There’s an excellent article that goes deep into the specifics of refilling your tank versus just exchanging it for a different Blue Rhino[1] tank. The article was written in 2013 but pretty much everything holds up. The price of propane has actually gone down in 2020 to less than $2/gallon Basically it comes down to this: Do you want to refill your tank and save $8$11? or Would you rather go to a nearby store and just exchange tanks? ...

Something to think about… I have seen a lot of hate spewed in recent days about a man who is a constant winner and overachiever, and that’s what the people who support him like about him. Yes, he’s been caught in some lies and maybe twisted the truth a little but he’s still out there proving his haters wrong time after time. Some people are just jealous of someone who is successful and has money. Throw in a hot foreign underwear model at his side and they hate him even more. You may not have wanted him in his role, but he’s there now and there’s nothing you can do about it. I know it’s possibly just going to get worse over the next several days, but like him or not, Tom Brady is turning things around in Tampa. ...

I wrote an article talking about using iCloud to sync your Downloads folder. So I did that and I found out I didn’t like it. I’m running tight on disk space (I have to cull more photos from Photos, which is taking up the most disk space for me) so Apple is uploading the files in ~/Downloads, then replacing them with an .icloud version. That means that I need to download the file to use it. ...

It was both a sad and happy Halloween here in Portland. Our youngest teenager is almost 15 so we definitely didn’t have a lot of cute costumes. There were no worries about meeting up with friends to go trick-or-treating. In the end, we had two people come ring our bell so we could send candy down the chute. What made it happy was walking the dog leading up to Halloween and Halloween Eve and seeing the precautions people were taking: there were candy chutes, there were paper bags (didn’t rain here!) or plastic bags with candy inside set out, and more complicated measures for distributing candy in a socially distanced way. ...

Before we got married, my wife’s brothers and sister gave us a BBQ grill as a present. I also inherited two propane tanks from my dad. In doing some reading on re-filling propane tanks, it turns out that every tank has a date code on it. For example, this is the tank that came with the grill: Date Code of January 2001 We were married in July 2001 and the tank was made on January, 2001. ...

If you’re running a Mac with limited internal disk you’ll encounter this message: There’s a great article on how to manually delete Time Machine Snapshots Key steps: List available local snapshots “sudo tmutil listlocalsnapshots /Volumes/Macintosh HD” Delete each snapshot “sudo tmutil deletelocalsnapshots 2020-11-01-002004” I’ve had to do this a lot when upgrading to a new beta release.

I’ve been using Gmail with the setting for “Display Images” set to off. It helps cut down on tracking and it cuts down on the visual clutter so I scan quickly. I got free 4 months of Apple News+ for buying a new Apple Pencil and I activated it. This is the message that Apple sent me: Apple makes a lot of how they’ve improved accessiblity and rightfully so. But this is not very good for the visually impaired, Apple.

A couple of years after I wrote about how happy I was with Blogofile, it stopped being developed. The last update on GitHub was in 2015, the owner has archived the repository, and Blogofile.com doesn’t answer anymore. I looked for forks and didn’t find any active ones. So as much as I liked the look and feel of my blog, it was going to have to switch software to something that was supported. I looked at several different options but the only one written in Python that seemed active was Pelican. ...

After almost 10 years of letting the blog sit, I wanted to bring it into the modern world. One of the issues was that I had last touched the blog back in 2011 when SSL connections were only for transactions. The blog was just fine serving pages at https:// but the rest of the world has moved onto https:// Notice the “s” for HyperText TransPort Secure. I was able to do that with some work but the biggest problem was that most of my URLs end in / but some didn’t. I was able to find a blog post on how to use Lamdas from AWS called from Cloudfront to handle adding a “/” to requests. But some-url/ and some-url and some-url/index.html were treated differently. ...

Right now, if you give blood, the Red Cross will test it for Covid-19 before distributing it. They say it takes about 1-2 weeks for the results to come back. It took a little longer than that for the email to come but I was also not expecting anything but negative. Still, good to know.