Things I've found in and around my 100+ year old house

Most of these items were found during remodeling and landscaping. Ordered by value

1. 1856 Nickle found in the yard while building a retaining wall on my side of the Erie Canal bed.
2. 1907 Dime found when replacing a door to a second floor porch
3. Miscellaneous blue-glass bottles found while working on retaining wall.
4. Rolex silver baby spoon
5. Postcard from 1924 advertising a boxing match at the Rochester Athletic Club (found while I was still working at the unrelated Rochester Athletic Club)
6. Rusty old horseshoe
7. Bottle of Mercurochrome.
8. Old knitting needle

Fixing rendering problems with checkbox and radio on Firefox 3 with KDE 4

I've been living with a rendering problem on Firefox 3 under KDE 4 with Kubuntu 8.10 for some time but today I decided to try to fix it.

The problem was that the checkbox, radio and sometimes buttons and input fields on web pages under Firefox 3 didn't render properly until I did a hover over them. Once I scrolled the page those widgets got hosed again until I hovered over them again.

I had tried installing latest video drivers and tweaking KDE 4 look and feel settings to no avail. After a little digging, I found that the problem isn't with KDE 4 settings, but the settings for "GTK Styles and Fonts". Access these settings under "System Settings".

The page has a radio selector for "Use my KDE style in GTK applications" that was selected. Changing this to "Use another style" and selecting "Raleigh" made this problem go away but had a negative overall effect on how Firefox looked. I was on the right path though.

A little more digging made mentions of a common GTK style called "QtCurve". I installed this via Adept, closed the System Settings window and reopened it. Now "QtCurve" appeared in my "Use Another Style" dropdown. I selected it, pressed apply, then restarted Firefox.

And it was beautiful.

It also fixed my checkbox rendering problems in Eclipse (where the right edge didn't display).

Before:


After:

Ripping copy-crippled DVDs

Since my kids like to manhandle DVDs and they usually end up scratched, I decided to keep the originals in a safe place and burn copies which can live near the TV. When one doesn't play anymore, I can just re-rip the DVD or better yet, use the ISO image to burn a fresh copy.

So the first rip/burn went perfectly with the Windows freeware DVD-Shrink. I used it to rip to an ISO file, then I used another freeware program "InfraExpress" to burn the DVD. Problem solved, right?

Wrong. Some newer DVDs employ a copy protection mechanism that tricks DVD-Shrink into thinking the disc is corrupt. To get around this, I found the free-trial-ware program AnyDVD, made by Slysoft. I'm not sure how it works but using that program I was able to rip the DVD to a format that DVD-Shrink could use to then create the ISO. I did have to reboot after installing AnyDVD software and again after I unchecked the "run at start up" option to turn it back off.

The end result is that I have personal-use backups of my legitimately purchased DVDs. Now I just have to make sure the kids don't get to the originals!

Cutting and installing laminate countertop

I had a small base cabinet next to my washer that I needed to get a countertop for. Leaving 1/16" gap for the appliance and a 1" overhang on the end resulted in 24 5/8 width. I found a 5' countertop at Mr. Seconds that was reasonable for $44.

I was concerned about cutting the countertop but it turns out that a 36 tooth finishing blade on my circular saw did the job perfectly. I made a cleat as a saw guide to be sure I got a nice straight line.

I stood the countertop on the front edge to cut the backsplash as my first cut, then called over my neighbor for a spare set of hands and made the second cut for the remainder. I cut in a smooth motion to minimize chipping. No masking tape along cut on face of countertop required.

The next step was to put the edge laminate on the exposed edges. Anne did much better than I did at this. I suggest enlisting the wife, especially for the detail work of filing the extra laminate off. Hot iron set on Acrylic did the job for the adhesive.

Observations: when determining the width of the countertop, consider any extra molding on the outside edge of the base cabinet. I had a 1/4" strip near the front that I didn't consider, so my gap next to the washer ended up being more like 5/16".

Also, when putting in screws up into the countertop to affix it to the base cabinet, be sure the screws will not come anywhere near the surface. This seems like a no-brainer, but the cabinet's hardware for holding said screw was a flimsy piece of #2 plastic which flexed and allowed extra reach for the screw I used, which punctured the laminate. I used a clamp overnight and a dab of glue to fix the small puncture.

Ubuntu: Synaptic not in menu and cannot start/run from command line

My otherwise blissful installation and use of Ubuntu on an aging 2.4ghz athlon was rudely interrupted today when I could not find Synaptic package manager in my menus, and when, when I tried to run it from the command line, I was informed that there was a su problem and I should contact my administrator. Oy. I am the administrator...

Turns out that the problem was that I somehow removed myself from the admin group, therefore, I lost privileges to do sudo type things (such as fixing the fact that I lost sudo priviliges).

To correct this, I had to reboot and go to the recovery console and choose the root shell option. From there, I used the following command to restore the admin group to my user account.

# usermod --group admin rcs

I then rebooted and everything was good again. So Ubuntu is back in my good graces.

Dual-head kubuntu alt-tab only shows windows on the active screen

I've been plagued by this problem since I installed and configured my Kubuntu 7.04 and I just happened upon the solution by entering the just-right search terms. When I alt-tab to find a window, the list of windows are only the windows on the active screen. Meaning that I get a different list when my mouse pointer is in the left screen and the right screen. I'm used to just seeing all the windows across screens regardless of which screen my mouse pointer is in.

Solution found on ubuntuforums.org (http://ubuntuforums.org/archive/index.php/t-284693.html)

Run: "kcmshell kwinfocus", in the resulting dialog, check "Separate Screen Focus". Save changes and press alt-tab. You should see all windows.

Jump-starting a car using jumper cables

Yesterday, I absent-mindedly left my headlights on when I returned to work from lunch and when I went to leave for a doctor appointment at 4:15, the battery was completely dead. A friend and I tried to pop-start it, but had no luck. Then someone who works in the building came over to give a jump start.

After playing with the jumper cables for a little while, we got it started. Which led me to look into the correct way to connect the cables, which is:

Dead battery: jumper cable to positive terminal
Live battery: jumper cable to positive terminal
Live battery: jumper cable to neutral terminal
Dead battery: jumper cable to some ground on or near the engine (shiny metal)

They also recommended shutting off the engine of the car giving the jump-start to protect the alternator.

So there you go. And here you go: http://www.carbuyingtips.com/jumpstart.htm