Yep yep yep, it’s been another busy month; actually two because I didn’t post any updoots last month! I’m still bad about taking pictures of things, but I have some to share.

In November I was all over the place driving to different Thanksgiving celebrations and preparing for the winter season around the house, so there wasn’t much time to spare for internet activities. I did make a few songs that I’m thinking of making part of a short album to post later in the music section thru Bandcamp. I plan to call the album “Simply Beautiful Trance,” which is pretty much just classic-ish Trance tracks that I’ve made, some old and some new.

I was also working on another short cartoon, but it’ll be a little while before I finish it. I’ll announce it and the music later in an RSS feed post.

This week and last I’ve been repairing my truck, which is a Ford Ranger XLT from year 2000. The check engine light came on one evening while driving home from a Thanksgiving supper. I pulled over pretty quickly to check it out, but everything was alright. The following day I checked the error code and it was a thermostat stuck closed. I had to read up and watch some videos to learn about it, which looked simple enough to do on my own. Fortunately it didn’t ever overheat because the thermostat handles coolant flow between the engine and the radiator, opening when it reaches a certain operational temperature. It’s been cool outside though, so I guess that helped.

For the Rangers, I had to buy the thermostat with the housing included. Some videos I watched simply involved popping the radiator hose off and unscrewing a surround, but not mine… nope. There was a bunch of junk in the way making it really difficult to reach. Reading around the web I saw that I would have to pretty much pull the whole damn truck apart for clear access and I wasn’t about to do that. The worst offender though was the timing belt guard. I had no choice but to rip the fugger out, which broke the guard so I guess that won’t be going back in there anytime soon. I did get to see the condition of the timing belt now that the guard was out of the way and yeah, it needs to be replaced soon anyhow… I figure I’ll just get another guard and have someone change the belt for me sometime next year and hand the guy the new guard.

I drained the truck of what was once anti-freeze, but it looked more like chocolate milk to me. It was full of rust, so after pulling out the thermostat and popping out the stuck spring, I put it back in (minus the spring) and flushed it a couple of times. Then I used a radiator cleaning fluid and drove around a few days with that, and when I flushed it, out came more rusty water! A few more flushes and it was clean enough, so I removed the old thermostat housing again to install the new one. Buuut the new one didn’t come with the little sensors for the dashboard gauge and ECM. I figured I would just use the sensors from the old one, but some asshole thread locked them instead of using thread tape; I tried everything to remove them, but ended up stripping the nuts smooth so that was the end of that plan.

I drove back to the auto store to buy two new sensors that same day and got it all installed! Poured in some new anti-freeze and drove it around a bit. So far so good and no check engine lights, except that I suspect the thermostat sensor for the dashboard gauge doesn’t freaking work! Either that, or it’s too cold out for the engine to ever open the new thermostat so that the sensors can get a reading. I’m keeping a close eye though, pulling over occasionally to lift the hood and feel if the engine is getting too hot or not. It’s possible there could be a trapped air bubble inside between the sensor and anti-freeze, but I’ve burped the thing enough now that it shouldn’t be the case. It was working with the old one...

Now I didn’t think to check if there wasn’t some sort of dumbass plastic seal covering the spring inside that needs to be removed because I didn’t want to disturb it. I really don’t want to have to take it back out again!

One afternoon I went to Tractor Supply to get some cat food, flea collars because somehow fleas got in the house, and heat lamp bulbs for the well house, Poochie’s new dog house (more on that later), and possibly my Outhouse too if I ever get it hooked up to power. As I was perusing thru the store, I saw on clearance a kitty cat play set for $25! It was around $100 originally, so what a steal; heck yeah I bought that too and set it up for the cats that same day! I have a picture below of KitKat posing on top its pedestal. The other one is Snickers taking a picture after totally stealing my camera.

I’m working on a dog house for Poochie so that he won’t freeze in the winter. I have some pictures of it, but I’ll post those later in another update blog post once I finish it. At the moment it’s serviceable, but it still needs its insulation and floor.

It took a little bit of coaxing to get him to go inside, but once he discovered it was warmer than being outside at night, he stays inside under the heat lamp now. I have it setup on the front porch, but eventually I’ll move it out into the yard somewhere. I built it in such a way that I can take the roof off so that it can be easily picked up and moved.

Oh and before I forget about it, I’ve been meaning to say that Poochie has now been doggie vaxxed! O,,,,O

It’s just for common outdoor dog things like parvo and rabies; I do the flea topical myself, so no pill for that because those are too expensive. Skunks have also been showing up on the porch to pilfer his leftover food. I’ll get woken up middle of the night from him barking at them, meanwhile the skunk couldn’t even care. I pop them with my BB-rifle to scare them away and surprisingly they don’t spray.

Meanwhile at work, we’re still throwing out old servers and computers. Some of it’s new though, like the Intel NUC’s that were bought roughly two to three years ago. This round isn’t nearly as much as the first round, which I think I estimated was worth around $80,000 just thrown out…This round I don’t know, I didn’t really count them this time. We did have to pull them apart to remove the hard drives though which took a lot of time.

The old Sun UltraSPARC’s are so cool, I wish I could have them all, but I don’t know what I would do with them; and plus, legal department wants them destroyed! AHHH, it’s just too terrible to see because I think these have potential value for other businesses operating legacy equipment in need of spare parts. We’re also throwing out some rather new Cisco enterprise networking equipment (not seen in picture) worth more in total than the value of my property. I have a few pictures below of the crime scene, albeit some of this stuff is so old that it’s only value would be in a computer history museum.

Despite being antiquated, I really liked these old servers. The whole operation ran in such a UNIX way that just made sense compared to today’s $olutions. I wasn’t very fond of CDE, but it was kind of required for the legacy business applications since that was the environment they were originally written for. Also fun fact, a number of the older servers in my picture (pre-2000) were setup for thinnet, sporting network cards that supported 10BASE2 networks. The original network during the IBM mainframe days was thinnet, but the company migrated to 10BASE-T around the mid-90’s as they got away from IBM. Operationally, this company has pretty much smooth sailed it since then, not bothering to screw with things that don’t need to be screwed with, but it doesn’t own itself anymore and the parent holding company over it is attempting to modernize it, which is why we’re throwing all this old stuff out.

I welcome modernizing the business because it’s sorely needed, but I don’t think the direction taken nor the amount of expense going into the modernization effort will ever be profitable enough to keep pace with the quickly growing operations budget as contracts and the like renew beyond their introductory rates. Enterprise cloud meme crap for literally everything, flashy product peddling startup consultants, job hopping linkdin analysts, and contracting multiple MSP’s to manage the beast is like slapping down a freight train engine on a small bus; yeah, we might have the money to pimp our ride for right now, and it’ll certainly get the wheels spinnin’, but it’s also overkill and unwieldily expensive to maintain indefinitely. There have certainly been some immediate benefits and perhaps in time we’ll see if it pays off, but I think it’ll get to be too expensive.

Thanks for reading my blog!

I’ve been on and off the Trinity Desktop Environment since my last blog post earlier this year. It’s still been a bit rough to work with on a laptop due to missing quality of life features that I come to expect these days, or odd glitches that left me confused; yet slowly but surely, I’ve been figuring it out and wanted to showcase them here in a follow up blog post!

Touchpad tap-to-click

There was a recent new release of TDE a few days ago for 14.1.3 that brought a few additional nice to have features. One of those is a touchpad, which it didn’t have before! Originally I was having to setup an xorg conf file to enable tap to click by default for my touchpad, but now it’s a built it option in the control center.

Just go to the Control Center > Peripherals > Touchpad to find the tap to click option.

TDE screen saver lock screen not covering the desktop

The next problem that I didn’t like to see was the TDE screen saver / session lock failing to mask my desktop. This may or may not be a problem for you, depending on your graphic driver. I’m on Intel CPU integrated graphics, which will sometimes run into issues like this, so to fix it go into the Trinity Control Center, then under the Appearances section click on Screen Saver. If you look carefully, there’s a checkbox labeled as “Use legacy windows.” Simply check that and the lock screen should render correctly!

Multi-touch swipe to change virtual workspaces

I like multi-point gestures for switching the virtual workspace on a laptop, it’s kind of intuitive imo. Now if you’re using a laptop with a touchpad that does supports multi-touch gestures such as three or more fingers instead of simply two, you can use the program “Touchégg” to enable and configure this functionality. Now the program “Touché” is the graphical application for configuring your multi-touch settings while “Touchégg” seems to just be the service that starts up with the system. It’s a hideous looking application, but it works and you’ll only need to set it once and forget about it.

First off you’ll need to install Touchégg:

sudo apt install touchegg

Then the crappy part is installing “Touché” which so far you either have to build yourself or install it thru flathub… Yeah. And also the thing is mostly written in javascript too lol. It’s a gross program, but it does work and like I said, you just set up your gestures once then forget about it!

From in the touche program, make sure that you’re in the global gestures option, then in the “swipe” section. I only keep “Left” and “Right” enabled while keeping the others disabled, but this is up to you. For swipe left, adjust the drop down option to “Execute a command,” then fill in the command box with “xdotool key ctrl+F2” Execute on “Gesture begin.”

You should do the same for the “Right” swipe option, except change the F2 to F1.

Now go into your keyboard shortcuts (Trinity Control Center if you’re using the default Twin window manager, or KDE System Settings if you’re using KWin.) Adjust the key bind option for “Walk Through Desktop List” (For KWin settings it’s “Switch to Next Desktop”) to “Ctrl-F1” and “Walk Through Desktop List Reverse” (for KWin settings it’s “Switch to Previous Desktop”) to “Ctrl-F2.

You should now be able to swipe to either virtual desktop.

Bluetooth on TDE

A reader from the previous blog post had a few things to say too. Apparently Trinity does have a bluetooth manager, which wasn’t ever listed on their site… But if you would like, you can install tdebluez-trinity instead of the bluez package to manage bluetooth devices. I don’t know if it works any better or the same as bluez, but I figured it’s worth mentioning.

After installing, just launch tdebluez and it’ll show up in the system tray. It functions a little similarly to bluez.

The rest of the bullet points in that post I already covered in the video. Kmix is still utterly useless to me on whatever device I’ve installed Trinity to. I don’t know if I’m doing something wrong or not, so I suggest just keeping a button on the taskbar that opens pavucontrol-qt.

Even better display management and how to orient and position displays on TDE

So in my video for the Trinity blog post, I recommended lxrandr for managing multiple displays. I’m not too fond of lxrandr though because you can’t position the displays, so I found something even better! You can use “arandr” which is a much more complete display management solution than lxrandr.

Arandr stores the settings as a shell script within ~/.screenlayout which you could use in a login script if you wanted. It would be nice if this was all automatically ran and detected… It might be possible to create a service script for this.

Now something that I’ve noticed when changing display settings on TDE is that vsync gets all messed up. I actually recall this being an issue with Compton, and it probably still is; but regardless, TDE uses compton for its compositing and this can be addressed by restarting the service with the following command:

pkill -HUP compton-tde

You can append this to the arandr screenlayout shell scripts too so that it does it for you automatically!

echo " && pkill -HUP compton-tde" >> ~/.screenlayout/*

Window tiling with TDE Twin

At first I didn’t really like Twin since I couldn’t half and quarter tile my dang windows with the pointer like I was familiar with in every other desktop; it truly was like using an old Windows XP era desktop. But after a little digging around in the control center, I found a check box for window tiling in Desktop > Active Borders. Just check the box – errr radio button? - for “Tile window” and activate both options below it for maximizing windows and display content when tiling. And there you have it, window tiling with the pointer!

How to fix TDENetworkManager

“Connection attempt failed! Secrets were required to establish a connection, but no secrets were available.”

Note:For Ubuntu users, you’ll probably want to install the tdenetwork-trinity and network-manager-tde packages which creates the network manager icon in the system tray. It wasn’t included for me so if you’ re in the same boat then just install that, log out then back in and you should be good.

At first I was having trouble connecting to any of my wireless networks from the TDENetworkManager, yet they worked just fine when on the Plasma desktop. I figured out that the connection profiles I had setup weren’t going to work with the TDENetworkManager because the password used for connecting to those networks was kept in a psk file on the keychain (in this case, the Seahorse keychain for me because this is a Ubuntu desktop that came with GNOME.) Apparently Plasma will start up GNOME services if they’re available which includes the Seahorse keychain, and the Plasma network manager is able to integrate with that keychain. I guess this is a cross-compatibility feature of Plasma, but Trinity isn’t going to play those games and so fails to ever send a password to authenticate with the wireless network.

The TDENetworkManager is certainly able to detect your connection profiles which are stored in /etc/NetworkManager/system-connections

If you cat out your connections, you’ll probably notice there’s no password in the files. That’s because the connection profile was configured to integrate with a keychain to authenticate the connection. TDENetworkManager has no clue what to do with these additional options (I don’t think keychains existed back then), so what you’ll need to do is to simply create a new wireless connection from the TDENetoworkManager and you’ll be good to go. It uses an older method of just storing the password in the connection profile itself as “psk=my_password.” Probably not that secure, but who the fug cares? If someone manages to break into your computer or steals it, then you’ve got bigger probl ems on your plate bro.

In case you’re especially brain dead right now, to create a new connection profile all you gotta do is click on the little network status icon in the system tray. It’ll look like a grey globe icon if you’re not already con nected to a network. From there, select “New connection …”

Wrap up

That’s about all I’ve got. I did find out you can uninstall some of the bundled software that comes with Trinity without those packages being necessary dependencies. I didn’t really like the older version of Kate and Konve rsation that it came with and was able to uninstall them no problem. This was mostly due to the lack of a functional spellcheck that I could easily access from a right-click menu.

I also found this old start menu alternative “KBFX Spinx” that the Trinity repos include, albeit it’s very basic. Believe it or not, there are still old themes out there you can install.

This program is old and sort of buggy. I really like the credit section where each author has a profile picture and a small blurb about them.

Thanks for reading my blog!

Related blog post: Trinity Desktop Environment Guide & Review (2024)

It's gettin' about that cozy time of season bros...

Another month, another blog post!

It’s been a little slow around here on the web since I’ve been busy IRL. Most of my time I spend at work, then what little time I have left I either spend it on house repair work or chores, so I don’t have much to write about to keep consistent like when I first started the site a few years back. Well, at least much worth writing about, because I don’t give a fug about fake politicians and their fake “elections” going on in the states at the moment, or whatever next desert war they’re drumming up to re-grease Uncle Sam’s dirty hands. Don’t think I’m so disconnected that I’ve totally stopped caring, but you have to pick and choose the things to care about anymore in this kind of environment or you’ll be ravaged by every hapooning. It’s cold, but it’s necessary for preservation of the mind amidst psychological warfare and I’m not about to concern myself over what some media boob tells me to think or worry about.

Now web service-wise, I did discover that webscrapers were scrapin muh forum because PHPBB comes with a retarded default “bots” permission group that permits the user agent of most well known web scrapers full access that bypasses mandatory user sign in to view the boards. I freaking hate PHPBB’s permission system, it’s worse than SharePoint! So I cleaned that up and now nothing can scrape posts without an account. ^{unless there’s another backdoor I’m not yet aware of...}

I do miss the days of forums being publicly viewable without requiring an account, but those days are long gone. I'm not interested in building a free-for-all LLM dataset so get rekt Google and Bing!

So to continue where I left off from the last blog post on house repair work, I finished wrapping my plumbing with an insulation foam tape. It was more difficult doing that than installing the dang plumbing itself! In hindsight, I don’t recommend using nail down half clamp J-Hooks like I did. It’s such a pain in the ass to wrap anything around the plumbing work when it’s so close to a surface; and because it’s so close to a surface, I didn’t have enough space to slide a foam tube around it which is why I went with a thin insulation foam tape that’s a lower R value. For the next run of plumbing work that I’ll do, I intend to use extension hangers so it’ll be easier to slide a foam tube over the pipe.

Also, I finally have a water softening filtration and aeration system installed for the well, which means no more hard water and no more sulfur water! I’ve been hauling gallon jugs of drinking water from work or from my parents for over a year now, but now that the well water is soft enough, I can finally use it in my Berky filter without it clogging up the filters.

It’s a bit jank at the moment, but I’ll re-build the well house soon™!

I’ve had some trouble with the aerator though, which is the big black looking torpedo shaped tank on the left. Every few days it runs through a regeneration cycle and dumps some water in the process out the back of the pump house. During the process it’s supposed to eventually close the valve that’s dumping out the water, but the damn thing gets stuck and I come home to find a swamp in the back yard. I’ve had the guy that installed it fix it two times now, so I’m a bit skeptical of this system. I’m going to be beyond pissed if it drys out my well, so I’ve been keeping a closer eye on it. The mechanics of it seem simple enough, so I suspect the little motor that turns the gear to open and close the valve is probably no good. If it keeps acting up, I’m going to just try and return it because it was $2,000.

The softener in the blue shaped torpedo tank, including the black brine tank barrel in the front of it too, works perfectly fine! The aeration system is really only good for removing the sulfur smell from well water and iron, which is a nice to have but not exactly necessary unlike the softener which is a must.

All that’s left now is to install a new main line from the well pump house to my manifold block system, and then I’ll have running water! I’ll need to rent a mini trencher to dig out a trench for it though because there’s too much rock in the soil to make it worth my while in shoveling by foot.

Last week there was a magnetic storm over the atmosphere which produced some aurora lights as far down as Texas, so I took some pictures of it that turned out really great! Now the camera made it look a lot better than it really looked by eye, but even by eye it I could see it.

I was driving home late and when I got out of the car I noticed the sky had a faint red glow to it. At first I thought there was a big fire somewhere nearby because I could smell smoke, but then I remembered hearing about the magnetic storm.

And that’s all I’ve got for this month. I’m planning to build a dog house for Poochie since the weather is cooling down. Right now he likes the cold weather, but I don’t want him to freeze to death when it really gets cold out! He has a bad habit of chewing apart anything made of fabric or cardboard though, so no pillow for him; I’m just going to carpet it and install a heat lamp.

I also have a new neighbor about a mile down the road which I found out is from Commiefornia! So yeah this was the guy I was bidding against when I bought this house. He bidded a lot more than me, but wasn’t going to be able to actually buy the house until after a year once he sold his place back in California. The seller didn’t want to wait because they had a $30K reverse mortgage to pay back on the place and were already struggling with other debts and stuff and so went with my lower cash offer.

It’s a good thing too because that dude from California that bought the little abandoned house up the road from me just friggin bulldozed it! It really wasn’t in that bad of shape and could have been restored... but yeah, that was the fate of my place too if I hadn’t got it when I did, so it narrowly escaped certain doom. Hopefully it’ll have another hundred plus years of life to live.

Thanks for reading my blog!

Why work a dirty jerb for someone else when there are plenty of dirty jerbs back home?

Hulloo Cozy readers! As is the usual excuse, I’ve been busy; too busy to be writing blogs and things. Let’s see, what all has been going on?

Well I recently discovered online auction sites where you can find things for mega cheap, I had the kitties “fixed” and vaxed, finally plumbing the house, got some old family heirlooms to decorate the place with, and arranging a water filtration and aeration install with a contractor.

So most of the auctions going on around my area are just a bunch a junk, but I did find one that was for an antique store liquidation! Ohh yeah, I found quite a few nice little odds and ends to decorate the living room with from that auction too.

It was also a first time learning experience, because some of the things I got I had to throw out in the barn because they weren’t any good. Now I was familiar with the particular antique store being liquidated and most of the items that were on auction, but there were a few that I took a gamble on. I got a fancy sofa in good condition for like $44 and a 10x12 rug for I think $18? That’s a dang good deal!; until you actually get the items only to find they’ ve been absolutely soaked in freaking piss! Lesson learned, never buy anything that’s upholstered or made of fabrics from an auction.

I managed to nab the stained slag glass lamp that was sort of a center piece in the store for a long time. The guy selling it wanted around $200 for it and wouldn’t haggle it, which is more than I’m willing to spend on a stupid lamp. But at auction I got it for $75! Check out this beaut next to one of my fans!

Here’s a picture of the living room, which is slowly shaping up. I can’t really invest a whole lot of money into it how I would like, so I’m just settling with the minimum for now. Those are still the same old nasty curtains that came with the house by the way. I would replace them, but have you seen the price of fabric!? Sheesh, it’s gonna cost a small fortune so I’ll just hold off on that for later.

I had my cats “fixed” when I was off for the week to work on plumbing the house. I figured it was a good week to get it done since I would be around the house to keep an eye on them as they recovered. It was quite an expensive ordeal though, costing about $900 in total. Though I can afford it, it is a considerable amount from my savings that I’m wanting to put into buying land. It’s definitely going to be awhile before I can get any land at this rate due to odd things like this.

Someone in the last blog post wanted to see more of Poochie, so here’s some pictures of him with a cow bone. I’m about to take him up to Tractor Supply soon for his vaccinations because I have no idea if he already has em or not; judging by the fact someone dumped him, I’m going to assume that he isn’t. He’s been doing well though, and likes to romp around in the pastures with the gang of neighbor dogs. Probably the best life a dog could have.

Been rolling in the mud!

Since it’s getting cool out, I’m going to build him a house soon with a heat lamp built into it and a large cushion (if he doesn’t drag it out to chew apart) so he can stay warm in the winter. Also he needs a collar and a name tag, but he’s never worn one before so he might not go for it. I know cats can be that way unless you start them off as kittens wearing a collar.

Anyhow, I took a whole week off of work to get some plumbing work done. It might not look like much in the pictures, but man it was a lot of work. First off, I had to clear out the back utility room then reorganize it to make space. I also cleaned and sterilized the floors with bleach water since they were filthy and stunk. It’s the cleanest this room has probably been in decades!

For the plumbing, I’m using the PEX manifold system with PEX-B pipe and crimps cause I just love microplastic carcinogens in my water! (No, I intend to run my drinking water thru a reverse osmosis filter beneath the kitchen sink.) I like this method of plumbing because there aren’t any fittings beneath the house, which are always a weak point; it’s just continuous pipe from the manifold to the destination!

And yes, I’m running it thru the crawl space and up into a narrow hole drilled thru the floor directly beneath its destination rather than thru the interior walls of the house because lemme tell you, just about every dang wall in this house is covered in shiplap that’ll be too difficult to pull down and I don’t like the idea of tearing it up or drilling holes thru wall studs either; sounds like a recipe for disaster. Now the downside of running plumbing in a crawl space like this is exposure to freezing cold temperatures in the winter and little vermin that might think to chew it up. I don’t have to worry so much about the freezing cold here in Texas, but I will wrap it in an insulated foam tape just in case.

Thanks for reading my blog!

It’s been a pretty good month since the last update. Things seem to be going well on the technical front with the site and such. I haven’t really been up to much site-wise though. I did make a backup script so that I wouldn’t have to go down a list of things to manually copy and a few other scripts to better manage things without having to dig thru log files.

Other than that, most of my time is either spent at work or at home working… But I did some grilling this last weekend to take a break after a sweltering hot week of clearing out junk here. I made charcoal grilled burgers and sausage which came out great!

Here’s a picture of my cats too. They like watching me from the window sill in the cool house while I’m outside working. I setup this chair to watch my grill on the porch from inside, but they claimed the spot once I got up to flip the patties.

And here’s a video of them playing with a cracker box. I usually throw them boxes and cardboard pieces since they like playing around with it. They eventually tear it all apart, leaving it in scraps.

So I’ve been cleaning around the house in preparation of getting water finally ran from the well. I cleaned out a quarter of the barn out back so that I had an area to move junk from out of the house which was cluttering up the utility room and getting in my way. Some of the junk I can’t exactly dump without going thru some bureaucracy, so I’m just going to move it to the barn for now.

I found this old torn up phone book in a closet from the 70’s. It has a lot of neat little pictures in it and businesses that were once in the town nearby. I’m surprised by how many businesses there use to be around here too! There was even a friggin peanut factory, but you wouldn’t ever know that seeing the dilapidated shape of the town today. Thanks NAFTA and Bill Clinton! What also surprises me is how despite there being considerably less business or job opportunity today in small towns than in the past, the population of these small towns is often times larger than ever before in its history, and yet it's so dead. I wonder why that is?

Speaking of dead things, I also found this big ass dead mummified rat in a closet. There were also a bunch of smaller mice skeletons everywhere in the closet too, go figure! I figured out how they were getting into the house too, because the morons that installed the upstairs bathroom before I ever came along cut out a huge hole in the floor of the closet to run the septic line out and didn’t cover the exposed space. That would explain why there was so much mouse and rat shit everywhere back when I got the place. They haven’t been a problem though ever since moving in, but I’m definitely going to cover that opening up.

The closet is in the cats room though, so it would be a bad idea for any rodent to find its way into the rest of the house since they like chasing things.

Thanks for reading my blog!

Yeah that’s right, I’ve got MOAR CozyNet site updates! Really all I’m doing is just messing around because I get bored at work and I’m wondering how much I can squeeze out of this VPS. I was thinking that it would be pretty cool to run a PHP forum, but there are some prerequisites to get it done right, or at least sort of right.

That prerequisite is an email server so that the forum can handle user account creation and user driven password reset requests. You can get by without a mail server, but then it’s just a half baked forum and nobody likes half baked things right? So now I’ve finally got a mail server setup for CozyNet too, which is great because now I can use a mail client instead of needing to sign into ProtonMail to read emails (yeah I’m not paying for another ProtonMail account just to use their bridge service.) I’ll be updating the contact info soon. Also another cool thing about this is I can easily integrate PGP signed emails for anyone wanting to verify the authenticity of the message. I do have a public PGP key btw, in case anyone was wondering.

Maybe I shouldn’t be mentioning anything about a forum but I think you CozyNet readers are an alright bunch given the fact you’re readin muh blog! But there are some restrictions and limitations because if you guys know anything about forums, especially running a forum in today’s morally maladjusted society, it’s a really BAD idea. So that means no server hosted file attachments (plus I don’t have the storage capacity to host files anyhow), and all accounts are manually activated. So right now I’ll activate rando accounts, but it’s a short window where thereafter I’ll only activate accounts for frens and fren of frens. Also an account is required to even read the forum, which is a bit unfortunate because I think forums are a great source to index for web search engines, but this ain’t Y2K anymore so Google and Bing can get bent.

I haven’t yet written any rules, but they’re basically the same as the IRC server rules. Also I don’t ever plan on this getting big and want to keep it small. Hopefully things will go well, otherwise I’ll just shut it off, so be cool bros.

If you’re interested in some good ol’ fashion shitpostin’, then head on down to the CozyNet forum!

Thanks for reading my blog!

Of late I’ve been using the Debian pastezone pastebin service and figured that it would be pretty cool to host my own pastebin service. I searched around on github and gitlab for a PHP based pastebin that would hook up with my mysql database service.

I did find a few projects, but I didn’t like the way they looked or operated. I think the one I liked the most though was this old project, “php-pastebin-v3.” It’s an archived project, but I don’t care if projects like these are abandoned; they’re simple services that honestly don’t need some continuous development.

Despite liking this one, I wanted something that was a little more simple, just like Debian Pastezone, because it can be accessed by simple browsers, even text based browsers! Poking around on Debian pastezone brought me to the project source, which is a Perl and CGI based service.

This is quite similar to my Xapian Omega internal site indexing and search service, which the Omega web front-end is a CGI based application. I wrote a short blog on it awhile ago here, if you’re interested.

I like these sorts of simplistic backend services because they just werk! Now I am a bit leery to the “security” of it all, or perhaps its unbeknownst lack thereof; but generally the security boils down to the web server itself and what might be unknowingly permitted. Now this is just a hobby site so if it gets wrekt then oh well, but it makes a good learning experience none the less. So check out the CozyNet Pastezone!

I think having this is especially nice for the IRC where the occasional snippets of code and configurations are pasted into the channel. I’ve modified the pastebin service to include an address bar because I wanted to make the pastebin into an iframe-able widget that wouldn’t require the user to open a new tab from their browser; they can just load the paste link directly within the search input and hit “Go” to load the page. You can also somewhat navigate from outside of it onto other CozyNet web pages, which is kinda funny, but out of scope for it’s purpose. You can see this in action on the CozyNet homepage below the IRC chat window in a toggle button that reveals the pastebin. You can produce links and load links directly within the iframe without ever needing to leave the page which I think it’s really neat!

Or alternatively, you can just go directly to the pastebin service if that floats your boat.

I’m not finished with tweaking the pastebin service by the way. It still needs some improvement in the theme department, and I’m considering disabling the commenting system for hidden pastes since it doesn’t exactly work very well; I mean, it does work, but it runs into some weird session error after making a comment, which you can resolve by simply going back and refreshing the page to see the submitted comment. Additionally, I’m thinking of also integrating my captcha system that I use for the comment service to cut out any potential C&C bot submissions.

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Yeahhh I know… I’m not posting as much anymore it seems; I’ll try to fix that. I would like to keep up with writing detailed long posts, but that’s really caused a problem with being consistent. It’s just not easy trying to come up with a well fleshed out post is all, so I’m just not gonna do it unless I’m in the mood.

I’ve still been keeping busy with house stuff. After over a year of shidding innawoods like a wild man, I’ve finally got my outhouse to a usable state. I simply got sick of being attacked by so many damn mosquito's when trying to take care of business. Since it’s been raining a lot here this year, the mosquito population exploded. I’m also mowing the yard twice a friggin week, which if you recall is about 1 acre (0.4 hectares), so it’s a real pain in the bum, and itchy too. Keeping up with that among other things doesn’t leave me with much time in the day to blogpost or shitpost because I’m too tired by the end of it.

Landscape-wise, I have a laundry list of things needing to be done too. Clear up fallen trees, make a burn pit to burn limb piles, clear out trash piles from the backyard, cut down trash trees in the backyard, pick up dead limbs and branches, weed-whack, mow, poison, and more. For now I’m just doing my best to maintain things so it doesn’t get too out of hand while nature is trying to reclaim the property. It at least looks better than last year, where the whole “yard” was just overtaken by an overgrowth of rag weeds and Johnson grass. I’ve been trying to stay consistent with mowing so that I can kill off the perineal weeds; the sticker plants are by far the worst.

On the pet front, the kittens have been doing well. They’re growing quick and will be full grown cats before long. They like playing games and being mischievous too, such as scratching the trim in doorways. I flick water at them and chase them away from it to deter them, but instead of learning from that, they just try to do it even quicker. They’ll even look right at me while doing it before quickly darting off, as if to say “teehee you can’t catch me!” I call them my paint scraper assistants.

Also apparently I now have a pet dog. Someone dumped him off on the road and I guess he walked a few miles up to my place since I keep the porch light on and there’s no other dogs here to chase him away. At first I tried chasing him away because I don’t want a dog and not really fond of them since they tear shit up and make a lot of noise (more so than a cat.) He kept away after that, but then one morning it was raining outside and he was beneath one of the trees that fell over beside the yard (which is one of the fallen trees still on my list to clear out.) He was just there barking to the sky and looking all wet and miserable, so I got him a pan and emptied out a can of wet cat food that I wasn’t going to use since my cats became crack addicted to it.

He’s been coming around since then, which I figured he would after feeding him that one time, so I got him a bag of dog food, some chew bones, and a rope toy. He sticks around now in the back yard and is a really friendly dog when not skittish. He’s a nearly all white Australian Shepherd with bright almost white blue’ish eyes, with one eye having some weird coloration deformity. Despite being young, I think he might be nearly blind because if I throw his rope toy or a stick, it just doesn’t register in his dog brain that I threw anything at all; my cats have more sense when I throw them something! I have to be really obvious, and then he’ll chase after it, but then he has completely no idea where it landed and will look around then give up.

Here’s a picture of him. He’s real skinny right now, and has flea rashes. If he sticks around and trusts me a little more, I’ll get a kiddie pool to give him a flea bath in and brush his fur out. Right now his name is Poochie, as in “The Itchy & Scratchy & Poochie Show.” I don’t really have a way to keep him in the yard since it’s easy to escape, so hopefully he doesn’t get into any trouble.

He has both his eyes, it's just hard to tell.

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Yeah, the CozyNey blog isn’t ded, I’ve just been busy is all! I was at the Texas Linux Fest a few weeks ago, which was alright. It wasn’t as Linux-y as I would have liked, but I suppose it was a good occasion to get out. The traffic in Austin isn’t very fun though. They have a lot of these apartment development blocks being built up and a lot of people moving in. The street system doesn’t seem very capable of managing the vehicles without causing traffic jams. I think that city has taken on more people than it can withstand. If TXLF is held again in Austin, I probably won’t go.

Anyhow I got to eat out a little there, and had some barbecue at Terry Black which was extremely friggin expensive! I was expecting that though, but it was really good. Then the next day I had burgers at Sandy’s. Here’s a picture of their neon sign!

Back at home, I’ve been a little busy. I setup some rain gutters in the back, and plan to start working on gutters for the front soon. These will really help keep the foundation from moving around. For now it’s alright, but over time water beating down isn’t good for it. In fact, I found a sill beam in the front beneath the porch that I’ll need to replace, which I’m not looking forward to.

I also now have kitties! They seem pretty smart and took right away to the litter box, despite not ever being trained to one. They’ve been quite busy in that box too, so I keep cleaning it out. I’m really surprised by how fast they figured it out. I just sat it down, put one inside and that was it! I need to buy them some more toys because I have them playing with leaves and cardboard strips right now, and so they make a mess.

Here’s a picture of the two kittens. The darker grey cat is Snickers and the lighter one with stripes is KitKat, and they’re both girls. I later put a box on its side with a large flap and sat their bed inside which they like a lot. At first they were trying to sleep beneath the dresser, so the secludedness of the box around their bed helped change their minds. As they get bigger, I’ll get them another bed and litter box.

Now the room I put them in I spent a lot of time cleaning and clearing. This was the last room on the first level that I hadn’t yet bother cleaning properly, so the floor was filthy. But I finally cleared out my stuff to mop and scrub the floors with water and bleach. There are still a few things in there I can’t move out just yet, which I think will make fun climbing obstacles for the cats.

Oh and one other thing I almost forgot to mention was the eclipse! I got to seen the full eclipse which was pretty cool. The moon covering the sun really makes it look a lot closer than it really is; it seemed as if the moon was just a few miles up in the air directly overhead, and it looked foreboding. When everything went dark, it felt like evening time. I was out at my parents place, which is also out in rural Texas. As it got dark, the air felt cold like the evening time, the owls by the creek started hooting, the crickets chirped, and the goats all went back to their barn for the night.

A few minutes later when the sun came back out, the goats all ran out of their barn back into the pasture to follow their morning routine in the afternoon. They probably thought that was the shortest night ever! Then the owls and crickets stopped making noise and the day continued back where it left off. The next big event to look forward to this year will be the invasion of the cicadas!

I don’t have any good pictures of it unfortunately, otherwise I would share one here too, so have a cat picture instead!

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