Diary of a Network Geek

Solar power has come to represent hope in science fiction, and climate change.

My wife and I got solar panels in 2018. It was not a decision we made lightly, but we’re quite glad we did. For one thing, solar power almost completely off-sets our electricity bill. For another thing, we feel that having solar power helps the long-term health of our planet. It’s just a good idea and the technology is finally catching up to the promise solar power first held in the ’70s. We don’t have batteries yet, since where we live there’s a requirement for solar systems to be tied to the power grid. And, too, four years ago, battery technology just wasn’t quite where we wanted it to be to invest in a battery backup solution. It pretty much is there now, or close enough, at least, that it’s worth doing.
When we got the solar panels, I told my wife that it felt like I was living in a science-fictional universe. When I was growing up, solar power was almost exclusively the province of the future or science-fiction. Today, we’re closer than ever to realizing the promise of that future. Sadly, it’s still more fiction than science, but at least there’s hope.
So, to encourage you in that hope for the future, I thought I’d share two free collections about the promise of a solar future from Arizona State University. First, there’s The Weight of Light, which came out in February of 2019. Then there’s Cities of Light, which came out this year in February. Both are described as “…[a] collection of science fiction stories, art, and essays…” that explore how our future may look fueled by solar energy “… with an upbeat, solarpunk twist…” And, of course, for the ebook versions, both are free as well.

Why not download them now for your first “summer read”?

This post first appeared on Use Your Words!

I’m always happy about sharing something that’s free.

With Christmas just around the corner, I know I’m feeling a little spending fatigue. Granted, I mostly send fruit from the McAllan Valley home to Illinois for family, but it seems like I’m spending money all the time around the holidays. If it’s not being tempted by a “Black Friday” sale of some kind, then it’s spending on a holiday party or some other similar thing. And, it’s not that I mind, mostly, but, as someone who has struggled with consumer debt and over-spending, the extra money spent at this time of year really starts to wear on me.
So, I’m always looking for cheap and free things this time of year to share with you, my faithful readers. Combine that with my penchant for hiding from the world via a good book, and sharing this article on Make Use Of titled The 7 Best Free Ebook Download Sites seemed like just the thing. One of them, Project Gutenberg, I’m both familiar with and have shared multiple times before, but the rest are new to me. And, if you don’t have an ebook reader, don’t worry, one, PDFBooksWorld, just needs a computer to read the PDF-ified books!
One note about this, though. As far as I can tell, the sites linked are all legal sites and not pirating work. Some have a mix of free and paid books, but they do all have at least SOME free books. And, at least one of them really only links to books that require an Amazon Kindle Unlimited account to get the free books. Also? Just to be clear, it’s wrong to pirate books. If they’re not freely available, it’s always best not to steal the work. Besides, this close to Christmas, can you afford to get on Santa’s “Naughty List”?

This post originally appeared on Use Your Words!

As you might have guessed from the title of this blog, I’m a geek. In fact, I’m actually a professional geek. Rumor has it, being a geek is cool now. I’ll get back to you on that.
In any case, one of the ways my geek has expressed itself is in early support for Linux.  I’ve used Linux, one way or another, for more than twenty years.  It’s hard to believe, but it’s true.  What’s more, I’ve been Linux certified for more than ten years!  Strange but true!  I don’t use Linux as my main operating system, though, because I live in the real world, not a Techno-Libertarian Utopia.  And, yes, that means, I use Windows.  At home, it’s Windows 10, because that’s what came installed on the laptops I got for my wife and I while I was a highly-paid contractor in 2016 and we were refreshing all our electronics.  But, much to my surprise, there’s a way to run both Windows and Linux, together on the same machine!  Without having a dual-boot system!  Thanks to an article from the Linux Journal, which almost went the way of the dinosaurs last year, I have activated Windows Subsystem for Linux, which is ONLY available on Windows 10, and then installed Ubuntu, which is free, from the Microsoft Store.  The little screen-shot at the top of this post is Ubuntu, running in its own, little window, on my Windows 10 laptop.

This is exciting!
Now, I can brush up my bash scripting by setting up a series of rsync jobs to keep my two Western Digital MyCloud drives in sync, essentially backing one up to the other.  From the literature, I had thought that was built into the models I got, but it wasn’t.  I tried to use SSH to get that setup directly on the MyCloud devices, since they’re running some limited *nix kernel, but something about the way they were configured made connecting one directly to the other and running rsync from working “as expected”.  This, though, should get me around all that.
Now, all I have to do sort out the syntax for properly mounting the Windows shares I’ve set up in the Ubuntu virtual machine app.  So, I’m not 100% there yet, but this is a great start!

Seriously, health tips from Walt Whitman himself.

I think about health a lot, because I’m overweight.  My cardiologist would like me to lose at least 20 pounds, preferably more.  He just doesn’t quite buy that my wife, being a good Southern woman, expresses her love for me through food.  And, she really loves me.  Seriously.
I also tend to be a traditionalist, though, so when I saw that old Walt Whitman had written a 13-installment series of articles giving men of his day health advice, well, you can imagine how I became quite interested.  Maybe, finally, I’d have someone who was on my side for why I didn’t have time to lose the weight!  And why bacon can be served at every meal!

Sadly, it was not so.  Mr. Leaves of Grass himself said just what my cardiologist did; get up and walk.  Yeah.  And, he suggests walking outside, in the fresh air, and everything.
I feel betrayed.
You can read all his advice, which, I might add, is perfectly good for women for the most part, too, if you just follow this link over to the University of Iowa archives.  It’s actually a pretty good series of articles and, while he doesn’t say much about bacon, he does suggest that there’s nothing wrong with eating beef.  So I have that much.

Anyway, it’s Friday and you might as well read what else he has to say.
Enjoy your weekend!

This post originally appeared at Use Your Words.

I think everyone could use a little positive thinking this week.

I know I sure could!
I have read more than my fair share of self-help books and the one thing they all mostly have in common is the idea of “positive thinking”.  Whether it’s The Power of Positive Thinking by Norman Vincent Peale or How to Win Friends & Influence People by Dale Carnegie or Think and Grow Rich by Napoleon Hill or A Better Way to Live by Og Mandino,…
Read More

It’s time to clean up my act.

Seriously.
My wife is a professional organizer and decorator, so those of you who know me well know how she suffered when she first moved in with me.  I hadn’t devolved into a complete hoarder, but I had gotten an unfortunately significant start.  She dug me out.  Honestly, I wish I had her ability to let go of things, but I tend to hold on to too much.  Naturally, when she asked me to read The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up, I just about had a panic attack.  But, I did read it and, once I got past some of the ways the author talks about discarding things, I could see why my blushing bride loved the book.  In spite of whatever reviews you may have read about the extreme method described, it’s really not so terrifying.  The essence of it is to get rid of the things that you don’t use or need or want any more, to make room, both literally and figuratively.
I’m not saying that it’s been easy for me to do, because it hasn’t, but I do find myself thinking about what I really need and use quite a bit.  The reality is, I have too much stuff to really keep track of it all.  So, I’ve been taking some of the time I have, while I wait to get connected to my next work opportunity, to reevaluate and clean out.
I have told myself for a long time that I don’t like change, that I’m not good with it.  But, that’s not really true.  Sure, I like to control change, but in many areas of my life, I’m constantly changing, growing, trying new ideas and methods, keeping what works and discarding the rest.  One area that I haven’t been working at as much lately is my personal organization and scheduling.  I’ve been very reactive and not nearly proactive enough to suit me.

I used to be a “to do list” fanatic.  Every day I’d start my day with a fresh list, carrying over the things I didn’t finish from the previous day, and adding to it.  On Friday, I’d set my list up for Monday before I left the office.  First thing Monday, I’d review the list and see if I thought of anything else to add over the weekend, because my brain just will not shut off and stop thinking about work.  It’s how I’m wired, I guess.
Mainly, though, I loved crossing things off my list.
I know, it’s a strange thing, but the idea of crossing something off my list actually gave me a little thrill.  And, when I’d get to the end of the day, I’d see all the things I’d crossed off and think about how great it was to get all that stuff done.  Somewhere, though, in all the jobs and the “life stuff”, like getting married, divorced, beating cancer and getting married again, I lost that habit.  I tried to “leverage technology” and my smart phone to get a to do list app that would synchronize with my computer, but, frankly, nothing ever worked to my satisfaction.  And, of course, it was a convenient excuse for why I stopped doing it.
Some time back, I read Getting Things Done: The Art of Stress-Free Productivity by David Allen and I sort of made a half-hearted attempt to set some of his system up, but, honestly I never put enough effort into it. At the time, his book didn’t have a lot of technological help for geeks like me that wanted to use the cloud to keep things synched up.  I need to find out what’s changed, because the time is ripe for me to re-read that book and, as my wife and I reorganize our physical space, get my mental space in order and prepared for a new job.  This is the perfect time to get reorganized and have my system in place, ready to go, before I land somewhere and have an endless stream of projects to track.

So tell me, gentle readers, what do you use to stay organized?  If you’re a fan of the GTD method, what tech tools do you use to stay on track?

Advice from your Uncle Jim:
"A man is known by the company his mind keeps."
   --Thomas Bailey Aldrich

No, I’m not writing it, but I’m not knocking it, either!

I know a lot of people do look down on fan fiction, mostly because it traditionally hasn’t been the best quality.  In fact, back in the old days, when I first was trying my hand at writing, it was very much denigrated and no one really wanted to admit that they wrote “fan fic”.  It was, after all, problematic in a number of ways.  For one thing, it was never…
Read More

If you finished your NaNoWriMo novel last month, you may want to submit it for publication.

Here are tools that can help, via the Bookbaby blog.
First of all, know that these aren’t all free and all require a bit of work!
The first tool is Submittable.  It is free for “submitters” (ie. writers), actually, and has tools for keeping track of not only what you’ve submitted and to whom, but any awards and accolades you may have achieved with your writing.  You do…
Read More

I love space.

Recently, thanks to the Martian, there’s been a lot of attention on NASA and space exploration.  Frankly, I think there should be more attention paid to the incredible work that NASA does and a larger portion of our National budget should be spent on what they do.
As a photographer, I admire the large volume of images that they release to the public domain every year.  Images that inspire.  Images that educate.  Images that, I hope, lead us to…
Read More

Yes, resources to actually layout and publish your own magazine, mostly for free.

My blushing bride pointed out recently that I mostly haven’t posted anything original in years.  Just links to other resources and some brief copy around it to explain what I’m posting and why.
This week isn’t going to be any different.

I love magazines.
They are, perhaps, my most annoying secret vice.  They’re hard to store and, since I have so little time to really read these days, I tend to…
Read More