Below is an attached PDF document that contains a journal of our China Trip. If you are reading the document while we are still on the trip, then this document will be updated on a regular basis to reflect our daily experience, so be sure to bookmark this post and revisit this PDF document.
Retiring the Greenhouse
We have had a greenhouse in our backyard since the summer of 2015 (almost a decade ago). The greenhouse lasted much longer than we thought, given that it is just a thin aluminum structure with transparent plastic wall and roof sidings.
We are planning a sunroom extension and had to remove the greenhouse. This past Saturday, October 19, was the day marked for disassembly. A friend of mine agreed to disassemble the greenhouse and will later attempt to erect and reuse it on his property.
Raspberry Pi Using apcupsd
BMS Communication Issues
Ubuntu 24.04 Upgrade
Inadequate Power Causing ZFS Scrub Errors
The Cost of Freedom
Today is a Blessed Day
New Found Love for LaTeX
In a previous post called, Scaled Solar System, I used 
git.
Traditional word processing tools like Google Docs or Microsoft Word are insufficient because tracking changes with Microsoft Word is simply too difficult to deal with.
Both my wife and I are about to travel to China in November and we had several disparate itineraries from various airlines, tour operators, hotels, and such. In the past, I usually used Microsoft Excel to create a combined itinerary. However, last year I tried to keep the combined itinerary in the iOS Notes App. Both solutions were less than ideal. Excel proved too difficult to edit on the go because I either had to use the mobile Excel app or open up my laptop. Once changes are made it would be difficult to track the changes that I made.
With the iOS Notes App, editing the cells within a table is okay for simple stuff, but for a complicated itinerary, the formatting capabilities simply did not exist. The tracking of changes was also an issue.
This time around, I am going to use
It took me some time to set up my Neovim environment for
The resulting PDF master itinerary has been very satisfactory. It was fulfilling to once again work with
Bedroom Audio Setup
After watching the YouTube video below:
I felt compelled to listen to my Bedroom audio system which I have not done for quite a while. I was pleasantly surprised by the musicality of the playlist that I quickly mustered for the night. I created the playlist on my old Mac mini 2018 using Apple Music configured for lossless music and USB output. On the other end of the USB is a Topping D90 DAC. My Q-Acoustic 3020i bookshelf speakers are powered by the S.M.S.L. DA-9 stereo amplifier.
With the acquisition of the S.M.SL. DA-9 stereo amplifier from my Winnipeg trip last year, and a freed, old Mac mini. I am able to swap out the old Raspberry Pi running Volumio as my streamer, and use the Mac mini instead. This way not only can I take advantage of Apple Music Loseless, but I can also install mpd to play my FLAC library. I still use the Rigelian App on both my Mac and iOS devices to control music from my mpd.
However to get the Mac mini working with my Topping D90 external DAC, I had to configure mpd appropriately. Below is a snippet of the mod configuration for audio_output. The configuration file is stored in ~/.mpd/mpd.conf.
audio_output {
type "osx"
name "D90 "
device "D90 " # optional
mixer_type "disabled"
dop "yes"
}
The following command can be used to obtain the detail of the USB audio devices that my Mac is aware of:
system_profiler SPAudioDataTypeNote the extra trailing space of the D90 name.
Below are the pictures of the equipment and software of my stack.
