tinkering

Tonight’s plan.

I’ve been planning to swap out the 256 NVMe drive for a 1tb drive. This should be quick and then I’ll have more storage on my desktop.

Then I dropped the tiny screw into the PC. And it was lost to another dimension. I scoured the floor and desk and everywhere nearby with a magnet.

Nothing.

It must be inside the computer. I worried about it wedging itself between the motherboard and case. Or getting wedged into the power supply and shorting it. All of the worst case scenarios.

I removed the optical drive. Then the drive cages. I unplugged everything. Then unscrewed and removed the motherboard.

Still nothing.

So… I resolved myself to it being gone forever and went to work putting it all back together. I powered it on before I put everything back in place and screwed the last screws in.

Then I grabbed the external hard drive, and the cables to plug it all back in and power it on to continue the restore of data with a temporary screw holding the drive in place.

And what do I find? Right under the cords and cables I moved three times and looked over, under and around?

One Tiny Screw with a screwdriver tip for size comparison. — One tiny screw.

Yesterday flew by like lightning. I was setting up the Ubuntu desktop I have on my desk so it is usable as a web server to test out a CCTV solution for my house as well as some CMS tools I wanted to play around with.

WordPress Thought: I’m tired of WordPress because every single theme looks exactly the same!

I installed a local copy of WithKnown, a self-hosted tumblog, but its Markdown plugin does not work which in 2018 is a deal breaker for me. I don’t want to use a GUI to make links or bold text. I don’t want to

I found a nice little tool called Bludit. But it refused to see the .htaccess file very clearly at its root. If I removed the file completely, it threw an error, but when I added it back it complained about not finding it. Which it clearly found because it errored out without it. After much too long, I gave up trying to use it and moved on.

I installed Pico. Remembered I didn’t want to mess with hand coding and deleted Pico.

I looked at Grav again. And Hugo. I didn’t get as far as installing either yesterday, but I thought about it. Only to remember why I never end up using them. Either something doesn’t work (that I can’t figure out) or it’s too much work.

I want a simple place to write text, style it with Markdown, add a photo or two, and post. I don’t want a hacker’s solution. I don’t want to mess with plain text config files. I don’t want to spend more time tinkering with the writing space than writing.

After the day of tinkering I didn’t come to a good conclusion. Nor did I get anything written which was part of the reason I was setting something up. I still yearn for the place to dump Markdown files but when I set those up, it’s too fidgety to dump them and there ends up being extra work I need to do to get it either looking nice or working. At all.

Carl T. Holscher fights for the customers.

Tag: tinkering

One tiny screw