Rode to Born Free and met up with Tony at his booth. It was pretty awesome. Love hanging with Tony. Doing it again in 2017.

Alien Run 2016 was a total blast. Love this run. Rode with all the Douche guys and had a great time. We stayed in the Clown Motel on the way. Trippy place.

Had a great time with Nikki Sin on the Ride To The Pines. Can’t wait for the next one.

Picked up this Stealth Gear holster and SOE Gear belt. Love them both. The holster is super comfortable and the belt holds it up great.

I kept my Dell laptop while I was using my MacBook for the past nine months. The last distro I put on it before switching to the Mac was Fedora. It’s a bit different from the Debian distro’s I was using before, but it has the best support for the latest Gnome desktop and software that I use. In the time I was on my Mac the Linux system ran great. No problems at all.

Last week my contract ended with MortarStone and I’m still a few thousand shy of paying my taxes. Since my Linux system has run fine I’ve decided to sell off my Mac to help pay the government theft of my hard-earned money. Also I don’t have another contract lined up yet.

So I’m back on Fedora GNU Linux.

After a quick upgrade to Fedora 23 and I’m off to the races. I’ve gotta say, I’m glad I’m back. Fedora is running perfectly. Everything works great so far. It has all the latest software that I use like Passenger, Nginx, Atom, and so on. I also found this really cool new email client called N1. I just need to get used to the keyboard again now.

Gotta get back to tweaking my OS for my next endeavor. I’m hoping to start my own project this time around, but when you don’t have any money because the government likes to take it makes it hard to do six months without a paycheck.

Picked up this sweet S&W M&P Shield 9mm pistol the other day and got my Kydex holster for it. It’s a nice little setup. Works well.

Well. I’m back on a Mac Book Pro after three years on Linux. Finally got tired of fighting with Linux trying to keep it working correctly. Even when I had it “working” there were still problems. Like full screen video would tweak the display, tool-tips were corrupted, and that stupid authentication box popping up a few times a day that did nothing.

Recently my Linux system was just locking up all the time. Not sure if it was OS or hardware but I was at my last care given. I was just over the constant battle to keep it running.

I spent 10 years on Apple and hardly had any problems on their platform. The only reason why I left was the Apple lock in that was happening. Now that there is competition that doesn’t seem to be a problem as much anymore.

So, I went down the to Apple store and purchased a new Mac Book Pro with Retna, 16gb ram, and a 3.1GHz processor. It has way more SSD than I need but that’s fine.

It took a few days to get everything installed that I needed on it. My development tools, Rails, databases, PHP+WordPress, all that usual stuff. I’m a bit behind on work but I think now that I’m not messing with my computer I can actually get something done for once.

So here I am. Back on the Apple wagon. Hope it works for me.

I installed Debian Jessie a while back because I was totally sick of Ubuntu and it’s every-upgrade-breaks-stuff. I was sick of video card problems mostly. It would never save my screen setup. And it started corrupting my wallpaper after waking up from sleep. Annoying.

So I installed Debian and everything was working well. I did run into a few video card problems mainly with full screen videos (YouTube, Netflix, Hulu). This is my TV as well as my computer.

So I switched to Gnome-Wayland and that fixed it right up. The problems were gone for the most part. Fonts were a bit weird but I could live with them.

So I was working away yesterday and then suddenly out of the blue my screen locks up. After fooling with it for a bit I found that it’s my OS that’s locked up. And I had a bunch of work that wasn’t committed yet.

So I hard boot the system thinking that everything will come back up and I can start working again. Nope. I would get the GDM log in but I could not log in. It would act like it was then it would just return back to the GDM. I did no updates or anything. This was totally out of the blue.

So I try switching back to Gnome on X11. Nope. Same thing. Would not work.

I’ve had it with Debian and its no-propitiatory-software BS. It was a pain to install Google Chrome so I could watch Netflix. So I’m done.

I download ARCH Linux to try. Boot off my USB drive and it boots to a shell prompt. No installer! What the.

Well while I’m here I’ll mount the main drive and back up some work to my backup drive. I do that then I go to the docs to figure out how to install this thing.

This is not an easy system to install. You basically have to do everything manually at the shell. I get a bootable system but no network. Another hour I have bootable and networking. Then I install Gnome and my tools. Then Google Chrome…. PITA. I’ve had it. Nope, do not like.

I just want a system that I can use to do my work and not have to mess with to make it work. And no, I don’t want to run Windows or Mac and be locked into their BS.

Back 15 years ago when I ran Linux it seems like it ran a lot better than it does today. I never had problems with updates or video cards. Everything just worked. But anyway…

I download Fedora 21 to try.

I haven’t liked RedHat distro since I switched back to Debian way back in 1996 or 97. RPM was horrible and always had dependency problems. Then they went all enterprise and corporate.

The install was beautiful! Even the boot screen was really nice. It was a little weird picking the install drive but the rest was fine. It was super fast too. Way faster than any other distro. I was up and running on a bootable system in no time. And it looked great.

After copying a bunch of stuff over until wee hours of the morning I finally noticed I had a bunch of updates to do. So I ran those and it actually improved the system.

After doing the updates the font rendering was super nice and everything seems fine.

So, here I am on a Fedora system. So far so good. Two days later I have all my stuff installed and my work environment setup.

A few things got me messed up like my copied rbenv from my old system wasn’t compatible with the new. Had to recompile all my Rubies and gems. Only took a few hours to figure out that I had some ruby stuff breaking everything in my ~/bin dir. But for the most part everything is almost back to normal.

We will see in a few weeks if things stay good. I’ll let you know.

For a few years now I’ve had problems with my furnace blower cycling on and off when it’s really cold out. Usually at night it would do it when I have my house set to 64 degrees. When I had it set above 70 it would work fine.

First I replaced the top plenum sensor being the only one I could find. That didn’t fix it. Later I thought it had something to do with my filters being too thick. So I replaced them with thinner ones. It seemed to help but when it got colder outside it started up again.

Finally this year I decided to fix it once and for all. So I opened things up and found the limit switches. There are two of them on my furnace. One is the high limit for shutting down the heat if it gets too hot. The other is to control the blower motor. First I figured that they just needed replacements. So I purchased replacements for them. It didn’t help. In fact it got worse.

This is when I started to really research this problem. The way the limit switch works is that when the flame comes on and heats up the plenum then the switch will turn on the blower. When the flame goes off the plenum cools down and the switch turns the blower off. There are different temperatures for the switches. There is a high temp that is for turning on and a low temp for turning off. My furnace had a 115/20 switch. That means it turns on the blower at 115 and turns it off 20 degrees below that. So 115 on 95 off. The new replacement switch I got was 120/20. 120 on and 100 off. And the new switch made it worse.

This is when I realized what was happening. The heat would build up to 120 then the blower would turn on. My house was 64 and that cold air would enter and cool the plenum down under the turn off temp. What I needed was a lower temp switch.

So I purchased a 100/20 and that was a problem in the other direction. The blower wouldn’t turn off now. I guess it’s too close to 100 degrees in the plenum normally. So then I found an adjustable switch. It was about $15 but it was worth it to save in fuel and electricity.

I put the adjustable switch in and set it for 110/20. That night it still had the problem so I turned it down until it worked. Finally ended up close to 105/20 on the switch and it’s been working out great!

I’m posting this because there wasn’t many answers on the internet when I was searching for this problem. Lots of people have the problem but nobody posted any solutions (other than call a professional). So if you are having the same problem then pick up an adjustable limit switch and go for it. Also, many other furnaces already have an adjustable switch. Mine did not.

Update – 2015-02-12:

My fancy adjustable fan switch stopped working. Lame. Woke up in the morning with the fan cycling over and over. Turned it up and that kinda fixed it but now it’s doing the cycling when it’s cold again. So I ordered another switch that has a 30 degree difference. So it’s a 115/30. I think the problem is the difference span is too small. We will see.