Rose-Hulman Visit Near the end of our Midwest vacation, Timothy and I took a day to drive from Noblesville to Terre Haute and had a scheduled tour of Rose-Hulman Institute of Technology. I’d visited once or twice after I’d graduated when Michelle and I lived in Dayton, but had never gone back once we settled in New Hampshire. It was just too far and we started having kids shortly after getting to NH....
Minivan It’s Back!! This evening around 5:15pm I finally paid up (a little less than $3100) and got our Odyssey back. Bunches of rings, gaskets, one piston rod, and lots of labor. 3 days worth! Expenses… Between the A/C and Front Brakes from a couple of weeks ago anticipating this trip, and the replacement of the rings for half of this engine, it’s getting debatable that I wouldn’t have come out on par to sell the van last month and just buy a low mileage Accord off lease....
Back when Michelle had just recovered from her initial rounds of chemotherapy, we sold our 2000 basic Honda Odyssey. Knowing the hell she’d been through, I wanted to treat her and we bought another Odyssey but this time bought the “EX-L” model. It had many amenities like heated leather, sunroof, climate control, power doors, etc. We didn’t get the “Touring” edition because Michelle thought things like the navigation and the drop down screens for watching DVDs were way overpriced and I agreed....
Moto G6 As I mentioned the other day, Michael’s phone died. Powering it on would just put it in a boot loop, and no amount of trying to boot into Android recovery would work. I’d chatted with Google Fi’s online help and they agreed to expedite another one right away. The replacement Moto G6 arrived this afternoon. I asked Michael to put it on a charger so it’d be ready for activation later....
Great gobbledygook title, eh? Enough to make you glaze over? Hang in there… This weekend I spent some more time tinkering with the cheap Linux laptop, my Pinebook Pro. One of the things I wanted to do was be able to see the files that we have on a home network drive as local files on my computer. I’ve never had luck with this in the past. Some back story: over three years ago back in April 2017, I ordered a nice Network Attached Storage (NAS) from one of the two leading providers: QNAP....
Movie As I wrapped up my Friday debugging, Claire and her beau came over. We opted to go for a family Chinese Dinner together – always a good call because it’s an affordable way to eat “family buffet style”. And the table we usually get (due to family size) is a larger round table away from most background noise, which makes for easier conversations and less distraction. When we got back, we watched “Tucker & Dale vs....
I’m waking up and digging into a light breakfast and decided to write about another small project of 2020: my experiences with the Pinebook Pro. In a nutshell it’s an inexpensive, ARM-based, Linux laptop. Inexpensive? $200. ARM-based? That’s the type of CPU that’s in your mobile phones, tablets, and usually smart watches. Linux? It’s the operating system that powers the internet, Android, TiVo’s, and much more. But no, it’s not Windows10 or MacOS....
This morning marked the end of my relaxing four day holiday weekend. Like many Americans, I had last Friday off in observance of Independence day. I also had Monday off as a special Qualcomm celebration of the 35th anniversary of their founding. Last night Daniel helped me drop off the minivan for repair. It is 10 years old and holding up well for its age. Honda, like Toyota, makes quality, solid vehicles....
Where have you been? Somewhere around 1998, someone created a tool which I wish I’d known about: sitecopy. And it does what I’d been doing a decade ago for bilikfamily.com but in a different manner. When I was writing entries at my site, I’d usually create it all on my local computer, preview it, and when happy with it, “deploy” it (i.e. upload it) to my web server. This is one common approach with smaller sites that aren’t Amazon, Facebook, etc....
When it rains, it pours. Or as Roseanne Roseannadanna liked to say, “If it’s not one thing, it’s another. But it’s always something.” (Example from YouTube) Saturday morning I went to get groceries and noticed that the key fob (aka the van remote) couldn’t do anything. Upon further examination, I found that the unlock button had seized. After unloading the groceries Timothy and I worked to open up the fob layer by layer....