Posts by lennys (70)

lennys February 01, 2025

My phone broke

So yeah, my phone isn't working as of about as of about 43 hours ago, by now. One minute everything was fine, I used it to take a couple of pictures. But the next time I took it out of my pocket 10 minutes later, the screen was dead. Pressing the buttons does nothing. I know it's still powered on because if I press and hold the power button for a couple of seconds the phone vibrates, but other than that it's a brick. The alarm clock still works, but to turn the alarm off I have to hold down the power button for 15 seconds until the phone reboots. I have a device protection plan for it, so I opened a case with Google about it and took it to an authorized repair shop. After a couple of hours they said the motherboard was bad, and that I might as well get another phone because it would cost more to fix it than a new phone would cost. Today I heard back from Google, they are going to replace it with a Pixel 7 that should be shipped to me and arrive sometime between the 7th and 10th. So until then I'm stuck without a phone. It's like I had my right arm cut off. It's amazing how dependent we become on the technology we use regularly, such that when something fails it becomes a crisis. Now if I want to pay any of my bills I have to physically go to the bank because I can't login even with a laptop due to the 2 factor authentication - I can't get any text messages or use the authenticator app. Sigh. In other news, I finally got started with the final coats of paint on my toolbox project. I had to bring everything inside yesterday because of rain, but if the weather cooperates I think I'll be finishing up this project soon. I just need to put a couple more coats of paint on the drawers, then put everything back together and I'll finally have a decent toolbox rig. For the record, don't do what I did and try to restore anything, buy new instead. This project was too long, too expensive and too much of a pain in the neck. Of course I didn't know that at the outset, so it's been a learning experience, but not one I'd care to repeat any time soon. You really, really should have your own garage for stuff like this. Doing it on the patio like I've been doing just carries a lot of problems along with it, such that all the fun gets taken out of it at the end.

lennys January 20, 2025

lennyshort.com and general web design stuff

So I have the new lennyshort.com design up and running now. It's been in the works since November, so it's a relief to have it up and done. I started out with just a basic HTML and CSS template, plus some basic "Hello World!" content from the original lennyshort.com website. From that I gradually put together a new Django project, grafted the content into it, and tweaked it until I was satisfied with the result. This last week or so I've been working on getting the blogging feature running, which I finished for the most part yesterday. I haven't made any blog posts yet, so that's something I'll have to do soon. I can do them through the admin interface, and I can use Markdown to make it look pretty and stuff. I used some AI agents to help me with the code, which saved a lot of time and frustration. Today I spent some time reading through some stuff about building Django + JavaScript projects on a site I found a few days ago. From there I found some "boilerplate" Django designs on GitHub that I might try to use in the future. There's so much stuff available online that it almost doesn't seem like its worth it to write basic HTML and CSS any more, as you can create some pretty slick looking web designs with a running backend baked in. A lot has changed since I first learned HTML in college. Website design and development has changed so much over the years I'm having to learn how to do it all over again.

lennys January 11, 2025

Whoops

So I had a new blog post all written out yesterday, but I forgot to save it and closed the browser by mistake. Oh well, today's another day. It's Saturday at 6:26 am and there's nothing going on at work like usual. I'm thinking about what all I have to do: I need to catch up with Scrimba, there's a couple of quizzes on DataCamp I can do, I need to get the Contact Us form on lennyshort.com working again, and there's always work to do on my routers in my cabinet. Too much to finish all of them today, but hopefully I'll make some progress somewhere. I managed to get the new lennyshort.com design deployed yesterday (after much tweaking and troubleshooting, thanks Google) and I'm happy with it so far, but it still has some unfinished sections in it that I want to figure out. I'll be working on that periodically for a couple of weeks, I imagine. I did manage to get the captcha working properly on the Contact Us form in lsenterprises.tech, and I had it working in lennyshort.com prior to the new deployment, and so far I have seen a large reduction in the amount of bot spam I was receiving via those email forms. I had to fiddle with both websites a lot longer than anticipated to get it all working right, which just shows my inexperience working with Django. I have noticed that since spending a lot of time over the last 12-18 months studying Python that I understand the Django code better, which is good. My main objective in studying Python to begin with was to become a better developer, so overall I'm pleased with the improvement. There's still a long way to go though.

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