All posts by mlapaglia

New House!

My fiancĂ© and I purchased our first home! after about a month long process we’ve finally moved out of our apartment and into a house all our own.

First up was changing all of the door locks and dead bolts. I learned how to re-key Schlage locks to save myself some money I’d have to spend on a locksmith.

Second thing we did before moving in was paint. The previous owner had children who had taken to the walls like white on rice.
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I received a grill as a home warming gift from my parents (warning, some assembly and re-assembly after you mess up required).
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I’ve always wanted a server rack for my network/server equipment. I found an older model on Craigslist for cheap! Took me a while (and some family eye rolls/assistance) to figure out how to fit it into the closet. After some Amazon purchases for a patch panel, switch, UPS, and power strip I was ready!
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I am in the process of wiring up the house with Cat5e, replacing all of the old telephone and speaker outlets with glorious high-speed internet.
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And when I say high-speed internet, i mean fiber-optic (fiber modem in white) >:-)
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Had to strip down the existing poorly build cabinets to fit the server.
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Cray fish have inhabited the yard from the drainage area past my property.
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The fence around the yard wasn’t wide enough to fit a riding lawn mower. I extended the gate by converting part of the fence into a gate so I could mow my…
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…Beautiful back yard (aside from the cray fish holes and wet spots). Still need to remove some of the old nails, couldn’t manage to get them out with the tools I had on hand.
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The area has received an incredible amount of rain in the past month. Low spots in the yard have swelled with water, another issue I will need to take care of. I plan on installing some french drains in the trouble areas (the entire yard) to get rid of the excess water.

I am currently learning how to configure OpenHAB to control my newly installed Z-Wave thermostat and lights. As we go through our list of items we need to repair automation will hopefully be soon to follow :).

DataTables Search box blocking backspace key?

Working with DataTables for the first time I was having some issues with the UI. The search textbox was not allowing the user the backspace. They were able to select the text and use the delete key to clear it out, but it almost felt like there was a script capturing and suppressing the backspace key press. Upon closer inspection the “type” of the input was “Search”. According to w3schools (and Visual Studio’s Intellisense) this was valid HTML. The example of their site worked as well. Perhaps it had something to do with the other scripts running on the page, or possibly the Bootstrap library addon for DataTables? Changing the type to “Text” fixed the issue. I found an easy workaround here until I can fix the root of the problem.