Domestic problems, been a little too depressed to update this blog for all 1 or 2 of you besides me who have looked at it. Nothing that won't eventually be resolved, but let's just say I've had some root canals and they were a walk in the park compared to this.
Finally noticed the Lowes again, it's near the Crenshaw stop of the Green Line. Have to go there and see if I can get some copper tubing to make the parabolic shaper needed to make the plastic mold needed to make the sun helmet/cooker.
Another sign of life in Long Beach's Rainbow Harbor, a reddish-colored crab walking along the bottom at low tide. Overall the damned place still looks too sterile to me, no doubt because of the toxins mentioned earlier.
I've been seeing some yellow fruit on trees from the train. They may be some type of lemon or lime, because I noticed such a bush on the way to Portfolio today. The unripe fruit looks exactly like a lime (because it is?) but the riper ones are almost orange, and inside they look like an orange but are far too sour for my taste. And of course the shape of the fruit is still like a lime, with that little nipple on one end. Before I leave for NM, I plan to check out at least one more of those trees I saw. For tomorrow, I intend to finish the Universal Edibility Test on a succulent found near the Del Amo stop yesterday.
I modified the UET so it can be used more often; typically 24 hours of near-fasting is necessary, and that's too much stress on my system to do more than once a week. So I split it into two parts: day one, just complete up to swallowing the test sample and waiting 8 hours, then eat a normal meal. Day two, after 8 hours fasting, eat the 1/4 cup and wait 8 hours. Using this method, every two days you can have tested another plant or part of a plant. The way I study all night and sleep during the day makes this even easier; I normally just drink water all night anyway, so eating a little breakfast (the test sample) before going to sleep is perfect. After an average of 4 hours sleep, if I wake up alive that ought to be good enough proof that the sample was edible; of course if I can wait another 4 hours before eating anything, all the better.
Found some instructions on the web for exporting your Thawte Freemail cert, so it can be imported into other applications. The basic command is, after telling Netscape to save your cert as mycert.p12:
I think this was easier under older versions of netscape; IIRC, the .pem format was the default. Anyway, to import it into IE you only need the .p12 file. The .pem is useful for experimenting with signing jarfiles and whatever else. I tried signing a certificate request using the IE wizard, and it seemed to work, but when I then tried to install the cert the wizard told me the matching request couldn't be found. Even though it was in the same place as before. I don't understand. Anyway, I now partially understand how these certs are used, with SSL, for website authentication, instead of the old username/password method. I haven't gotten it to work with cygwin/apache yet, but the concept is at least grokable now, and I didn't have a clue about it until the last 24 hours.
I found some of my old CFS Automation Project and EZR programming floppies while cleaning out my room a week or so ago, and yesterday I paid $12 to use a computer with a floppy drive so I could zip the files up and place them on my website, in the src/ subdirectory. Not sure what everything is for, it's been years since I wrote that crap... I just wanted to have it saved for my vanity's sake.
last updated 2013-01-10 20:14:11. served from tektonic.jcomeau.com