Dole's Cherry Mixed Fruit Photographer

I wonder if Dole has a dedicated photographer that solely takes the pictures of Cherry Mixed Fruit cups.  He somehow injects two extra cherry slices into the cup but I don't know how he does it.

Dole, how does that photographer do it?   I only get half the amount of cherries.   Is he magic?

Hofflander

Derek: Look, Hansel, Hoff's on is way to eat another hamburger drunk like.
Hansel: No, my brother, he's eyeing your main squeeze Matilda - like I did remember?

The biggest Windows mystery of all time

Let's not speak only when necessary

Powershell - Fixing my CreationTime with LastWriteTime

Techsmith's SnagIt has long been invaluable to me with all the screen captures that I do.  Up through SnagIt 2021, it has nicely organized all my screen captures by Year/Month within its Library.

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

California Tools Compressor - Valve causing breaker to trip?

These are great oil-less air compressors and they are very quite for what they do.   After years of service, this one started randomly tripping the 20amp breaker but would work most of the time to bring the tank up to pressure.

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.

49ers 23 - Cowboys 17

Dak makes a run for it, eating away precious seconds.....







 
 






 

Logitech keycap letters are horribly weak

The ASCE keys and others wear out way too quickly on QWERTY keyboards.  I can't help but believe that Logitech knows this with the hopes for consumers to repurchase keyboards over and over.
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.

Preserve first X characters of each line in Notepad++

In notepad++, press CTRL-H.
This regex example will chop off every line longer than 200 characters:

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.
  

Felt the need

 Reality: A compromise of a state or local government system does not necessarily mean election infrastructure or the integrity of your vote has been compromised.

  Rumor: If state or local jurisdiction information technology (IT) has been compromised, the election results cannot be trusted.

Marina Fox and Youtube have passive aggressive desires to link to "Rumorcontrol" https://www.cisa.gov/rumorcontrol whenever Trump speaks.

Yet, they assure you with "not necessarily".   That's bogus.  If you've been compromised, then you should assume an integrity problem.  That's just common sense, people.

Browser UI Chaos

Although I encourage users to run various browsers, getting to the Options and Settings menus can be confusing. 

Get real Coleman

Payment Gateways are Killing Us

Also Venmo, you're not even answering the phones because of COVID-19.   How are you even in business?

Firefox is Woke and goes Broke

Mozilla states, "Firefox is removing terminology from the browser that has been identified as derogatory or exclusionary."



Yet, in Tools->Options->Logins and Passwords, the struggling browser company is still insensitively displaying that evil "M*ster" word right there for us to read.  The "Learn more" link is there for you to LEARN, you unwoke user you!

A letter of complaint undoubtedly landed on Mozilla CEO Chris Beard's desk describing how painful the m-word conjurers up memories.  So he took action!  He knew as well as we did that social healing is of the utmost importance to a HTML rendering engine.

I will now take the torch to help eradicate the m-word from all civilized industry:

1. Auto Mechanics:  You shall refer to the Master Cylinder of the brake booster now as the "brake hydro cylinder -BHC".
2. Electricians: You shall refer to Master Switches as Primary Switches.  NO EXCUSES.
3. Transformer Engineers: Primary Windings is correct.   Very good.  You didn't call is Master Windings or some hurtful pejorative like that.
4. No more Master Jedis... because The Last Jedi was supposed to be it.  I didn't know Yoda and Mace Windu owned slaves!  Shame on you Samuel L. Jackson (and Jim Henson)!
5. The Master's Cup......  don't go there....
6. FedEx, the master tracking number lingo has to go! I refuse to track packages now.

7. Mad Max: You shall refer to Master Blaster as just Paul Larson.  That goes for you too Tina Turner.

In other IMPORTANT news....

Firefox usage is down 85%

Also, a tech company just called and offered a whitepaper for me to read.... I triggered, "WHITEPAPER"!

Thanks, Firefox, for exposing the tech sector's cruel insensitivities.

use target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer" to prevent fraud and page hijacking

When searching Google, you're presented with results that seemingly has direct links.   You see them by mousing over the links and the true url is displayed in the browser's status bar:



For all hyperlinks, Google inserts a click and onmousedown event in order for the href hyperlink address to quickly change to their /url data collector link.  This tallies the number of advertising clicks and you can understand how /url is Google's most valued, ahem, url.

Note that there are readily available browser plugins which cripple google's url bait-and-switch events in order to circumvent tracking.  These plugins make google work more like the DuckDuckGo.com engine which doesn't track you near as much.

Speaking of url links, when you click one, search engines do not employ a target="_blank" to open a new windows (or tab).  You have to right-click->open in new tab if you want that to happen.   Normally the search engine page politely goes away and is replaced with your destination website like how normal links work since day one.

However, if your browser was to open up a new tab with the use of the target="_blank" function, then that new page could certainly be capable of hijacking the previous page.  The new page can run javascript to cause it's parent page's location to go somewhere else like a phishing site.  This is because the default permission is to allow for a new windows/tabs to have control of it's parent window/tabs.  Image if a rogue site silently replaced your parent page with a look-a-like scam page?  So, to protect us normal citizens,  browsers employed the new "noopener" parameter.

The noopener keyword for the rel attribute of the <a>, <area>, and <form> elements instructs the browser to navigate to the target resource without granting the new browsing context access to the document that opened it — by not setting the Window.opener property on the opened window (it returns null).

There is a nice write up on why you need to use "noopener noreferrer" IMMEDIATELY on all your external links: https://www.reliablesoft.net/noreferrer-noopener/

Uninstall VMWare Player

Uninstall

C:\ProgramData\VMware\VMware Player\Uninstaller\bootstrap.lua  

or

C:\ProgramData\VMware\VMware Workstation\Uninstaller\bootstrap.lua   

using a text editor and comment out line

CheckForMSHyperV()  

with two dashes, so it will become

--CheckForMSHyperV()  

Generac Generator - Insulation Falling Down - FIX

The other day I noticed the heat insulation had soaked up moisture and came partially unglued from the roof of the generator.

After squeezing out the water the glue was fortunately still tacky and stuck it back to the roof.  I ordered some 23.6-44.5 inch curtain rods from ebay.   This should keep the insulation buttoned up for cheap!

It's still binary 0's and 1's

Also, check out this funny skit: https://youtu.be/IzNGkwGYE4E

New Windows Computer - Ulcer

Spiny wheel. Thanks for your patience.
Spiny wheel. We're still working.
Spiny wheel. Please don't turn off your device.
Spiny wheel. Still setting things up.

repeat.... repeat.... repeat.... repeat.... repeat.... repeat....
repeat.... repeat.... repeat.... repeat.... repeat.... repeat....
repeat.... repeat........................

OK, we got through this part of setup...... Now let's see what's new
from Windows.

wait... wait... wait..... finally it's done.

So, the out-of-box experience is fine for most new systems but this
particular one just took a while.  Microsoft, I don't mind it doing what
it needs to do, but some status info showing real progress would help
people's nerves worldwide.