Posted By RichC on January 3, 2016
The long holiday weekend with decent weather gave me a chance to knock out a few chores. One was to clean and close up Tootsie‘s dog door. I realized that over her 17 year life that she was in and out of this Plexidor opening a couple dozen times a day … at least! It’s amazing just how well it held up … if you need a doggie door, check them out.
Posted By RichC on January 2, 2016
Guess what arrived for my new “old” car? Yup … the historical plates after last weeks title transfer. The registration has finally been updated for my late father’s 1958 Packard Hawk (you’ll need to think Studebaker Hawk if you haven’t seen the last Packard badge car).
I’ve posted previously from a couple car shows with my dad … but now its my turn to carry on the family tradition.
The 1958 Packard Hawk was the sportiest of the four Packard-badged Studebakers produced in the final year of Packard production. The Packard plant in Detroit, Michigan had been leased to Curtiss-Wright (and would be soon sold to them), and Packard models in this dying-gasp year were all rebadged and retrimmed Studebaker products. The 1958 Packard Hawk was essentially a Studebaker Golden Hawk 400 with a fiberglass front end and a modified deck lid.
Instead of the Studebaker Hawk’s upright Mercedes-style grille, the Packard Hawk had a wide, low opening just above the front bumper and covering the whole width of the car. Above this, a smoothly sloping nose, and hood—reminiscent of the 1953 Studebakers, but with a bulge as on the Golden Hawk—accommodated the engine’s McCulloch supercharger that gave the Studebaker 289 in³ (4.7 L) V8 a total of 275 bhp (205 kW). At the rear, the sides of the fins were coated in metallized PET film, giving them a shiny metallic gold appearance. A fake spare-tire bulge adorned the 1953-style Studebaker deck lid. ‘PACKARD’ was spelled out in capitals across the nose, with a gold ‘Packard’ emblem in script—along with a Hawk badge—on the trunk lid and fins.
The interior was full leather, with full instrumentation in an engine-turned dash. As on early aircraft and custom boats, padded armrests were mounted outside the windows, a rare touch.
The styling was definitely controversial, often described as ‘vacuum-cleaner’ or ‘catfish’ by detractors. The styling has come to be appreciated more today than in its debut. Only 588 were sold, with Packard’s impending demise a likely contributing factor. Most were equipped with the Borg-Warner three-speed automatic transmission. Approximately 28 were produced with the B-W T85 3-speed w/overdrive manual transmission. Studebaker-Packard was the first manufacturer to popularize the limited-slip differential, which they termed Twin-Traction. Most Packard Hawks came with TT. It was certainly the fastest Packard ever sold, since it shared the majority of its components with Studebaker’s Golden Hawk. The price was $3995, about $700 higher than the Studebaker model, but with a more luxurious interior. Electric window-lifts and power seats were optional extras.
Its rarity and status as the best-regarded of the ‘Packardbaker’ final-year cars have made the Packard Hawk quite collectible. Values are roughly double those of the equivalent Studebaker, although they are still low by comparison with Corvettes and Thunderbirds. Because a Studebaker drivetrain was used, mechanical parts are more readily available, although body and trim parts are more difficult-to-impossible to find. While it is a unique car, current restoration costs almost always exceed the selling price.
Specifications at LINK
EDIT: Adding a “squawks” found in my dad’s notes.
Posted By RichC on January 1, 2016
If you enjoy playing with inexpensive computer gadgets and perhaps getting them a LinuxOS Raspberry Pi … or maybe a PINE A64??? Check out the inexpensive Single board Super Computer … and under $100 computer set-up and top of the line smartphone might be all the tech many of us need?
PINE A64 compared with Raspberry Pi
PINE A64 compared with C.H.I.P and Arduino
Posted By RichC on January 1, 2016
Out with the old and in with the new. Happy New Year 2016!
Edit: Posting this as a Raspberry Pi home image server test from the iPad. Impressive little box!
Posted By RichC on December 31, 2015
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Posted By RichC on December 30, 2015
Digital Ocean’s cloud based servers have me debating which is best for the MyDesultoryBlog.com in a worse case scenario? Do I continue with the $1/mo automated backups 4 times per month or go with the no-charge manual “Snapshops?” The $12/yr charge in the short term is probably reasonable but would have preferred a daily image even though I’d never do that manually. Perhaps I’ll stick with the automated for a month to see just how reliable the cloud-based server is before moving to manual “Snapshots” (along with my usual sFTP backup and database “dumps)?
Scaling:Snapshots can provide an easy way to scale out a system: you can take a snapshot of a current server and spin up a new droplet from the snapshot. As soon as the process completes, you will have two identical servers to bolster your setup.
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Backups: While automated backups make sure that is always a version of your system available in case of trouble, snapshots have the added benefit of being possible at any time. A snapshot could be taken prior to making any drastic changes to a server configuration, so that, should the changes be unsuccessful, you will have a version to revert back to.
Posted By RichC on December 29, 2015
How do you control the brightness 
on Thunderbolt connected secondary monitor without any physical controls? This took me a few minutes to figure out … so its worth archiving as a tidbit.
When your display desktop is at a premium, or you are running virtual operating systems, having a second monitor is a real plus. I added a secondhand 27″ Mac Thunderbolt display to my iMac and love the extended desktop especially for a Parallels Windows 10 virtual machine; it now sits on it’s own large monitor. The small single Thunderbolt connection and matching resolution made this a no-brainer decision … but there was a glitch: I could not control the second monitor’s brightness setting?
There is a simple solution: Plug in the pigtailed USB wire from the Thunderbolt display (as well as the Thunderbolt wire) and then you can use ctrl-F1 and ctrl-F2 to dim and brighten the second monitor just as F1 and F2 controls the primary monitor.
Posted By RichC on December 29, 2015
Posting a few photos after completing the woodstove project that I’ve been working on this past month or so. It is working great as we used it to dry a bit after the rainy and wet Knockerball fun when the kids were home for Christmas.
After spending a few hours cleaning the old stove and de-rusting, I painted the exterior with a new coat of high temperature flat black paint and am pretty happy with both the looks and heat output. The new flue and chimney draws well … even with the warmer weather we had last week. Now for a few more screws and some priming and painting the ceiling pass-thru … it will be ready for a cold weather winter test.
Posted By RichC on December 28, 2015
After making the Microsoft update from Windows 7 to Windows 10, there 
were a few items lost in the mostly automatic update (BTW, it is as painless an upgrade Microsoft has ever done). One of the add-ons for the Mozilla’s Firefox browser that I find hard to live without is FireFTP (simple FTP client). Much of the FTP an sFTP management that I do has been with this and so I’ve accumulated a few “saved” log-ins and profiles. Unfortunately it broke and all the login data was missing?
Here’s what you do if this happens:
Note on the Windows 10 desktop there is a folder called “Old Firefox Data.” Inside there is the normal looking “dot” default profile directory – normal if you ever had to access it in the past. After opening this folder you will be looking for three files: fireFTPprograms.dat, fireFTPsites.dat and key3.db. Don’t lose these, but “copy” them to the desktop while you navigate or open a new folder window containing the currently functioning Firefox install. You will find it by drilling down to something like:
C:\Users\”username”\AppData\Roaming\Mozilla\Firefox\Profiles\”current.default-##”
(notice the items in the quotes will be unique to your Windows install)
(click for larger illustration)
After REPLACING the current Windows 10 data with the “Old Firefox Data” … be sure to close and reload Firefox. The new FireFTP add-on should now have all the FTP data that was in the previous install.
*NOTE: When you replace the Windows 10 FireFTP data with the old, you will lose whatever you may have started to use … so save any new FTP data.
Posted By RichC on December 28, 2015
Google and NASA engineers announced that tests with the D-WAVE 2X, the quantum computer developed by them, showed that it’s 100 million times faster than an ordinary computer. The impressive record was achieved in a test in which the D-WAVE 2X ran an optimization problem and found a solution much faster than a conventional computer, using a single-core processor.
Source: Interesting Engineering