When Life Gives You Leaky Chimneys
I fixed my chimney, saved $350, and enjoyed a lovely day outside.
Alan's Blog
I like to share my experiences in development, home improvement, gardening, and life. Here's hoping a search engine lands you here when you need it most. ...
Latest posts
My Rabbit Can
My rabbit can plan. The AI must be told.
This One Simple Trick Will FIX Your Night Blindness!
As I get older I notice my body is not what it used to be. At 30 I threw out my back carrying a chair despite regularly lifting far heavier objects daily. My eyes have always been fantastic, aside from that pesky astigmatism , with no corrective lenses needed. However, I began finding myself unable to see as well when driving at night, and this concerned me. I wondered if I may be at the beginning…
I Forgot My Phone and It Was Wonderful
The main reason I got my phone is the same reason that resulted in me forgetting it one Sunday morning and having to go through a day in 2024 as if it were 2004: Battery. When I looked for a new phone, I wanted one that could power through multiple days and arrived at the iPhone 15 Pro Max. I make use of the 80% limit charging feature to protect the battery life, and each day I only use 20-25% of…
It's 2AM and I want to Sleep but IIS is Being Uncooperative
Last night I was ready to deploy a new application on our Windows Server running IIS. All of the files were ready to copy over. They worked completely fine when being accessed as a self-contained executable 1 . Everything pointed to it being a smooth deployment and me being able to head off to bed until users logged on in the morning. Using Visual Studio I published a framework-dependent version…
Reverse Engineering a Credit Card Processing API
This isn't some multi-million dollar heist or massive hacking attempt, this is a real story about me working to update an internal API used to charge credit cards. The previous processor was shutting down at a specified date and alerted us that we'd need to find a new processor. Easy enough, there's plenty of processors out there so we compared our options and found one. Now all I have to do is…
Successful New Years Resolutions - I Learned American Sign Language!
Every year I like to make New Years Resolutions 1 . I'll often make a handful of them, knowing most I won't complete, but anything that does stick really sticks well. Here's my lists over the past few years, and where I actually ended up on each: 2021 No more alcohol / So far so good! Do some kind of exercise / Built up strength exercise, still do it almost daily Drink more water / Nope Eat less…
Constructing a Daniel Tiger Lego Set
My daughter loves Daniel Tiger . My daughter loves Lego. Why not see if anyone has ever put them together? 🤔 The Search The first thing I did was a quick Kagi search to see if an official Daniel Tiger Lego set ever existed. It does tend to be a bit of an odd ask, given Daniel Tiger aimed at children aged 2-4 years old, and Lego are often a minimum of 3 years old 1 due to their small pieces.…
Templates for Dynamic HTML Elements
This is probably something that already exists and is well documented, however I came across it today so I figured I would share. It seems that more often than I'd like I'm in a situation where the user expects the ability to dynamically create new elements from a button click. Depending on if these elements already exist on the page, there's a few ways I can generate the HTML to add: Reference an…
OneNote is Not The Same as OneNote
Last Updated 2023-10-27 This is a short post, and may be updated as time goes on, but just because we are all on OneNote and OneNote is available on all major platforms does not mean there is feature parity. Sure, most things are there, and from what I've seen there's read-only support for everything, however I've noticed these differences: There's several different, or at at least were several…