John's Blog

An update on all the things.

Kyle and Sami are fully recovered from their covid stuff. Kyle called today and said he’d be here tomorrow. He may bring a dog or two or three along with him. Kim has been busy painting wood and cutting out the pieces for all the backlogged card boxes, Kyle will assemble ‘em.

Kim is out at the moment, she went to a book club meeting at a friend’s house. I’m here holding down the fort.

It’s Saturday afternoon where the weather is cool, almost clammy. We got dusted with a bit of the white stuff last night, it’s mostly gone as I type this. The forecast is for a few weather disturbances next week. Forecasters are still too timid, offering little more than ‘we think’ and ‘things could’. I’m thinking three inches tops by the end of the week, Bob the Dead Poet’s meteorologist is thinkin’ six. He and I have dollar bet riding on the end of week total as called by the Moline airport on the Illinois side of the river.

I just texted Kim asking her if she fed the dogs lunch before she left.

Yesterday I was almost furious about the number of hoops I had to jump through to get my prescriptions moved from pharmacy A to pharmacy B. Almost furious. But it seems to be done except for a few I’m still waiting to see on the other side. It’s not Funny how Kim’s moved without a hitch.

My next project has been prioritized for me. Kim wants a few improvements to the exhaust system that pulls the smoke and fine particles from the laser engravers and dumps it outside.

Her requirements are: better exhausting, quieter exhausting, and whatever I create must be built using existing bits and pieces as possible. More to follow.

On the computer front I’m continuing to flesh out this simulator database (SDB) thing. I move slowly on this project and it’s probably for the better. I have finally laid down a few ‘gotta haves’.

I want to be able to sit down at a computer anywhere in the house and use a web browser to interact with SDB. I’ve never created something like this before but it’s not hard to do.

Making any ‘web browser’ the user interface for SDB means I can slide a few technologies off the table: I was gonna use Python as the programming language, TKinter for creating the user interface, and SQLite for the database.

I have some experience with those three tools, enough to have made good progress once I got started. But those are the wrong tools for a database that’s ‘served up’ to more than one computer. Annnd… The front end would need to be either in one place and accessed via some janky network resource sharing witchcraft here in the house or I would have to maintain updated copies of the app on every machine I’ll want to use to access SDB. And don’t get me started on maybe having to deal with Windows.

Much better to use a browser to interact with SDB. I’ll create a web site on the server. I’ll configure Apache so that only computers in the house can access the thing. The database will be MySql because it supports connections from boatloads of places at the same time (concurrency).

So the SDB tech stack is gonna be LAMP, HTTP, and CSS. The LAMP stack is already running. I’ve done very little coding in MySQL, PHP, HTTP, or CSS so it’s gonna be a little steep at the beginning.

Anyway, I’m stickin’ a fork in this article. Cheers.