Check out my new TESTING page where I hope to continue testing new features. Also, be sure to have a look at my new HIKES site and especially some of the “highlighted” hikes that are listed in bold there.
Note that HIKES used to be a “section” here, but there are a lot of them so I made a site just for them.
In my last post, Adding Netlify CMS for Editing This Blog, I was able to successfully engage the Netlify CMS with a “local” copy of this blog. But I never got the CMS to work in production with this blog’s App on DigitalOcean (DO). I should note that DO’s support folks were very helpful, but in the end I think all of the client-side stuff that Netlify CMS is doing was more than they were willing (capable?
Continue Reading »OK, I’m using the “Rich Text” editor option in the body field here in my “posts” Netlify CMS form for this blog. Will it work? We shall see! Yup! I have to confess, this is pretty cool. I’m even able to switch dynamically between the Rich Text and Markdown editors here! How Was This Done? Let me elaborate just a bit… Using Hugo Since this blog is published using Hugo I looked to the Netlify CMS guidance provided at https://www.
Continue Reading »My daughter, Mackenzie, and I have been using this blog for testing new features lately. If you’ve been following me here you’ve seen some of them pop-up on the home page. Now that we have a host of them working, I need to move some out–of-the-way so they don’t clutter things up too much. However, I don’t want to discard them, in some cases we didn’t implement them anywhere else so this is the only working copy we have.
Continue Reading »For 2021 I’ve signed on to be a member of the steering committee for Toledo’s 2021 Community Visioning (CV) project coordinated by Tree’s Forever and Iowa’s Living Roadways, Iowa State University Extension and Outreach, and other partners. Tama is also a Community Visioning participant in 2021. A Simple E-Mail Sign-Up I’m only posting this as a test of what I think might be a very simple sign-up form using email. What you see below is just a test, so please don’t expect any invitation from this!
Continue Reading »Posting this quick link to emoticons available in Hugo… https://www.webfx.com/tools/emoji-cheat-sheet/
For 2021 I’ve signed on to be a member of the steering committee for Toledo’s 2021 Community Visioning (CV) project coordinated by Tree’s Forever and Iowa’s Living Roadways, Iowa State University Extension and Outreach, and other partners. Tama is also a Community Visioning participant in 2021. I Like to Walk I try to get outside and walk as much as I can, but I especially like walking with a purpose… not just walking for the sake of exercise or stress-relief.
Continue Reading »A couple of years have now passed since I purchased an Elecrow 5" HDMI Touchscreen display for the Raspberry Pi and put it to use. I even 3D printed a very nice case for it. So, there’s a bit of configuration code on the SD card that can be edited to determine if the 5" screen is active, or if the RPI’s output is directed to its HDMI output port. Well, in the last 2 years I forgot what to edit and what changes to make.
Continue Reading »Now that I’ve cleared the driveway of the latest snowfall, I am officially declaring this to be “My MQTT Weekend”. It actually started on Friday night, the weekend, not the snow. Rather than posting a lot of gibberish here, I’ll just point you to my project repo at https://github.com/SummittDweller/Motorized_MQTT_Blinds and especially the Additional Resources portion of the README.md file there. If/when I get this all working maybe I will post some photos, maybe.
Continue Reading »Adding this OneTab link where I will collect CommunityVisioning.org resources.
Using this very informative post to add some SEO to my Hugo sites.
Over the end-of-year holiday break in 2020 I managed to ressurect my old home-office CentOS 7 development server. I had a mind salvage and update Paperless on that server, and I did manage to do that. However, along the way I discovered the Paperless-ng branch of the project and I installed it, using Docker as suggested, by creating a new project and configuration I’ve saved as summittdweller/paperless-ng-dockerfiles. Mounting my ReadyNAS Share To successfully mount my ReadyNAS/Paperless SMB share I had to do the following on centos7 as root:
Continue Reading »This past weekend I managed to get a VNC server running on my centos7 node, where I run Paperless. The build instructions came from https://www.howtoforge.com/vnc-server-installation-on-centos-7. The node is available at 192.168.1.22:5901.
Sorry, I’ve posted and experienced too much sadness in the last two weeks, and more. Two members of our immediate family, Sully and Stitch, passed away on November 14th and 20th, respectively. Sully was our male kitty, only about 6 years old and his passing was a real shock. He was an ornery, sometimes grumpy cat, but very loveable at times. We miss him very much. Stitch was the matriarch of our cat family, about 18 years old and a gorgeous long-haired kitty. Stitch was in poor health the last year or so and not very playful so her passing was not such a shock, but it’s still hard to take. Fortunately, she passed comfortably in her sleep, nestled up on the couch between Mackenzie and Christine. We miss her too.
Continue Reading »Another very sad evening here… Stitch, our 18-year-old female long-haired kitty has passed, less than a week after Sully. Unlike Sully, this passing was expected since Stitch has been losing weight and becoming increasingly frail for many months. Fortunately, it looks like she just slipped away in her sleep on the sofa, resting between Chris and Mackenzie. Stitch was a gorgeous kitty, very calm and loving. She will be missed by all. 😢
A very sad day here… Sully, our male tuxedo kitty who was only about 8 years old has passed. This was definitely not expected. Our oldest kitty, Stitch, is about 18 years of age and she’s been in poor health for many months, so we expect that she might pass soon, but not Sully. He was an ornery, good boy, and he will be missed by all. 😢
Quite some time ago I added an Announcement feature to the Rootstalk website that I helped design and maintain for Grinnell College. Events of the past week have driven me to implement this feature as part of this blog and one other site, with some minor improvements.
Continue Reading »Tomorrow is Labor Day 2020, but it also will mark 4 weeks since the August 10 derecho. Thankfully, I believe today marked the end of the clean-up, at least on my own property. I was going to write this post yesterday after another 6+ hours of work outdoors, but last night we had another storm roll through, and all day the winds have been blowing upwards of 40 mph, so I put in another 6 hours or so cleaning up even more debris.
Continue Reading »So, the Iowa Geocacher’s Organization annual Hike-n-Seek event is coming to Tama County and Otter Creek Lake on Friday-Sunday, September 25-27, barring any more 2020 disasters. 🍀 The weekend is slated to include September’s Friday Lunch Club (FLC) too, but the restaurant that was slated to host FLC was destroyed in the August 10 derecho. This morning The FLC Committee, aka Borky00, aka Bill, asked me about possible outdoor park settings for FLC as a means of giving folks plenty of room for social distancing.
Continue Reading »Today, Sunday, August 23, 2020, marked the start of what looks like another schorching heat-wave here. So I pitched in during the morning at the home of my “scurry” partners Jeff and Mary Fasse-Shaw, to help with cutting up some of the deadfall along the creek on the west side of their property. We got a good start, but there’s a lot of fallen timber to be cleared there!
Almost every day for the past few months I have walked with my “scurry” around Cherry Lake in Tama. We generally walk in the morning before the heat, humidity, and mosquitoes get too bad. We finally got power back on Thursday evening, August 20, so on Friday morning, August 21, 2020, we walked for the first time since the derecho of August 10. It was actually more like an obstacle course than our usual stroll, but we still managed to collect quite a bit of trash, as usual. There were about a dozen places around the lake, a trail that is about 1.33 miles long, where fallen trees required that we climb over or weave around. It’s no fun to do either, especially since the “weaving” sometimes involved venturing off-trail into the poison ivy. Makes me itch just thinking about it.
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It’s been far too long, again, since I posted to this blog, but this time I have a legitimate excuse: we’ve been without power or internet, or much of anything, since about 11:45 AM on Monday, August 10, 2020. So we have now been more than 10.5 days without power. I’m only able to post this because of a portable generator I bought on August 12 (that was an adventure in itself) and the wireless hotspot that my phone has provided almost 24/7 ever since the storm hit.
Continue Reading »Eleven days and seven hours without, but the power is now back on at 104 W. Summit Street in Toledo. I’d estimate that for the duration we burned about 105 gallons of gas just to keep the fridge, my CPAP, one lamp, and two fans running. Glad to be back in the 21st century. Now, what’s all this I hear about a deadly virus and some political scuffles?
It’s the start of day number eleven, and still no power. Checked the forecast and it’s getting hot…so am I!
The power is still out here, almost 10 days after the derecho knocked it out. So many power restoration predictions have come and gone, I’ve lost count. Still I’m told that what we need is a one-man, 15-minute fix. Perhaps in the morning I’ll stretch our broken power line across the street and pitch a tent next door until an Alliant truck stops and gets this done. I know they are busy, but 15 minutes of one lineman’s time a week ago, when it was first “promised”, would have been so nice. I fixed my own Mediacom connection more than a week ago, and there’s evidence tonight that their service has been restored. So, if I had power, I think we would also have TV and internet. IF.
It’s been far too long since I posted to this blog; I guess I’ve been busy? Nah, not any more than usual, but during the COVID-19 pandemic I have doubled my efforts to get out and walk in the fresh air whenever possible. I’m thankful for my small “scurry” – that’s the term for a collective of squirrels – who not only take walks with me around Cherry Lake, but all around town.
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