Creative Aspects, Inc. – where vision meets technology

Home Maintenance

Squish! Walking on wet carpet when we get home from a long day is not any fun. Why is it always on the weekend? So we move all the furniture out of the way and look for all the obvious culprits. Picture this:

I’m not a fan of home maintenance, but this fix is simple. (Of course, we did not find this out until Monday after using the Bissell carpet cleaner and fans to dry out the water for two days.) The solution: use a flat head screw driver to loosen the clamp on the left side of the hose and the whole (condensation drain) on the right including the elbow (trap) lifts out. Then take it outside and use a hose to clean/rinse it clear. Easy peasy. When the service technician showed me this, I felt silly. We must have pulled five gallons out of the living room carpet and watched a dozen youtube videos. It’s really clean now. Bad news, I really have to finish the cleaning the rest of the carpet in the living room.

“Oh, lordy may.”
Many of my elders – For as long as I can remember.

Again, I have to have remember how to change the filter on the refrigerator. I know it is quite simple. Maybe it’s the blood rushing to my head when I get down on the floor that makes me forget.

The instructions on the box say to refer to the owner’s manual! Now, where did I put those. [Note: If I can find it I always blame in on the flood we had. Which brings up the washer hose replacement, recommended every five years. Has it been five years already?] So instructions on our filter is easy enough. Push the button on the left and the old filter pops out. Pull and remove (twist) off the end cap. Next pull off the blue caps on the end of the new filter. Put the end cap on and twist into position. Replace the filter in the refrigerator so the end cap is horizontal as above and push (hard) until the filter inserts to be even with the grill and pushes the button back out. (Aside: In the case the refrigerator is running without a filter, the cap will not be even with the grill.) Now all have to do is run water through. One and a half gallon(s)? Yep, I used a 20 oz container, ten times. Alexa said that is 1.56 gallons. Done.

Mmmh. I usually change the battery on the smoke detector, every time the DST/CST changes which is coming up. I’m not feeling like getting on a ladder today but it is coming up. I might even put the cover back on the kitchen light that I fixed the other day. 😕😎

As for the washer hoses, well, it has been almost exactly five years and I felt back there. They are crunched up solid against the drain insert but no moisture. I really should replace them, but that is an all day project. Besides, metal hoses are tougher, so they should last longer. Right? That reminds me of a while back when the washer was making a wonderful noise.

I was so relieved to discover that we didn’t have to replace the washer. No it wasn’t falling apart. Bolts had come loose underneath holding the working parts shifting them into the plastic container that sits beneath it and the rubbing of moving parts made unbelieveable noise. The appliance guy was was so dismal when he heard it and so happy it was an easy fix. Of course he could lift it and see what was going on. I can’t even move it anymore. I think we should move the door to the garage to give us more space and put wheels under these appliances so we can move them ourselves. Of course another earthquake could get interesting! 😂 In any case, I think I should get help to replace those hoses. So, I’m delegating.

Update: Note that when changing the filter, be sure to match the arrows match as per the bottom picture and to vacuum dust behind the “draw” vents.

Lower left arrow matches filter arrow upper right.

Twisted trimmer: After ordering the EGO trimmer line correct size but NOT receiving twisted, I finally got “twisted” and the battery died mid lawn. Ahh, bummer. Update: New battery one the way; recycling bad battery at Home Depot. Cleaned trimmer and working on details of how it is supposed to work. Also ordered combination small mower, trimmer and edger by Black and Decker which should be here on Halloween. Spooky. Of course, it is supposed to rain, so may not be able to check it out on the last half of the backyard.

Still unable to recycle refrigerator water filter. 😥

© 2010 ‐ 2024 Creative Aspects, Inc.

Gutenberg Editor TESTING

Cover Picture Block

What you are reading now is a text block the most basic block of all. The text block has its own controls to be moved freely around the post…

… like this one, which is right aligned.

The goal of this new editor is to make adding rich content to WordPress simple and enjoyable. This whole post is composed of pieces of content—somewhat similar to LEGO bricks—that you can move around and interact with. Move your cursor around and you’ll notice the different blocks light up with outlines and arrows. Press the arrows to reposition blocks quickly, without fearing about losing things in the process of copying and pasting.

Headings are separate blocks as well, which helps with the outline and organization of your content.

A Picture is Worth a Thousand Words

Handling images and media with the utmost care is a primary focus of the new editor. Hopefully, you’ll find aspects of adding captions or going full-width with your pictures much easier and robust than before.

Using Gutenberg editor and inserting with copy paste from IAWRITER first from edit and second from the preview. They were both the same. Editing html beyond what is available e.g. see header 6 below indicates Custom HTML on side label of block.

Try selecting and removing or editing the caption, now you don’t have to be careful about selecting the image or other text by mistake and ruining the presentation.

SLH: Non-Fiction

The Undoing Project by Lewis, Michael 612.8
~~The Grid~~ by Bakke, Gretchen 333.793
The Mother Tongue by Bryson, Bill 420
~~Embroider Your Life~~ by Mornu, Nathalie 746.44
She Sheds by Kotite, Erika 725
Knitless: 50 no-knit, stash-busting yarn projects by McFadden, Laura 764.4
Presence by Cuddy, Amy 158.1
The Origins of Totalitarism by Arendt, Hannah 321.9
~~The Death of Truth~~ by Kakutani, Michiko 306.2 Purchased
Engineering for Cats by Delaney, Mat WISHLIST
differently wired. by Reber, Deborah On Order (Library)
~~My Life as a Goddess~~ by Branum, Guy
Killing It by Davis, Camas On Order (Library)

SLH: Fiction

Everything I Don’t Remember by Khemiri, Jonas Hassen
Where the Crawdads Sing by Owens, Delia
The Idiot by Batuman, Elif
Reading with Patrick by Kuo, Michelle
~~Little Fires Everywhere~~ by Ng, Celeste AUDIO BOOK
Let Me Be Like Water by Perry, S.K On Order (Library)
Cloud Hotel by Hanshaw, Julian On Order (Library)
Three Things About Elsie by Cannon, Joanna
The Yellow Envelope by Dinan, Kim WISHLIST
Nemesis by Reichs, Brendan Young Adult Fiction
Princess Cora and the Crocodile by Schlitz, Laura Amy Youth Fiction
Beast by Spangler, Brie Young Adult Fiction
Merrow by Braxton-Smith, Amanda Young Adult Fiction
Invictus by Graudin, Ryan Young Adult Fiction
Some Writer by Sweet, Melissa Youth Biography

NBH: Fiction

House of the Rising Sun by Burke, James Lee
Envy by Brown, Sandra
And West is West by Childress, Ron
Keep Quiet by Scottoline, Lisa
Sky Blue by Brand, Max
Holy Ghost by Sandford, John On Order or Ckd Out(Library)
The Last Time I Lied by Sager, Riley (LARGE TYPE)
The Girl Who Takes an Eye for an Eye by Crantz, Lager
~~Murder on the Left Bank~~ by Black, Cara
~~The Cabin at the End of the World~~ by Tremblay, Paul
~~Crimson Lake~~ by Fox, Candice
Force of Nature by Harper, Jane
The Dry by Harper, Jane
The Bay by Harper, Jane
~~Sharp Objects~~ by Flynn, Gillian
The Grown Up by Flynn, Gillian
Don’t Eat Me by Cotterill, Colin On Order (Library)
The Ruin by McTiernan, Dervla On Order (Library)
The Little Old Lady Behaving Badly by Cotterill, Colin[^1]
Sweet, Little Lies by Frear, Caz
~~My Sister’s Bones~~ by Ellwood, Nuala
Snowblind, Nightblind, ~~Blackout~~ by Jonasson, Ragnar

NBH: Non-Fiction

~~American Fire~~ ~~by Hesse, Monica 364.16~~
~~No One Tells You This~~ by MacNichols, Glynnis 362.83
Dead Girls by Bolin, Alice On Order (Library)
What Unites Us by Rather, Dan 323.6
Class Clowns: How … Investors Lost Billions … by Knee, Jonathan WISHLIST
The Physics of Wall Street by Weatherall, James Owen WISHLIST

[^1]: Other mysteries by Cotterill, Colin e.g. -[x] I shot the Buddha, The woman who wouldn’t die

The Inserter Tool

INTERESTING
‘Question: How do I delete this block?’ she asked. You should type the quotes if you want. Ignore those in the text? We will see. Notice the last few characters on the last part of this quote is OUT OF ALIGNMENT.
Answer: “Right click on the block, then click more options and to remove the block. CTRL+ALT+BACKSPACE key version does not remove the text INSIDE the block.”
She noticed 10/2018 punctuation out of alignment and functioning of short cut key to remove block does not remove text inside, where as using the buttons does.

Imagine everything that WordPress can do is available to you quickly and in the same place on the interface. No need to figure out HTML tags, classes, or remember complicated shortcode syntax. That’s the spirit behind the inserter—the (+) button you’ll see around the editor—which allows you to browse all available content blocks and add them into your post. Plugins and themes are able to register their own, opening up all sort of possibilities for rich editing and publishing.

Go give it a try, you may discover things WordPress can already add into your posts that you didn’t know about. Here’s a short list of what you can currently find there:

Text & Headings
Images & Videos
Galleries
Embeds, like YouTube, Tweets, or other WordPress posts.
Layout blocks, like Buttons, Hero Images, Separators, etc.
And Lists like this one of course 🙂

Visual Editing

A huge benefit of blocks is that you can edit them in place and manipulate your content directly. Instead of having fields for editing things like the source of a quote, or the text of a button, you can directly change the content. Try editing the following quote:

The editor will endeavor to create a new page and post building experience that makes writing rich posts effortless, and has “blocks” to make it easy what today might take shortcodes, custom HTML, or “mystery meat” embed discovery. [Does this mean that more than one sentence is in right alignment is an issue?] Something else is wrong with the above quote block. Still testing.

The information corresponding to the source of the quote is a separate text field, similar to captions under images, so the structure of the quote is protected even if you select, modify, or remove the source. It’s always easy to add it back.

Blocks can be anything you need. For instance, you may want to add a subdued quote as part of the composition of your text, or you may prefer to display a giant stylized one. All of these options are available in the inserter.

You can change the amount of columns in your galleries by dragging a slider in the block inspector in the sidebar.

Media Rich

If you combine the new wide and full-wide alignments with galleries, you can create a very media rich layout, very quickly:

Accessibility is important — don’t forget image alt attribute

Sure, the full-wide image can be pretty big. But sometimes the image is worth it.

The above is a gallery with just two images. It’s an easier way to create visually appealing layouts, without having to deal with floats. You can also easily convert the gallery back to individual images again, by using the block switcher.

Any block can opt into these alignments. The embed block has them also, and is responsive out of the box:

You can build any block you like, static or dynamic, decorative or plain. Here’s a pullquote block:

Code is Poetry
The WordPress community

If you want to learn more about how to build additional blocks, or if you are interested in helping with the project, head over to the GitHub repository.

Help build Gutenberg

Thanks for testing Gutenberg!

2017/10/23 Mixed Media Crafting Videos

Watching mixed media and crafting videos is my new vocation. Notice I said WATCHING, not doing, because my major project has stalled trying to figure out how to do snow at night. I also have to spend at least 15 minutes getting glue off my fingers every time I work on the sky; ah, yes, because I’m quilling. My current favorites are done by this lady: Gabrielle Pollacco. I’ve been watching her youtube videos and it looks complicated, but if I watch enough, maybe my brain will pick up some techniques. I really love the layered dimensions. Watch out relatives, you may end up with some strange looking presents in the near future. Ha.

2017/09/15 Definitely cut the cable!

Update 09/15/2017: We are saving $100 per month and have updated streaming to: NVIDIA SHIELD TV Streaming Media Player [2017 Version] which will let up play games and video off HD, but the improvement in streaming is well worth the cost of approximately $200.
Original 07/12/2017: It has taken me over a month to get the information I need to finally get rid of cable, though we are still getting internet service from the same company. I had an old emergency HDTV antenna to receive free channels of live TV which did not work well. I purchased Winegard FlatWave Amplified FL5500A Digital HD Indoor TV Antenna from Amazon and after I moved equipment around so I could free up a power plug, I managed to get in NBC, CBS and ABC acceptably, though it does burp occasionally. Other channels, CW for example, is not as clear, but much improved over my old antenna. Also, we are getting GRIT, which has old westerns, Walker Texas Ranger and other old shows, which is ridiculous, I know, but using anything to get off the horrible NEWS during dinner is my idea of stress relief. My next task is to determine which DVR system we need to record when we can’t help missing our favorite shows. Actually, we don’t have many favorite shows, especially during the summer which is why I chose to work on it. I like some of the summer fare, like ZOO, but other(s) in my family cannot stand it, so I made the big SACRIFICE so I can get later this year, hopefully, on Amazon Prime Video or Netflix, which we have had for literally — years. So I am looking forward to watching my shows this fall, like NCIS, which we don’t want to be so addicted to but somehow can’t seem to pull away from, ha! We have HBO NOW so we can watch GOT in mid July, and we are currently using SLING TV (Both Blue and Orange) for everything else, eg. SPORTS and added STARZ, EPIX and SHOWTIME and still managed to save around $100 from what we were paying. This is both encouraging and exasperating. To search for what we want to watch takes much longer and more time and I forget and totally miss shows I used to record on DVR for those JUST IN CASE WE CAN STAND IT moments. I ordered a TV Guide today subscription today to help me/us FIND stuff. Just looking at reviews, like Rotten Tomatoes every night is getting too complicated for late in the day. Also, I have to remember to plug in the Amazon Firestick for SLING, because it only runs for around three hours before if overheats and locks up. I am waiting until fall, to see whether we need to get invest in better equipment, eg. Roku or XBOX One, though I am, so far not really that impressed with either. In fact, I have been looking at Tablo and/or Tivo as alternatives. I have burned out on Microsoft (XBOX) after decades of updates and I would like simplify. Speaking of which, I heard about Simple.TV and that may be a possibility. Frankly, I expect to be in the process of getting all the features I want for some time as no single system, plan or company is really meeting all my requirements and I am thinking that’s a good thing, because if there was, they would probably be charging me/us a fortune. Ha!

About the internet charges: I have already been using my own Modem/Router for years, with good outcomes, but I can only get 30mbps from this company and we are paying around $70 per month. The company “Store” said I could get 100mbps (maximum) for this market for around $100 per month, but with a whopping $200 installation (guarantee fee)!! Really!? Before I found this out, on the phone with the commpany that is supposed to be SO MUCH IMPROVED and customer oriented, they quoted me 100mbps at special rate this month of $49.99 or for $100 per month I could get 300mbps rate and that had me drooling! Unfortunately, they did not directly handle our business. They set me up for a big disappointment. We had to “turn” in our cable equipment and deal with the “local store”. The quoted deals were reserved for the big market area?! So what does it take to be a big enough market? Is it the local equipment that is stopping them? They are going to lose their business because other companies in this area are at a MINIMUM of 60mbps and around $50 per month. So, I did not yet take us on that time consuming task of road of converting all our email over to something else yet. It’s hot, I’m tired, and can I even remember all the places, people that have my email address? Really? Why aren’t they improving our systems? People surely know about the 97% profit margin they are making. The shame is that they have the best email (webmail) I’ve ever had. I am looking into that too. I need an email system that is web based and independent of these providers. Yes, it’s true, I am a demanding customer. Remind self: don’t sweat the small stuff. I have survived the headache of research and experimentation and I am saving $100 per month! Woo hoo!

2016-11-28 I have been…

I have been taken from my mother by strange men to kiss me.
I have been called names.
I have been frowned upon.
I have been disbelieved.
I have been disenfranchised.
I have been laid low.
I have been made fun of.
I have been disrespected.
I have been hated because of my religion.
I have been ignored because of my gender.
I have been slapped on the butt by my boss.
I have been underpaid.
I have been without scholarship.
I have been without health insurance.
I have been convinced I was dying.
I have been undiagnosed (sic).
I have people tell me I am going to hell for my beliefs.
I have been given bad grades for saying what I truly think.
I have had people take my hand away from the phone while talking to my boss.
I have had people call me fat.
I have had friends who lied to me.
I have had husbands who cheated on me.
I have had dear ones who died.
I have seen my political leaders shot in the head.
I have been poor.
I have been in the minority.
I have been living in the United States of America all my life.
I have been residing in Arkansas, Kentucky, Oklahoma, Texas and New Mexico.
I have been afraid of living in a ‘third’ world country.
I have been afraid that Republicans would deny me my rights.
I have been sixty-two years old.
I have been retired.
Who am I?

2016-07-27 PHP Testing, 1, 2, 3

<?php echo “<p>Testing my new PHP function.</p>”; ?>

Doesn’t work in attempts to embed in content-area. I also tried other places, but it ‘broke’ the code of the theme. Changed the theme to twelve for now.

Update on 2016-07-30: I have spent the last two days using Cloud9 to test PHP code and copy proven snipets to twelve successfully. I cannot remember exactly what else I wanted to do, so I am going through the code section of PHP in PHP, MySQL, JavaScript & HTML5 All-in-One For Dummies, which has proved reasonably accurate so far. I have corrected (library) book in a few notations where print faded. However, the statement that single quotes are interpreted as literals does not seem to work in Cloud9. Everytime I put in a variable name that matches, even without the preceeding dollar sign, strange things happen. I may pursue this later, but for now I am happy that I have added this statement to theme twelve successfully:


        <?php
	echo ‘<br /> &copy;’;
	echo date("Y");
	echo ‘Creative Aspects, Inc.’;
        ?>

This produces: Content ©2016 Creative Aspects, Inc.
Note that this was hard to get into Word Press post because the editing took place and converted text to html even using the Text tab, so all HTML symbols were used for less than, greater than, left single quote, right single quote AND ampersand.

Added function to actually get the year from posted/updated. Look at source code of the pages to actually see the function called auto_copyright.

2016-07-24 Amazon FireTVstick is Great

Yesterday, I installed our new FireTVstick in about five minutes and spent the rest of several hours trying to get it to fail while I had TV and three other devices going at the same time. No burbs, hiccups or sags in performance. Granted we did not watch movie(s) for long, but we did play music and it was great to be able to listen on our receiver/speakers. We were also impressed with the resolution quality and the number of free or nearly free channels included with this and Amazon Prime.

We are looking into subscriptions to HBO NOW, Curosity Stream and Hulu, probably. And I will bet it won’t be too long before we are ordering some educational courses on Great Courses Plus. We will likely reduce our cable channels and use the money we save on these subscriptions. I am so tired of the traditional programs.

Our favorite channels, news and most sports are available. I had some concerns about NFL channel, but hey, we have friends and family we can go visit when we missing something and we don’t mind being a day behind sometimes. We don’t have time to watch everything we want and we record things that are really unnecessary anymore. I do not like be locked into watching something OR recording something at a particular time.

P.S. I watched several series last night (on Amazon Video) and they were only 9 minutes long. At first, I thought that it was 9 hours long and thought, who would have made a movie that long. Anyway, if you made a nine hour long movie it would have to be a mini series – right. We might hurt people. Can you imagine sitting in a theater for nine hours? Anyway one of the series was called “SO DARK” (21 minutes) and it was so good! I want more. NOTE: See also “SO PRETTY” first?

2016-06-07 Animation Gif Code

I started at google.com this morning and it says:

It’s World Emoji Day!

This is one of the code projects that you can ‘play’ with. Great for kids. I used this: Made With Code Projects Gif

Here’s what I made with the animator project:

Unfortunately, it did not animate at first. What’s wrong? Basically, the width default crops the animation because these gifs are animated by using a series of snapshots or FRAMES. So you should use the SIZE-FULL option when inserting the media. I learned this trick (or bug fix) from this guy, who also recommends taking off the LINK to the media which is also defaulted. Blogging Handbook Uploading Animated Gifs

I also wanted to use my selfie with makeup – to ASSESSORIZE (another project), but uploading background was disabled. Ah, mmh… so try this instead!

Note: All images are put in the post with width and height set at 150 each. Though the images vary in size the displayed size looks the same. This is scaling. When you import the media, you determine the link and the size option. In this case, emoji is thumbnail, animation is full and selfie is medium. Since the others were not animated, it makes no difference. I also changed the

CLASS=alignnone to alignleft, alignright, aligncenter respectively for the images and added “float: right; and margin: 10px;” inside the image tag

to wrap the text around the images. Source: Result of google search: “wrap text around image HTML5”

If you are interested coding or getting your kids involved, be sure to check out the coding projects links at the bottom of the page, for example: MIT’s Scratch Oh, dear, I could play all day.

2016-07-16 Backyard Video Squirrels in Snow

This is a video I made on Dec. 14, 2014 that is fun to watch. Edited for size using WeVideo. [Free version is limited to approximately 7 minutes and 5G.] Takes a really long time to UPLOAD and process for editing, but editing is fun. Took twenty minutes for the video to be published after.

WeVideo Squirrels busy in the backyard during snow….