name is also common and also has only four letters.] I assumed it was a cold call. She wanted to talk to me about advertising on Facebook and asked me if I had time to talk. Remember that.

It so happens I have a project that may involve Facebook advertising. I told her I wanted to talk, but I needed to schedule a time. She said she was west coast, so we agreed to talk 4pm eastern, my time. She said she would call me then. I scheduled: “Jane Facebook 4pm.”

Now I didn’t really think she was with Facebook. I get a lot of cold calls. I figured she was a contract sales person or with a company that does lead qualification. Our company actually sells such a service. I’m sympathetic to cold calls. Still, I wanted to talk to her about advertising on Facebook. I’ve done some work with Google sales, made some small purchases, and it is all fascinating.

Continue reading →

Fiveforks.com Increasing Outages

Posted on 04/04/2012 by jeb

Fiveforks.com has been experiencing increasing outages at JustHost.com based on the website monitoring tools I use at AreMySitesUp.com and SiteUpTime.com. I decided to file a complaint, but I wanted to make sure the problem was with the JustHost server.

There was a reported big outage on March 12th. So I went into the raw logs that record every visit to Fiveforks.com whether by a person or a search robot (like the GoogleBot.) In this copy paste from the logs there is a really big gap of “silence” indicated in [RED] by my note.

I don’t have these kinds of outages with BlueHost.com where SJNLilburn.com is hosted. Pay a bit more there, but you get what you pay for?

222.77.227.81 – – [12/Mar/2012:16:45:13 -0500] “GET /ted/2011/10/stanza_and_epub/ HTTP/1.0” 200 23222 “http://fiveforks.com/ted/2011/10/stanza_and_epub/” “Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 6.0; MSIE 5.5; Windows NT 5.0) Opera 7.02 Bork-edition [en]”

222.77.227.81 – – [12/Mar/2012:16:45:15 -0500] “POST /ted/wp-comments-post.php HTTP/1.0” 302 – “http://fiveforks.com/ted/2011/10/stanza_and_epub/” “Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 6.0; MSIE 5.5; Windows NT 5.0) Opera 7.02 Bork-edition [en]”

222.77.227.81 – – [12/Mar/2012:16:45:38 -0500] “GET /ted/2011/10/stanza_and_epub/ HTTP/1.0” 200 23204 “http://fiveforks.com/ted/2011/10/stanza_and_epub/” “Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 6.0; MSIE 5.5; Windows NT 5.0) Opera 7.02 Bork-edition [en]”

109.230.217.46 – – [12/Mar/2012:16:45:41 -0500] “GET /ted/2008/09/domain_registration/ HTTP/1.0” 200 16313 “http://fiveforks.com/ted/2008/09/domain_registration/” “Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; Powermarks/3.5; Windows 95/98/2000/NT)”

[16:45 = 4:45 pm above. Next visit below at 1 minute past midnight. So 7+ hour outage.]

180.76.5.58 – – [13/Mar/2012:00:01:17 -0500] “GET /ted/2011/01/snow_day/ HTTP/1.1” 500 252 “-” “Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; Baiduspider/2.0; +http://www.baidu.com/search/spider.html)”

146.0.74.234 – – [13/Mar/2012:00:03:05 -0500] “GET /wp-login.php HTTP/1.1” 200 2195 “-” “Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.9.1.3) Gecko/20090824 Firefox/3.5.3 GTB5”

46.251.228.99 – – [13/Mar/2012:00:13:15 -0500] “GET / HTTP/1.0” 200 2441 “http://fiveforks.com/” “Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 6.0; Windows NT 5.1; SV1)”

46.251.228.99 – – [13/Mar/2012:00:12:39 -0500] “GET / HTTP/1.0” 200 2523 “http://fiveforks.com/” “Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 6.0; Windows NT 5.1; SV1)”

Google Web Fonts

Posted on 09/10/2011 by

In website design, you are restricted to a limited set of text fonts. You have to design based on the most common fonts people have installed. The complex data for drawing the font doesn’t come across the web, but rather from the local operating system. You control this with style code that looks something like this:

body {font:15px arial, helvetica,sans-serif;}

Which means, try to use areial and if they don’t have that, use helvetica, and if they don’t have that use whatever san serif default font the reader has.

The only way to use a creative display font would be to be to make it a graphic and display it as an image, which would not be text and would not be sizable or searchable. It wouldn’t really be a font.

As bandwidth has gotten greater… everyone is now watching YouTube and streaming Pandora… the concern about being so efficient with text has diminished. Why not send some extra font data with the page so everyone can read whatever font you want to use?

Google Web Fonts does just that. They have a nice little shopping tool that helps you browse different styles of fonts and then “check out” with the code to put at the top of your website. It is a specialized stylesheet call back to google fonts.

<head>

<link href=’http://fonts.googleapis.com/css?family=Schoolbell’ rel=’stylesheet’ type=’text/css’>

After trying on some different fonts, I settled on a general text font for Mac5’s home page called Cabin and then a fun display font for JEB:LOG titles called Schoolbell.

JEB_LOG with Schoolbell.png

What’s he building in there?