Blog: Fr. Robert

Bye Bye Joomla

2018-04-23 by Fr. Robert

I have completed my move from Joomla. For years I developed websites in Joomla, but when I quit developing websites I found my remaining personal websites did not need a CMS as complex as Joomla. Not that I dislike Joomla, it is a great CMS. But I don't need a One ton truck anymore.

So I started looking for a smaller simpler flat CMS. I came across a small CMS called Yellow from Sweden. I have no idea how big the user base is but it met my requirements: simple to setup, and simple to use.

There are many flat CMSs out there Grav, Pico, and many others. The only way to find out which one is best for you is to try them and see which one works for you

I tried Grav but did not like it. That is not to say Grav is bad in fact it is one of the most highly rated and popular flat CMSs. My philosophy is that in a CMS the content, the plugins, and the templates should be independent. One should not be dependent on the other. That is not the case with Grav. The way the templates work content can often be template dependent. If you never change templates that is never an issue but if you have an existing Grav site and change templates it is quite possible and very probable that your site would not display and error out. You would have to edit every article to make it compatible with the new template before the site would be functional. I believe there is a way to bootstrap templates so your site can function if you change templates but that seems like a lot of extra work.

But that is why there are many CMSs. I like Yellow you may not. I didn't like Grav you may thing it is great. Pick the one that works best for you.

Cupcakes from Scratch

2018-03-14 by Fr. Robert

As you may know my wife works for a non-for-profit and last weekshe had an appreciation event for her volunteers. I volunteered to make cupcakes. After some trial and error I came up with a recipe that is a hybrid of two others. The first is a yellow cake recipe from Taste of home . The recipe can be found here https://www.tasteofhome.com/recipes/old-fashioned-yellow-cake/print The second is a cupcake recipe that can be found here. https://noopurskitchen.com/2017/01/11/vanilla-cupcake/

Here is the resulting hybrid recipe. I listed amounts for 8 cupcakes but it can easliy be upscaled for more. If you muliply the amounts by 3 you will get the same amount as a box cake mix.

Ingredients

  • 1/6 cup Butter
  • 1/6 Cup Oil
  • 1/2 cup sugar
  • 1 egg
  • 1/2 teaspoon vanilla extract
  • 3/4 cup all-purpose flour
  • 1 teaspoon baking powder
  • 1/4 teaspoon salt
  • 1/2 cup 2% milk
  • Possible Variations to add
  • 2 TablespoonCocoa Powder
  • 1/2 Teaspoon Mint Extract
  • 1. Preheat oven to 350 deg F. Line a 12-muffin tray with 8 cupcake liners.
  • 2. In a bowl, sift the flour, sugar, baking powder and salt.
  • 3. Add the butter and mix till you get a crumbly texture.
  • 4. In a separate bowl, add the milk, oil, vanilla and egg and mix slightly.
  • 5. Add the liquid mixture to the dry slowly and mix until well combined.
  • 6. Scrape the bowl once and mix again for about 30 seconds.
  • 7. Using an ice-cream scoop or 2 spoons, scoop the batter equally into the tray. They should fill a little more than half.
  • 8. Bake the cupcakes for about 15-18 minutes till the skewer inserted comes out clean.
  • 9. Remove from the pan and let them cool completely on a wire rack.
  • 10. Serve them with a frosting of your choice – I frosted them with buttercream.
  • 11. These should be stored at room temperature in an air-tight container. They taste best the day they are made.

Training Wheels Paella

2017-06-07 by Fr. Robert

Last night I cooked my first paella. To the purist it was not really paella but it was a good first attempt.

I used Food Wishes' Sausage and Shrimp Paella recipe. It turned out really well. I did one minor change and one major change.

The minor change was I used fresh Andouille sausage and left it in link form rather than slicing it.

The major change was I did not have any saffron. I used a substitution suggested by The Spruce Website. For every 1/4 teaspoon of saffron I used 1/8 teaspoon of tumeric plus 1/2 teaspoon of paprika. While I can not speak to how authentic the taste was, the taste was very good.

While not an authentic paella my wife loved it and is that not the true measure of a recipe?

paella

Upgrading Treat Dispenser

2017-01-02 by Fr. Robert

During Christmas break I found a replacement AC adapter for Roman's treat dispenser. The treat dispenser is an Esquilo project. Esquilo is WiFi enabled physical programmable circuit board.

The treat dispenser is a repurposing of Patrick Jackson's Internet-enabled Candy Dispenser. The only change I did was hot gluing the auger to the servo rather than screwing them together. The idea being the hot glue functions like a sheer pin. If the auger jams the hot glue will break rather than burning out the servo.

The library has a 3-d printer which was great way to get the mounts and auger made.

The project is an easy beginner project in terms of both programming and hardware assembly. So give it a try today.

Upgrading Ubuntu 12.04 to 16.04

2016-12-20 by Fr. Robert

For sometime now I have been wanting to update my desktop computer from Ubuntu 12.04 to 16.04. Knowing that sometimes an upgrade can go sideways. I waited till fall semester was over. Yesterday, being the first Monday after semester over, I decided to tackle the upgrade.

I downloaded the iso image and installed it onto a usb drive. The first glitch I came accross was a small one. When the machine booted from the usb drive rather than going to Ubuntu live I received an error.

Missing parameter in configuration file. Keyword: path
gfxboot.c32: not a COM32R image
boot :

The error is not a big problem all I had to do was type live and Ubuntu finished booting. The error is caused by a different versions of the fie syslinux in the iso compared to the machine creating the bootable usb drive.

I selected the install icon and the install was off and running. The install procedure I thought went off without a hitch. But to my suprise when I rebooted, I was taken to the grub rescue prompt. Something had happened to my grub configuation file. I did try to fix the issue from grub but to no avail.

After doing some searches I found boot-repair-disk. I installed the software onto a usb drive and rebooted. The software walked me through the grub repair and before I knew it my computer was booting properly.

Even with the issues, the upgrade went fairly smoothly and the new version of Ubuntu is running fine.