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snow laboratory fixes Wednesday, November 26 2014
Snow began falling at some point this morning, perhaps starting as rain. By the time I looked out the window, it was coming down in big flakes and beginning to stick on vegetation and even the ground. Eventually some four or so inches of dense snow would accumulate, cracking off weak branches from the White Pine above the dog house in the yard. My Lightroom webapp client wanted to come for a meeting at 11:30am, and I told him he was never going to make it up the hill.
[REDACTED]
I took advantage of the snowy day to address some annoying little issues in the laboratory. I have a couple crescent wrenches that had been in the backs of the two cars, and they'd both somehow rusted enough that their thumb screw adjustments could no longer be turned. So I lubricated them and used a hammer to un-sieze the sliding half of the wrench "jaw" that the thumb screw turns. After a few runs up and down the track, those jaws were working as good as new.
I also rewired the video cables to two of the monitors in my five-monitor array so that the KVM controls a 1600 X 1200 monitor instead of a 1920 X 1080 monitor. The KVM works fine with both sizes, but since the Mac's VGA output cannot drive the bigger monitor, I'd had to drive it with a DVI signal, which cannot be switched by the KVM. And since (for reasons of equipment setup evolution) the bigger monitor had been on KVM, the KVM functionality was no longer really working for switching monitors (instead, I was doing the switching by pushing buttons on the monitors to select between inputs). With it now set up to go to a 1600 X 1200 monitor, I managed to restore all of the KVM's utility. This might seem like a trivial issue, after all, it had still been possible to flip back and forth between computers even with the awkward arrangement that had evolved. But it was just complicated enough to make me dread doing it, meaning I wasn't getting the use I should have been getting out of my Mac Mini.
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