The Other Don Kelly

So, remember that inkjet printer I got last year? Well it broke: there doesn’t seem to be any dirt or debris or anything in the mechanisms, but every piece of paper jams. I tried a bunch of things but it looks like problem is in the mechanical systems, like a worn rotor or something. Ugh…

…and double-ugh: our other (laser) printer — Anne’s old workhorse from her office — broke as well. Probably a sensor issue but it keeps reporting a nonexistent paper jam.

We went almost a month before cracking, but I bought a new laser printer last week. It’s a Brother DCP-L2640DW: printer, scanner, copier, potential fax machine (but not in your face about it like the last one). The only drawback is that it prints in black and white, which feels weird to not have a color printer but honestly, we almost never even use color, let alone need it.

So we’ll see. It works great so far, but “a new broom always sweeps clean” as the saying goes. This printer cost about triple the last one, so I’m hoping it’ll at least last three years…

One of the things I’ve been helping my Mom with are her finances. I started out with spreadsheets to keep track of things, but about six months ago I switched to using GnuCash, an open-source financial program.

This is a great tool, sometimes a bit more than I need, but sometimes it’s also oddly inadequate: it has all sorts of built-in reports, and they can be customized, but several types of reports are just not available (I am partial to pivot tables). I can export the data I need, but the full export is so complicated as to be almost useless, and the simplified export — they warn about this — doesn’t export certain pieces of data. It was very frustrating.

(For those playing along at home, I was exporting transactions, specifically ones involving expenses, to CSV, and the simplified export would only list one expense split per transaction. Transactions involving multiple splits were thus incomplete.)

I happened to come across some online discussions about GnuCash where people were saving their data into databases rather than the standard file, and were then able to use database tools as well as GNUCash to work with their accounts. Well I like databases too, so…

I decided to use SQLite to make things easier, changed my file format, and opened up the file in DBeaver. The database was a bit convoluted but not crazy, and I tried some SQL snippets I found online to see how it all worked. Then, I wrote a script to export all expenses into a CSV file — it worked like a charm, and I was able to build a pivot table in LibreOffice Calc in like two steps.

The only person who will ever care is me, but I do like to open the spreadsheet occasionally, and just admire it.

Happy May Day!

Though I’ve been using my new laptop almost exclusively this past month or so, I’d let the final setup tasks fall by the wayside — not abandoned, just on the back burner for a while. But then, over the last few days, I made some real progress:

My Header Calculation Program

I moved the program over to the new machine a while ago, but it wouldn’t run (not even to just give a version number and exit), with an error message saying that it couldn’t find the MXML library. I tried setting up libmxml and ran into another other issue: my code was compiled to a 32-bit architecture (two laptops ago), and the new laptop wouldn’t let me use th 64-bit mxml library with the old program. (Not sure how the old laptops let me get away with it.) The obvious answer was to recompile, which was something I needed to do anyway for some parts of the program, to make it compatible with the new database configuration.

I got libmxml installed properly, ran make, and as expected I found some errors. I needed to install PostgreSQL’s libpq library, which wasn’t too hard, and after that make ran fine, and so did the program itself. It was kind of cool to run the thing, but ASME header calculations really are something I have no longer have any use for.

That was Wednesday.

My Local Web

Today I got my web server configured to display and run my internal website. I got the server up and running a few weeks ago, but I was dreading this next step — it turned out to be more straightforward than I expected; the only hangup was getting PHP installed, which took all of a minute… And now I have my internal website back, including what I expected to be the most difficult part: my LV commuter map. Granted, I’ll probably have to Marie Kondo my way through the place to get rid of all the old clutter, but that’s a task for another day.

Most of what I did before this week was just moving files, but these were both firmly on the “porting software to a new system” side of things. What’s left for the new laptop? I will likely set up my background soon, to be like the old laptop — right now I kind of like the current dark generic background though, so we’ll see. And then I should be done!

Every end is a new beginning.

— Captain Cloud

So my old printer finally bit the dust. It was an HP PSC2175, a combination color printer/scanner/copier that I got in probably 2000. It was pretty snazzy for its time, and even until it finally broke it was extremely useful. (The only technology it really lacked was Wi-Fi, though it did have a bunch of weird, semi-proprietary camera memory chip ports, and a USB connection that made Linux-early-adopter me learn a few things.)

The printer started having trouble a few months ago, then finally went belly-up in early June: whenever it was turned on it would just start making sounds like a ratchet or gear was slipping. The Internet told me that this was because some internal parts needed cleaning, but neither I nor any repair place I called would do it. So, I started looking for a replacement.

I finally replaced it last week, with a Brother MFC J1010DW, essentially the same printer/scanner/copier I had before, except it now also has Wi-Fi connectivity (and it’s not Hewlet-Packard, my only other criterion).

I’m surprised that I feel a little down about getting rid of the old printer. It really owed me nothing at this point, but I had it for so long and it had been a reliable workhorse all that time, I feel like a part of my life has slipped away. It’s still up on the desk for now though, I can look at it any time I want until I finally recycle it.

By the way, this is what I was writing twenty years ago, and this is what I was writing fifteen years ago.

I have no idea how this happens (or, if it’s nefarious, what is supposed to be accomplished by doing this), but I discovered, about a week ago, that some other domain was aimed at my IP address — as in, you type in their website name, and it goes to my site.

I found this out when I was doing a little security check-up, and noticed the other website name (which was, basically, almost-random-string-of-letters-dot-com) among the logs. I Googled it and the results showed snippets from my site. Hacked!!

Well not quite: some further Googling explained what was going on (but not why). I also found that when I tried to actually go to the other site my browser refused to load it, because the SSL credentials (for my site) did not match the bogus website’s hostname. Thank you SSL!

According to my Googling there was nothing I could do to prevent someone from aiming their site at my address, short of contacting the bogus site and asking them to stop (fat chance), but I could configure my site to throw a “Forbidden!” error at anyone coming to my site from any other hostname but mine. So now my site won’t load from that host, even if someone decides to ignore their browser’s security warnings.

What did the trick was a little snippet added to my site’s root htaccess file:

<IfModule mod_rewrite.c> 
RewriteEngine On
RewriteBase /
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} !^donkelly.net$ [NC]
RewriteRule ^ - [F]
</IfModule>

Maybe everything that dies someday comes back… I see that some company has brought the dire wolf (or some reasonable facsimile) back from 10,000 years of extinction. Not sure how I feel about that yet…