Keith Graham

I have finished installing MacOs X under Virtual Box. In previous posts, I talked about upgrading my PC with this in mind. I used the following tutorial: https://www.makeuseo … -10-virtual-machine/
The only issue that I have is that the mouse is not responsive and jerks around as I try to select something. This may not work out as a development machine as I wanted.

Shaun just messaged me and told me had started proofreading the book. He said he had found a great many errors and would let me know when he finished.

Well, that puts the kibosh on launching tomorrow. I hope that I didn’t screw up my free kindle promotion. I unpublished the book, so let’s hope that the Amazon programs will show that.

5/26/22: Here we are a week later, and it still is not ready for prime time. Maybe I can get it going by June 2nd or 9th.

I knew that you could host web pages on GitHub.com, but I did not know how to go about it. The tutorials are all for Linux, and involve Jekyll software, which only runs on Linux.

95% of the world runs on Windows. I started slogging through the documentation, trying to figure out how to make things work. You can see the results on https://www.ErrorMessageEyes.com. Getting to the point where it worked was not easy.

I use Cloudflare as a domain registrar, so it was easy to set up the domain and DNS.

The rest was not obvious. I downloaded GitHub Desktop software, which is not all that useful, but it was good to set up a new repository and a branch for the project.

I keep the websites that I have on Google Drive so that I can work with them on any of the computers that I use.

I use Kompozer to create the website. The days of me being able to code CSS by hand are gone. My brain no longer works that way.

GitHub Desktop updates my repository and branch easily.

I had to log into GitHub on the browser to get at the options to use the GitHub pages option. It is a menu item hidden deep in the settings menu. I can’t remember what I did exactly, but I fiddled a bit with the settings, and when I set the custom domain to ErrorMessageEyes.com, it all magically worked. If I had to do it again, I am not sure that I could get it to work at first. If I wanted to add another domain, I think that I would have to add another repository and branch.

One last thing, if I make changes to the HTML, I have to clear the cache in Firefox in order to see them. There is some option that tells the browser to use the cached version of the page, even if the page has changed. I find this annoying.

GitHub looks like a fairly dumb hosting option without Java, PHP, Perl or any other scripting language. That’s why you need something like Jekyll to make it work. I wish that someone would create an easy way to create a static website that I could push to GitHub using Windows.

Tomorrow Eventually, my book goes up for free on the Amazon Kindle store. I feel like a mad scientist trying to conquer the world. I have this crazy plan to reach the top 10 in the Amazon book store Best-Seller list.

I will hit Hacker News with a link to my new domain, www.ErrorMessageEyes.com. I am emphasizing the word “free”. If it hits, it will be good for a few hundred downloads.

I joined six Facebook user groups that are based on cyberpunk or Science Fiction. Each group has 50,000 or more users, although I suspect that most of the users are either bogus or inactive. I will spam each group with a link to the new domain. With luck, they will be good for another few hundred downloads.

I can count on a dozen or so downloads from my FB friends. They might even share the page, helping me get a few more.

It is possible that I will be able to hit 500 downloads, and if it goes viral, I may make it up to a few thousand downloads. This would be enough. When the free period ends, I will still be high in the Amazon bestseller algorithm and may sell a few dozen books for real money.

But it is more likely that I fizzle and get 100 or so downloads at best. I’ll know better on Tuesday morning.

In a previous post, I talked about upgrading this server to 16Gig of ram. I had problems on the system after that. It threw all kinds of errors and this morning I came down, and it was frozen. Anyone trying to access one of my sites got the Cloudflare copy of archive .com.
I finally opened up the case and pulled two of the 4Gig chips and put in the two old 1Gig chips. Now I have 10Gigs. So far, so good.
I am going to wait awhile to see if it stays good. It has been running for about 6 hours now and there hasn’t been an issue. I have been using some memory hog image editing software, and it never burped.
Keep your fingers crossed.

I put 16Gig of memory in my machine and the 256M SSD. I formatted the new SSD as exFat, but I am willing to bet that’s not what a Hackintosh needs. Everything seems to be working, so far.
I have the old 4Gig of memory in a bag. Erica’s machine has 6Gig. I don’t know how the memory is configured. If there are 8 slots on the motherboard, I should be able to get her up to 8Gig. I have to wait until she is not using her PC.
I suppose that I should order Erica’s new SSD. It will cost around $85. I think I might order a power supply, too. Hers has lots of fan noise.
Update
Erica’s computer has 4 slots on the motherboard. This means that she probably has two 1Gig and 2 2Gig memory cards. There are other possible combos, but my lowly 1Gig cards won’t help her.

In 2010, I put together 13 computer related stories and published Error Message Eyes. It made me a couple of hundred dollars over the last 12 years, but it was not what I would call an overwhelming success.
It occurred to me recently, that I had written quite a few more computer oriented stories in the last 12 years, so I started collecting Error Message Eyes, Release 2.0. The new book has 24 stories, but I only used 5 from the last book. I took all the Mizuki stories and put them in order. I then wrote three new stories by assembling fragments and finishing them, so that Mizuki is now a novella.
One of the things that I hated about the first book was that it was riddled with errors and typos. I used a combination of straight quotes and curly quotes. Every time I read it, I cringed.
This time I installed something called LanguageTool, https://languagetool.org/. I have to absolutely recommend this software for anyone who is suffering, as I am, from brain fogging drugs to treat seizures. The Firefox and Chrome plugins make your web writing much cleaner (although not 100% error free). I use LibreOffice and the installation there is much more complicated, but worth it. It freezes up LibreOffice regularly, but CTRL-ALT-DEL lets me kill it, so I can start again. You just have to save your work whenever you stop to think. In spite of its faults, I like it.
Shaun Lawton volunteered to do the artwork, so I am eager to see what I get. I like Shaun’s art. It is high-tech, bold and colorful. He said it would be done quickly almost two weeks ago, but I think he underestimated the time investment he would have to make.
I have done two proofreads of the book and am 30 pages (out of 220) from finishing the third time through. I like to rewrite as I proof and wind up adding new typos. I will be starting over again tomorrow for the final proof. I don’t want to be surprised when I check the book and find typos that I missed.
I want to do a major spam operation to all the editors, forums and FB groups that I can find. The digital version of the book will be free for the first 4 or 5 days, and I hope that it will get enough downloads to make it to the Amazon top 10 list. If I do this, I might even make money when I start charging for the book. I’ll charge as little as I can for the paperback.
For vanity’s sake, I want to make a hard cover version and buy a few for myself, and one for Shaun and one for John Shirley. John was a major inspiration for the stories in the book.

I have been listening to Gibson’s Count Zero while I take my walk. The weather hasn’t been cooperating, so I am only 1/3 of the way through after two weeks.
Gibson uses a phrase ‘The Hard and the Soft’ meaning hardware and software. I have not done anything for my computer upgrade plans.
I want to upgrade my old Dell i5 that has 4G ram and a 1 TB drive. I bought 16G of ram on eBay. I have a 256G SSD that I want to add as a second drive. At the same time, I want to take the 4G chips that I replace in my machine and put them in Erica’s old Dell, so she has 8G of ram. I figure I should get another SATA SSD, so I can upgrade her and get rid of the clunky old hard disk.
Recap: Replace ram on my machine and add another SSD. Add removed ram to Erica’s machine and replace HD with SSD.
Replacing Erica’s HD involves cloning her current disk, which is time-consuming. Adding ram is trivial.
Replacing my ram is trivial. Adding the new SSD is only a matter of figuring out how to format it for a Hackintosh.
I need a SSD SATA data cable for my new SSD and one to use for Erica’s new SSD to run the clone.
I have a 256G SATA SSD WD Blue for my addition disk. I need a 1 TB SSD for Erica’s machine, which will cost me $85. WD Blue are best rated, so that’s the way I’ll go.
I ordered a handful of SATA cables because I can’t find my stash (brain fog). I need to order Erica’s SSD, and I am thinking about doing that.
While I have Erica’s machine open, I’ll vacuum it because I think that it is full of cat hair.
So you see, I am still working on Hardware, just not moving forward very fast. I need to finish this step before I can move onto creating my Hackintosh.