Not much... But with your help, I am learning...
Time-traveling from the comfort of your Living Room wall, without knowing what the hell a Gigawatt is.
Is snow white the same color as cloudy white? Paint color Hell... May 15th, 2020, 10 pm, Author: Joseph Welsh
One of the projects that we started during our Shelter-in-place, Lockdown, no visting bars, and pandemic quarantine was to paint the entire first floor of our home. This week, as a secondary Monther's day present, my boys and I finished this project. The main living area was to be two colors, Glidden paint colors Northern Exposure and Silver Blueberry. if you refer to picture below, Northern Exposure is on the left and Silver Blueberry is on the right.
However, this post isn't about the wacky world of paint colors and their associated names. This is about deciding what to hang back up on the wall. For years we had a great picture of our oldest son discovering what the Atlantic Ocean looked like. He had such an expression on his young face and we were lucky to capture the moment....
Of course, this picture is going up on the main living room wall, but we needed some balance. We have a second son and I had to search the Welsh archives for photos of Casey, about the same age, and at the beach. After a long hard search of historical beach photos, and trying to match the criteria specified I came up with this:
Now with some balance in the force...I asked the wife to setup the picture wall. She laid out the design and left it up to me to hang them up. Armed with a ruler, drill, and two levels, I began to hang the pictures. Whilst I hung the pictures, I realized that I had engaged in a type of type of time travel. Although my oldest is on his way to college in the fall and the younger boy will soon be going to high school, I had, on my wall, frozen moments of my boys when all they cared about was the sun, the beach, the ocean, and their parents.
This is how the wall worked out..
The whole point of this rambling post, is please, take lots of pictures of the people in your life. It's cheap and easy with the advent of great smartphone camera's you can never have enough photo's. You never know, when you might need a memory wall with windows to your past.
The Past in the Palm of My Hand
Keeping Busy in a Covid-19 world: May 8th, 2020, 11 pm, Author: Joseph Welsh
One of the most often used phrases used in the last 3 months has been "In these uncertain times..." It's been used in every commercial from buying a new car to buying a classic hoagie at our local WaWa. I agree times are uncertain, and navigating this crisis is worse than trying to figure if Han Solo shot Greedo first. Of course, everyone knows Han shot first, so maybe that's not a good metaphor.
Fortunately, for me, my job can move from an office to a home office very easily. I am a lucky man, and other than trying to figure what kind of mask I want to buy off the interent to display my creativity, Star Wars. I am facing no real hardship because of the Covid-19 crisis.
I will take a break here to list several organizations that you can support if you have a job like mine and may be able support others who aren't so lucky.
- World Central Kitchen- GiveDirectly
- Feeding America
- No Kid Hungry
- International Medical Corps
- Meals on Wheels
While I have been working from home, I have gained almost two hours of time I didn't have while I was commuting back and forth by train to Philadelphia. I have been painting rooms, mulching and painting walkways, making pool side tables, and listening to podcasts. One of my favorites is called Accidental Tech Podcast, and on it, one the hosts, Casey Liss, described his incredibly complex use case with (at least two) Raspberry Pi's to check if his garage door was open or closed. As Casey admits, this project is overly complex for what it does, but for him it seemed to occupy his mind (and he genuinely sounded like he had fun doing it.)
So in that spirit, I broke out of my computer device storage, a device I loved that pre-dates all smartphones (Iphone and Android alike) a Palm T|X:
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In the times before smartphones, Palm Computing was arguably the leader in the PDA (Personal Digital Assistant) market. I was one of these PDA devotees. I ran my whole life from a PDA. I had started with a Palm Pilot Vx, then a Handspring Prism and finally the Palm T|X
Today the Palm PDA market is all but gone, but being in IT, I had a good backup on a 1gb SD card (April 16th, 2011). That date probably represents the first time I bought an Android Smartphone and retired the Palm T|X. I was an android user for some time and eventually I came late to the Apple iPhone party, my first device was an iPhone 5c (Blue). Since then, I have become an iPhone devotee.
So armed with viable backup, and then restoring that backup to the device. I powered the TX on. I then happily discovered that it would still hold a charge, I started playing with it. Interestingly enough, the programs I bought for the PDA needed registration codes. I had been a big purchaser of PDA apps and always assumed that the registration codes would be backed up with the apps. This turned out not to be the case for at least half the apps. I had recorded some of the registration codes in the PDA, but for most of the apps I did not. As you may of guessed most of these companies are out of business, and not able to support their apps or even have a viable webpage. Managing to get some of the Palm applications registered, I setup the PDA.
Now, truth be told, there is nothing that the Palm T|X does that any modern phone can't do better, faster, and easier. Except one, during my restoration of the PDA, I was abe to re-install one application that I loved, and as far as I know, hasn't been duplicated on an a modern iPhone.
It was called the Fitaly Keyboard.
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Fitaly was a virtual keyboard for Palm PDAs that boasted much speedier stylus keyboard input then Graffiti 1 and 2. I was very good at using that keyboard for input (I was terrible with Graffiti). If I was an iOS programmer who knew anything about the popup keyboard API's and some programming, that would be my first project.
I would love to see someone get permission and develop a Fitaly keyboard for the iPhone and Ipad. I would be a buyer.
Meanwhile, I will continue to play with my Palm T|X, because right now it occupies my mind and in uncertain times like these, we all should have our minds occupied.
Lockdown and Dinner Chores
Tor - tea - a or Tor - till - a, How I learned how to cook with my youngest son, Casey: April 29th, 2020, 9 pm, Author: Joseph Welsh
As we all know, for the last weeks, we have been under a lot of pressure. Stay home, stay 6 feet apart, don't socialize, etc, etc. Many have complained how hard this is, not going to the shore, not going to a bar, not even going to a friends house for a beer or two. Cabin fever has gripped us all. I however, have utilized this time to do all things I had on my Joe - to - do list. I have cleaned the house top to bottom, painted the first floor with the help of my greatest quarrantine partner, my lovely wife.
I have made a pool shelf to put my beer on whilst I lounge in the pool. I have mulched walk-ways and patios. It is amazing what you can do when one hour and forty minutes is given back to you because you don't have to commute via train to Central Philadelphia.
One of the things I have instituted during this lockdown is to cook dinner for the family one day a week with my young son Casey. I am not much of a cook, but I can follow instructions, and in this case they are called recipies.
However, On this day, I am just the Soos chef, the Head Chef is my son Casey. He loves to prepare food and then cook it, and I being the lazy parent that I am, I let him.
This has worked out great, in the last two weeks, we have made Italian Crock Pot Chicken, and today we made Hosin Pork Soft Tacos. Both meals came out great, but the real bonus is the bonding time I have with Casey. This is how it came out:
It tasted great, but the taste couldn't compare to the feeling I got from watching my son doing something complicated and enjoying it. If nothing else worthwhile comes from this pandemic emergency, at least I got to spend some unfortgettable moments with my son, and for that I am thankful.
The New Improved WhatDoyaknowJoe
Why I left Squarespace to host my own Website: April 27th, 2020, 10 pm, Author: Joseph Welsh
When I started this website, I wanted to start a personal blog to write about things that were on my my mind. I didn't think there was any real interest in what I what I wrote, but it was something I wanted to do. I started this blog and had it hosted on Squarespace. I had heard how easy it was to host a blog on Squarespace and they were a frequent sponsor on some of my favorite Podcasts (Accidental Tech Podcast, Connected, Reconcilable Differences), and they offered discount codes that made starting with them a no-brainer.
Squarespace was as good as their advertising, you could create a blog and a lot of the of the mundane maintenance of running a website was hidden from the average user. Unfortunately, for Squarespace, I was not satisfied with the level control they exerted. I wanted my website to reflect my accomplishments from learning HTML5 and CSS but I couldn't get past Squarespace's interface.
So I moved from Squarepace.com to Linode.com. Linode allows me to create my own linux computer server, hosted by them, but giving me full control of my site. I began my new journey to learn how to code my own website, and this is the result.
This leads me to acknowledge that a lot of this website style has been co-opted from a developer/Apple computer enthusiast/gamer who I don't know personally but whom I admire greatly. His name is John Siracusa and his website is Hypercritical. As T.S. Eliot once said that "good writers borrow, great writers steal". I have stolen his style (which I liked and modified to fit my own style) for this website. Although, he doesn't know me, he is like a technology brother to me and I need to give him credit for the website design. I have learned a-lot just by studying his coding style. Interestingly enough, John mentions the phenomena of thinking you are friends with some one you listen to/admire/follow in several of his podcasts. I have never met John, but I suffer from the said phenomena.
Now that I have the new site up, I will be building pages for Computing and Woodworking. I will be adding posts about helping my older son build a gaming computer and many of my finished and on going woodworking projects.
I have also archived my posts from the last year and will repost them here. I would expect to be able to be repost the those posts within the next month.
I hope you will stay with me as I discuss my life, Windows and Apple computers, Woodworking, Home Improvement projects, Star Trek and Star Wars, and whatever happens to be on my mind.
Here's to the new journey!