Invisible touch

One of the CDL Home Pages is a hand crafted web page. Meaning I haven't a clue how to use Wordpress so I wrote all the HTML, CSS and Javascript by hand. I did learn a few new tricks such as Responsive Web Design. I'm hoping this will help with the page ranking (we're practically invisible). It's going to be a while before I try to update my other web sites. I spent a lot of time learning how to use Chrome's Dev Tools. Learned various methods of making pages responsive and learn a thousand different ways not to make a light bulb. The iterative process is not fun! Problem is I need to be the jack of many trades but expert of few. So I don't really fully understand the material before I need to jump to the next thing. I'd design a page 90% of the way and something would brake. A lot of time time the design work involved tables which don't seem to like being responsive. They always seemed to runoff the right of the page. The new flex stuff looks interesting but whenever I added the code that worked by itself to an existing page it stopped working. Something is not right there, I'm missing some detail. Anyway we can now use CDL's page on a variety of devices from full desktop browsers to watches (though I bet the text is still tiny). Now that I've done this, there's no one to brag to. So I just have to be happy in the knowledge that I made that page. Not a lot of satisfaction there. ;-)

Arrivederci 2021!

Boy was 2021 a rough year, I won't go into details but for the most part, I'm happy to see it go! It's been a few months since I last posted but I've been very busy. Around the house I picked up a ZigBee thermostat but I haven't installed it yet. I have several Sonoff 2-Way switch modules, not installed yet. I purchased a SuperMicro server so I can fully support Xfinity's 1.2G internet access. I added a new work bench and I'm setting up one of my rooms as a workshop/office. I finally found the missing hardware for the bathroom shower and kitchen sink. I replace the kitchen faucet and proved I can still solder pipes, even with the lead free solder. Oh, and I didn't burn down the house. Next up my bathroom. That's going to be a major project but I'll take it in steps.

Now to support the 1.2Gbps Xfinity access I needed a router that could handle more than 1Gbps. That was the port limit of my older Ubiquiti ER-Lite-3 router (1G x 3). That router served me well and I may try to sell it on eBay. So I picked up a SuperMicro X10SLH-LN6TF (10G x 6) as the FW. I then tried out pfsense. That worked well but I needed to add a RT8125B NBaseT card to support the 2.5G interface on the Xfinity modem (it will drop down to 1Gbps but I'm paying for 1.2Gbps). So I went with Opnsense instead. I now have a working 2.5Gbps interface between the modem and the FW. I did have the install the re driver, add some lines to loader.conf and reboot (also reboot the modem). I'm now waiting on the 10G Copper Ethernet SPF+ to arrive with some Cat6 cables so I can add that to my Cisco switch. I'll still need to add some more cabling to my network so I have at least 2Gbps Ethernet bundling between all the switches. And yes I know it's overkill but I work in networking. I also have my own DNS and Certificate Authority for my local machines.

I'm also busy with CDL, my makerspace and podcast studio and with my TCF presentation. We're back on Zoom so I need to figure out how to deal with that. I only have about a month to prepare my TCF presentation. In that time I also have:

• Hosting CDL's Microcontroller Mondays - every Monday, 7PM until 10PM
• VCF Swap Meet 2022 Feb. 26^th
• Hosting Fubar's Robotics Event - March 5^th
• NJ Maker's Day at InfoAge on Mar 25^th
• TCF Presentation
• VCF East 2022 Apr 22, 23, 24

So I'll be a little stressed.

The past few weeks we've been busy adding to the network infrastructure at Camp Evans. We ran two large spools of single mode copper between the CDL (9059 - The telecom building) and Radio Museum/Admin Annex (9032A). It will be a few more weeks before we've completed the last step to terminate in the basement of the Marconi Hotel (9001).

Oh I'd like to add that while working in the Radio Museum I had a great time with the exhibits. Calling it a Radio Museum doesn't really do it justice. I really need to go back and visit to get the complete tour. I highly recommend it!

Right, almost forgot, I spent a good part of a day working on my node-red-contrib-mytimeout flow. I fixed the repository to have a main and dev branch. Main is what folks should pull their production code from. If someone wants to fork code, use the dev branch. My feature branches (like the pause feature I'm working on) are branched from the dev branch. I've added my test suite to the 3.2.2 main branch but forgot to tag it (later). At the moment I'm working on adding a pause feature. I think I have it working but I need to add test coverage. One of the advantage of having the test suite is that as the code grows more complex I don't need to worry that I've missed something as the test suite should cover the old requirements. The new code and tests just make sure I cover the new requirements also.