DIY Live » Logs

Residency Starts Soon

Greg Lipscomb — Mon, 16 Jun 2008 16:02:20 +0000

Well, I start residency soon. I will be starting on July 1. I have been out of the country for a few weeks, and it seemed that my site went dead for a few weeks. It is rather unfortunate. I have lost a lot of traffic in the process. It seems that some of the search engines dropped my page. Hopefully I can get it put back up.

I had a chance to go visit Thailand, Cambodia, and Laos. They are truly great places, and very different than home.

DIY Battery Backup (UPS)

Greg Lipscomb — Sat, 22 Mar 2008 16:02:23 +0000

I just recently talked about me starting a saltwater reef aquarium. A lot of time and money goes into starting such a device, and the rewards are great. There is one problem though with having a piece of the ocean sitting in your living room. You have to have a constant supply of electricity. (I have actually found that even on my little 20 gallon tank, that it cost about $25/month to run.) Anyway, if the power cuts off for more than 4-5 hours, it could have devastating results on the poor inhabitants. I almost feel a moral obligation to not let that happen.

I had to start thinking of what I would do in case of a power outage. The oxygen saturation in a saltwater aquarium is much less than that of a freshwater, and if the water stagnates, it can have devastating effects. I also live in a hurricane zone, so that could be a disaster. The obvious solution is to get a generator. This would work for any long term outages. But what happens when the power goes off at 8AM, and you don’t come home for 9 hours?

I thought about getting a battery backup UPS system for a computer. I quickly found that they are very expensive, and don’t contain enough energy to last very long at all. I need at least my main circulating pump to run, and I want it to run for up to 24 hours. The first thing I did was go buy a 13$ battery back up air pump that plugs into the electricity, and turns on if the power is cut. This would at least keep some of the oxygen levels up, and was a quick and cheap fix.

The next thing which I have not built yet because I don’t have the time or money is to build my own battery backup. The design of one is relatively straight forward. All you need is a marine deep cycle battery, which will allow for multiple charges and discharges. I need a trickle charger to always keep the battery topped off, and I need a power inverter. I simply plug the circulating pump into the inverter, and it will run off the battery.

Now that doesn’t make much sense. I need a way of detecting if the electricity is on or off.

All you realy need for that is a double pole double throw switching relay. You connect the coil to the electricity in the wall. If the power is on, the switch will swing one way, and if the power is off, it will swing the other way. Then you connect the “on” switch straight to the electricity. When the power is connected, the pump will be plugged in, and will get its power from the outlet. You also will connect the “off” switch to the power inverter. If the power is cut, the relay will change, and your pump will continue to run off of the battery power through the inverter. You simply buy a nice charger that will turn itself off when the battery is charged, and you now have a great DIY battery backup.

Here is a simple parts list found

here.
-Marine 95ah deep cycle battery $45 (auto zone)
-Battery case $10 (auto zone)
-Schumaker auto trickle charger $25 (auto zone)
-Inverter- I used a really nice one that runs about $75, but you can get a 150w for about $40
-120v 3pdt relay (I found cheap 4pdt) $5 (all electronics)
-Extension cord for line in/out of the xfer box $5 (HD)
-misc. components… electrical and project boxes, ac outlet, wire, spade connectors, in-line fuse holder and connectors $20 (all electronics, radio shack)
___________________
~$150**

This could also be used for a battery backup for a computer. See this great project here.

Residency Match

Greg Lipscomb — Fri, 21 Mar 2008 20:58:16 +0000

Well, I found out that I matched for Residency in Neurology. What a relief. I am also in the process of getting a house. Yeah, it is true that the fourth year of medical school is much easier than the earlier years, but there is stress, and time consuming things of another kind. Just thought I would give a quick update.

I have started a 20 gallon Long salt water reef aquarium. It has been a blast so far. I will write an article telling how to do it soon. There is a fairly steep learning curve involved in starting a reef aquarium.

Forward wordpress feeds to feedburner

Greg Lipscomb — Fri, 20 Jan 2006 16:48:01 +0000

I use wordpress to run this site, and wordpress creates its own rss feed. It actually does a good job of creating feeds, but their is only one problem. It does not keep track of how many feeds you have. I found a plugin for wordpress that will forward all of your feeds to feedburner. Feedburner is a site that handles all of your feed requests, and keeps data on how many people are subscribed, as well as how many people are clicking through to your site. This plugin works great, but it requires you to use Apache. Apache handles all permalinks through a .htaccess file. The plugin edits this file to make any feed requests to be forwarded to feedburner. My server does not run Apache. It runs IIS, which means that I can not use the .htaccess file to handle my permalinks. I have to have /index.php/ in my URL.

Basically, the plugin won’t work. I did some research and found a site, fredfred.net/striker, where I learned here how to edit my wp-feed.php file to forward to my feedburner address.

In order to do this his way, you simply first register with feedburner and point it to

http://www.diylive.net/index.php?feed=rss2 {Of course, instead of diylive.net, you would put the address of your feed.}

The next step is to open your wp-feed.php file. What this file does, is when a feed is called, it will forward the feed reader to the appropriate feed, ex. rss2, atom, rss, or rdf. I found this code from fredfred.

< ?php
if (empty($doing_rss)) {
$doing_rss = 1;
require(dirname(__FILE__) . '/wp-blog-header.php');
}

//this is the code for FeedBurner
if( $wp_query->query ==’feed=feed’ ){
header(“Location: http://feeds.feedburner.com/DiyLive/”);
exit;
}
//end of the added code

In this example, you add this code in the file to forward anybody accessing your feed through this address – www.diylive.net/index.php/feed – to your feedburner account at http://feeds.feedburner.com/DiyLive/ {again, you would change DiyLive to your own account}.

I found some bugs in this though. A lot of people were accessing my rss2 feed directly by typing in www.diylive.net/index.php/feed/rss2. This Would bypass the code, and still allow them to see my wordpress feed. I only forwarded about half of my readers to my feedburner account.

With fredfred’s help, I was able to redo the code to make it forward all of my feeds to feedburner, no matter how the specified it.

Now, I had to do some adjustments, First I will show you how to edit the code. For the original part that I added, you need to replace

if( $wp_query->query ==’feed=feed’ )
with

if( $wp_query->query ==’feed=feed’ || $feed == ‘rss2′ || $feed == ‘rss’ || $feed == ‘atom’ || $feed == ‘rdf’)

You would also need to change the line that says
if ($feed == ” || $feed == ‘feed’)

to

if ($feed == ” || $feed == ‘feed’ || $feed == ‘feedburner’)

The next important step is to go to feedburner, and change the original feed to http://www.diylive.net/?feed=feedburner. Now, all of the subscribers will be forwarded to feedburner, but feedburner can still access your wordpress code by stating tht feed=feedburner. Here is a screen shot to show how to set up your feedburner settings.

This is kind of confusing, so I decided to give you the entire code. You can download it here. Just save it as wp-feed.php, and replace your other file. You just want to make sure that you edit it, and where it says header(“Location: http://feeds.feedburner.com/DiyLive”); that you change it to your feedburner address.

Full Post RSS Feeds

Greg Lipscomb — Fri, 20 Jan 2006 01:57:54 +0000

I am sorry for any changes that have been made to the RSS feeds. I was messing with some settings trying to figure out how it all works. I have changed back the RSS feeds to full posts. I hope this has not inconvenienced anyone. Go sign up at feeds.feedburner.com/DiyLive

Greg

Get your geek news

Greg Lipscomb — Wed, 18 Jan 2006 13:31:07 +0000

Have you ever been tired of everyone being called a geek? Now if you own an iPod, or an xbox, you are a geek, and people are proud of it. Justin over at geekfab.com got tired of reading about the newest features of the ipod, or all of the trendy things. He still loves his iPod like the rest of us do, but he remembers the good ‘ol days where being a geek was not a good thing. He decided to start a news site for people that really are a geek. It is a new site, but gives a lot of information on search engine optimization, and on making your blog rank higher with google. He will be updating it more in the future on some DIY projects, as well as more helpful hints on how to run a better more efficient blog. Go check out his site at [Link]

Comments fixed

Greg Lipscomb — Sat, 14 Jan 2006 23:20:38 +0000

I finally fixed the problems I was having with my comment section. Now, they should hopefully be readable. I am sorry they were all jumble to begin with. It has been hard to reverse engineer this script. I am new to CSS and php, but I am at least getting things the way I want them. Feel free to leave comments and read them now.

Greg

Change RSS feed to feedburner

Greg Lipscomb — Fri, 13 Jan 2006 16:55:43 +0000

Hey, I want to thank everyone for searching my site, and for coming back. I have several readers that follow my site through my RSS feed. I want to consolidate everyone into one place so I can keep track of it all. Will you all please change your feed to http://feeds.feedburner.com/DiyLive That will help me out a lot. Thanks

Greg

LAUNCH of new DIY Live Forums!

Greg Lipscomb — Sun, 08 Jan 2006 15:11:59 +0000

Well, I had some positive feedback on the forums. I got a VERY basic simple machines forums running. It is a default template, and is not much to look at. There are prob. tons of errors, and you will all have problems using it. These are all things that I can fix in the future. Anyway, try it out, register, and introduce yourself.

I am not sure about the categories yet, I posted a few, but any ideas would be appreciated. I want this to be a community forums where anyone can come for help. I want to keep it clean. I will edit anything that I feel is questionable material. Anyway, check it out. I may not be on much today. I have a big Pathology test tomorrow. I will either post stuff as admin, or as lipscgr.

The forums can be found at www.diylive.net/forums

Greg
DIY Live.

DIY Live Forums Poll

Greg Lipscomb — Sat, 07 Jan 2006 21:58:51 +0000

I have been tossing over the idea of creating a DIY Live Forums. I have a good following of people, who have a large knowledge base. I think a Forums would allow us to discuss projects that we are working on, as well as post questions that we have. I am sure that someone would know the answer to what is stumping us on our projects. I just wanted to do a quick poll to see if any of you readers would be interested in a forums for diylive.net? Leave a comment to let me know what you think about it. If there is interest, I may start it up soon. (I may start it anyway )

Greg