My Weather Station

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I’ve had a Davis Vantage Pro 2 weather station for some years.  The corner of my block is 22 feet above sea level, which is about the highest point in south Florida (apart from Mount Trashmore).  The station on my roof is about 44 feet above sea level.

Florida has a very high rate of lightning strikes.  The closer you are to the equator, the more powerful they are.  My house has been hit a number of times.  They’ve taken out several trees, my phones, my network, my alarm system and the latest hit my weather station.  At first it seemed to be the USB port on the indoor console.  I replaced that and got it working.  Now the barometer and wind direction are not working.  Temperature, humidity and wind velocity seem to be OK.

The warranty is good for 1 year and is long past.  It does not cover lightning in any event.

Once I get the truck done, I’ll have to think about replacing it.

I’m Back

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It’s been a couple of years since I’ve updated this blog.  So here is a summary of my current status.

Books

I’ve cataloged 9401 books in Koha.  Most of them are fantasy/science fiction or young adult books.  A lot of good fantasy is published in the young adult category.  Can you say “Harry Potter”?  There are a lot of mysteries and other fiction yet to go.  That should bring the total up to around 10,000.

Computers

My main workstation and my server are running KDE on openSUSE 12.3.  I have another machine running IPFire as a firewall to the internet.  There is also a testbed multibooted with whatever Liinux distributions catching my fancy.  The most recent is openSUSE 13.1 release candidate 2.

I’m still using my ASUS 1201N netbook, mostly for debugging networks.  I’ve fallen in love with my Motorola XY-Board (XOOM 2).  It has a 4G Verizon link.  They wanted $35/month to add it to my phone account giving me 4GB combined download a month.  For $30/month on a month-to-month plan, I get 4GB for each.  I think my new phone at the end of February 2014 will be a plane phone with no data.

Vehicles

I’m currently driving a 2012 Hyundai Sonata and loving it.  I recently got a 1950 Studebaker ½ ton pickup.  What fun.

Netbooks and KDE network manager

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I’m currently running an ASUS eeePC 1201n netbook/laptop.  It has a 12″ screen and a full sized keyboard;  sort of on the border between a netbook and a laptop.  It’s small enough to carry around comfortably and large enough to see and type.  I tried running openSUSE with KDE on it, but KDE has a major problem with the network manager.  It cannot connect to a wireless station with a hidden SSID.   Bug 209464 has been open on KDE since October 2009 and still marked NEW with priority HI and severity NORMAL.

My wireless station is not broadcasting the SSID and is using WPA/WPA2  personal with a pre-shared key.  I’m not about to change that. There is no point in broadcasting the SSID and letting the neighborhood know that wireless access is available to anyone with a good key cracker.

There are some workarounds which I’ve tried with limited success.  The Gnome network manager works fine.  I’ve also tried LXDE and Enlightenment successfully.  Come on KDE, that bug has been open over a year and a half.  If Gnome and the others can do it, look at their code and fix it.

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Back to KDE on openSUSE 11.3

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I did finally get openSUSE 11.3 to run on my dual screens, by installing Linux Mint 9 and copying the xorg.conf file back to openSUSE. That solved one display problem, but there were more to come. Skype, which I use a lot to talk to family and friends, installed. It needed a bunch of 32-bit libraries to run. Once I got it running, it kept dropping sound or locking up the system to the point of needing to power off.   The sound hardware finally stopped working.

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