StappsPlace.com

Outside painted, finally!

So I am not a die hard Elvis fan or anything like that but recently found myself in Memphis waiting on my flight back home. With 2 hours to kill, I Googled “Things To Do In Memphis” and stumbled upon Graceland. I have to admit that I wasn’t that excited to check out Elvis’ estate but there wasn’t much else to do in Memphis that interested me. Turns out Graceland is really a neat tribute to the King and was very interesting, I am glad that I had and spent the time to check it out. If you are ever in the area, I would recommend it, and try to allow around 3 hours or more to take the full tour, 2 was cutting it short.

In earlier post you may have noticed that I fought and fought with my wireless connection on my iPad and iPhone. No matter what I tried, I just could not keep either connected to my Belkin Netgear F5D8236 v2 wireless router. I recently bought a Cisco Linksys E1000 router and just like that, the problem is gone. Let me just go ahead and state that I did not have any wifi problems with anything other than my apple device. Netgear is great if you don’t have any apple devices but if you do, Cisco is the way to go.

On my way back from Taos NM, 180 miles from home, right out side of Lubbock, a guy decides to make a u-turn right into me. I clip him in the front at 70 mph, bounce off and hit a semi truck on my right, bounce off of him and then finally into the ditch.

The other car:

F18 maiden flight and last flight.

Brett, should’ve listened to you on the bad servo!

The old storage shed (10×10) was getting too small so now it’s time for a new one (20×26).

The default registration email that wordpress sends when a new user registers looks similar to the following:

From: WordPress [wordpress@stappsplace.com]
Subject: [StappsPlace.com] Your username and password
Body:
  Username: Stapper
  Password: ******
  http://www.stappsplace.com/wp-login.php

You can change this by modifying the pluggable.php file in wp-includes.

Look for the Send mail (wp_mail) section, more specifically:

$from_name = ‘Admin’;
$from_email = ‘admin@’. $sitename;

Just though I would take a moment here to wish everyone a Happy New Year!

1st Post: Nov 10th 2008
Latest Post: Dec 27th 2010
Total Posts: 221
Subscribers: 3027

I finally received my replacement iPad from apple the other day, which was supposed to fix all the wifi problems I was having with the one I sent in. The day I got it, I connected it to my router, verified the connection was good, let it go to sleep, get back into it and WA LA, no internet. In disbelief I went through all the troubleshooting steps I knew to hopefully fix the problem but nothing worked. Hopefully the next firmware version will fix these annoying wifi problems.

Freggin Apple!

Recently I posted on Removing the website entry box on the comments page in WordPress. My thought was that this would significantly reduce the amount of spam comments, but in doing so I discovered a whole new issue regarding comments. What I found is that even after the website entry box was removed from the comments page, comments were somehow still being left with a website entry in the database. Without looking into too much, I simply decided that basically comment entry was somehow being scripted and auto generated by spammers.

So my new policy, and added to my automated maintenance routine, is to simply mark all comments where a website is entered as spam. This has actually worked out to my benefit because most spam is now easily identifiable which has greatly reduced spam all together on my site.

Right now with 1k subscribers and my blog being open to non subscription comments, I delete approximately 14k spam comments and approve approximately 200 comments every week.

Anyway, happy moderation.

I have been debating for some time now whether or not I really want to get into the RC Helis. I’ve had several 3 & 4 channel, fixed pitch helis in the past that are very easy to learn and fly, those don’t really count. The 6 channel helis are a different story, when you add roll and pitch into the mix, it’s a whole different story. Anyway, I just got my Honey Bee CP3 in and am doing my best to learn to fly it on my own using a flight sim and training kit for the heli.

Kara gave me a Lumix TS2S for Christmas!
The DMC-TS2 is shockproof, waterproof, dustproof and newly added freezeproof in design with the capability to record high-definition movie in AVCHD Lite. Featuring a 28mm wide-angle lens, 4.6x optical zoom and iA (Intelligent Auto) Mode, this versatile camera lets you capture your moments no matter what the intended shooting terrain is. Swim along with tropical fish and capture shots of beautiful coral reefs, or take recordings of your friends around a camp fire. The DMC-TS2 is an extremely versatile camera that you can take with you wherever the action calls.

Thanks Kara!

The head cover holders on the Volitation 9053 Helicopter are very fragile, mine broke on the second flight I believe. They are not very expensive but after replacing them several times I decided to come up with a simpler and hopefully better solution to hold the cover.

I started by drilling holes in both sides of the frame just behind the original rear cover holder mounting screws.

Then I straightened out a paperclip and pushed it through the holes I just drilled. Using needle nose pliers, I created a bend inside the frame walls to help the paperclip stay in one place.

Then I bent the paperclip like the pic below and created hooks on both sides to slide through the cover holes.

So we bought our iPad about a month ago, brand new from Best Buy. Stock from the store, it came with firmware 3.2.2 and the wifi worked like a champ, I don’t remember any issues what so ever. Just a few days ago, I made a big mistake and upgraded to 4.2.1. Now I can’t stay connected to my wifi, the wifi at work or any wifi for that matter. Apple no longer signs 3.2.2, so I can’t downgrade.

I have tried:
restarting my ipad & router
turning off my wpa encryption
resetting the network settings on the iPad
restoring the iPad to a backup and as a new device
broadcasting N only, turning B & G off
turning Safari AutoFill off
adjusting the brightness

I called apple customer support last night and was surprised when the support rep I was talking to fairly quickly said that he would simply ship me a new one after I had explained to him everything that I had tried. Seems to me that there is an obvious problem with a certain number of iPads (estimated at 3%) and no clue as to what exactly is wrong or causing it at this point. Apple needs to hurry up, this little issue about drove me to the point of throwing the thing through a window.