Grant's Place

Had a near by lighting strike that took out the DSL modem, new Ubiquiti router, and a switch which had to be replaced.

Thankfully I had a few older parts I could sub in for a while. Also got a phone line surge protector to hopefully catch anything like that in the future, will still try to get things unplugged in bad weather just to be safe.

That wasn’t the only bit of technology troubles I suffered, one day my computer died. Testing as best I could I figured that the Power Supply had died, while a surprise it was a bit old. But troubles didn’t end when the new PS arrived, at
first all seems fine before the computer died again.

Had I made a mistake, was the motherboard the problem, or maybe the CPU?

After having waited a week for the PS, I now waited again for a new MB in hopes that would solve my problem. But alas, it did not, and in trying to diagnose things and in swapping the CPU between motherboards, the CPU didn’t get locked into place and some pins were bent!

Thankfully was use of a magnifier I was able to carefully move the pins back in
place. (JOY)

It was when I was able to borrow from a known working computer the answer became know, the replacement Power Supply was dead. Brand new part, you would not think it’s also bad and should be replaced.

So new unneeded motherboard and bad power supply goes back, and rather than wait we visited Best Buy in a nearby town and got a PS there. At least if something went wrong it would be easier to return.

Joyfully the new PS work! I had my desktop back after about 2 week of waiting and troubling shooting on a shoestring budget.

Learning that Google is closing Google+ was a bit of a half surprise with Google’s tendency to shutter services. I’m not a very chatty person but I Will be sad to see it being close.

I did have a though, considering all the times Facebook has had problems and they are still running, and the few times Google+ did and it’s being shuttered…

So like I mentioned in an earlier post, when Google+ shutting down I thought I would setup a self hosted WordPress install on a Raspberry Pi 3b I was using for other services.

For the most part it’s working pretty good, but a memory leak in Mono does cause some issues.  Money and Budget willing I’ll get another Pi and HD setup and move the website over to it
sometime.

In the meantime I’m working on filling out the web site with the features I want, and rethinking how I handle photo uploads to various services.

I have been kinda slow about getting everything setup, first problem was after I added a cache plug I would find plugins being installed and other actions like I had clicked on something. Disabling the plugin didn’t seem help, had to remove
it completely, and so far so good.

Also have been looking a WP gallery plugin, something where I could add and remove photos from the FS level w/o going through the website, would list photo exif data and provide maps when GPS data is present and would work with eCommerce plugin for selling, even better could also work with a printing service.

I know, I’m asking for a lot, but maybe something like that exists. I do like the look of http://pigallery2.herokuapp.com/, but that would be something running outside of WP.

I’ve also stuck my toes in the waters of Dockers, sometimes you just have to try something to see just how useful it can be over what you have been doing.

More personally it’s been a nice year, except when the weather changes. This autumn and winter, with the weather changing every few days it seems, I been hit with a headache/light migraine w/o enough time to recover from the last one.

That really does zap you of energy.

This post feels like it’s long enough, so I’ll end it here with … I’m Looking forward to the New Year, the past is done, and the future is yet to be.