Toby's Log page 2

Impreza brake calipers, suspension, money

in

It is perhaps deferred maintenance, but I had to put $2000 into my car (2013 Subaru Impreza). At this point that may just be around the value of the car itself. Brakes, suspension, and oil change. I’ve been wanting to get a new car, but that amount of money is going to make me want to keep this for at least another year to make it worth it. But I was somewhat forced into it by loss of most braking power.

Continue reading post "Impreza brake calipers, suspension, money"

Vim: Netrw SFTP error

in

I was annoyed by a problem that cropped up in the latest version of MacVim when using SFTP with the included Netrw plugin. It showed an error every time I opened a directory. So I filed a bug and helped get it fixed. I spent a fair amount of time looking for the exact commit in the Netrw code where the problem started. I then filed a GitHub issue about it with that information. It got fixed in like an hour, at least in the repo. Still waiting for it to make it to MacVim.

Continue reading post "Vim: Netrw SFTP error"

Proposal: *daily

in

I propose that, for any word that ends with the suffix “day”, the suffix can be replaced with “daily”. The new word shall be equivalent to putting the word “every” before that word. For example, “Mondaily” means every Monday, “Tuesdaily” means every Tuesday, etc. Seems a useful shortcut to discuss these. For example, “Fridaily I go into the office” seems a little quicker and simpler sounding than “Every Friday I go into the office”.

Continue reading post "Proposal: *daily"

Project: Website theme switcher

in

I finally made a theme switcher for my website. Ever since I saw the CSS Zen Garden, I loved the idea of using the same markup with completely different appearances. This led to a desire to have multiple themes and an ability to switch them on my own site. Early on I didn’t have the ability, and later I didn’t have the energy or time, or decide on the way I wanted to do it. There are performance and complexity considerations, as well as needing to make decent themes other than the default one. My eventual desire to have a static-friendly site complicated the performance aspect as well.

Some browsers have a built in way to change to alternate stylesheets, but they stupidly download all of them even when they’re not being used. I’m not doing that. So JS or a server-side cookie solution are needed, and the latter won’t work for static sites. I try to minimize the JS on my site and didn’t want something heavy or complex, especially if it were loading before page render.

Recently, I had the energy and decided on a simple, lightweight JS way to do it. I decided to start it even without real alternative themes.

Continue reading post "Project: Website theme switcher"

in

I don’t use npm often. When I do, I tend to be reminded of annoyances in using it. One such annoyance is that it doesn’t take into account the node version in use when installing new packages, as I posted about four years ago. It just goes with the latest if no version is specified, regardless of its ability to run in the available environment. So I have to manually step back versions until I find one that works. The alternative package manager yarn at least has the good grace to error out for incompatible versions, so I used that and just decremented the version of each package until it stopped erroring.

Some of us like to let our OS package manager manage our OS-wide software for security, stability, and simplicity, and that isn’t always the latest and greatest.

Dunc got skunked

in

My brother’s dog, Duncan, got skunked recently while I was walking him. They were very close quarters between, in a ditch / drainage pipe, so I don’t think I got any on me. It was dark, and around a bush from me, so I didn’t even see the critter, and didn’t know it was a skunk until after I had pulled him away and noticed the smell. But it was quite some work to get him cleaned up.

Continue reading post "Dunc got skunked"
</toby>