Category: miscellaneous

See the book “Axtell Geneology“, my grandfather is listed on page 286.

I am finally getting around to cataloging the books I own. Now that I am running Linux I found a free piece of software that does what I want: Tellico. While it is for KDE I had no problem installing and using it with a Gnome desktop. So far I have cataloged over 300 books, which has been very easy due to the internet search feature of the software.

Another feature of the software that I liked at first was the ability to output an HTML report. I wanted to post my book list on this site and I thought that would be the easiest way. It was easy, but didn’t have the format or features that I wanted. Fortunately, the software also exports to an XML file. So I exported the XML and wrote my own javascript program to display the list.

You can see the list here: robertjwallace.com/books

While I was web surfing the other day I stumbled upon an article about things you can do with old phones. One of the ideas was to use it as a web cam. I thought that was a great idea so in a very short amount of time I had a new “cat” cam.

My old Windows phone is a Lumina 920. I charged it up and installed a free app called Win IP cam (there are similar apps available for Android and Iphones.)

The next step was to get a phone tripod to hold the camera. I found a nice one on Amazon Prime for $8.00. It even has a quick release plate.

While I normally just use a web browser to watch Abby, I also wanted the option of capturing the video to a file, so I googled and found a nice open-source piece of software that runs in Linux (as well as Mac and Windows), called OBS Studio. It took about a minute to get it installed and running.

So with an investment of $8.00 and a little time I now have a “cat” cam.

I recently helped some friends develop their websites. Both are wordpress sites, one was a redesign of a very old hand coded site with a custom coded CMS, the other a new site from scratch.

Some of the most magical effects are effects that have an element of luck involved. While such effects are often impossible to repeat, they are also impossible for the audience to figure out. They are effects that build reputations.

As a retired software engineer I got bored and so I wrote an on-line Faro game. It is a work in progress. You can find it at https://robertjwallace.com///faro-game.

You can find rules and history for the game at various web sites. See: