Summitt Dweller's Blog

An old fart's memory dump: Lots of code, some life experiences, and a little humor. No politics!

Tama-Toledo Parks - Derecho Follow-Up for August 24

2020-08-24

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.

Derecho Follow-Up - Saturday, August 22

2020-08-22

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.

Iowa’s 2020 Hurricane

2020-08-18

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.

Pandemic Pastime: Walking and Picking Up Trash

2020-08-03

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.

→ Home Automation

2020-05-09

During the COVID-19 pandemic I decided, while working endlessly from my home office, to resurect the hanging bird feeder outside my office window. I like having the birds visit, but I’ve noticed one problem… starlings! They are cranky, bully bastards and chase all the welcome visitors away, if I let them. Well, I don’t intend to let them anymore. 😁 I won’t go into details here but my remedy involves removing the screen from my office window, and occasionally opening the window itself.

Launching MacDown from a Terminal

2020-03-15

Lately I find that I like to open Markdown documents in MacDown rather than Atom. This is espeically true of things like “README.md” documents that I intend to read, but not edit. This can be done without any special configuration, assuming MacDown is installed and working. To do that use a syntax like this: open -b com.uranusjr.macdown path/to/document.md A command I’ve been using quite often today is: open -b com.uranusjr.macdown ~/GitHub/dg-isle/docs/install/install-local-migrate.