The Cra1gster

My wife has cancer – Now what?

February 15, 2020
By: TheCra1gster

My wife Tam was recently diagnosed with cancer. That’s so fucked. But then I thought “In six months I’ll be able to own this joke”: Me: My wife got burnt the other day. Friend: Badly? Me: Yeah, they don’t fuck around at the crematorium. The above should illustrate two things about me: 1) I’ll need humour to get through this and 2) I swear It’s a lot to come to terms with, in a short space of time. Here’s the latest: Disclaimer I’m not a medical professional and treatments described here may not be suitable for anyone else. If you…

How to scan with a wifi networked Epson L355 on Ubuntu 14.04 (trusty)

January 17, 2020
By: TheCra1gster

Long story short – possible, but no walk in the park. Beginning to think we linux users are masochists. The price of absolute power, I suppose. It’s a shame my ScanSnap 1500 broke down sometime ago. Not so much broke-down, rather some nasty looking goo started leaking out of it and I thought it a good idea not to power it up until I took a look under the hood and work out what’s going on. Like many things, this has been put on the back-burner. There’s really not much need to scan documents anymore, and with the amount of…

Merry Xmas 2019

January 14, 2020
By: TheCra1gster

How was your Xmas day? We had a quiet one here, just the two of us if you don’t count the Canadian lobster. The wife had to work in the morning while I teed up some carols on YT. It was enjoyable to listen to them throughout the day. We started with some prawns on the BBQ. Note to self – shouldn’t have drowned them in olive oil, the flare-up blackened them somewhat. Still tasted good, though. Washed down with a nice NZ Sav Blanc. Then on to the lobster which we picked up from Villa Market. Hard to fit…

Getting the Ricoh SP230 DNw up and running on Ubuntu 14.04

January 3, 2020
By: TheCra1gster

Let’s call it a Xmas present to myself – I purchased this printer as my old HP Laserjet had finally given up the ghost. It owed me nothing as I managed to squeeze about 8 years out of it! Remember kids – getting it out of the box is the easy part, it the setup where the rubber meets the road. First I tried to run the installation program on the CD which needed a Windoze box, enter my trusty Virtualbox VM with Win10 as a guest OS. Hit a roadblock when it couldn’t detect the SSID of my router…

I’ve dropped 24kgs without really trying

December 23, 2019
By: TheCra1gster

I’ve been overweight for most of my life – still am but things are heading in the right direction once again 🙂 Friend Marko sent me a pic from Dec 2013 recently and I thought I’d try on the shirt pictured in the photo as I knew I’d dropped a fair amount of weight since then. Wow! – I could now button the shirt up which was impossible when I was at my heaviest (about 133kg). I’m proud and surprised I’ve dropped a total of around 24kgs – but it’s taken time and there have been no ‘magic bullets’ of…

A taste of Issan

December 18, 2019
By: TheCra1gster

With my ‘permission to stay’ date fast approaching, it was time again to head to the other side of the Thai border for a while. This time around, I decided to catch an AirAsia flight to Vientiane, Laos and stayed the night before heading south to visit a few places I hadn’t seen before in Thailand’s Issan region. I didn’t bother doing any sightseeing as I’ve done that a few times before – just grabbed a cab from the airport to the hotel and soaked up some of the local Beer Laos (cheap as piss!) while sitting outside a small…

Beer Uncle @ Paseo shopping mall

October 7, 2019
By: TheCra1gster

I think I’ve managed to find possibly the only bar in a shopping center in Thailand. Beer Uncle, located at Paseo Shopping Mall on Ramkhamhaeng Road, is a quaint spot with a couple of fridges full of craft beers which, it has to be said, ain’t the cheapest. But if you want to drink quality beers while the wife is looking at shoes and handbags, will you really be arguing about price? Husband daycare ain’t free, folks! Last Friday night after doing the shopping at Villa Market, I dragged the wife in there for a few and left 6 or…

Tech tedbits

October 4, 2019
By: TheCra1gster

Here are a few things I’ve struggled with this week. Javascript addEventListener I tried to implement a simple accordion using some code I found at w3schools but couldn’t get it to work (within WordPress) I had to resort to using jQuery and finally got the desired result using the following code:

<script type="text/javascript">
var $jq1 = jQuery.noConflict();
$jq1(document).ready(function($){
//alert("jQuery loaded");
//console.log("Running script to add event listener");
$(document).on("click", "#btn1", function() {
  this.classList.toggle("active");
    var panel = this.nextElementSibling;
    if (panel.style.maxHeight) {
      panel.style.maxHeight = null;
    } else {
      panel.style.maxHeight = panel.scrollHeight + "px";
    }
  });
});
</script>

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var $jq1 = jQuery.noConflict();

$jq1(document).ready(function($){

//alert("jQuery loaded");

//console.log("Running script to add event listener");

$(document).on("click", "#btn1", function() {

this.classList.toggle("active");

var panel = this.nextElementSibling;

if (panel.style.maxHeight) {

panel.style.maxHeight = null;

} else {

panel.style.maxHeight = panel.scrollHeight + "px";

}

});

</script>

I suspect the issue was either a JS conflict OR the DOM not loading fully when trying to add the EventListener. Note the above script needs to be at the end of the file, after the HTML for the button and panel. HTML table line-height This is something…

Surprise and Spoil

October 1, 2019
By: TheCra1gster

A surprise party .. yes they still exist Before we headed to Pattaya for the main event, we stopped off in Ban Chang to surprise a mate for his 60th birthday. It’s getting harder and harder to do these days, with instant messaging and all. I think we pulled it off as he seemed genuinely surprised. But then while he was probably expecting a quiet night in, he had to rush around and get music, drinks and seats sorted pronto. It was a fun Friday night. The beers were chilled to exactly the correct temperature, no mean feat given the…

The mysterious case of the high water bill

September 27, 2019
By: TheCra1gster

‘Town’ water is cheap over here, and billed monthly, thankfully (see why below). The bill usually runs to about THB 100 or a little more, and has been like that ever since we moved into this house. Five weeks ago we received a bill of 181 THB, which was nearly double the expected amount. Didn’t think too much of it, willing to ‘keep an eye on it’. Bad move! Here’s the tip – if you receive an unusually high water bill, your first move should be to check your water meter! (*sees wise heads nodding*) We didn’t 🙁 The following…

Our trips together

The Serious Stuff

The Ramble