Leakage from a Cluttered Mind

OS X 10.8 Finder toolbar shortcut

Phil — Mon, 06 May 2013 19:42:57 +0000

I did not know this. While I knew OS X finder has navigation arrow buttons at the top left of the window that can be used for traversing backward and forward through the folder hierarchy you have visited, I did not know that you can click and hold the button to see the whole hierarchical list and then choose whichever folder you desire. Thanks to Mac OSX Hints for this one.

First day with a new Raspberry Pi

Phil — Wed, 03 Apr 2013 04:55:00 +0000

Raspberry Pi

My Raspberry Pi arrived today. I have some vague ideas of what to do with this tiny computer, but the list of things I have to learn (or relearn) is very long. Nevertheless, I successfully booted it and have briefly played with it through a command terminal session and through a GUI.

The standard “getting started” instructions say to hook up a HDMI monitor, USB keyboard, and USB mouse. That wasn’t very appealing to me—too much work trying to free up a monitor (or trying to work on the Raspberry Pi in front of the 46″ TV screen). So I downloaded Adafruit’s Occidentalis 0.2 Linux distro that is preconfigured with sshd and avahi (Bonjour client identifying as raspberry.local) on boot. Followed directions on how to load this image onto a 4GB SD card using Mac OSX, installed the card into the Rasberry Pi, hooked up an ethernet cable, and plugged in the power supply. The on-board LEDs flickered like it was booting.

I started a terminal session on my Mac:

RivendellPrime:/ phil$ ssh -l pi raspberrypi.local
pi@raspberrypi.local's password: 
Linux raspberrypi 3.1.9adafruit+ #10 PREEMPT Thu Aug 30 20:07:05 EDT 2012 armv6l

This logged me in as user pi. After playing around for a bit, I decided to try to get a graphical user interface running.

To get that going I needed a VNC server, so entering sudo apt-get install tightvncserver downloaded and installed ‘tightvncserver’ on the RPi. Firing that app up on the RPi, I then ran the ‘Chicken’ VNC client on the Mac giving the raspberry.local name and its password, and up popped the GUI window for the RPi on my Mac. Sweet!

Hiking and geocaching in the Phoenix area

Phil — Sun, 10 Feb 2013 04:06:40 +0000

McDowell Mountain Sugaro

For our first day of hiking in the Phoenix we went to McDowell Mountain Regional Park near Fountain Hills. This was a nice hike densely packed with geocaches and lots of cactus. After hiking we grabbed a coffee at Fountain Park and watched the huge fountain for a bit, then grabbed a few more nearby caches.

View of the fountain from in front of Sofrita’s

At sundown we ate on the patio at Sofrita’s. It was quite good. On our drive back to our motel we stopped at a Costco for gas and got a frozen yogurt (high class dessert).

Superstition Mountains

The next day we hiked at the Lost Dutchman State Park east of Phoenix. Actually, we parked in the state park, but did most of our hiking in the Superstition Mountains wilderness area. There are a couple of very rugged peaks here, but we only hiked near the base. If we ever get back to the area I would love to do some scrambling up towards the top.

[View slideshow]

On the way to Phoenix

Phil — Fri, 08 Feb 2013 01:20:51 +0000

Our schedule of being in Riverside for a birthday and then the Roughneck Rendezvous a week later left us with some time to fill up. Since we have never been to Phoenix (well, once we drove through it on our way to Sedona), we scheduled three days there to hike and explore.

We made a couple of stops along the way on the drive from Palm Desert to Phoenix. Near the southern entrance to Joshua Tree National Park we stopped for an earth cache, and then noticed a small sign pointing off down a dirt road to a historical marker, so we had to check that out. During WWII the area was called Camp Young and was used, along with several other desert locations, as a training center for preparing troops for combat in north Africa. A little further east on the freeway we came to the Patton Museum which had a number of tanks and armored vehicles on display outside, as well as Patton memorabilia (I suppose) inside. We just gave it a cursory look from outside the fence.

Near Quartzite (where snowbirds gather by the thousands), we did another earth cache and a virtual cache at the cemetery. There were so many people at Quartzite that there was a traffic jam at the first off-ramp.

We arrived at our motel off I17 in the late afternoon, had an early dinner, and went to the movies to see The Hobbit. While I try to research our motels carefully, I didn’t get this one right. We were satisfied with everything but the location. I don’t think I have ever stayed at a motel that was so close to a major freeway, and I was a bit concerned that I needed to use keycard entry on the front door after 7 pm. The mall across the freeway is where we went to see The Hobbit. There were so few cars in the parking lot I thought most of the mall stores were closed (but it still has a Macy’s as an anchor). I think as Phoenix rapidly expanded, this mall lost business to newer malls on the outskirts of town.

[View slideshow]

Whitewater Preserve hike

Phil — Fri, 08 Feb 2013 01:00:23 +0000

Last year I hiked and cached on the Pacific Crest Trail at the start of Section C (just north of the 10 freeway near Palm Springs at Whitewater). While I found 32 caches on that 13 mile hike, that was only about half of the ones hidden on the PCT in this area. This year I wanted to start from a different trailhead and try to find the rest.

Luckily it’s only about an hour drive from Riverside (where we spent the night) to the Whitewater Preserve trailhead. I say luckily because no matter how hard I try to get an early start, I fail. We parked where the road crosses the Whitewater River (there is a parking lot and facilities farther up the road) and started hiking on the loop trail. We climbed up to a ridge with good views of the canyon and then joined up the Pacific Crest Trail right about where I had turned around last year.

We followed the PCT down to the bottom of the canyon and hiked upriver in the broad wash for a couple of miles. At some point the trail crosses the river and climbs up the ridge on the other side. Perhaps next year I’ll give that a try. Turning around and heading downriver we came to the Preserve ranger station and parking area. Apparently this area used to be a trout farm until it was purchased by the Wildlands Conservancy. There are still trout in the pools but general fishing isn’t allowed. We continued on back to our car with a total of 17 caches found.

We stayed at a Comfort Suites motel and ate at La Casita in Cathedral City (I think). Both were satisfactory. We gassed up for the next day’s drive to Phoenix at Costco and while there split a frozen yogurt.

[View slideshow]

Desert Adventures

Phil — Tue, 05 Feb 2013 22:32:17 +0000

South edge of Joshua Tree NP

Last year I attended a geocaching event in the Anza Borrego desert with some friends and had a reasonably good time (I waffle a bit because getting bounced around in the backseat of a Toyota FJ on rough off-road trails is sometimes painful). Since the same event (Roughneck Rendezvous) was being organized this year, I used it as an excuse to plan a 2,000 mile, 2 week trip to visit family, hike and explore new places, and find some geocaches. Plus, I talked Karen into coming along, even though desert conditions are not her favorite thing.

Future posts will describe the places we went and things we did, but here I’ll describe our first weekend, which was an enjoyable time with Karen’s brothers in Riverside and Anaheim. It happened that our visit coincided with Karen’s sister-in-law’s birthday, so we had a great time enjoying that celebration.

Sunday morning we did a geocaching hike before visiting Karen’s older brother in Anaheim. Our objective was Orange County Stash, an old cache hidden in the first year of geocaching, and the oldest cache in Orange County. Trabuco Canyon is an interesting hiking area and is worthy of another visit when we can spend more time.

This volunteer fire station is at the trailhead for the hike up the creek.

This is the terrain around Trabuco Creek

Photo: Little Lakes Valley

Phil — Fri, 01 Feb 2013 01:00:40 +0000

Photo taken August, 2011. This beautiful area is one of my favorite spots in the eastern Sierra.

Photo: Sunset showers in the Teton Valley, Idaho

Phil — Fri, 25 Jan 2013 01:00:34 +0000

Photo taken in 2011 from the yard of our rental cabin in the Teton Valley near Driggs, Idaho. The Grand Teton range is obscured by the clouds.

Photo: Frozen Tenaya Lake in Yosemite

Phil — Fri, 18 Jan 2013 01:06:54 +0000

This photo was taken a year ago just before the very late snow permanently closed Tioga Road. The ice surface was snow free and lots of folks were ice skating. This year the lake must have several feet of snow on top of the ice.

Sycamore Grove walk before the storm

Phil — Wed, 28 Nov 2012 05:49:04 +0000

I had forgotten that our little Sycamore Grove Park can have very nice fall colors. I’ve been hiking in various regional parks recently, but not Sycamore Grove. We took our grandson there for a walk as the sun was setting, and it was beautiful. I only had my iPhone 4, but grabbed a few shots. A major Pacific storm is supposed to roll in tonight and stick around for a few days, so the trees may get stripped of their leaves.

Sycamore leaf

The Sycamore bark is pretty too

[View slideshow]