Keith Graham

I saw a pair of Chromebooks on ShopGoodWill.com going cheap and I bid $17. I won the pair of Chromebooks for $15. $7.50 a piece shows you how little reputation Chromebooks have. The shipping cost me more than the two computers.
Chromebooks OS is built on Linux and there are lots of project pages that let you install a full Linux repo. I am going to try this and then run a LAMP stack similar to how I ran a WAMP stack on my desktop computer. I will then copy over my WWW folder onto the Chromebook and configure it to replace the desktop machine. It will be interesting.
After I get LAMP working on the Chromebook I am going to do the same thing with a Raspberry Pi. I have a feeling that the Pi will run my websites better than the Chromebook.
If I find time to do this I will post the results here.

I have been using a few different email forwarding services to get email service for the websites running on my local machine.
Cloudflare.com started a beta test of an email forwarding services. I signed up and got accepted this week. I am now using Cloudflare for JT30.com HarpAmps.com and this site KPGraham.com.
Send an email to anybody at one of these sites and I’ll get the mail in my gmail mailbox a few minutes later. I’ve tested this a little and it seems to work.
I will not be very concerned if it doesn’t work. I don’t anticipate any long conversations with anyone.

I had some inspiration and did some googling and I have discovered that I can run a webserver on a raspberry pi. Why? I am running a dozen websites on an old desktop computer in a cluttered room we call the “cat room”. It has been a storage room for old furniture and the cats have decided it’s a good place to take an occasional piss. The old PC draws about 150 watts. A Pi draws 5 or 6 watts. It makes no sense to leave the old PC running all the time to serve a few simple websites.
I asked Erica for Raspberry Pi 400 for Christmas, so I may be installing a LAMP stack on a Pi on Christmas day. (LAMP is Linux, Apache, MySQL, PHP and is a standard web server configuration.)
If I can get it working I will turn off my desktop PC, perhaps for a long time. I will probably only turn it on to do Taxes and write short stories.

I have enjoyed answering surveys from Survey Monkey for a few years now, but I’ve done it for free. I recently found that there are a bunch of sites that will actually pay you a small amount to answer surveys.
I have been doing surveys from one of these sites and I’ve made about $50 a week. I do the surveys with the TV on, and I don’t have to concentrate very hard on either the survey or the TV.
There are many places to get paid for surveys, but I have been using https:/www.prolific.co. It has the disadvantage that it pays out in Great Britain Pounds, but it pays directly to PayPal.com so that it is converted to US Dollars automatically. All of the surveys pay for $10 to $15 per hour. Most surveys take a few minutes. Some surveys take 20 minutes or longer.
I am a preferred survey taker because of my age, but it is still hard to snag a survey. The competition is fierce. Prolific.co has shut down the admission of new users because the users so far outnumber the surveys available. I am hoping that things will settle down a bit and I will be able to answer more than I am doing now.
It is nice to get some money for something that is fun to do. I don’t count this as a job, but I am using the money I make to buy Christmas presents.
It is much better than playing solitaire while watching TV at night.

I sent resumes into a dozen or so job postings and was answered by one of them. A week later they emailed me a ‘thanks but no thanks’ message.
I am bummed out an I will not be trying to find a new job. I think being 70 years old makes this difficult.

For the last six months I have felt well. I’ve been writing, working on my tube amps, and doing some light programming. I have finally achieved balance of life that allows me to get some things done.
I found out that my move to a New Hampshire CCRC was limited severely due to not having enough accumulated wealth. I am about $300,000 short. I decided that I could work a few years as a programmer and make up that difference, so off went the resumes.
I have an interview this afternoon and I could not sleep from worry. My problem is that I have been programming from time to time, but not everyday. I can still do it just fine, but I have to stop and look things up fairly often. I am not sure that I can ace an interview. Now I am tired and I have a headache and have to talk to a group of people on Zoom and still be smart, engaging and a nice person. I see little chance of getting this job, but I need the practice.
I have had a few other responses asking for my resume or other information. I expect that one or all of them will be getting back to me.
Wish me luck.

DNS=Domain Name Server
When you wand to go to a URL in you web browser, the browser needs to convert the WWW type name into a numeric IP address. It does this with a DNS lookup.
By default your PC is configured to use your cable company’s DNS through a process called DHCP.
The problem with this is that your cable company has a slow DNS that also keeps track of the web sites that you visit so it can sell you customized ads.
There are several free and fast DNS providers including Google. I have been using the Google DNS for years.
Recently I found out that Cloudflare, company that I really like, has a super fast DNS that is easy to use.
There are simple instructions for setting up the CloudFlare DNS on your PC on their website. It is pretty simple to do. Basically you turn off DHCP and type in the new DNS address. They are 1.1.1.1 and 1.0.0.1. It took me about a minute to do. If you haven’t done anything like that the instructions are on their website which simply is https://1.1.1.1
There is a link on the top right hand to get the DNS setup instructions for Windows or Mac.
The main page has the app links so you can use the fast DNS with you cell phone. There is a free version, but they want to sell you a fancy version for $4.95 a month. Go with the free version for now. It is very fast.

I have been paying $10 a month to the cable company to rent our cable modem for 30 years. I never got around to replacing the old modem and returning it and I feel stupid.
Today I finally replaced the modem. I bought a $50 replacement for my modem from Amazon. I got the same brand and model number in order to prevent any problems, but that isn’t really necessary. I could have upgrade to a faster more modern modem, but that might have caused issues. I do not play online games where modem speed is an issue. I simply browse the web.
I received the new modem a few days ago and today I went into the cellar and unplugged the old modem and plugged all of them into the new modem.
Problems:
I did not get any internet. I read the instructions on the cable company’s website carefully and wrote down my account number and other information. I was supposed to type in a special URL that would let me register the new modem.
It turns out that you have to wait 10 minutes for the cable company to realize that you have a new modem plugged in.
Once I waited, the URL popped up, I plugged in my account number and then after another long wait, the system told me that it had found me. I pressed a continue button and then the new modem initialized and I had a new modem working.
Things to know:
The modem is not your cable box. It is a smaller box that is connected to cable coming into the house. It is connected to your WiFi router via a yellow (usually yellow, anyway) network cable.
In my case I have what is known as a “telephony” modem where I plug my telephone cable into. Some people don’t use their cable company for telephone access and won’t have this kind of modem.
Usually the cable signal comes into the house on a COAX cable. If you have a cable box for TV then you have a splitter that sends part of the signal to the cable box and half to the modem. This should have been done when the cable was installed, but be aware of it.
I have 30 days to return the old modem to the cable company so I won’t be charged rent for it. I will hold on to the old cable box for a week or so, just to be sure that everything works.

Erica had a problem with her phone. It wouldn’t hold a charge. A Google search indicates it’s a bad battery. YouTube convinced me that changing a battery in an iPhone is more than I am willing to attempt.
I’ve got a guy in Westwood, NJ that fixes mobile phones cheap and guarantees his work, but Erica wanted to go with the Apple Genius Bar.
This would be my first experience with the Genius Bar.
My first impression is that it was packed. There were lots of people in khaki pants moving around and helping people. There was a crowd of people waiting for their shot at a genius. We must have looked overwhelmed because someone walked up to us almost as soon as we had entered and we told him that we had made an appointment online. We were ushered to a special table and five minutes later we were explaining our problem.
We needed a new battery was the immediate verdict, although that’s how I started the conversation. I wanted to know if this was rare, but then I noticed that there was a pre-printed form that had a checkbox for “replace battery”, so I guess it happens all the time.
We signed the forms and gave up the iPhone and had an appointment to come back in a couple of hours.
The new battery cost us about $55. The phone now works well.
At one time I thought about getting a part time job nearby to fill my afternoons. I had looked up Apple Genius and found that it paid about $20 per hour. I felt that that was cheap for a man of my diverse and extensive talents and thought nothing more of it. Now that I’ve seen them in action I am glad that I did not fill out the application. Geniuses don’t seem very smart and the job looks to be very boring. I have more fun working on Amplifiers or typing in short stories.
The title of this entry is “At the Genius Bar”, but now I am thinking that it would make a great title for a short story!

The reason I started reading science fiction again after a long rest is a kind of of SF called cyberpunk. I read Vernor Vinge’s novel “True Names”, John Shirley’s novel “Eclipse”, and William Gibson’s novel “Neuromancer”. These books made me love Science Fiction again.
When I started writing science fiction stories I found it easiest to write cyberpunk. I wrote about 30 cyberpunk style stories. I wrote lots of horror, fantasy and traditional SF stories, but I enjoyed writing cyberpunk.
That was 30 years ago. I have had problems in my life since, and I find it difficult to write at all. I do write short stories from time to time, and I usually write cyberpunk.
The problem with writing cyberpunk is that it has gone in and then out of style. There are not many venues that buy cyberpunk stories anymore.
I just wrote a nice little story called “Two Annies”. I sent it out to four or five magazines and got nothing but form responses. I doubt that they ever read much beyond the first paragraph.
I sent the story over to Shaun Lawton who runs a cool little zine which is internet slang for web magazine. He is the editor of the “Freezine of Fantasy and Science Fiction”. I don’t know how I got involved with Shaun’s Freezine, but it has a kind of appeal that keeps me coming back. If I write a “Weird Tale” style story I always know where it can find a home. The trouble is that Shaun prefers horror and there have not been may cyberpunk stories in Freezine.
Shaun has “Two Annies” now and I hope he wants to include it. I guess I could sell it somewhere if I waited, but I’ve had a few cyberpunk stories out for submission for three years without a sale.

I have added a windows task that updates my statistics program at midnight every day so at least I am keeping a good record of what is happening. The stats show a few hundred hits per day on CTHREEPO.com and JT30.com. This is far less than my good old days where I would get 20,000 hits per day. I am not sure what has happened. (I think that I know. Facebook has pretty much replaced web browsing and people rely on Facebook as an aggregator of information.)
Erica’s iPhone is acting strange and is mostly useless. I am backing it up now and I will be doing a hard reset. This appears to be the last resort. Actually, second to last resort. I have a spare iPhone that I using to clone Erica’s phone. 1) I want to see if the problem is repeatable across phones. 2) If the spare works well, it will be Erica’s main phone.
I wrote a science fiction short story. It is the first SF story that I’ve written in over two years. I did write a short Mystery story and sold it last year, but this is the real deal. I am letting it ferment and I will go over it again looking for problems and ways to improve it. I wrote 3,000 words in one day. That’s a whole bunch of mistakes that I must have made. The problem is, that it is hard to see the mistakes I make, since I made them and my mind ignores them. I will reformat the story in a few days and go over it line by line. I expect it to go out to the big pro markets starting next week. I always start with The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction because that is the place where I’d really like to make a sale.

I’ve started working on a version of “Astounding Spam” and “Stop Spammers” plugins that does not require WordPress. I have researched how to load a PHP program before anything else loads. This will allow any website that can run PHP to stop spam from loading up on form submits.
I don’t suppose I’ll ever finish it, but at least I have the idea and have even written part of it.
This year I harvested about 40 pounds of honey from my hives and I’ll be getting some more, perhaps, next week. The first batch is almost gone.
I installed Awstats on my home server and I am trying to get it to work right so I can see what kind of traffic I get. I am getting very few hits on my websites. Google doesn’t seem to find my sites anymore. Installing Awstats is the first step in doing the necessary SEO optimization of my sites. The problem that I am having is updating the Awstats library every day. I’ll be checking in a few minutes to see if my “task manager” solution has worked.
I have been downloading Jason Ricci’s Harmonica instruction videos as audio only and putting them on an iPod. I like my old iPods. They have many hours of battery life and I can listen while I walk without the complications of using my phone. I am going to create a “mix tape” of the things that I need to practice.
Erica and I are running out of British crime dramas. I may have to actually pay for Acorn TV. There is absolutely nothing on network TV to watch right now.

I wanted to produce a guide to creating a home server, but it could fill a book and probably would be obsolete within a month of me writing it. I decided to just list the steps and anyone interested in this could google for the details.

If you have a website already, like I did, these are the steps that I took to get it on my home server.

1) Get a CloudFlare account and set your DNS to point to the CloudFlare DNS. CloudFlare has lots of information on how to do this. CloudFlare helps you set up SSL which is “Secure Socket Layer”. SSL is an absolute requirement for a website. CloudFlare does all the work for you once you use their DNS.
2) Transfer your Domain registration to CloudFlare. You should do this immediately. CloudFlare is far cheaper that most other registrars. I saved $4 a year on a dozen domains. I save about $36 a year by using CloudFlare as a registrar. Since I am retired, I like saving cash.
3) Get yourself a cheap desktop computer running Windows. You need this to stay up all the time. My computer is 12 years old. I put an SSD drive in it and changed the power supply. It runs cool and quiet. I expect it to last another 10 years. I’ll have to vacuum it out every year because the fans build up cat hair.
4) Install WAMP on your server and set it so it starts up automatically whenever the server starts up.
5) Set your Server to use a static IP address. This means it will always use the same ip number whenever it starts up so that the router doesn’t give a new address every time you reboot.
6) Configure your router to let web ports 80 and 443 through your the router directly to your server’s IP address. This step is a little obscure when you google it and is different for every router. You may have to call your router company’s help line to get a clue how to do this.
7) Open the Window’s firewall on your server to let 80 and 443 into your server so that WAMP can see it. This is a little complicated and different for every version of Windows and your anti-virus software may have to be configured, too.
8) Go to your Internet company (the one you pay the bill to every month. Around here it is Optimum or AT&T). You have to get the internet company to let ports 80 and 443 into your machine. Some companies block this to keep out pirates. They may want to charge you for this, but for me it was as simple as checking a box on my account setup page.
9) Get a free account at NOIP.COM. This is a service that will keep track of your server’s external IP address, the one that world uses to find you. You will wind up with a NOIP subdomain like myserver,dnsns.net. If you go to a browser and type this in you should be able to see your Wamp welcome screen. I am not sure about this, you may have to add the NOIP subdomain to WAMP in order to see it.
10) Download and install the NOIP automatic update software so that it will check you every 5 minutes in case your internet company randomly changes it.
11) Configure your Windows Hosts file to see your NOIP subdmain.
12) Add your NOIP subdomain to WAMP and restart WAMP.
13) Check with a browser that you your NOIP subdomain will show your server welcome page. If you don’t, start googling to see what you did wrong.
14) Copy your domain files into a sub-directory on your server. Make sure you get all of it. Test it under WAMP. You may need to add a dummy name to the Hosts file and add a new url to your WAMP configuration.
15) Now it’s time flip your domain to your home server. Go to CloudFlare and delete all of the dns records. There is no going back, now. Add the two CNAME records. One pointing to your NOIP subdomain for your main domain and another for the WWW subdomain. NOIP has lots of information how to do this with CloudFlare.
16) Update your WAMP VHOSTS file so that it shows your domain and restart WAMP. There is lots of information on Google on how to do this.
Bob’s your Uncle.
I am an experienced computer guy. I’ve been doing this kind of thing for 50 years. It took me two weeks to get all this working. I made lots of mistakes. IF YOU CAN READ THIS, then it works. This is running on my home computer.

I used to use my JT30.com and kpgraham.com domains for some email addresses. I reasoned at the time that I needed to protect my gmail address to avoid spam. Those days are gone and thank goodness that gmail does a good job filtering spam.
I still have these odd email addresses that I use for account logins and for some newsletters. When I moved most of my domains to my home web server I lost these. The email was offered as a service by my hosting company, but now my hosting company is me.
I needed a way to service these domain email accounts. My first idea was to run an email server on my home computer. I decided this was overkill for three or four email addresses. I knew that CloudFlare DNS let me add MX records. The MX record in your DNS controls how other email servers discover your server in order to send you email. I had no idea how to configure MX records.
After some Googling, I discovered that there are free services that will “forward” email from one domain to another and all you have to do is set up the MX record.
I signed up with improvMX.com and set all email going to JT30, CTHREEPO, and KPGraham to go to my Gmail address. The site gave clear instructions for setting up my MX records plus a TXT record. Now, if you sent an email to [email protected] it will wind up in my gmail account.
ImprovMX has been steady and working well for about a week now. I know nothing about the company, but it ranks high in Google, which is usually a good sign that it is popular. It ranks high on a some internet surveys. I have already received a few emails that I would have missed without knowing it. Since these emails aren’t mission critical I don’t need to be worry. If ImproMX dies, there are many alternatives.

I had the idea that since I am putting up all of my old data as static HTML pages on my home computer that might try t do the same with Facebook. I have a lot of data on Facebook. I started posting in 2008 - that’s 13 years.
Facebook has a page where you can download all of your posts, comments, images and videos. I tried it but the download file was too big and it failed. I wound up being able to download the data, but including the low resolution images.
I have started parsing the posts and images, but I can’t cross reference the comments to the post that they are related to.
My goal is to make a complete flat file web page that can be browsed from beginning to end. It is lots of work and lots of programming, so it may be a while before I can make it all work.

(This is not a technical post. I’ll do that next.)
I now host about 15,000 pages on my home computer. Most of these are pages that I’ve written, but many are created programmatically.
I started blogging when the WWW first appeared in the early 90s. I created one long page and kept on adding to it. When Blogger.com appeared I switched over to it. When WordPress appeared I switched over to WordPress.
For 30 years I kept adding to my websites. I kept four blogs and added to them several times a month. I had CThreePO.com where I collected information about writing Science Fiction. I had JT30.com where I collected information about playing harmonica. I had HarpAmps.com where I collected amplifier information. I then created a website called IDI0T.com where I wrote about programming. I switched that over to BlogsEye.com which I used for an online novel, but I abandoned that project. I never liked the name idi0t.com so I flipped over to BlogsEye.
I am seriously thinking about compiling information from CThreePO.com into a book called “Help in Writing Science Fiction”. Most of it is written already. All I would have to do is organize it and reformat it. It would be lots of work, but I think I might make a few hundred bucks off of it.
My web server is getting about 200 unique users per day and a few thousand pages. Some of these are robots scanning every page in a domain. Some of these are web scrapers and I find copies of my websites running on servers in Russia or Eastern Europe. I have to fix up my access rules tokeep these actions to a minimum.
It feels good to be back in the web business. I have WestNyackHoney.com running on a server. It is a WordPress blog. On the same domain I have a chicken blog and a beekeeping blog, but both have been abandoned for 10 years.
I also act as Web Master for TuxedoHighway.com which is Larry’s band site. In addition I have the domain TragicBabylonPublishing.com. This is for an anthology project that seems to have failed. I sold them a story, but was never paid. I’ve moved it over to a free blogger account, but I still pay for the domain. I’ll renew the site one more time and then I will inform the editor that it will die soon.
I have to put WestNyackHoney.com on the server and then I can stop paying for my web host, a savings of about $200 per year.

I used to run wget, an old command line Unix utility program, to “get” things from one server and drop them on another. I am pretty sure that it came with an old version MS-DOS or Windows.
I am using wget to clone a copy of my JT30.COM website from the internet down onto my local disk. The command line (sorry no window for wget) is

wget --mirror --convert-links --adjust-extension --page-requisites --no-parent https://site-to-download.com

I am grabbing JT30.COM so that that I can use my local disk to host my websites and this is the next one on my list. I am using wget in order get “flat files” only because the original site uses the PHP programming language to fix files as they are requested. My goal is to have no programming at all on any of my sites. So far wget has copied more than 22,000 files and shows no sign of stopping. JT30 was a big website and I wrote or collected lots of information on how to play blues harmonica.
At one point I had split off several website into their own domains because JT30.COM was getting too big. Since then I have recombined the websites into one big one. I had HARPAMPS.COM, HARPLOG.COM, HARPL.COM and probably others that I don’t remember. They are all together now, though.
Wget has been running for a half an hour and shows no sign of slowing down.
The next site that I get will be BLOGSEYE.COM which was my programming blog for many years. It has a few thousand blog entries, but will be easier to work with since I gave up the domain a long time ago (it is now registered with a domain squatter so I can’t get it back). I have a zip of the last version of the site. I will probably be adding it here to my KPGraham.com domain.

Several years ago I moved all of my domains to Google. At $12 per year they were cheaper than the domain company that I was using. (This was so long ago that I don’t even remember who handled the domains before Google.) Recently CloudFlare started doing domain name registrations for about $8 per year. You don’t need to convince me that saving a total of about $40 a year by switching all of my domains is a good idea.
The main problem that I had was using Blogger.com accounts. Google makes it easy to use a custom domain with Blogger. I can’t get it to work with CloudFlare. The one I had setup for Erica is now a redirect, but it gets very little traffic so I don’t think anyone will ever notice.
The last one that I have yet to do belongs to the editor of a magazine that I sold to. I volunteered to help with the domain (big mistake) and for the last 6 years I have been paying for it. He has problems dealing with the publication process and may never publish the book that the domain is advertising. 6 years later and the book has not been published, I have not been paid and there seems to be no future in the domain. The story is good and I could get a few hundred dollars for it if I sold it somewhere else. When I bring this up the guy says he has a signed contract and threatens to sue me.
I don’t want to resort to a redirect, because I am afraid that I’ll get a snarky email. I’ll guess I’ll try it and see what I can do. I’ll steel myself to the nasty feedback. Worse comes to worse I’ll offer transfer the domain to him and let him do the development.

I bought three packages of bees to replace hives that died over the winter. When you get a package, the queen comes in a little mesh covered box with sugar plugging one end and then a cork. After you dump the bees into the hive you have to take the cork out and hope that the bees eat the sugar plug and release the queen bee. It is done this way so the bees get used to their new queen and won’t kill her.
I installed the three packages last Friday afternoon. Now it has been three days so I have to check to see if the queens have been released. One hive had released their queen and one had not. The other looked like they had gnawed mostly through the sugar, but the queen bee was still inside the cage. I released the trapped queens and put the lids back on the boxes.
I am being careful about this because last year I was not feeling well, and I did not release the bees properly. By the time I got around to checking the queens were dead in two boxes. This is a waste of $150 per box, plus the gas to get up to Kingston, NY and back. This year I am feeling much better and I think that I did a good job.
There is no guarantee that the queens will flourish in the hives.
The queens should start laying eggs almost immediately. The eggs will hatch in 21 days. I should see the new bees at the entrances to the hives on May 18th. Sometime in the next couple of weeks I will open the hives and look for “brood” which is immature bees. If I don’t see any then I will have to hurry up and find a queen. A hive without a queen is often cranky and will sting anyone who comes near it. If one of the three hives is behaving different than the others, I will open it as soon as I get a good day to see what is going on.
Beekeeping is much more technical than you would think. That’s why so many programmers seem to keep bees if they can.

Back when I wasn’t feeling well I became very frustrated when I tried to update my plugins. I just couldn’t trust my logic. Today I was able to get around these frustrations and update the plugins to show that they work with the latest versions of WordPress. This, at least, is a start.
I want to make some changes to the plugins other than version numbers. I am not sure that I should be wasting my time. I am making about $20 a year off them and it seems to be that it is not worth the effort.
I get requests and complaints from users which I largely ignore. I can’t debug minor issues related to conflicts with other plugins.
The “No Right Click” plugin will probably never work on every website with every browser. Browsers do not want you messing with the context menu. I tried running JavaScript that prevented right clicks altogether, but even that didn’t work. The “No Right Click” plugin has 5000 users which I don’t understand. It must be working for some people.
I don’t understand why “The Astounding Spam” plugin is not more popular. I am going to update some of the tables and see if it helps.

I sat down with the laptop this morning and tried to access www.kpgraham.com. It timed out and I figured that I still had some work to do.
It turns out that I had been experimenting with my hosts file trying to force access to the domain and I had done it wrong. I cleared out the hosts file and reset the dns cache. It worked just fine.
One of the things that concerns me is that Cloudflare “flattens” my “CNAME” dns entry to point directly to the IP address of my server. I worry what is going to happen when Optimum changes my IP address. It does that after power outages, or when the network resets things in the computer room in West Nyack. I don’t know if Cloudflare will re-flatten the dns entry.
For the time being www.kpgraham.com and www.cthreepo.com are working well and I will sit tight. I found a bunch of broken links in cthreepo.com and I am writing a program to validate my links. It will use the apache access control to report the bad links and requires some fancy programming. We’ll see if I am up to it.

I discovered, after 4 days of trying to fix things, that Optimum blocks the web port 80, so I could not access my home computer from the internet. I was running WAMP and I have moved kpgraham.com to my office computer. I was upset when I found out that my cable company did this.
I had an inspiration and searched for the cure. Of course I found it on some obscure discussion board and I’ll be damned, but it worked.
Now I have to do some more configuring and I am done with this site.
It goes from my browser to cloudflare to noip.com to my box. Very cool. I will have to see how stable it is.
www.cthreepo.com is next.

Wamp is a way of running the Apache web server with PHP and MySQL on your own machine. Windows-Apache-MySQL-PHP.
I have been using Wamp for many years to test things. Now I am going to use it to make sites that the world can see that run right here.
I am using a website called NOIP.COM to provide the internet address of my home network and you should be able to see https://www.kpgraham.com on the computer in my home office.
Why? I can eventually run all of my websites for free. The only down side is that when the power goes out I may have to click a few things to get it started again.

I have been fooling with github,com and netlify.com and have been able to turn some of my hosted sites into static pages. It seemed very difficult, but it turned out to be possible. I think this site -kpgraham.com- might be the next site to work on.

The advantage is that I can write a web page, in this case a blog entry, and then “commit” it to github and magically it appears on the internet.

Github gives you 2GB of space and believe it or not, that is not enough to put all my websites out as static sites. CThreePO.com is about 1GB and HarpAmps.com is about 3GB. Some people create multiple user ids on github, but I want a better alternative.

I have a local webserver called WAMP running on this machine (the desktop in my “office”) and I can run everything that I need here. What I am having trouble with is connecting my local machine to the outside world. My router will not allow me to connect to NO-IP.com and I can’t afford a static IP address. (If this confuses you, don’t worry. It means that my network address keeps changing every time there is a power outage or my router resets, and I have no way of announcing to the real world that my web server is here.)

I am going to spend some money on a fancy router sooner or later and get this working.

https://www.cthreepo.com is my oldest domain. The content is even older so this is a record of my blogging writings going back at least 25 years.
I felt a little sharper this week, so I revived a static version of the site. In so doing I lost a hundred or so program pages, but they are no great loss.
It is fascinating to read how I wrote and thought back then. I was pretty smart back in those days.

I have not been writing much. The pills I take make language difficult. I have what is called “tip-of-the-tongue” syndrome and have trouble getting the right word. I sold my mystery story that I wrote in October on the first try, so I still have some skills. The language of the story is a little less colorful than I’d like, but the plot works.
I saw another market open up for stories that are similar to one that I’ve got kicking around in my back-brain. I think that I want to sit down and make an outline for it and maybe try to write it. The story isn’t too complicated and may be short. The story venue has a minimum of 2,500 words. I probably can make that with a little push. My stories are usually 3,500 to 5,000 words, but, like I say, I am not confident in my writing ability.
I’ll sit down in the office (where I have the good keyboard) and see what I can do. Maybe nothing, but we’ll see.

Here is the description of the story anthology. It only pays $25, but I don’t think I can produce a $500 story right now. A sale is a sale.

Gonna talk about writing for a second.
As an editor and practitioner, I am of the school that believes that every word in a story needs to have a specific reason for being there, and that the writer should ‘control’ that.
Anything less denotes a lack of craft mastery, to me.
That doesn’t mean that every ‘that’ must go away, or that mss HAVE to be as pared-down as possible (though I like that, especially when paying by the word), but that there must be ‘purpose’.
Creation of effect should be ‘intentional’, and it is not a substitute for story.
This by way of reminding you that open subs for The Dark Heart of the Wood (OM Folk, vol 2) begin March 1. The sub period is sixty days.
We are looking for folk horror, especially that which is off the beaten path or advances the concept in some way. 2500-5500 words prose, 25$. Poetry also acceptable at negotiable pay rate.
We are limiting to 15 slots this time around.
Submit to: [email protected]

note: I wrote a pretty comprehensive outline. It is about 800 words and I added some interesting ideas as I wrote it. I will try to write the story this week. The snow will keep me in the house. I am now worried that I might make the story too long just to fit in the ideas that I’ve come up with.
If I can sell the story, sometimes the editor sends me a PDF of the anthology. Watch here and if he does ask me to send you a copy. My rich friends will have to pay the 10 bucks for a copy, but friends, relatives and blues players can get a freebie.
kpg

I collect Premier amplifiers, but recently they price has gone through the roof. For instance I own 3 Premier Twin-8 amps. These are sweet little amps that sound great, but are not loud enough to be useful. I am thinking about getting rid of two of them. I bought them for $50 to $75 each and now they go for $1,500 on eBay. I saw a model 76 amp that is “pick-up only” that is cheap. I don’t have a model 76 and I would like to go get it.
The amp is in Manchester PA more than 5 hours away. So I could get the amp cheap with the added cost of 11 hours of gas and time.
I am tempted to do this because I have had both vaccine shots and it would be an interesting trip. I’ve been stuck in the house for a year and this might be fun. My brother will have his second shot in a couple of weeks, and he already had a case of COVID once already, so he could ride right seat on the trip.
The whole thing comes down to the question of whether or not I really need another amplifier and if I can negotiate the amp price even cheaper.

I need some adapters for my luggable conversion.

The portable PC has a an old style PC keyboard. I need to convert that to USB using a Soarer’s cable. $45.00

I need to power the Raspberry Pi using the internal molex connector. These were used to power hard disks and floppies. This is an inexpensive cable that just connects the lines. $15.00

I need a USB adapter for a 3-1/2 inch floppy. I don’t really need a floppy drive, but I need it for authenticity. $25.00

I also need a Raspberry Pi. I need one with a composite av video output to run the orange screen. This is like a an old black & white TV. The newer Pi’s have the composite output. Raspberry Pi Model 4 B. $50

I want a front panel that has USB ports so I can load data onto the Pi without taking the case apart. $25.00

Total $160.00

==================================================
Update:

I decided not to do the floppy drive and replace that with a drawer that can hold the Pi. Cost a little less, but I am not sure.

I decided to rewire the PC power supply to put a receptacle inside the box and use a PI branded power supply, Add $10.00

The PI 4 does not work well with composite. I can buy a box that converts HDMI to composite. Add $20

Figure $200 for a PI Luggable.

I am up to $190. I might wait for the PI 5.0 to do this. I will be buying two of everything because I have two 5155 luggables. Neither one works. Non-working ones go for $200. Working ones go for $450.

Figure each box goes for $300 plus $200 plus $100 labor and I might be able to sell them for $600 if I want.

In the mid 1980s I bought a portable IBM PC through a friend who worked at IBM. These were not like laptops. They were basically full size computers with a handle. They were not really portable, but were called Luggable. I used it for a good 10 years. I have it in the cellar. I also bought another one as a backup that is down there somewhere.
I modified it over the years so it used a Intel ‘486 motherboard with lots of memory and a video card that can drive the little orange monitor like a VGA monitor. I packed 5 hard disks into the thing.
I did a lot of work on that computer. I carried it on many airplanes and was able to fix systems in Boston, Philadelphia, Chicago, and Washing D.C. and other cities over the years. Eventually it was not practical to use it and I had an IBM Thinkpad the weighed about 10 pounds as apposed the luggable that weighed about 40 pounds.
The old luggable has sentimental value and I’ve wanted to get it going again. The last time that I tried I did not get good results. I could not boot it. I think that I don’t have something hooked up correctly, or else the motherboard has died. The onboard motherboard battery is supposed to be good for 7 years and it has been 35 years since I got it.
I just read an article about the Raspberry Pi being able to run MS-Dos or Windows XP. It has a composite output that should be able to drive the old orange screen built into the luggable. It is 1000 times more powerful than the original 8088 motherboard in the luggable.
I decided that a project this Spring will be to rip out the guts of the old PC and make a nice bracket for the Raspberry PI. It will not only be much lighter, but much more powerful. I can make a boot menu to load MS-Dos 6.22, Windows XP or even Linux. I can relive my glory days in writing MASM programs, something that nobody does anymore. I can load Visual Basic, which is a language that I loved. I can transfer my programs to the Linux system and get them to run on modern machines. …Or maybe not. These are great ideas. We’ll see how far I get.

Justine sent me an old desktop computer about 10 years ago. It is a little slow and old and over the last year it has started making fan noise an overheating. I considered buying a new desktop, but they go for about $600-$700 for the one I wanted. I vacuumed out the fans and it ran well for a few months, but it started making horrible noises again.
I bought a NVIDIA video card (because it has a fan). I bought a nice 1 TB ssd. I also bought a power supply on eBay. I had to return the power supply because it was not compatible with my computer, even though it was advertised as thus. I returned the power supply bought an inexpensive one (that cost less than the eBay one).
I replaced everything and now I have a very cool, very fast , quiet system. The ssd makes a huge difference in the speed of my 10 year old system. The NVIDIA card also seems to make all the graphics much faster. The power supply is twice the wattage of the old one.
I now have an old system that may be good for another 10 years for about $150.
Pretty soon I will be wandering the back roads of Rockland County and I might find a nearly new desktop computer in the junk. I’ll just transfer my hard disk to the new machine and have an even newer machine. The older machine might be good to run a local security server that runs a DNS server and VPN or maybe a media server.