I took a bit of time to re-do the weather station configuration. I had obtained an EeePC 900A on the very cheap a little while ago and had been using Ubuntu Netbook Remix on it to host the wx200d daemon for my Oregon Scientific, piece of junk, wireless station. The 900A is a woefully underpowered system for a workstation, but the low-power consumption, built-in "console" and decent specs (for a lightweight server) makes it attractive for home tinkering.

Ubuntu Netbook Remix turned out not to be a good choice (took up far too much RAM and disk space) so I wiped it and went with Ubuntu Server (9.10). I had been using some custom code that orchestrated ploticus for graphs, but - as I was already sending data to sites like Weather Underground - I decided to just utilize their feeds and some keen Drupal integration for my own site.

The main weather site now uses the data graphs from the Weather Underground and the new weather block on RDN is a handy Drupal module that also connects to the Weather Underground for the readings (which makes the block [below] and the rapid-fire page).

If you had not already noticed, the weather cam (an old D-LINK DCS-900W) has snaps in thumbnail form on RDN and in larger form on the weather site. Weather Underground siphons the images off and makes handy time-lapse videos of the changes (they only approved it today, so no good stuff if you're seeing this on 2010-02-16).

This will only mean something to a fraction of the folks who visit, but RDN (and all the sites hosted on the server) are now 100% switched to the nginx web server. Anything wonky over the next few hours/days should be attributed to this change and pls drop a note in the comments (if they still work) or to my e-mail if things do begin to look strange.

Hey there stalwart readers. Just a quick post to let you know that RDN is adding a sister site (for real this time) - Not Obvious - where I'll be doing most of my tech and infosec musing. I'm giving Posterous a full-on try and have some Mars Edit-ish plans for a Posterous client (if I like the experience of their site).

Given some of the directions I want to take RDN in, it seemed to make sense to finally take advantage of the domain I registered a little over a year ago.

There's a hard link to the new companion site in the RDN header and it has full feeds, comments, etc. If it was an especially good posting week, I'll do a "highlights" post on RDN.

I'm moving all hosting to slicehost servers and cut the main RDN site over this weekend. Most things seem to be working. Please give a shout out if anything appears to be wonky.

UPDATE

Mary and Tori both decided to retire their current sections and I have discontinued the weather site as well. Trying to figure out the best way to manage everything moving forward. Now to eat up a few GB's of bandwidth backing everything up offsite.

Just wanted to drop a note to everyone that I am, in fact, not dead. I do feel dead, mostly due to this illness that's been hanging on for a while. Doc says it's viral, so rest and symptom relief. Between work, being sick, Twitter, infrequent TAB posts & the fam, it's been waaaay to hectic to personal blog, plus I'm trying to start a non-personal blog as well.

Doc sez I should start feeling better by the end of the weekend. Joy. Expect massive posting thereafter :-)

If you've sent e-mail, I should be able to get to it within the next couple of days. Been too unfocused to even skim through GMail...

If you're one of the few, cool folks who comment here @ RDN or have just been lurking, waiting for that perfect post to arise that was worthy of your €0.013, I wanted to make you aware that I installed the spam-filtering akismet module today.

Drop me mail (bob at my self-named hosted mail net address) if you get rejected so I know I need to turn it off or tweak it a bit.

Some noteworthy items do not warrant a full-on blog post...at least that's [part of] the premise of tumblr. I - mostly - tend to agree, and fearless readers should now see my tumblr feed as a right-hand block.

You can also bookmark the gathered post directly or just subscribe to that RSS feed for updates.

I'm thinking of a weekly "best of my tumbler quick hits" post, but we'll see how that manages to manifest itself.

For some reason, iTheme was bugging me. It may have been the excessive rounded corners. Perhaps it was the typographic idiosyncrasies and inconsistencies. Kubrick has always "felt" right and it seems to play nice with Safari now, so it's up until I can come up with something better on my own.

I just need to get an iPhone CSS file customized for it.

Let me know if you have any theme suggestions.

Hey true believers,

Mary is blogging.

Quick link in the tabs on the top of RDN for it as well.

It appears that changing the blog id from whatever the initial setup gave you to story allows you to post entries to story nodes rather than blog ones.

Howdy, true believers. Picking a house tonight, but am testing MarsEdit 2.0.1 with Drupal 5.2 at the moment while I wait for the latest caffeine injection to kick-in.

Always seeing if there's a better way to blog.

Wow. The Live Preview feature *really* slows down typing (very CPU intensive).

UPDATE: So, looking at the post, then edited post (with categories) it seems like the interface between the two is good. It would be great if it would let me post to the story area rather than the blog area, but that may be configurable (I'll check the forums). Line breaks work fine and the posting is fast. Flickr integration is also a nice feature as well.

Found some time to optimize rudis dot net for the iPhone. I created a custom iPhone.css for Drupal's itheme that gets rid of everything but the content div (no search, navigation, background image[s] or sidebar). I'd prefer it if those bytes were never sent to the client, but hiding them works well. (I may re-add search once I can figure out a pleasant way to display the box)

The actual "code" is after the jump. It requires two additional lines in the itheme page.tpl.php:

<meta name="viewport" content="width = 545" />
<link media="only screen and (max-device-width: 480px)"
      href="/themes/itheme/iPhone.css"
      type="text/css" rel="stylesheet" />

Trackbacks are officially disabled. Props to those Drupal site admins who have diligently moderated trackback spam into oblivion, only to do it again...and again...and again...and again.

It's a bit of hubris to expect to get a trackback to begin with - it's just a podunk personal blog. The experiment of enabling them (about a month ago) was educational, however. There definitely are a gazillion zombie PCs out there, just watching the meta-aggregators, waiting for an opportunity to post trackback and comment spam.

If anyone running Drupal does read this, have you done the trackback enable/disable tango, or do you find it not a problem (if you have them enabled)?

Well, I really liked GlossyBlue, but have no time to debug it. So, give a shout out to Garamond. Sigh.

So, I should test things on other browsers before declaring victory.

Back to using BlueMarine until I get things squared away. Apologies for any inconvenience.