Car Troubles

There a few skills that are really good to have among your friends and family: computer nerd, general contractor, doctor (a vet can do in a pinch), and mechanic.

The days of earning my keep as the computer nerd are fading. These days computers mostly take care of themselves, wifi self-configures, and you upgrade a computer by buying a new one. From time to time I help 'get better at Facebook', get photos off a phone, or tell people "Nonono!  Wait until next week to but an iPad!"  (Seriously wait)

Anyways, Mrs. Chaos' car battery has been slowly going. The last two oil changes they've mentioned it's getting to its end and it has a lot of corrosive buildup. The last time they offered to replace it, but Mrs. Chaos tells me not to pay for stuff we can do. This past week it finally died. It was kind enough not to die when we were in SF, but wait for us to return home.

Husbandly duties include basic car maintainence, so I whipped out my toolkit (a computer repair toolkit) and went at it. All of the screws and bolts were massively corrodid, by attacked it with my socket screw driver and elbow grease. Too much!  The battery cable terminal broke apart in my hands.  "No problem," I thought and went to unscrew the cable terminal. I had no luck at all. The screw was crudded on and I had no overage against the dangly cable.  Try and fail. Try and fail.

The only choice left is to repair it like I would repair a Mac: throw it out and buy a new one. 

Initiate Recovery Protocol

All of my friends who have younger siblings who are going to college or high school - my number one piece of advice is: You should learn how to program.Mark Zuckerberg

I thought I lost a program I wrote a year ago. The app proxies a website and provides an API and mobile-optimized view of it. I use it every day. Every day. I have a lot of programs like this - that parse/optimize other people's websites. I even built a framework that pumps a website through Tidy/XSTL and can create RSS feeds for most websites (take that archaic websites!).

With iOS7 out I have been updating the look and feel of these little proxy sites and I couldn't find the source code to one of them.

PANIC! This was an important one! I have a ton of scripts that hit a JSON proxy. I use the web app daily. No source code? It had been operating flawless for a year, but it was only a matter of time before the website would change in some trivial way and everything would break. Time Machine? Not there. Dropbox archive? Not there! Old DVD backups? Not there? Where did I code this thing? Some of my projects I upload into Google Code - but the scrapers seems a little weird to publish publicly and aren't there. So I found it no where and I was sad.

Then I realized that it runs on Google App Engine, so I took a look through the documentation and learned that I could download the WAR back out. Which ... I ... did. While class files, compiled JSPs and minified/obfuscated JavaScript is not the most useful thing to work with, it's way easier than nothing.

Anyway, long story short (too late) - with a little bit of decompilation I had all my source code back, sans-comments. So the source code is back in my computer, all's right with the world.

I've Been Using eBay

I got rid of a few things in the governor's office that I didn't believe our citizens should have to pay for. That luxury jet was over-the-top. I put it on eBay. - Sarah Palin

I have a lot of old gadgets and I have always been scared about selling them on eBay.  So I've mostly sold them on Gazelle.com and been very happy about it.  It's simple and easy and I get a decent amount of money for it.  Still - I have always known that all resellers like that do is wipe your device and resell it for more money on a site like eBay.  So I've been tempted to cut out the middle man a make some extra money.
A month ago I gave eBay a shot and I have been exceptionally happy with my outcome.
1st Generation Apple TV?  Gazelle would give me $16 for it.  I jailbroke it and sold it on eBay for $125.  Are you paying attention?  That is more than it costs to buy a NEW AppleTV from Apple.
Verizon Motorola Droid?  Gazelle said they would only take it for recycling.  I rooted it and sold it on eBay for $40.
When it came time to get my new iPhone 5s, I turned to sell my old iPhone 4s on eBay.  Since my 2-year contract was over I had ATT unlock it.  Gazelle was going to give me $200 and eBay gave me $295. 

My crown jewel?  My 2004 PowerBook G4. It has been worthless for quite some time in the eyes of resellers. eBay? $201. Seriously?  I live this plCe!  I can only imagine the thousands of dollars in old electronics I have given away over the years. I could have been a richer man.