Kitty rats

So i finally managed to get my ham radio license in november after several years of wanting to do it but not having the patience or ability to really study well. I was talking to an old roommate and she told me about hamtestonline. Apparrently hamtestonline is a really great way for studying for your ham radio exams as i had call to find out. You are allowed to miss 9 questions on the technission exam, I managed to only miss 5!

Next goal is to get my general license. I've already paid for the course just need to actually do the work. Hopefully i'd say by march at the latest i'll have my general license.

I'm not sure if i'll get my extra license or not. I will probably do it just to say i did it, however it's not really a priority. Most of the ham bands can be gotten with your technission and general licenses at this point chris told me that getting that one is more to say you've done the work then anything else.

I wonder how in the world we can run an HF antenna in an apartment.....lol!

I have no real idea what's going to happen with this project at this point even if it's going to actually move forward. Currently I'd consider this project up in the air and a giant question mark weather it's going to move forward. I got nailed with medical things so we'll see what happens.

for many reasons that have come up in the last couple days mike and i decided to just fork talking arch. I'd rather not drag frustration and politics into a project I want to help start and we decided that since we want to add quite a few new features to talking arch as well as try and  keep a generic talking arch livecd for those who just want straight talking arch.

And so we're forking it. we've decided to do several things i'll mention below all of which we think will help those who need a standard talking arch livecd that talks but we want to create a special livecd with several things.

*we want to create 2 sets of livecds 1 which uses fenrir the new screenreader and 1 which uses speakup.

*in the long run we will probably have to move to fenrir but that's quite a ways off i suspect.

*we want to create a livecd with many admin and rescue tools that  will assist those blind folks who  are system admins who need those features.

*We also want to add support to that same livecd to include other installers  so that say a user who needs a talking livecd but debian isn't talking,  the user can use that admin type livecd to install debian voidlinux arch you get the idea.

We are greatly looking forward  to getting this project moving and hope that those who may use it will enjoy it. I'll announce further things as we get things rolling. I suspect however the first step is to bring the generic livecd current so people dont have a livecd that's a year old or more.

Stay tuned!

So last year when i origionally bought kittyrats.com I wanted to relearn some of my admin skills part of which was buying kittyrats.com and getting a vps to play with. We had seen something of scaleway's offers they had at one time of  $3/month for a nice little arm server with a decent amount of disk and ram. I was also looking at prgmr.com as well as that's where chris's domain the-brannons.com has been hosted for many years.

Itried scaleway for a while and hated it too many accessibility problems on their site for 1 thing and many other things i hated about them.  I ended up going with and sticking with prgmr for many reasons the setup  was nice getting  voidlinux set up on it was easy for chris to do. having an out-of-band console via ssh is absolutely wonderful and the support and staff is incredibley wonderful to deal with. So, there is my recommendation so to speak. I have nothing but wonderful things to say about prgmr and well scaleway....the accessibility nightmare of the centurey and other bad things.

I've used marijunaa for several years now for medical reasons. I have a lot of issues that i'll write about later but for now let's say that i have severe chronic pain and vomiting and psych issues i dont think they've fully diagnosed. For me marijuana is a needed medication.

Doctors here dont deal with pain meds much any more and dont like giving them out for chronic pain. For me i refuse opiates for many reasons. The biggest of which is i dont like what they do to me plus they make me puke.

So medical marijuana for me it is. It controls the pain and nausia but it's got the side effect that i'm psychologically adicted to it. What this means is that my body seems to essentially require that the levels be stable. when they're not it causes my psych issues to spiral which makes me puke.....you get the idea.

As for recreational marijuana it's now a thing i could take or leave. it's a medicine and so essentially it's no longer fun.

I've not discussed this screenreader yet as it's been a while since i've had a blog i've been happy with.

Fenrir is a user-space screenreader for linux. I love it as i think it's a good replacement for speak considering speakup has some issues.

In reality all screenreaders have their issues but i prefer fenrir for many reasons. Mainly it's not built into the kernel and i can use it with an x terminal and get around orca's terminal bugs..

I think the biggest bug i've found in fenrir so far is one that i hope will be fixed before the next release.

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we have 2 kittyrats and definitly dont want more. JIngles and bastet are like our children for lack of better wording. Jingles is starting to have i guess what i'd call old age issues she gets really bad hairballs that cause her to spew a lot. so off to the vet on the 10th, and maybe we can find out what's wrong with the jingle kitty.

Bastet on the other hand is a healthy girl but she's got this weird fear of mike's guide dog. She kind of freaks out a litle but she's also getting curious and brave so we'l see what she does.

The kittyrats will have their own wordpress blog soon like me. They've got a older blog but it's time to hear what they have to to say!

everyone probably wonders by now what's a kittyrat? chris and i started calling our cats kittyrats when we got jingles. Reason why is because she's got a super long tail and long body and legs. The term kittyrat stuck because well it's stupidly cute and fun.:P

We got a roommate a bit ago and now mike calls them kittyrats to!

talking arch was a project created by chris several years ago it provides a way for users to have an easily accessible talking live cd for linux so they can install arch linux and possibley other things. I also know of many who use it as a rescue cd.

When chris stopped using archlinux the project was handed over to someone who took it on and has been maintaining it up till their x8664 machine went boom. Mike and i have decided to take over the project and either a, take it over or b fork it if we can't take over the project. Decision soon either way because if i dont hear anything by monday i'll fork.

i've been freenode staff off and on over the years as things have gone. I've been back for a bit over a year give or take and it's been an interesting experience. Over all it's been extremely enjoyable however and despite the spam the strange ones and the bad ones so to speak it's been well worth coming back.

I've changed my schedule recently to cover US nights and early sleeping EU hours so hopefully we've got a bit more hands to help out when users need to get the help.

i've had multiple blogs in the past and i've never really kept up witht hem for multiple reasons. This is one of those blogs where anything goes. I may discuss personal things open sources stuff and such and there will always be kittyrats!