For a simple, easy-to-make, and mostly homemade bike tire sealant I’ve resorted to the following recipe where the parts are mixed by mass:

3 parts Splash Original Blue windshield washer fluid (-20 degree F formula)
1 part FX Latex, Molding Liquid Latex, HV-65 (UPC 811832013546, 16-ounce bottle)

Splash’s Safety Data Sheet notes the windshield washer fluid is mostly water followed by methanol (to reduce freeze point), denatonium benzoate (a bittering agent), and patent Blue Dye L85000 (for coloring). The SDS also notes that the product’s methanol content is 30-32% by weight, which may be important should Splash ever stop manufacturing this product and we need a replacement.

It’s frustrating when people don’t post updates or additional details on how their homemade sealant works or how much it costs. I plan to report back here with updates on its performance as I use it. I mixed up a batch last week and plan to pour it into my Big Dummy’s Surly Extraterrestrial tubeless tires before RAGBRAI L. Ride on!

On cost I was curious if this recipe is any cheaper, per ounce, than name-brand sealant. This spreadsheet shows average per ounce costs at a local bike shop for 8-ounce and 16-ounce bottles of Orange Sealant. Based on those costs, the homemade recipe costs half the price of Orange Sealant’s 8-ounce bottle and it is about 30% less than their 16-ounce bottle.

** UPDATE 3-12-2024 **
I made 4 bottles of sealant and already used all of it up plus an 8-ounce bottle of Orange Sealant that I had to buy. I made a few tire replacements and helped others. I’m glad I have this recipe, I’m going to make another 4 bottles tonight or until I run out of time. After making the sealant, I poured about 3 ounces into my rear Surly Extraterrestrial tire.

** UPDATE 3-14-2024 **
Sealant in the rear Extraterrestrial is working great. The tire had been slowly going flat over three days before I added sealant on 3-12. After 3-12, the tire is holding pressure just fine again.

** UPDATE 3-15-2024 **
I think a contributing reason the recipe above is so successful is because of the ingredients, specifically the ammonia-free liquid latex. How do I know it’s ammonia free? Safety first is my motto. I contacted the manufacturer, Liquid Latex Fashions, and requested a Safety Data Sheet, which their brilliant customer service promptly provided to me. Thanks, Liquid Latex Fashions!

I posted about this earlier and had it happen again: I foolishly had 4 Safari windows with a zillion tabs open, updated macOS Ventura to 13.4.1 and Safari 16.5.1, patched with Opencore Legacy Patcher, and when I reopened Safari I noticed all my windows and tabs were gone. No sweat I had a Time Machine backup.

1. Click on your desktop, press Command Shift G, and paste this file path:

~/Library/Containers/com.apple.Safari/Data/Library/Safari

2. Go up to the Time Machine icon in the menu bar and choose “Browse Time Machine Backups”.

3. Click the up arrow to go back in time for the Safari window, I chose the previous night just before I had initiated the Ventura system upgrade.

4. Hold down the Command key and select/tap on each of the files highlighted below, then click the “Restore” button. Here’s a list of the files while I try to post the screenshot:

CloudTabs.db
CloudTabs.db-shm
CloudTabs.db-wal
SafariTabs.db
SafariTabs.db-shm
SafariTabs.db-wal

5. Quit Safari and when you’re prompted choose to Overwrite the existing files.

6. After the copying is complete, launch Safari and from the menu bar choose History->Reopen All Windows from Last Session.

Boom, your windows from the previous session should now be restore. I’m leaving my previous post up just in case Apple fiddles with Safari’s structure in the future. Also note, following these instructions does not erase your history, even information between the tabs you’re recovering the current time – this history remains.

* Sorry for the lack of a screenshot, I have it, but WordPress is giving me some fits. Must be a permissions issue I’ll fix later. *

Bleh, Microsoft’s Public Folders feature worked wonderfully on Outlook for Mac. My company recently moved to Group Mailboxes when Microsoft deprecated Public Folders. We were told that it would be possible to archive messages from an inbox to a Group Mailbox on iPhones (and Macs) just like Windows, but six months in and the feature does not exist outside Windows. Microsoft Support recommends that we request the feature and folks did 7 months ago, but there’s still no official word for if or when this feature will show up. Microsoft, please bring feature parity across platforms.

Ella’s right headphone speaker stopped working on her Beats Solo 3 headphones. I found this guy’s video helpful, specifically the first half of his video. Her headphones appeared to have a wire that broke, so I ran some a couple inches of wire in the left headhphone and the right headphone appears to be working again, but Ella and I swear it cut out briefly – may be another break somewhere else.

I’m going to order some replacement ear cushions and if the cut-outs continue, I’ll just run replacement wire between the ear pieces. Also note, in the case of Ella’s headphones, another guy’s video did not help nor did this one, and this one might have minimal promise if I want to try and cut corners with the right headphone and replacing wire.

The kitchen and bathroom in our house had several older water supply stop valves that required several turns to close and often leaked even when they were supposedly closed. When putting a bathroom in the basement 14 years ago I foolishly believed the older water supply stop valves were inferior to the newer quarter-turn stop valves that others bragged about.

After installing several of the newer quarter-turn stop valves I’m already finding them to have failed – when turned to the off position, they still allow a trickle or even a stream of water to flow out, and this is described by others too. The older style valves would also fail after several years, but they had rubber washer rebuild kits to rejuvenate the valve’s operation. In the case of the new quarter-turn stop valves, I contacted one manfacturer, Nibco, and spoke to a technical support person, Jeff. I asked if there was a rebuilt kit I could purchase for a failed valve I own and he said “No, none of the parts on that valve are field-serviceable”.

Look, I work for a company that makes a lot of money mine minerals from the ground, but it will be difficult to sustain this bleed rate on the planet if we’re constantly mining new minerals and, even if we scrap the existing valve, throwing energy towards making new supplies. Worse, replacing the valve isn’t even a one-to-one process. While I ultimately purchased a replacement valve of the same model from Menards, Nibco must have changed manufacturers because the new body was shorter than the last one and required me to shorten the 1/2-inch diameter copper pipe poking out from the wall. Putting a new rubber washer on an old style valve would have required 1/10 the time I spent installing a brand new quarter-turn stop valve body.

Don’t believe the hype, quarter-turn valves are great for a few uses, but long-term these valves will cost you more money and time. If you don’t value either, ignore this post.

My in-laws had an old MacBook Pro that they wanted the data wiped from, mainly because the display was missing vertical columns of pixels. I couldn’t bring myself to erase without figuring out what the issue was, surely others were on this years ago. Here’s a summary of people describing the issue with past and current fixes (the last I may attempt at a later date when I’m a bit more mobile).

Apple Community Support – Vertical lines of missing pixels on MacBook Pro

One customer saying that Apple replaced his machine

Apple’s Repair Extension, ended December 7, 2012

DosDude1 describes the repair, he replaces a defective Nvidia 8600M GPU on a 15-inch 2008 MacBook Pro

A1261 2008 17″ MacBook Prorepair.wiki

iFixit.com – MacBook Pro 17″ Models A1151 A1212 A1229 and A1261

Schematics and Boardviews Availability at logi.wiki

My macbookpro11,5 is rocking OpenCore Legacy Patcher (OCLP) 0.6.1 with Ventura. I recently updated from 13.2 to 13.2.1 and macOS updated after about an hour and a couple restarts and log-ins. Afterward, I attempted to use OCLP and its Post Install Root Patch feature and encountered an error message: “PatcherSupportPkg resources missing, Patcher likely corrupted!!!”, which left the macOS running without graphics acceleration (and a bit more slowly).

I first tried building OCLP’s nightly build code from my Mac, but I was left with the same message, above.

Finally, from OCLP’s “Build and run from source” page I clicked the link to download a pre-built binary. Using the pre-built binary to launch OCLP 0.6.2(n), where “n” equals nightly build, I then clicked the button to complete a Post Install Root Patch which loaded the proper GPU code and after a restart 13.2.1 is running nicely on my Mac.

I was replacing some housing on my Pugsley and noticed a few things that might be helpful next time.

First, the darn shifter pulley inside the external gear mech is a pain to get old cables out of. My shift cables refused to let the socket set screw to back out. Sadly, I had to drill all the way through the socket set screws with a 7/64-inch solid carbide standard length drill bit with a 118-degree point and then I reamed the shifter pulley’s threads out with a 4mm-70 tap. This works well, see pics below, just be patient so you don’t bungle the threads and drill straight already! I also found it helpful to drill out the old cable from the shifter pulley using a 1/16-inch drill bit (carbide not necessary for this one); however, this size bit will enlarge the holes for the shift cable – I didn’t see any issues with it for the final setup.

My Pugsley’s Rohloff kit has the old-school Rohloff shifters, so I followed the first 5:45 minutes of this video to remove the old cables and insert new cables. I did have to install one new cable housing, which measured 5 feet 11 inches for my XL Pugsley. For making connections to the external gear mech, I skipped 55 seconds into Rohloff’s video and continued along.

My Pugsley is back in business, though I still think shifting is stiffer than it should be. I may try fussing with the external gear mech’s angle to see if that reduces the stiff shifting.

I wanted a free solution to get macOS (and an Apache web server) working with Dynamic DNS offered by ZoneEdit. ZoneEdit’s DYN DNS instructions seem fine, but their macOS instructions seem a little out-of-date at the time I drafted this post. If you’re in a similar situation I hope these instructions help you:

1. Install ddclient by opening Terminal and execute the following command:
   brew install ddclient
2. Configure ddclient .conf file:
   pico /usr/local/etc/ddclient.conf
3. Modify the .conf file between lines 83 and 88 by making the following edits:

   use=web
web=api.ipify.org
protocol=zoneedit1
server=dynamic.zoneedit.com
login=(username)
password=(DYN auth token)
wildcard=yes
#your-sub-domain (this line is commented out in case I need it later)

4. For the login and password lines, replace (username) with your ZoneEdit username and replace (DYN auth token) with instructions on the next step.
5. To get your DYN auth token use a web browser and visit cp.zoneedit.com, log in with your ZoneEdit credentials, tap “manage” to the right of your domain name, tap the “DNS Settings” tab, and to the right of “Dynamic DNS” tap “DYN”. At the bottom of this page, click “view” to display your DYN Authentication Token. Copy your DYN Authentication Token and use it for Steps 3 and 4.
6. After doing all of this, restart your system and ddclient should take over on its own. For whatever reason, I had to restart my machine twice, but I might not have been patient enough after the first try.

Extra helpful bits:

You can adjust the execution interval by changing the value of
StartInterval (in seconds) in /Library/LaunchDaemons/homebrew.mxcl.ddclient.plist.

To restart ddclient after an upgrade:
sudo brew services restart ddclient

Or, if you don’t want/need a background service you can just run:
/usr/local/opt/ddclient/bin/ddclient -file /usr/local/etc/ddclient.conf

Thanks to this community post this DYN DNS solution for macOS was pretty easy to set up. Read about brew’s configuration for ddclient here. If you want to revive something more legacy with a macOS interface, this might be worth a look if it is updated.

My favorite VPN server had maintenance last night and this morning my Mac would no longer connect. The error message told me the username and password were incorrect, but this was not true. After opening Tunnelblick’s log, I quickly found that there were TLS errors – yes, seems the VPN server operator renewed the certificates!

Easy fix, I downloaded the latest certificate and profile by logging into my provider’s WatchGuard VPN website, downloaded the latest profile, cleaned out my previous passwords in Keychain, and logged back in. Note: to log in, I had to use the username “MFA\bcs”, where MFA\ represents the domain for multi factor logins. I’ve got more detailed notes on this, but until people request the details in the comments I’ll stop here. Also, for those just wanting to delete their cached Keychain credentials to start over, check out these instructions, and in my case it was useful to use these to see what domain I had logged into when my credentials and TLS certificate had previously worked.