USB Aromatherapy Diffusers

The last couple of days I have come across a spectrum of essential oil diffusers powered by the little witches that live inside our computers:

This one is an aromatherapy key drive available in 128MB to 4GB of storage.  The fragrances are Strawberry, Orange, Grape, or Apple. 

The diffuser above is a USB stick-pad type device in which you can put a drop of your favorite oil on it for your witch diffused fragrances. 

This device allows you to adjust the time, duration, and intensity of the applied oils.

The USB fragrance oil burner makes you feel pleasant and more relax at work.

I finaly found a perfect USB device for my aromatherapy hobby. This little guy uses leaf sized sponges for the application of essential oils, and a USB powered fan to difuse them.

Evil Squirrel Thursday

Each Thursday I will try to present evidence of squirrel conspiracies and unfold the true nature of there social circle.

The Bushy Tailed Rat web site proves, with evidence, that all squirrels are indeed evil and gives pictorial representation for the reasons why.

IT IS MY BELIEF THAT ALL SQUIRRELS ARE EVIL.  I HAVE CREATED THIS PAGE TO WARN THE PUBLIC.  MANY PEOPLE THINK THAT SQUIRRELS ARE CUTE, BUT I HAVE FACTS THAT PROVE THEY ARE VERY DANGEROUS.  I HAVE NOT POSTED THIS TO SCARE, MY ONLY INTENTION IS TO INFORM AND WARN.

The picture above is featured on this site proving that while not cutely begging for scraps, the Bushy Tailed Rat is secretly involving themselves with alchohol and tobacco.  -- More to come next Thursday. 

Three Rivers Trail

I took a small hike this morning down to the Mississippi and back up towards town on the Three Rivers Trail.

On the way down the path I ran into this comfy bench where I laid my head down for a rest.

For some reason I had a funny feeling in my stomach.  After searching for a reason why, my eyes came across a GPS equipped spy squirrel. 

Just like one of the 14 implike squirrels that were arrested by Iranian authorities for espionage. 

Random Thought : In the diffuser: 10 drops Bergamot, 4 drops Sage, 4 drops Indian Vetiver, set on low to spew throughout the day.

man throws computer out window

We have all been there.  Some hurl there computer through walls, out windows, or like myself most often gives it a good kick to show all the little witches living inside who is boss.

In Germany the police were called to an apartment complex with complaints of a loud crashing noise.  When they arrived, they found electronic monkey gadgetry spewed along the complex's parking lot.

The reason for the man plummeting the box out his window was frustration, enough said.  The police sympathized and all that was asked was the cleaning up of the once semi-functional pieces of the computer.

Just like the scene in Office Space where the gang of office gangstas destroyed the printer that gave them the most frustration, this man probably had all the right and reasonability to give the machine a whoop ass.  I know I have thought of it many times.  To be more precise, we have a high bluff not too far from my place in which I have imagined dropping what should be subserviant pieces of machinery down the side, hitting a few trees, and proving a point to the gadgetry gods.  Not even Dina would be able to save it from my wrath. 

ditched apache, moved to lighttpd with fastcgi-php and my lifetype, gallery, and other configuration parameters for the move

The default installation of my dedicated server OS was not serving my specific needs and was rather bloated in the sense of default available services and mechanisms used to configure them.  I have slowly been tightening things down a bit, and today I completed the transition from Apache to lighttpd and fastcgi with PHP as my web services provider.

With this move, I can focus more on necessity rather than shuffle through the extremities of a more complicated system, thus personalizing the web service.

For virtual hosts, lighttpd provides two modules to choose from: mod_evhost and mod_simple_vhost.  I chose mod_evhost as it allowed me to use regular expressions when defining virtual host paths.  So in my case I defined the paths with $server_root/domainname.com/subdomain with the root domain and subdomain web files located in public_html.

evhost.path-pattern        = "/server_root/%0/%3/public_html/"

My next step was to insure LifeType and Gallery 2 would run properly.  To do this, I would need the mod_rewrite and mod_redirect modules.

With my LifeType installation I needed a way to redirect my custome URL's which was accomplished with Apache's redirection to blog.php.  I also needed bind http error handling to error.php.  These are the two decelerations I used to accomplish this:

url.rewrite-once = ("^/blog/.*" => "/blog.php")
server.error-handler-404   = "/error.php"

 Also make sure to define your document root that is relative to your LifeType installation.

server.document-root        = "/server_root/public_html/"

I then copied my LifeType installation over to my lighttpd document directory.  That was all there was to it.

For Gallery 2 I needed to edit config.php and change the data.gallery.base variable to the appropriate new root of the copied installation.

I also changed the mod_rewrite SQL variable to 0 for inactive.  I am not sure if this was necessary to keep my search engine friendly URLS, but I did not test if it was.  In any case, I used the following lighttpd rewrite declerations to keep these good looking resource locations:

  url.rewrite = (
      "^/pics/v/(\?.+|\ .)?$" => "/pics/main.php?g2_view=core.ShowItem",
      "^/pics/admin/.(.*)" => "/pics/main.php?g2_view=core.SiteAdmin&$1",
      "^/pics/d/([0-9]+)-([0-9]+)/([^\/]+)(\?|\ )?(.*)$" => "/pics/main.php?g2_view=core.DownloadItem&g2_itemId=$1&g2_ser$
      "^/pics/v/([^?]+)(\?|\ )?(.*)$" => "/pics/main.php?g2_view=core.ShowItem&g2_path=$1&$3",
      "^/pics/c/add/(.*).html" => "/pics/main.php?g2_view=comment.AddComment&g2_itemId=$1",
      "^/pics/c/view/(.*).html" => "/pics/main.php?g2_view=comment.ShowAllComments&g2_itemId=$1"
   )

Make sure to replace /pics/ with the directory of your copied Gallery 2 installation.

This was the basics of the transfer.  Feel free to leave a comment if you have any questions or want to discuss the procedure I used.