2013 Concludes

|

Tonight marks the end of holiday and the year that will forever be known in the history books at 2013. In many ways an uneventful year, I did get to see some pretty interesting places and got to drive across the state at least once this year.

Home Sweet Camp

This past year I spent a lot of time exploring state parks. Not that I am a big fan of state parks, but I had a $40 Empire Pass, and figured while I had it, I better use it. Went up to the Adirondacks several times, then took a week to explore the Tug Hill Plateau in the rain, the several more weekend trips, a fall trip to Moose Plains, then that blockbuster trip across the state, that involved seeing many gorges in the beauty of the fall.

Rainbow Falls

Fall came much too fast, as did winter. But that’s just a sign of how fast the calendar comes back around.

Below the Horizon

Winter is a quiet time for me, but I look forward to the spring time. April is like 91 days away, but I expect the next few months to be pretty busy with work. I will probably spend much of the time hiding away from the cold, working on code, writing, and other projects at home. Go snowshoeing a few times, and maybe take some shorter trips, but I really want to continue focusing on saving so I can get my truck jacked up this springtime.

muller_white_1500-004

April will come. I am hoping to take my first adventure of the year that first week or two of April, maybe a couple of days in the Finger Lakes. Melted snow means mud, but its still fun if I can avoid getting stuck in the mud. Early April, while not summer, can still be quite delightful, if you watch out for the sunburn.

Muddy Truck at Camp

I am also looking forward to jacking up my truck in April, assuming I meet my savings goals. I will not jack up my truck until I have at least. It will be fun to see the world from 8.5 inches higher, going from a stock lift to 6″ inches of height plus 35s. Those 4.88 gears will be a lot fun, climbing the hills with ease.

Camping At That Beautiful Site

Next summer should be one of many good adventures. I am thinking of taking a trip down south next summer, visiting the Skyline Drive and Blue Ridge Parkway, and camping mostly in the backwoods of the George Washington and Jefferson National Forests in Kentucky, Virginia, and West Virginia. Should be a great adventure.

Good night! Happy 2014.

 

2013 comes to a close, much too quickly. But it was a year of many good adventures, looking forward to the many adventures of next year.

Christmas is History

|

The calendar reminds us that the darkest days of the year are beyond us, but it seems like we really aren’t making that much progress. The Christmas songs have been taken down from the radio, and the Christmas lights are rapidly being dimmed and extinguished every night, as we proceed towards New Years.

Ashokan Reservior

Next comes January. A very cold and dark month, although every day gets a bit longer. Today marked the first twilight at 5 PM in a while, every day will get a bit longer. The weather may still get a bit colder, but we all know what is next in distant future — spring.

I generally am not a fan of the long cold nights of darkness, when I usually stay in town and try to conserve money for next year’s adventures. But it’s part of living in Upstate New York during the long bleak winters.

Snowmobile Tracks

The lights of Christmas are dimmed, as yet another holiday season transitions to the cold hard realities of January.

Replacing All My Camp Lighting Next Year with LEDs

|

Right now, my primary source of camp lighting is a set of two 100-watt equivalent florescent bulbs, hooked to my truck’s inverter. Due to the nature of camping, and because things often get wet or dropped, they really do not last very long, and frequently need replacing.

Camp Lights

When they don’t get broken, I usually bring them home, and save them to the some day in the future when I return them for recycling. When they break — I don’t freak out — I usually just chuck them in the campfire, and pack out the glass and unburnt debris in the morning. I don’t really freak out about the mercury. But for environmental reasons, I would like to get away from mercury-based lighting, despite the relatively tiny amount of mercury in each bulb.

In recent years, I’ve been slow moving away florescent lighting whenever I can for camping. An early purchase of mine was LED Christmas light strings. The purpose of the Christmas lights was not so much for decoration — even though they’re pretty — but to provide a small amount of backlight to the campsite, so I don’t trip on things. A string of LED Christmas lights uses a fraction of the energy, even a smallish compact florescent uses.

Before I Killed the Lights

This past year, I noticed that LED light bulbs have finally come down enough in price to reasonably affordable. I bought my first one this past July, a 40-watt equivalent bulb that uses only 7-watts of electricity, for a bright warm white lighting of my American flag. It not only seems quite durable and efficient, it always bright regardless of the temperature. It keeps the flag lit regardless of the weather.

All Lit Up for the Night

With prices coming down even further, I bought a second LED bulb this fall for $10. It’s a 60-watt equivalent that uses only 10 watts of electricity. Best of all, even during the cold winter months, it works quite well.  I wasn’t crazy about the heat shielding on the model I bought, but many of the newer ones lack the ugly heat shielding over the glass. Despite 15 degree temperatures, the 10 watt LED bulb kept things bright all night long.

LED lighting is the future. Fluorescent lighting not only contains mercury, it also uses more power and dims dramatically even under modest temperature drops. Florescent lighting is fine indoors, in relatively warm rooms. But it doesn’t work well outside, especially when camping, when air temperatures can 50 degrees or even lower in the even lower. Common fluorescent lamps dim in the cold, while LEDs shine their brightness, regardless of the cold.

 

Two years ago, when I bought my truck cap, I bought a series of LED strip lights to light up the cap. At the time, I had the choice between warm-color LEDs and cool-color LEDs. I bought the cool colored ones, as I thought they would look more neat in the truck cap. I’ve been thoroughly impressed with them since purchasing, and would consider having them as part of a future off-the-grid home.

8_25

What’s nice about LEDs is they are natively 12-volts, so they work well with batteries, solar-panels, and most renewable sources of energy. The onces I bought for my truck, required no transformer or adapter, as they worked on natively at that voltage. It’s also relatively easy to step down 120 volt AC power and run it through a diode to create 12 volts DC to run LED lamps. Most LED lights are natively dimmable with common thysor-based dimmers and require no ballast.

led-flexi-strip-cool-white-ip65-24v

A decade ago, I toured an off-the-grid house in Clinton County. It was a neat home, and one of it’s best features was the use of 12-volt wiring for lighting. Rather then step up the voltage from the solar panels and batteries for lighting purposes, they chose to efficiently just use 12-volt DC lamps, mainly the relatively new LED bulbs and some halogens. They also had a large inverter to power 120-volt AC appliances and select number of florescent light bulbs.

No Campfire Yet

I think LEDs are the future. I am sure after spending $10 a bulb to buy a third or fourth camp light, prices will come down even further, and I will look back and think what a waste of money.

Technological progress has meant LED bulbs are cheaper, more efficient, and work well in the cold outdoors conditions.

Sticking with WordPress for Now

|

There’s a lot to like about WordPress, but there also is some limitations I really did not like.

What I Didn’t Like About WordPress

The standard category manager built into WordPress is awful, it can be slow, and clunky with many categories. It simply slows down and malfunctions a lot with many categories.

This is not a problem navigating the site, but the way it works internally, the category navigator creates excessive SQL queries and is slow. It turns out a simple re-write of the category editor, using plugins greatly speeded it up, and is much easier to use. That fixed that problem, and at some point, I may release my replacement category editor.

category

I also wrote a plugin to replace the default categories widget in the post authoring section. Rather then use a navigation pane to look for categories, the new category box now use auto-complete to select the category. So rather then search for the blogging post, it now provides me with an autocomplete box.

catedit

Another speed and reliability issue comes in with 404 errors. It turns out that when WordPress can’t find a particular post, it tends to do a lot of searching in different places for the proper post — regardless of whether or not you want it do that. Part of that was the fault of the 404 Redirected Plugin I had installed, and some has to do with the unique permalinks set-up I currently use — but it’s still an occasional problem, only faced by people who follow a bad link. It can sometimes bleed over and cause the entire site to go down over, but that’s pretty rare problem.

The 404 problem goes away entirely if I disable permalinks entirely, but not if the permalinks are left on in one form or another — even in preferred ID-based structures. I don’t really understand the issue, but it seems only slow down a small number of page views, so at this point, it’s been put on back burner.

Later

Been Exploring Drupal 7

I spent several weeks reading up about the internals of Drupal 7, and trying to decide if that was the blogging product right for me to replace my WordPress installation. I was surprised how much work it would be to make the switch, and retain many of the unique features of my blog that I currently enjoy.

Drupal 7, at least it out of the box design, is very bare-bones. There are limited quality, free modules for it compared to all-popular WordPress. But there was some things I liked a lot about it — namely the robustness of it’s module structure. I got a couple of books out of the library, and started hacking away at it. It was really difficult to get my head around though, as the whole system is very abstract, and getting it molded into my vision of how my blog should work, proved much more difficult then I expected — at which point I abandoned my efforts with Drupal for now.

I also did not like how much Drupal breaks between major release versions. It’s true that WordPress sometimes breaks it’s API — sometimes even in minor versions, but it seems like the whole WordPress platform is more stable than Drupal.

Gods Rays Reach Into Reservior

Back to WordPress for Now

Re-writing the category editor and category selector in the WordPress post editor, made things a lot nicer for now. It made the site immediately more maintainable, and made the whole back end work smoother. It convinced me that it would be easier to stay with WordPress for now, and focus on content and improvements to WordPress, rather then moving away from it.

I made some adjustments to infinite-scroll, to speed up the automatic loading of pages. Little things, but they kind of made a big difference.

I also spent some time fixing the categorization of posts, adopting a County-based system for places.

Right now, maps and photos are tied to the blog via shortcodes and automagically-generated posts via the API. This is not a perfect solution, as it sometimes breaks the permalinks by regenerating the WordPress page, every time a photo is updated. It also can be a bit sluggish in the back end, and cause weird problems from time-to time.

insidetheblog.png

The media (maps, photos, google maps) is stored in a custom table, totally seperate from the WordPress tables. It uses a seperate interface to maintain it all, while connected via a menu, and relying on WordPress API calls and categories, it really is only minimally integrated into WordPress. But it works fairly well.

During the Winter Months Will Continue to Explore

I enjoy writing PHP code. WordPress coding is a lot of fun too, because there are so many great APIs to call and easily accomplish things without doing much work.

I recently started using NetBeans IDE, rather then the much more minimal GEdit text-editor to code — which is great, because it provides many more helpful hints including integrating the WordPress API and PHP documentation, provides easy roll-back and tracking of changes, and makes finding coding errors much faster.

netbeans

We will see where this all leads. I have a lot of free time during the long, boring winter, to explore WordPress and take blogging into a new direction.

There's a lot to like about Wordpress, but there also is some limitations I really did not like.