There is not much update for the last two weeks. I spent a lot of time getting the new CodeProject tutorial completed. This one took almost 21 days to complete. It was published a few days ago. I am taking a break right now. The roof still has some leaking after I paint the reflective white paint. Pin-pointing the place where the leaking was happening is not hard. I bought some more wet patches and patched the leaking point with a lot of the wet patches. Now it will not leak for sure. After the fix, we experienced heavy rain once, and the fix held up well. I hope this is the last of it.

Since the last update, our family has gone to Marsh Creek and kayaked for two hours. And the same day, I went fishing for a little bit. I was using the Pautzke Balls salmon egg bait. That day I pulled up six sunfish from the stream. The problem with this bait or any other type of bait is that the fish would grow tired of it. They would stop trying to bite the bait. I will prepare multiple types of baits, dry crickets, dry mealworms, and salmon eggs. When the fish grew tired of one type, I will switch to a different one. All these were available at Walmart. I have bought these types of baits. I just haven't tried them yet. I am waiting for a day when I have some free time to try out my theory. The size 12 fishing hooks are great. The size 14 hooks are too small and fishes were able to steal the baits easily off the hooks. Once I find out about the variety of baits, I will write a follow-up memo.

Recently, I worked on a simple Python application. It is used to calculate the DTW of two sound files. This is something specific to digital signal processing. It took me two days to figure out how to do it, such as calculating the distances of each time point, plotting the distances of the two sound files, and plotting the path and heat map of the two sound files. It was fun. I think I can use this for my next tutorial.

I was constantly playing the game "Mass Effect: Legendary Edition" Every week, I would spend three nights a week for the past half year working on playing through this game. It was a fun game. At an easy or normal level, anyone can play it end to end without much trouble. I think I have three more missions to go before ending all three games. Previously, I did finish the third game on Xbox 360. And I started the second game on Xbox 360 but never finished. I didn't want to play the first game because it had ugly graphics. The Legendary Edition has superior graphics and is very enjoyable. I am looking forward to the day when I finish the whole series.

A lot of things happened since the last update. The roof issue seems to be fixed. After putting on all the sealant and foundation coating, the water is not getting in from the roof. In addition, I added a cover of white paint that should deflect 72% of sunlight. The temperature of the attic room is two degrees cooler than before. The air conditioner that runs during the day can cool the room for someone to stay during the day. If I use a reflective foundation coating to paint the flat roof, the room could be more comfortable for the summer. Maybe I will try the new coating next summer. Painting the roof is hard work, especially during a hot day. I had to carry the 4.75-gallon paint barrel onto the roof. Then I had to do the painting under the summer heat, crawling on my hands and knees. It was back-breaking work. I don't want to do it again any time soon.

I broke the new lawn mower. It wasn't something serious. Last week when I mowed the front lawn, a screw cap that connects the handle was shaken loose. And I couldn't find it. So I had to find a way to replace the lost cap. I had to bring the screw to Home Depot and find the matching cap. When I got home and tried to fix it, I found out that it needs a few paddings so that the cap and the screw can fit together perfectly. So I went back to Home Depot and got the paddings. And I finally got it fixed. This time I tightened the screw. It will not get loose again. It was my fault. I didn't tighten the joint screws. I should have done it right in the first place.

On Friday, the battery of my Buick Enclave was somehow drained. It happened just before I tried to go and pick someone up. I had to cancel that and call AAA to get it fixed. I paid a bit of money for a new battery. The old one is more than eight years old. The guy who diagnosed the battery said it still had 60% capacity. I thought it was time to be replaced. This experience made me think about getting a battery jumper in case of the same issue shows up later. I have to think about it.

I am halfway into the new Code Project tutorial. It is coming along nicely. It will be ready in a week or so. Since I spend so much time gaming these days, the project and tutorial work is taking much longer to complete. I am a little sad about this.

Recently I learned something about roof repair. The silicon-based sealant is not a good material for repairing the leaks on the roof. My parents-in-law found a handyman and taught me a few things about it. The material he used is Henry Wet Patch Roof Leak Repair. It is an asphalt-based sealant. The way it works is like mixed concrete. After applying the Wet Patch, he used another material to add an extra guarantee. The new material is called non-fibered foundation coating. The whole thing took 90 minutes. And the day was hot. The fix was dried in the afternoon. Hopefully, it will fix the water leak.

The crappy lawn mower finally died after it struck a baseball. I bought another one on Amazon. It took four days to ship. And it finally arrived. I remembered that I bought another one three years ago. It never arrived. This time, not only did it arrive, but also it arrived on time. The setup is fairly quick, and I used it once. It worked pretty well. My big silver car was due for state inspection. It passed the inspection easily. A few weeks ago, the rear right turn signal light was out. I installed a new one. After all the maintenance, this car is finally getting to the point where everything is working as expected. I suspect that next year, there will be some more fixes.

I went to Shenandoah National Park with my family during independence day week (2023). During that week, I only worked for one day. The trip was good. We tried to set up the tent on the first day, only to realize the tent frame sticks were all missing. As a result, we crammed into a hotel room for the first night. Then we spent half of the next day getting a new tent. In the afternoon, I witnessed a few giant millipedes (American Giant Millipede) that were 7 inches long. In the park, we saw a lot of deer, birds, familiar and unfamiliar plant species. It is fun that I try to identify plants and animals during my vacation. I went to the highest peak in the park on the third day. And we visited two different waterfalls in the park, a lot of hiking. It was very healthy for me.

We went home just before the storm came. And during the weekend, there was heavy rainfall again. And the roof leak appeared again. The flat part of the roof accumulates water. When the water reaches a certain height, it leaks into the house. I decided not to attempt any fix at this point. I cannot fix something that is not there. When someone creates an engineering problem with no solutions, the only thing left is frustration. I will end my memo at this time. And I will continue with a new one in a few days. For now, I will need to continue with my tutorial project. The progress has been painfully slow.

My roof was still leaking after all the work I had done. It was Friday, 6/22, close to 5 PM, when I noticed the water was streaking down the wall. It wasn't very severe. And It started at one fixed location. Thirty minutes later, the rain stopped. It was still wet outside, so I went up the roof and checked. There was the water running down the new chimney cover, down the brick wall of the chimney, and to the edge of the roof where a few shingles had cracks. The water was sipping into these cracks and eventually getting inside and running onto the wall in the attic. I made the fix right there. But it was wet. So I had to reinforce it on the next day. Today is Monday, 6/26. It has been raining several times through the weekend. And I have detected no leaking. I think it is finally fixed. I hope it will stay fixed.

The reverse osmosis unit is still broken. After the membrane was replaced, the reverse osmosis unit worked for two days. It then stopped working. After two days, it was working again. After two days, it stopped working. It has not worked since then. I called for the repair service again. I don't know when I can get it fixed.

I went to a creek to fish on Sunday. And I caught one small fish. I used a size 12 small hooks, with fake salmon eggs as bait. These fake salmon eggs were a great choice. I finally caught something that was not pan-fish. But I only caught one. Most of the bait was fed to the fish. They nibbled on the bait and took them off the hook. It was not easy to get these fish to swallow the bait with the hook. I need to work on my fishing skills.

The SSL certificate for this site was renewed today. Wow. It has been a year since I installed the SSL certificate. It took forty minutes to find out how to install the new certificate. And I installed it without any problem. Now I have a year before I need to pay $127 for the new certificate. I feel great!

Recently, there have been a few heavy rainfalls. My fix of the chimney cover was put to the test. As I expected, the water did not get into the chimney. And the wall in the attic room did not have water leak streak marks. It is finally fixed. I am happy about that.

I caught another groundhog with the trapper. To do that, U had to clean the trapper with water, removing all the scents of the previous groundhog. Then I set up the trapper near where the veggies are growing, with a few apple slices at the end of the trapper. The groundhog always falls for the apple slices. This one I caught was the last one within our area. No new ones have shown up in my veggie garden after I move this one somewhere far away from my house. We are all set for the summer. There are still some squirrels and chipmunks burrowed in around my home. I am not doing anything about them for now.

My reverse osmosis unit in the basement is busted. At first, I thought it was a problem related to the air pressure in the tank. So I pumped some air into it. It worked for a day and failed again. I called the vendor and scheduled a service appointment. We will see how much this fix is going to cost me.

My project work is going well. I have completed the work of uploading files for the site. While working on this, I discovered a new way of authenticating and authorizing HTTP requests. I will write a short blog post about this soon. And the code project tutorial, I am working on it. It will be the recycled material for uploading files from an Aungular-based application. I will also throw in some extra material on how to use the Angular-UI components. Everything is going smoothly. I am glad.

P.S. The reverse osmosis unit was OK. The membrane of the unit was blocked. The service guy replaced it with a new one and now the water is flowing again.

There is not much going on. I am busy working on my project and am making good progress. Media file upload and making icons for the file are working. And there is more work to be done. I will also take some time in June and write another tutorial.

The days are getting warmer. The critters are coming out. A few ground hogs were visiting my garden daily. I have tried all sorts of ways to dscouraging them from destroying the vegetables. First thing is to fix all the holes in the fence. I bought a trapper and caught one on 6/2. I released that one at a trail several miles away from home. It is not coming back. The other transgressors, they were not so lucky.

The summer just started, and I guess I will continue fighting the transgressing groundhogs. The plants are doing better. The mint is spreading as expected. The mint in the pot is also doing well. Although not as well as the ones on the ground. Every couple of days, I have to water that. The catnip and lemon balm are not doing well, they were barely grown. Too much Sun and not enough water. I planted some sunflower seeds, only four are growing. I bought 10 pots of Indian Lantana. They were doing OK at first, but are getting yellow for no reason. The marigold and the Zinnia are growing as well as they can be. I bought a pound of Zinnia seeds. Looks like it was a good decision. I hope this growing season is going to be a great success.

My car's air conditioner still works. It feels wonderful that the air conditioner can still blow cold air. After the car, my flashlight wasn't working anymore. Years ago, I bought 3 Duracell LED flashlights. Recently, I did a check, and two of them are working. The other one is dead. One of the batteries in it was corroded. The corroded battery tainted some parts of the flashlight. The metal parts were oxidized (rusted), so the electricity could not flow through.

At first, I want to throw out the bad flashlight. Then I thought maybe I can fix it. All I had to do is use a file and clean away the rust. Then I can insert the new batteries. It took a while for me to remove the rust. I added the batteries and it didn't work. So I had to sand away more rust and exchange the batteries holder from the good flashlight for the rusted one. After repeated tries a few times. The bad one finally worked.

I always thought that a good engineer can always solve a good problem. This is one of those problems. It seems to be impossible to solve at first. But if I apply my knowledge to the problem, the right solution would appear. I can try it. If it does not work, re-analyze the problem and try a different approach. Eventually, I can solve it or run out of options. Now, most of the time, I can solve it. The skill really grows as I am getting older.

I am sorry, guys. I have not posted my recent activities for quite a long while. Today, I finally get some free time and will give an update on what I have been doing for the past 20 days.

The first is the leaking roof. We had a non-stop two days of rain. I don't remember when. During the rain, again I saw the leaking marks on the wall in the attic room. After the rain, I went up the roof and checked again. The middle of the two chimneys has a heavy stain of rust. It seems that the chimney caps are leading the excess water into one of the chimneys, and somewhere down there has a spot that leaks water into the house. I bought a large chimney cap that can cover the two chimneys and installed it. Hopefully, this will fix the issue. Aside from this, I fail to find any other that could leak in rainwater. I think it is finally fixed.

I went on a tour of the East Coast with a relative. It was a week-long tour to Washington D.C., Niagara Falls, NY, and New York City. Most of the time, we spent it on the road on a tour bus. Oftentimes, we got to the destination around 9 PM or 9:30 PM and had to take care of food ourselves. It is fun but very stressful. When I got back, I slept for two days. I took the new camera on the road. And the hot pixel issue bothers me a lot. After I got home, I decided to shelve the camera and switch back to using the old D5100. I took some photos. Comparing these with the ones taken on an iPhone, I can see the DSLR is much weaker than the iPhone photo. Even my Motorola phone can produce better photos at times, with the power of AI enhancing it. DSLR is fading into history. But, I will not give up using it because it is a skill I like to keep.

Let me go back to my Buick Enclave. The AC is not working again. Just like last year, after the refill, the AC will work for the whole summer. Then the car endures the winter and AC stop working when summer comes again. I did some research. It seems I can refill the AC charge myself. At first, I bought a can of R134A Freon refill for 17 dollars and a charging cable from Amazon. The charge cable failed to work. Today, I sent another 59 dollars and bought a new can with a charging cable attached. And finally, I was able to recharge the Freon and have cold air blowing from AC. That is a big victory for me. The dealership charges $200 for the refill and $2,200 for a permanent fix. I hope this refill can last the whole summer of 2023.

I bought my current PC three years ago, It was a rage-driven decision. Since then, I have upgraded the SSD from 512 GB to 1 TB. And the system installed is a customized version of Linux Mint. One matter that bothers me the most is the memory configuration. When I bought the PC, the hardware market had a resource shortage. So this laptop has only 12 GB of memory. 12 GB memory sounds pathetic. It is slightly more than 8 GB but significantly less than 16 GB. Luckily, the memory parts are removable. This means these parts can be replaced. My only concern is whether this 4 GB memory can be replaced with a 16 GB with the same configuration.

I did some research and didn't anything that indicates there is a problem with the replacement. But I didn't act on this for a long time. It wasn't an urgent matter. Also, there is not a lot of information on what would happen if I fail the upgrade. Naturally, I was a bit nervous. Recently, I decided I should act upon my desire to upgrade. I would rather have my laptop with top-of-the-line hardware than settle for an average configuration. Buying the memory part is easy - Amazon, next-day delivery. Installing it caused a small confusion. I removed the 8 GB and installed the new 8 GB (Duh). The laptop didn't display anything for 8-10 seconds. Then it spins into life. I quickly realized the total size didn't change. So I turned off the PC, removed the 4 GB, and got the old 8 GB plugged in. This time, I did it right and the total memory size is showing 16 GB, not 12 GB. It is also faster.

I didn't know it was so easy. It seems I can upgrade the laptop to 32 GB with two 16 GB memory chips. I checked the price, it is only $34 per chip. Maybe I will do that with my next paycheck.

It has been 9 days, I have to write up some updates so that I can track what has happened during this time. First, one bad thing that happened is I crashed "the" big car in the garage. I forgot to close the passenger door and it hit the cabinet. The repair is going to cost me $4500 to repair it.

I went for dental cleaning. That was fine. I had to endure the ultrasound cleaning for 20 minutes. That was OK. Then came the annual health screening. I took two days to eat as little high calorie food as possible. And the LDL for cholesterol is still off the chart. I feel like such a failure. I will do more exercise, starting tomorrow.

The tutorial was submitted. I had to do some re-editing after the submission because I accidentally cut off some text at the very end. Anyways, I should post it here soon. I am thinking of the next tutorial I am going to write. Meanwhile, I have done a lot of work with my Twitter-like application. The editing post part is almost perfect. This type of side work is really a refuge for me from all my real-life problems. I am thinking of the next step for this application. It is going to be fun to get it working, just like I imagined.

I am almost finished with Mass Effect 1 on the Legendary Edition. I have probably two missions to finish. This game is hard to play because it does not give a clear mark of where I have to go. But it is short and gives me the freedom to go where I want to go. It is not bad once I figured out how to configure the weapons and armor for the characters. I like it.

Recently I took a break from playing video games. I had stomach flu for a few days during the 2023 Easter week. For two nights, I got some terrible heartburn. Then I felt weak for half a day. After I got better, I decided not to play games at night and slept early. And I took this break for two weeks.

For these two weeks, I didn't waste the time, I completed a new tutorial for CodeProject.com. The tutorial is on how to integrate PDF.js into an AngularJS based application. The integration is pretty easy. It is also a very powerful component. It gave me a good idea for a web site design. I will spent a bit more time on the twitter like application. Then I might start working on this new web application. The new application has a better alignment with my approach on personal data management. It is why I am very interested in this. I had an idea after my personal site is completed. But I halt the development of it after two days because of some un-answered questions. Now, it seems the answers are now available. I might be able to go forward with the development.

They all happened within the week. First, the water pump under the small sink in the parking garage was blocked. Then a few days later, the vanity light in the master bathroom broke. It was Friday, 03/31. I turned on the light, and it was lit for a fraction of a second, then it went out. It was an LED light, so I knew I have to replace it. The water pump was having a problem a few days ago. The only way to fix it was to take the pipe out, clean the pump, and re-attach the pipe.

The pump issue was resolved on 3/31. It was just as I have predicted, once I removed the pipe, and gave the pump a bit of cleaning, it was running as well as before. I did make the mistake of using an adjustable wrench to tighten the screw cap. It got too tight and it cracked. Those caps were supposed to be tightened by hand. So I had to run to Home Depot and get new caps. I bought 6 new ones. Afterward, everything sorted out as I have expected.

The next day, I went to Lowes and bought the same vanity light. I was very glad that I bought a generic brand vanity light. It was still well stocked. But the installation took a lot of energy out of me. First, I had to shut off the electricity to the master bedroom. This also shut off the electricity in the master bathroom. This allowed me to fiddle the wires with my bare hands. There were two screws that fixed the vanity light to the wall. The top one came off easily. The bottom one took a lot of work because the vanity mirror was beneath and I couldn't get the screwdriver in to effectively unscrew. I even lost a screwdriver bit. The broken light came off after the second screw was removed. The new light was wired up without much of a problem. The real problem came when I tried to fix the new light on the wall. I was unable to aim the screw to the hole in the fixture hardware. After half an hour of effort in vain, I took the vanity mirror off the wall. Then I had to loosen the fixture hardware so that the bottom holes could align, finally allowing me to get the screw in. Then the top one was easily screwed in. Then I mounted the vanity mirror. Everything was back to normal after that. Sometimes I liked to take some shortcuts, and it would end up costing me more work. This was one of those times. However, I did save a couple of hundred bucks by doing the fixing myself.

My review of the used Nikon D300 is here.

I have already written a blog post about this. Yet I was too excited to let it go. almost two weeks ago, I was at a convention with my kid and I saw a Nikon D300. It was listed with a low price of $125. And I jumped at the opportunity and bought it. It turned out to be a fantastic buy. It is all thanks to the fact that I have studied how to use Nikon cameras. To maximize the camera usage, I had to buy a new lens, a flash card reader, and several other items.

Waiting on the items delayed by evaluation. I made the configuration changes after the lens arrived. It will make the camera easier to use. I tested all the common functionality which I would use frequently, and all worked as expected. There is some unexpected outcome. First, I found the image sensor has some dirt or smudge. I was able to clean it up. After I turned on the sensor cleaning during shutdown and cleaned it a few times. The dirt spots disappeared. Another issue is the hot pixel at the center of the image. This hot pixel only shows up on certain occasions. It can be easily removed. I am not too concerned about it.

Overall, I was very happy with this purchase. The camera costs $1800 in 2007. I bought it at the inflated price of $125, which is almost the watermelon price for a camera. The camera performs really well in low-light conditions. And all the controls are easy to use. Even though the new camera is bulky and kind of out of style, it is still great equipment.

My review of the used Nikon D300 is here.

It has been a while, and I have not put out any updates. There is not much to discuss besides being lazy. I was busy with the tax return. It was effortless to do. And I am getting a larger return this year, which I am very grateful for. It is almost done. I feel much at ease now that I won't need to pay for the owed tax.

The new game Wo Long: Fallen Kingdom is out. This game is what I have much anticipated. But it is too expensive now. I must wait for at least 2 years before I can finally buy it. The game Ghost of Tsushima is at the low price of $19.95 at some time last week. But I don't want to buy it. I finally completed Horizon Zero Dawn in hard combat mode. And the videos are all uploaded. I am currently taking it easy. And I just started playing two old games, Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare and Halo Combat Evolved. They are Xbox 360 games running under Xbox One compatibility mode. They are kind of boring.

I have gain a lot of focus since I finished Horizon Zero Dawn. Right now, I am working on the Twitter replacement app. It is similar to this blog management site, only simpler. I am working on the user management of the posts list. This is the paged list that I recreating for the Angular application. I have made some good progress so far. A Twitter-like application is very complicated. I am only fifteen percent completed. This project is more like a research project I write and learn about. I am having a lot of fun with it.

I installed a new VM on my Linux PC, which used to host Windows 10 OS. I had to do this in order to get Turbo Tax installed. This is one application that I have to rely on Windows OS. Installing the VM is super easy. And with two monitors I can run the host OS and the VM simultaneously. I can only allocate 4GB of memory to the VM, and Turbo Tax runs fine with such a limited configuration. When running a VM, I can do very little work with the host OS. So, I decided that when I run the VM, I will run nothing else on the host OS.

Installing Turbo Tax is really a painful experience. The base installation is OK. The update installation was also completed with no issues. The real issue comes when I try to validate the product key. For no reason, the application cannot connect to the site to validate the product key. I pinged some familiar sites and the connection is OK. I suspect that there are some bugs in Turbo Tax that prevent Turbo Tax from accessing the product key validation site. I had to reboot the computer twice to resolve this issue and finally got the product key validated. The next step is to copy the old tax file into the VM. VM and the host OS are two separate OSes, I have to create a shared folder to get the files copied. This is done with the Samba file share service. And I did learn some new tricks to allow the Windows VM to connect to the shared folder on the host OS. Once I got Samba working, I was able to transfer the files. I could also install SFTP on the host machine, then access the SFTP from VM. Anyways, I am good with the Turbo Tax now. Next, I have to face the dreadful tax season...