EW's orbit of oddities
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Thursday, January 26, 2023
Dole's Cherry Mixed Fruit Photographer
Dole, how does that photographer do it? I only get half the amount of cherries. Is he magic?
Tuesday, July 26, 2022
Hofflander
Thursday, March 17, 2022
Friday, March 11, 2022
Thursday, February 17, 2022
Powershell - Fixing my CreationTime with LastWriteTime
Upon upgrading to SnagIt 2022, they converted over all my snag its and they mysteriously dispensed with Library's nice organization. Now I have a jumbled mess of 6000 captures and I'm so very lost.
The mistake I made after upgrading was that I moved out all the old .SNAG files to a backup location. The .SNAG files live here for version 2021 and prior:
C:\Users\User\AppData\Local\TechSmith\Snagit\DataStore
I uninstalled 2022, reinstalled 2021, and restored my image files back to it's appropriate DataStore folder. However, upon copying, Windows changed the Creation Date and now my SnagIt Library thinks all the files are of today's date. Oh boy. What a mess!
Luckily, the modification timestamps are intact. If I can just make the Create Time the same as the Mofication time, then my SnagIt Library would subgroup the files and I'm back to where I was. So, with one powershell command I can fix all my .SNAG files to make the Creation timestamp be the same as the LastWriteTime timestamp:
PS C:\Users\User\AppData\Local\TechSmith\Snagit\DataStore> Get-ChildItem *.SNAG | ForEach-Object{$_.CreationTime = $_.LastWriteTime}
As a side note, if you get this error, this means you need to close out of SnagIt 2021 and retry the powershell command above.
Exception setting "CreationTime": "The process cannot access the file
'C:\Users\User\AppData\Local\TechSmith\Snagit\DataStore\C72D8F24-C2EB-477C-A569-630E25980C4D.SNAG' because it is being used by another process."
At line:1 char:38
+ ... -ChildItem *.SNAG | ForEach-Object{$_.CreationTime = $_.LastWriteTime}
+ ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
+ CategoryInfo : NotSpecified: (:) [], SetValueInvocationException
+ FullyQualifiedErrorId : ExceptionWhenSetting
Wednesday, February 2, 2022
California Tools Compressor - Valve causing breaker to trip?
After taking the head off, I saw that the inlet check valve had a chuck of its metal missing and thereby causing it to leak compressed air. This probably caused an air-lock situation on one of the pistons which caused the motor to bind up which then tripped the breaker.
These thin pieces of metal are a whopping $40! But, so far this $500 California compressor has been worth it! I don't know where the metal piece went but it's working again.
Thursday, January 20, 2022
Wednesday, January 12, 2022
Logitech keycap letters are horribly weak
I purchased water applied decals but those didn't stay on more that a day.
So I purchased a new keyboard and, this time, coated it with Rustoleum clear primer. I cut open the bag the keyboard came in and tape around the keys to avoid spraying on the special function keys and the palm rest pad. You can see the spray lines.
Hopefully this will lock in the factory lettering permanently. I'll know in about 8 months of use if this experiment worked.
Friday, June 25, 2021
Thursday, May 20, 2021
Postfix Autostarts and delivers local mail
I had a Mac Folder action setup to call a shell script. Within the shell script is a mail -s command send send an email out. The problem is that a normal unix-based system, such as the MacOS, doesn't have a mail system running to help you deliver mail. However, it comes pre-installed with Postfix and a simple edit to:
/private/etc/postfix/main.cf
with the line:
relayhost = smtp.myabcdomain.com
is all it takes. But I thought I had to do more. I ran the mailq command and it said "Queue report unavailable - mail system is down". I ran netstat -a -n |grep 25 and saw nothing LISTENing on port 25.
To my surprise, just running the mail -s command to send an email will automatically start the service, listen on port 25, delivery the mail, then shut down the postfix service automatically. Knowing that, then I'm good. This saves me from learning how to permanently start postfix daemon and I don't care about bounce back messages as the smarthost will handle that.
Here you can see the mailq command works fine just after sending an email. and Port 25 will close after about 30 seconds.