I am not worthy ...

[Buzz McCool]

Not a worthy followup to Eli's Making Carbide Gouges hack, but here goes.

The largest natural gas burner on our six burner stove never lit correctly. Identified by our home inspector at the get go as not lighting properly, we have been using a long butane lighter to ignite it the past four years we've lived in the house. I did take a crack at fixing it once. Knowing that three things were needed for ignition (gas, air, spark), deducing there was plenty of air in the room, and observing and hearing a bright blue spark crack away on the burner, I concluded there must not be enough gas. I used a Dremel tool to cut a larger gouge in the castle like burner crenelation nearest the spark that create the picket of flames around the burner. This hack was a failure. A year plus of head scratching ensued as there were plenty of other home fix-it projects on the list.

ObHack:

Three things are needed for ignition (gas, air, spark). Well if I have spark and gas, maybe I didn't have enough air? (i.e. too much gas.) I had a small leftover piece of thin stainless steel bicycle derailleur cable that I flexed and ran the ends through two of the gaps in the crenelations nearest the spark (routing it under the burner cap to make it invisible, flexed to hold it in place) thus reducing the gas flow in the spark location. Now the burner starts right up.

Buzz

[Eli the Bearded]

In alt.hackers, Buzz McCool <buzz_...@yahoo.com> wrote:
> Not a worthy followup to Eli's Making Carbide Gouges hack, but here goes.

Oh, come now. It's not that far out. A bit of work, but it's something
to get me away from a screen for a while.

> The largest natural gas burner on our six burner stove never lit
> correctly. Identified by our home inspector at the get go as not
> lighting properly, we have been using a long butane lighter to ignite
> it the past four years we've lived in the house.

Hmmm. The burners on my current stove are sometimes finnicky. I've used
second dental scalers (the tooth scaping tool from cleanings) to free
crud from the crenelations (as you call them) from time to time. It's a
nuissance since I usually don't think of it except when I don't have
time to clean it.

Absent that, I have a go-to move of putting a pan over the tricky burner
and one over the burner next it. Then I turn the gas on both, one lights
and the other doesn't until the gas spreads out and reaches it. Poof, a
small poof but a poof, and it lights. Then I can turn off the second
one. Much easier than matches.

> Three things are needed for ignition (gas, air, spark). Well if I have
> spark and gas, maybe I didn't have enough air? (i.e. too much gas.)

The crud that clogs my crennelations is, I suspect, caked Bon Ami
("Hasn't Scratched Yet") which we use for various kitchen cleaning.
Make a paste and mortar it in and that might work if the cable hack ever
fails.

ObHack:

I like keeping notes along side source code. Things like a diff that
adds a lot of printf() debugging code; my own notes about understanding
how the code flows; todo lists; alternate "Makefile"s etc. These sorts
of things become a hazard to "git add ." and a distraction in "git
status". That is *unless* they are in .gitignore. And you know what's in
a lot of .gitignore files? A simplistic wildcard for vim swap files:

*.swp

Vim will name them all .${FILENAME}.swp so README.swp (with no leading
period) or patchthat.diff.swp or Makefile.swp all are ignored by git and
never going to conflict with an actual swap file, and are (a) unlikely
to be removed by a "make clean" (oops, sorry README.o is gone) and (b)
very unlikely to be the name of an actual file someone has or wants to
put in source control. "patch < something" never cares about suffixes;
"make -f Makefile.swp" works just fine; vim will edit files with any
suffix. It works so well.

And "git add -f" will add git ignored files if you need to.

Elijah
------
or pick your own suffix and add it to the ~/.gitconfig global ignore

[Buzz McCool]

On 1/29/20 10:47 PM, Eli the Bearded wrote:
> And you know what's in a lot of .gitignore files? A simplistic wildcard for vim swap files:
>
> *.swp

I don't encounter that problem because I put the gvim swap files
elsewhere. My notes say I originally did this because of the file
manager I used to use on my old Sun workstation.

ObHack: A snippet from my .vimrc file:

" If you want to put swap files in a fixed place instead of the
" same directory as the file being edited use:
" (for Unix)
" if expand("$HOSTNAME")=="buzz_mccool_computer"
" Double slashes at end makes a unique file name from path
    set dir=/var/tmp//
" endif
" I did this because the Solaris CDE File Manager GUI would stutter
" if opened to the same directory as a file I opened to edit.
"
" (for MS-DOS and Win32)
" set dir=c:\\tmp\\