Things that I have been doing instead of working on this 23Things project

So I had not been keeping up on my 23things for work. Why is that? Because I had a bunch of other technology projects on the go and just a limited amount of time at work. Fortunately, today I am only on the reference desk for two shifts, so I have the time to catch up.

And the other projects? Well, there are a few non-work ones: I am learning Python, which is going slowly honestly just because I am spending more time on French, I have reconfigured my household media server (not that Plex requires that much work), and I assembled a new computer for my wife.

Building a computer is actually pretty simple: you just need to buy a bunch of parts that all work together: I chose a new Gigabyte motherboard that only supports certain types of RAM, processors, and so on, so you just choose the best that you can get for whatever price you have set and make sure that it is all compatible.

The hard part was that I wanted it to run Apple's OS X, which is not something that just works out of the box. There is a community of people online that are into this sort of thing though, and they call these hacked macs "Hackintoshes" (quelle surprise). I had to choose the right hardware: only certain motherboards and CPUs will work, configure the BIOS on the motherboard just right, run a special program off that installs the OS off of a USB key, run a bunch of configuration tools so that everything worked right, and now I still have to troubleshoot a few issues that have come up (volume is disabled after it goes to sleep, Bluetooth is not working, occasional freezes that I think are being caused by GUI animations, and a kernal panic on boot when something is plugged into a particular USB port.)

Meanwhile, at work I have been preoccupied with Minecraft and Minecraft servers. Bea and I are running this program for teens and I want us to have our own stable server that they can log into while they are here--not shared over the internet, just connected to a wireless router here so you can connect to the network and join. This means running a server via Java in windows, which I know relatively little about.

The first issue was just getting the thing to run via a batch file. I had to learn about Path and how to specify what Java to launch, since the work laptop I was using had Java 6 and 7 and there are these issues with 32-bit compatibility with Windows 7 that I didn't want to even have to figure out. So I learned how to point to the exact version of Java that I wanted and I got the batch file configured so that more RAM is allocated and all that.

The second issue is Windows networking and Windows firewall. Both are, from my OS X and minimal Linux background, insane. Networking just makes no sense. There are Public, Home, and Work environments with different conditions, all the settings are buried here and there. I can get it to work, but I just do not understand the logic of it. The firewall is the lesser evil, although it still has the different environments and the issue of multiple Javas was confusing there as well.

All that is mostly behind me: I now have a server that works and I can start configuring. But the process was so annoying that I would rather track down an older computer somewhere (2 gigs ram and a post-"core2duo" CPU would be fine) so that I can put Ubuntu on it and have it set up as a dedicated server.

The other thing has being figuring out Hootsuite, which has simplified library social media significantly. I know that Cat was using it, so I gave it a shot and the ability to schedule posts is great.

So that is what has been up.