All posts by jrdalrymple

Simplicity Landlord 2010

Motorized junk, , ,

Again with catching up on past stories. Awhile back I picked up this beast looking forward to the upcoming snow season. Of course it’s useful for so many other things, like taking off deers at the knees when they run towards the sickle mower!

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It is a Simplicity Landlord 2010. My wager is circa 1965ish. Unlike common modern lawn tractors, this has a horizontal shaft engine. This particular unit has a full thru-shaft type crankshaft giving the engine 2 PTOs.

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In my case the front PTO is used for the snowblower. The rear PTO goes to a device called the “bevel gear box” which is the achilles heel for these model tractors. Mine is in mediocre shape, not amazing, but not ready to explode either.

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I had some problems with it running 100% initially, those were ironed out by replacing the points with this magical device I bought from amazon.

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Future plans – see how it deals with heavy snowfall this winter. I didn’t really have everything in tune for last years snowfall before it was all gone, but I have high hopes. In time I will rebuild the bevel gear box and also open, reseal and close the leaky transmission. A good coat of paint is in order at some time but I’m not sure when that will happen.

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I’ll post videos sometime this coming winter of it doing its thing.

New Nagios Plugin

Technology junk, , ,

Last Friday going into the weekend I ran across a snapshot on one of my VMware hosts almost 160 days old, OUCH. The right tool to keep that from happening is definitely Nagios. NagiosExchange didn’t really have a solution for my problem that I could find. Somebody has written a snapshot age tool in PowerShell but I’m not interested in having plugins run on hosts that aren’t my main Nagios server. I was given a fun project to work on.

The vSphere Command Line Interface (formerly the PERL toolkit if I’m not mistaken) was of little help. It didn’t really give me any interface into snapshot data at all. I decided the simplest solution would be to work right on the BusyBox console. I started Friday around noon and working on it here and there over a couple days came up with a usable product yesterday morning:

[jrdalrymple@nagios ~]$ /usr/local/nagios/libexec/check_snapshot.py
No password specified
usage: check_snapshot.py -H hostname [-U username] <-P password | -f PasswordFile>
[jrdalrymple@nagios ~]$ sudo /usr/local/nagios/libexec/check_snapshot.py -H 172.16.100.11 -U nagioschk -f /home/nagios/.check_esxi_hw.pw -w 10 -c 20

3 VMs are CRITICAL
Guest example1.domain.local has snapshot 24 days old!
Guest example2.domain.local has snapshot 28 days old!
Guest example3.domain.local has snapshot 26 days old!

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The results between my command line run and the Nagios GUI aren’t the same because I gave the Nagios check different thresholds.

I’ll probably put it up on Nagios Exhange at some point. For now I’ll just feel accomplished.

The Sad State of Portable Music

Technology junk,

The first tape that I bought with my own hard earned money in my life was Tiffany. I was 8, and while I liked the genre that would ultimately become my lifeblood (hard rock) on this particular day at Meijer in Kalamazoo MI I was choosing Tiffany.

It was great, I could shove that tape in my Walkman, put it in my pocket, listen to it over and over again anytime I wanted. At home on the high speed dubbing dual deck recorder my parents had I could create myself mix tapes, it was remarkable how easy it was to have whatever music I wanted at my fingertips anytime I wanted it.

25 years later, we’ve inherited the World Wide Web, LiPo batteries are keeping our portable devices online for days instead of hours, Amazon’s MP3 store has over 20 million songs available for download at a moments notice, Iron Maiden is still rocking your face off, and I find it difficult to listen to the music I want to at the gym – wut?

Before leaving for the gym today I downloaded a new installment of Voices of Trance from the Generation Trance forums. I’ve been listening to the same old totally awesome playlist on my phone since I bought it about a year ago. It was time for a change. In the past when I wanted change I figured the easiest way was to download one of the frequent installments from DJ GT or AVB as they’re always great to exercise too and obviously full of variety. You get to download and prepare an hour or more music in one big song as opposed to having to create a new playlist by poking through your library of 20,000 or so MP3s and hand picking stuff. By the time you get to the 6th or 7th song with the latter method you find yourself not even caring what you’re picking, you just want your music on the device so that you can get moving.

About 3 months ago I’d say Verizon, or Motorola, or someone was courteous enough to get my phone upgraded to the newest available version of Android, Ice Cream Sandwich maybe? I don’t know and long quit caring following the dumb candy versions of Android. I have expectations of my handset and no longer care what OS is underneath making sure those expectations are met. One of the features of the newest update on my phone is they took away my Motorola music player and replaced it with “Play Music.” To thus point I’ve used the sluggish app to pull up my old playlist and play it, a task it was up to although admittedly cumbersome at succeeding in. Today I wanted to generate a new playlist with my new music. I fiddled around on the app for at least 90 seconds trying to find the “new playlist” button and was met with ultimate failure.

My defeat caused me to be distracted for the remainder of my gym session. I spend the entire time thinking about the last time I was this disappointed in a portable music device – it hasn’t happened ever. I thought to myself, maybe I should be carrying my other phone (an iPhone5) but immediately recognized that I haven’t the foggiest idea of how to get MP3s from my computer on to it being that iTunes on my computer is absolutely out of the question.

I wanted to create a chart with my own subjective views on some different capabilities regarding portable devices of my past:

Date (approx) Music Web Phone Total
Original Walkman 1988 5 N/A N/A 5
Panasonic Portable CD Player 1994 7 N/A N/A 7
Ericsson Phone 1996 N/A N/A 5 5
Nokia 6120 1998 N/A N/A 8 8
Creative MuVo TxFM 1999 8 N/A N/A 8
Kyocera Slider 2001 1 0 9 10
HTC Apache 2006 4 4 4 12
HTC Elf 2007 6 5 5 16
HTC Diamond 2 2009 6 6 5 17
HTC HD2 2010 8 8 8 24
HTC Inspire 4g 2011 9 8 9 26
Motorola RAZR Maxx 2012 4 7 8 19
iPhone 5 2013 2 10 10 22

So there you have it, some things get better, but inevitably everything will get screwed up. Granted this is very unscientific, but for each item I can explain my reasoning in the scoring. I’m not surprised that my HTC HD2 and HTC Inspire 4g phones ranked better than the 2 I’m carrying today, they were both much faster on Android 2.x than the current brick. The iPhone is great but can’t compare musically because I’m unwilling to accept that such a great device should require me to go to a site with “hack” in the URL to get music on it.

“Why don’t you stream from di.fm or Pandora?” – The gym has poor cell coverage, neither AT&T nor Verizon is good enough inside the walls of the gym. Beyond that, I do have data limits, something neither Google Play nor ITMS care to concern themselves with for the current consumer apparently.

My Amazon research has led me to the SanDisk Sansa Clip+. I’m hoping it’s adequate. If not I guess I’ll pull out the old Creative MuVo with it’s massive 1GB of storage. Honestly, that’s about it’s only downfall when compared to music players over a decade newer. Shame on you consumer electronics companies.

What’s a hot link?

Life,

If you’ve never lived in Alaska pretty much all of your life and then relocated to a Midwestern state you may not be able to relate to this. Being a near-native Alaskan one of my standard breakfast selections for years has been hot links with eggs, or maybe a hot link and cheddar omelette, or a meat-lovers scramble which of course has hot links in it. In Alaska hot links are nearly as ubiquitous as sausage or bacon when it comes to breakfast meat.

I was eager to try hot links here in Minnesota. In Alaska you’ll find that no 2 eateries have the same hot links. My personal favorite (in this world) came from Sourdough Sam’s Cafe in Fairbanks. Nobody had bad ones, theirs were the best though. Now that I’d relocated to MN I was eager to try to find the breakfast joint that could top them, I now live in “the real world” afterall.

Honestly, at this point I don’t even remember where my first shot was. I believe it was a popular place in Blaine called Ole Piper Inn in Blaine. Guess what I didn’t find on the menu. I tried a number of different places in the upcoming months, never did I find them. At some point after I’d been to a place a few times and even generated rapport with the wait staff I went out on a limb and asked for them. I may as well have been speaking in a foreign language. The common answer when you ask someone around here about hot links is “do you mean Italian Sausage?” Italian Sausage is good but far from the same thing.

On Wednesday I talked with my culinary genius of a boss about it, and while he didn’t know what a hot link was he did have a few suggestions about where I could go that might be able to help. One of the places I’d even heard of, so yesterday I went.

The folks at Von Hanson’s Meat were just as clueless about hot links as everyone else around here, but they did know their meat. I described what I had in mind to them and the gentlemen behind the counter had 2 suggestions. One they described as a bit of a Cajun sausage which I knew wasn’t the answer. While I’m a huge Cajun food fan, hot links aren’t Cajun. So I just default-tried the other alternative, Andouille smoked sausage.

Andouille sausages are sometimes referred to in the US as “hot link” sausages. –Wikipedia

SCORE! I cooked some up and had them this morning. Not only were these definitely something I’d happily refer to as a hot link, these are easily some of the best I’ve had in my life. I’d put them right up there with Sourdough Sam’s.

I still have the problem of not being able to get them at a restaurant for Sunday breakfast, but the truth is in my new life I should be eating out less anyway; It works out. If you’re a Midwesterner though that has yet to try Andouille sausages, I encourage you to frequent your local butcher and change that as soon as you can.