Jim Deibele's Blog

Forward Email for Your Domain to Your Email Using Improvmx

Thu, 09 Jun 2022 05:10:15 +0000

If you own a domain, perhaps your DNS host provides mail services. When I registered JimDeibele.com, I picked Netlify’s domain server and it doesn’t provide mail service.

I wanted to put blog@jimdeibele.com on here so I could be contacted without having to reveal my preferred email address. A year from now, maybe I want to switch to blog2@jimdeibele.com because there’s so much spam going to the first email address.

Improvmx provides a service where you can control mail for a domain. On the free plan, you can have up to 10 aliases, meaning “blog@yourdomain”, “help@yourdomain”, “bigboss@yourdomain” and so on. There’s also a catch-all option, written as “*”. That means that anything that doesn’t match an alias will be sent to the catch-all address.

First issue of the Teleport Times - February 1995

Sun, 27 Mar 2022 21:27:00 +0000

Teleport was one of the first Internet Service Providers (ISP) in the US. It got its start in a technical bookstore. Back then, almost everything was done with modems over ordinary phone lines, usually entirely copper wires. There wasn’t an internet then, just Usenet.

The bookstore struggled but there was growing interest in Usenet. I closed the bookstore and moved the Usenet access business to a downtown office building. Why? Well, having access to phone lines was easier with US West in a central business district than GTE in a suburb. Also, the business didn’t need customer parking.

Using Atom with Markdown Writer for Hugo

Fri, 25 Mar 2022 11:48:42 +0000

I want a markdown editor that works with images. I stopped blogging because I found the process of adding images to each post so time-consuming. So I’ve been trying different things. There are a lot of markdown editors but very few of them handles images at all.

I finally ran across a reference to Hugo support for Atom. There are a few Hugo-specific packages (what Atom calls its plug-ins) but they’re not very well documented, not being developed, etc.

Killer Soduku Math Error

Thu, 16 Dec 2021 19:46:01 +0000

So my daughter Charlotte introduced me to Killer Soduku, an IOS app that makes it a little easier to solve soduku problems by giving you hints on what certain boxes should add up to.

The other day I was sure I knew what most go in a box but Soduku gave me a red square indicating that 9 was not the right answer. I went on to solve the puzzle except for that square. As you can see, Killer Soduku says the last digit left to be used (on the lower right) should be 8. But 4+2+9+7 = 22. If the total is 31, the answer must be 9, not 8.

Apple Photos - Please Give Me a Clue When Asking Me to Confirm Person!

Tue, 17 Nov 2020 11:04:27 -0800

I get the feeling that people at Apple didn’t have siblings. Or they only have 1 child.

Below is a picture of my daughter. But it looks a lot like her younger brother when he was the same age. A dad told me that kids would turn out to be very different and I’ve found that to be true for my kids.

But there are ages where they looked very much alike!

Treehouse for Fairies or Squirrels

Mon, 16 Nov 2020 16:07:31 -0800

Saw this while walking the dog today. I don’t normally walk on this side of the street and had never noticed it before. I hope somebody had fun making it.

PS: I need to figure out how to get Hugo to make thumbnails. But this was taken with the iPhone 11 I have in my pocket. Man, it takes amazing pictures.

Tree House for Fairies. Or Squirrels. North side.

Covid for the Holidays

Mon, 16 Nov 2020 15:30:46 -0800

Our family is carefully planning the holidays. For my wife’s birthday we went and saw her parents. They stayed in the dining room near the gas fireplace while we stayed near the open patio door. Masks were worn except for eating and drinking.

For Thanksgiving, we’re planning on hosting one brother and his two kids. Outside, with a heater attached to a propane tank. Maybe two.

And, for Christmas, maybe it’s all via Zoom. That’s not traditional or even fun but if it keeps people alive, well, it’s worth it.

Watching the Covid 19 Rt Rate in Oregon Climb Again 3rd Wave

Sun, 15 Nov 2020 14:11:35 -0800

Rt.live shows the Effective Reproduction Rate, or Rt, for the whole US and specific states.

The rate for Oregon started high, came down, went up a little, came down, and is now going up.

What’s really scary is

My oldest is doing her freshman year of college online at home. My other two are doing their high school classes 100% online, including Intro to Industrial Arts for one and Band for the other. With the onset of bad weather, it’s been weeks since we had somebody over since we can’t socially distance in the house.

How to Automatically Keep Your Python Packages Up to Date With pip-review

Wed, 11 Nov 2020 08:12:27 -0800

One way to install packages is via Pip.

pip install django

Pip will install not only the program you want but anything else it depends on. Further, you can use pip to upgrade a program and its dependencies.

pip install --upgrade django

I’d set up a cron job that would do this:

pip install --upgrade django requests pytz certifi httplib2

Eventually I added a second and third line. But there’s a better way: use pip-review

How to Use Google Voice and a $50 Obihai VOIP Adapter for Free Landline Phone Service

Mon, 09 Nov 2020 12:15:17 -0800

TLDR: replace your landline with a one-time $50 purchase and $20 to Google.

10 or so years ago, we disconnected our landline. Our local company had been Pacific Northwest Bell, then Qwest, and finally CenturyLink. The service got worse - noise on the line, sometimes voices of other people, etc. - and it always got more expensive. Caller ID started at $5/month but it went up from there. We were paying about $30/month for relatively basic service when we stopped.

How to Block Ads on Your iPhone, iPad, and Laptop Easily, Effectively, and for Free

Mon, 09 Nov 2020 00:00:00 +0000

I have been using uBlock Origin for many years on my Mac. Recently, I tried replacing my 2015 MacBook Pro with a 2018 MacBook Pro. There were a lot of things that I liked about the new MacBook Pro but what bothered me was that it had only 8GB of RAM whereas the older one had 16GB.

I would listen to the fans howl and eventually I replaced it with a machine I described in The Perfect Mac. But as happy as I am with my Mac Mini, it’s not portable. So I added an iPad Pro to the mix. That’s been pretty good but the ad blocking on the iPad doesn’t seem anywhere as effective.

Gilbert Heights Elementary School Grade 6 1973-1974

Sun, 08 Nov 2020 09:24:49 -0800

Gilbert Heights Elementary School Grade 6 1973-1974

Top row: unknown, John McIntosh, unknown, unknown, unknown, Liz Silva, unnknown
3rd row: unknown, Lisa Mullen, unknown, unknown, unknown, Ray Teuber?, unknown
2nd row: John Speck, unknown, me, Pat Dye, unknown, unknown, unknown, Mrs. Margeson
first row: Denise Buckley, unknown, Charlotte Trapp, unknown, Debra Halvorsen?, Jim Greenslade

We moved and changed school districts the year before. So I only had year at Gilbert Heights Elementary School before this photo and a year after. Still, I’m surprised I can’t remember more names.

What Waiting for the 2020 Election Results Felt Like

Sat, 07 Nov 2020 00:00:00 +0000

Ran across a neat graphic that sums up what it’s felt like waiting for the results of the 2020 Presidential Election results felt like.

Updating my old blog, I was surprised at how many links broke over the years. So I decided the image for posterity. When I went to download the GIF, it turned out that Twitter had converted it into an .mp4 video. When I used a website to convert it back, it grew from under 10k to just over 50k.

Vote by Mail After 20 Years of Experience in Oregon

Fri, 06 Nov 2020 00:00:00 +0000

There’s an excellent article in Vox about vote by mail in Oregon, focusing on how it started and how it evolved.

It’s difficult to forge someone’s signature on a ballot. Not impossible, not if you have access to something with their signature, but difficult. And it’s hard to see that scaling to any numbers.

It’s pretty much impossible to insert fake ballots into the system. There are bar codes on the envelopes mailed out to voters and it’s pretty simple to reject any bar codes that don’t match what was sent out.

Refill Propane Tank vs Blue Rhino Exchange in 2020

Thu, 05 Nov 2020 00:00:00 +0000

There’s an excellent article that goes deep into the specifics of refilling your tank versus just exchanging it for a different Blue Rhino[1] tank.

The article was written in 2013 but pretty much everything holds up. The price of propane has actually gone down in 2020 to less than $2/gallon

Basically it comes down to this:

Do you want to refill your tank and save $8$11?

Would you rather go to a nearby store and just exchange tanks?

Something to Think About as We Wait for the Votes to Be Counted

Thu, 05 Nov 2020 00:00:00 +0000

Something to think about… I have seen a lot of hate spewed in recent days about a man who is a constant winner and overachiever, and that’s what the people who support him like about him. Yes, he’s been caught in some lies and maybe twisted the truth a little but he’s still out there proving his haters wrong time after time. Some people are just jealous of someone who is successful and has money. Throw in a hot foreign underwear model at his side and they hate him even more. You may not have wanted him in his role, but he’s there now and there’s nothing you can do about it. I know it’s possibly just going to get worse over the next several days, but like him or not, Tom Brady is turning things around in Tampa.

Use Dropbox or Google Drive to Sync Your Downloads Folder Not iCloud

Wed, 04 Nov 2020 00:00:00 +0000

I wrote an article talking about using iCloud to sync your Downloads folder.

So I did that and I found out I didn’t like it. I’m running tight on disk space (I have to cull more photos from Photos, which is taking up the most disk space for me) so Apple is uploading the files in ~/Downloads, then replacing them with an .icloud version. That means that I need to download the file to use it.

Sad and Happy Halloween 2020

Tue, 03 Nov 2020 00:00:00 +0000

It was both a sad and happy Halloween here in Portland. Our youngest teenager is almost 15 so we definitely didn’t have a lot of cute costumes. There were no worries about meeting up with friends to go trick-or-treating. In the end, we had two people come ring our bell so we could send candy down the chute.

What made it happy was walking the dog leading up to Halloween and Halloween Eve and seeing the precautions people were taking: there were candy chutes, there were paper bags (didn’t rain here!) or plastic bags with candy inside set out, and more complicated measures for distributing candy in a socially distanced way.

How to Get Your Old Propane Tank Re-Certified

Mon, 02 Nov 2020 00:00:00 +0000

Before we got married, my wife’s brothers and sister gave us a BBQ grill as a present. I also inherited two propane tanks from my dad. In doing some reading on re-filling propane tanks, it turns out that every tank has a date code on it.

For example, this is the tank that came with the grill:

Date Code of January 2001

We were married in July 2001 and the tank was made on January, 2001.

Delete Time Machine Snapshots When Your Disk is Almost Full

Sun, 01 Nov 2020 00:00:00 +0000

If you’re running a Mac with limited internal disk you’ll encounter this message:

There’s a great article on how to manually delete Time Machine Snapshots

Key steps:

List available local snapshots “sudo tmutil listlocalsnapshots /Volumes/Macintosh HD”
Delete each snapshot “sudo tmutil deletelocalsnapshots 2020-11-01-002004”

I’ve had to do this a lot when upgrading to a new beta release.

Give Blood, Get Covid-19 Tested for Free

Tue, 27 Oct 2020 14:33:33 -0700

Right now, if you give blood, the Red Cross will test it for Covid-19 before distributing it. They say it takes about 1-2 weeks for the results to come back. It took a little longer than that for the email to come but I was also not expecting anything but negative.

Still, good to know.

The Perfect Mac

Tue, 27 Oct 2020 00:00:00 +0000

Are you traveling a lot?

Do you like to carry your computer around the house with you?

If so, maybe you need a MacBook. But for most people, the perfect Mac is the Mac Mini with an i3 processor and 256GB of SSD. Why? Because you can expand the system memory on your Mac relatively cheaply to 32GB and you can attach terabytes of SSD for about $130/TB.

MacOS will load as much as it can into RAM and you’ve got 32GB of RAM, your processor will be flying along and outperform much more expensive processors if they only have the standard 8GB of RAM.

Sync Additional Folders with iCloud Drive

Sun, 25 Oct 2020 00:00:00 +0000

As the kids are getting older, 2 out of the 3 have switched to MacBooks from Chromebooks. That makes 4 out of the 5 of us pretty firmly in the Apple eco system. And after switching from Picassa to iPhoto to Aperture to Google Photos to (Apple) Photos, I’ve decided that’s going to be my last switch. I’m going to keep my personal photo archive backed up to iCloud.

A few years ago, iCloud was not as stable as it is now. But it now seems as stable as its major competitors Dropbox and Google Drive and we’re already using it to back up our various Macs, iPhones, and iPads.

Gmail filters - avoid using list

Sat, 24 Oct 2020 00:00:00 +0000

Filters in Gmail are incredibly useful but about 50% of the time the default is to see something like this:

This is an example of what programmers call a “write only” command. Why? Because a few months or weeks from now - or even tomorrow - you’ll have no idea what this corresponds to.

You’re much better off putting in “From: somecompany.com” or “Subject: [list prefix]” in your filters so that you can remember what they mean.

Don't Run as Administrator on Your Mac

Fri, 23 Oct 2020 00:00:00 +0000

One of the first things that I do on a Macintosh is to create a new user (say “admin”), give it administrative privileges, and then reboot. I log in as admin and lower my own privileges to an ordinary user.

Why? Because there were a series of exploits relying on quietly doing things requiring administrator access. You’d download a game and never notice during the install process that it was accessing things it wasn’t supposed to. Things like your passwords stored in your browser, access to your camera, etc.

Oregon Forest Fires in September 2020

Wed, 09 Sep 2020 00:00:00 +0000

This year we had the worst forest fires that I can remember. Things were bad 3 years ago, when teenagers playing with fireworks set off a forest fire 40 miles from Portland. Soccer games and other sports were cancelled because of the extremely poor air quality.

But this was worse. The farm where my grandfather and father lived was classified as category 3, meaning that everyone was to evacuate immediately, for several days. The house where my parents-in-law was classified as category 2, meaning that they were to be ready to leave at a moment’s notice. The smoke and the worry was causing so much stress that they moved to stay with a grandchild.