Moved to WordPress!

Drupal, Hosting, Websites, WordPress / By / / , , , / 1 minute of reading

After using Drupal for many years, I’ve decided to switch to WordPress as my Content Management System. My hosting company, MacHighway, uses cPanel to manage user sites, and it provides a default version of PHP and its associated modules, which I don’t have access to change. It seems that recently, Drupal has changed their system requirements to require additional PHP modules, which are not installed, so I have not been able to upgrade to the most recent releases. I found the FG Drupal to WordPress plug-in, which can migrate the content from Drupal sites which work quite well, so I’ve migrated this site to WordPress. I’ve done a few updates already, but I’ll try to review each of the pages to make sure that the graphics are there, etc.

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Upgrade to LED Headlights

Trucks / By / / , , , , / 2 minutes of reading

One of the most noticeable changes when switching from the Touareg to the Canyon was the headlights. The Touareg had really nice self-leveling High Intensity Discharge (HID) headlamps. By comparison, the OEM halogens in the Canyon felt like driving with a flashlight… I found that this was a common complaint discussed on forums like ColoradoFans forums and took one of the recommendations. It surprises me that for a high-end pickup that GM builds it with such crappy headlamps, when more modern, brighter LED headlights cost under $75 retail. GM could certainly have done better for very little difference in cost. I was also surprised to find that even aftermarket HID conversion kits are only about $250, much cheaper than the $1,200 that many manufacturers charge for upgrading to HID lights. I went with the LED for simplicity, as well as cost, since the HID lights require an external ballast, so they are a little more involved to install. I ordered a set of Sealight X1 from Amazon, which were only $70 for both low and high beam. I ordered them on Friday morning, and they were delivered early this morning. It took about a half hour to install, and was fairly easy. The hardest part was getting under a rubber cover on passenger side, which I think directs cold air into the air filter intake. Even in the daylight, I could tell that they were brighter, mostly due to the 6000K color temperature being bright white instead of yellow. I’m going to go

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2019 GMC Canyon All Terrain

Back to a Diesel Pickup Truck

Diesel, Trucks, Vehicles / By / / , , , , / 4 minutes of reading

The lease on the VW Touareg is about up, so we decided to start looking at our options. I was considering buying out the Touareg, as it’s been a very comfortable vehicle, it’s big enough to tow the trailer, but small enough to fit into the garage. We had to go to a VW dealership to get the details on the buyout, since we’re within 90 days of the end date. The residual was about $25,500, but the “deal” that McDonald VW presented to me had about $6k in fees and crap added to it, making the cost over $31k. Their “offer” for me to buy the vehicle that I’ve been driving and paying for the past three years was about $500/month with $4K down! I quickly realized that I could get something brand new for that much… I had been looking at options for SUVs that could tow over 7,000 lbs. and there isn’t much that isn’t full sized, or over $75K. I thought that if I wasn’t going to be able to fit it into the garage, and was going to have to pay that much, I might as well look at another pickup truck. My last pickup truck was a 2005 GMC Sierra K2500HD Crew Cab Long Bed with the 6.6L Duramax Diesel, which would cost over $65K now, with similar equipment. In my search, I discovered that GM has a smaller 2.8L inline 4-cylinder Duramax Diesel that they offer in the Chevrolet Colorado or GMC Canyon mid-size pickup

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MacBook Pro to iMac

Computers, Macintosh / By / / , / 2 minutes of reading

After continuing to have trouble with my old 2011 17″ MacBook Pro, I’ve concluded that it’s time for a new machine. I tried replacing the RAM, but it still won’t boot up. I concluded that it probably wasn’t the memory or the drive, but maybe the CPU or Logic board is failing… Rather than spend more time and money trying to replace the SSD, I figured that it was time to replace the MacBook Pro, after 6 years. I surveyed my options on Apple.com. The new MacBook Pro’s only come in 13” and 15” now, with the Retina display with high resolution but high pixel density as well. None of the laptops have optical drives any more, so I still think that there is not much advantage in carrying around a laptop vs. my iPad Pro. When I have travelled that past few years, I have only taken my iPad with me. Also, the 15” MBP costs nearly $2,800! Having realized that I don’t really carry my laptop around with me, I checked out the options for iMacs. They have a 21.5” model, and a 27” with a 4K or 5K screen… Since I will likely be keeping this machine for another 5-6 years, I really wanted the 27” 5K screen model, which also has a faster 3.8GHz i5 processor, and a 2TB “fusion” drive, that is a hybrid small SSD with a larger conventional hard drive. The system is supposed to keep frequently used files on the SSD, and less

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Upgrade didn’t go so well…

Computers, Drupal, Websites / By / / / 2 minutes of reading

So, last week I decided that it was time to upgrade from Drupal 6, since it was past it’s end of life for support. I had dabbled with Drupal 7 a bit on my laptop, and had read through a couple of Drupal 7 books over the past year or so… The CPanel script installer kept nagging me that there was an upgrade to perform, and it appeared to have a script to go from 6 to 7… I took backups of all of the MySQL databases, put both of my sites into “Maintenance Mode” and disabled all of the non-core scripts, then let CPanel run the upgrade… Boom! It didn’t get through the update script without errors, and I decided to try the update.php script, and that threw errors as well.. I poked at for a couple of hours, trying to work through the issues. The first problem is that Drupal 6 kept a list of blocked IPs in a table, which Drupal 7 doesn’t have, at least not when it tries running the update. I was able to find a tip with a script to create the missing table, which got me a bit further, but it continued to have issues. I finally decided to try jumping up to Drupal 8, which has an updated “Migrate and Upgrade” module which supports both version 6 and 7. I restored the database back to their original condition, then created two fresh installs of Drupal 8 in separate directories. I enabled

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Good “Schiit” at the Rocky Mountain Audio Fest

Audio, Entertainment / By / / , , , , / 4 minutes of reading

Last weekend I was able to attend one day of the Rocky Mountain Audio Fest, which is held here in the Denver Tech Center, not far from me, along with fellow MacinTech members Rick Hyman and Jon Flowers. I went through many of the vendor displays in the “CanJam” exhibit focused on Headphones and mobile/personal audio devices, and one of the most interesting things for me was from the Sennheiser booth. I have a set of Sennheiser HD600, which they had on display along with an HDVD 800, their $2,200 headphone amp, as well as an HD650, an HD800 and HD800S. What I noticed is that they were using balanced cables for all of them, where there are separate ground wires for each side, along with isolated, balanced amplifier modules. Even in the noisy exhibit tent, all three of us could hear a marked difference between their demo units and my headphones, which I had brought with me. Even with the same model headphones plugged into the same amp, but with the standard cable using a shared ground, there was a noticeable improvement in the clarity in the high-end, better control in the bass, and a more open “sound stage” with the balanced cable. Because the HD600 has a replaceable cable, it’s easy to upgrade to a four-wire balanced cable, and I found an “inexpensive” one from ZY for about $75 through Amazon.com. Sennheiser’s balanced cable is about $240, and “premium” cables go for about $330, which is more than I paid for the headphones! To use balanced headphones, though,

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2016 Highland Ridge UT2710RL

New Trailer

Camping / By / / , , / 2 minutes of reading

We have still had our 27″ Gulfstream fifth-wheel up in Buena Vista, CO, at the Snowy Peaks RV park, which has its own storage lot. Since I don’t have a pickup truck to move the fifth-wheel, the RV park moves the trailer for us when we go up for the weekend. It’s been very convenient, and less expensive than paying higher storage rates in Denver, and burning up the fuel to haul it up into the mountains. We discovered an unintended consequence of replacing the Jetta with the Touareg is that it has a 7,000lb. towing capacity! I had not imagined that an SUV that size would be able to tow that much. This got us thinking that if we replaced the fifth-wheel with a conventional travel trailer that we could tow with the Touareg we could travel and camp again. After exploring some options online, we started checking out some options at local dealers. We wanted to go to Camping World in Fountain, and stopped at a few places in Colorado Springs as well. One of the first places that we stopped was Pikes Peak Travelland, where we saw the 2016 Highland Ridge UT2710RL Ultra Lite. Surprisingly, despite being 27′ was only about 5,500lb. empty weight, well within the towing capacity of the Touareg even when loaded. This seemed to suit our needs, was well laid out, and nicely finished. I especially liked the recliners at the back of the trailer, which are incredibly comfortable. We looked at a few

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2016 Volkswagen Touareg Lux V6 4MOTION

New Volkswagen

Vehicles, Volkswagen / By / / , , / 2 minutes of reading

Thanks to the diesel emissions scandal, and the uncertainty of what kind of “fix” would be required to meet emissions, this seemed like the best time to try trading in my 2011 Volkswagen Jetta Sportwagen TDI. While I have loved the Sportwagen for it versatility, and have loved the 2.0L turbo-diesel for its power and fuel efficiency, we had been thinking about getting an all-wheel drive vehicle so that my wife wouldn’t be snowed in while I’m traveling. In order to take advantage of the trade-in opportunity, we limited our search to Audi and Volkswagen. I wanted something with similar storage to the Jetta wagon, about 66 cubic feet, which eliminated the Q3 and Tiguan, leaving us with the choice of a Q5 or Touareg. We decided that we would meet at McDonald VW, drop off the Jetta so that they could do an appraisal on it, and we could go to Applebee’s for some dinner. While I was stuck in traffic on the way there, my wife arrived at VW. She talked with the salesman a bit, and made some headway toward making a deal. She wasn’t sure how it would work out, so she suggested that I stop at the Audi dealer on the way there. While I was working with the salesman at the Audi dealership, they took the car down the block to the VW dealer, so the guys at VW knew that I was talking to the Audi dealer. In the end, McDonald VW was able

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Mousejack

Computers, Security / By / / / 1 minute of reading

Speaking of Logitech (in my previous post) it also turns out that security research firm, Bastille, has uncovered a vulnerability in many USB wireless keyboards and mice where the USB “dongle” is easily hacked, allowing someone to connect to your computer and take over control of your keyboard… The list of manufacturers includes Dell, HP, Logitech and Microsoft. See the details at the website created by Bastille, or one of the many news articles like this one at ComputerWorld. The article has links to more information, a list of affected devices, and links to manufacturer support sites that have already posted software or firmware updates. This only affects USB Wireless devices, not Bluetooth devices like the Apple keyboards and mice.

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