The car failed Missouri safety and emissions testing today. When I pulled out of the driveway this morning something happened up front, on the brakes, one of the wheels locked up, "SLIP" and "VDC" lights came on and wouldn't shut off. Restarted the car, got out, checked for anything noticeable and drove down the road to the gas station. At the station I decided to plug the OBDII scanner in and sure enough, it was throwing an ABS code.

This weekend, being what is likely the last warm weekend of 2015, I decided it was time to wash/claybar/wax the 350z. The weather was beautiful, I spent most of Saturday afternoon performing the first two steps, washing and clay bar’ng the car. The car was pretty clean, but there were some decent cone marks/residue on the side skirts from the previous owner, most of the time spent with the clay bar was there, though there were various other locations on the car that needed attention as well.

Earlier this week, Dave from SoloPerformance.com and I headed down to Chattanooga to pick up Project350z V3. A 2003 Nissan 350z Touring model, with 145k miles on the clock. The car was purchased from a fellow autocrosser, and is primarily prepped for SCCA’s STU class.

So the time has come, I am currently car shopping again. I’ve been threatening it for a while now, but with the 2015 Solo National Championships going on this week, and a few other life things figured out, it is time to make the 2016 autocross season happen!

So a few details. I’m once again looking at early 350z’s, this time around I’m not looking for a daily driver, this next car will be built specifically for autocross and a fun weekend toy, with some daily driving here and there (thankful I have a short commute). I am looking for the perfect car, how do you define that? Well, in an ideal world the perfect 350z for me would be

This is a follow up post to our post earlier this week

Earlier this week we posted about not being able to get the INSTEON Wireless Security IP Camera with Pan, Tilt and Night Vision working with our Insteon Hub using the Android Application. I reached out to Insteon support to see what they had to offer, they suggested that if I had an iOS device I could use the “Add existing” option when adding the Camera to the Hub app, but that feature isn’t available on the Android version.

We are an Android household, though I do have a Macbook Pro, I don’t have an iOS devices. I commandeered the office’s IPod Touch for the weekend to see if I could get the cameras working, and what do you know, they sure do!

Has anyone been able to successfully configure the Insteon Wireless IP Cameras to work with the Insteon Hub, though the Android application?

I’ve tried multiple times over the past two months and finally gave up and emailed support to see if they can help. My cameras work fine using the IP Camera Tool, but I cannot get the App to finish the “Saving settings – do not unplug camera.” screen. It will reboot the camera after applying the settings, but never responds after that. You can then retry, but the camera doesn’t reboot a second time.

I’ve tried with both the camera plugged in to ethernet, and with it just using WiFi without any luck.

For years I have maintained a set of Visual Studio project templates that are used by thousands of people to quickly and easily create Modules for the DotNetNuke Content Management System, and for years, I have had people request that I create a project template for creating a DNN Skin (now known as Themes).

This weekend I finally took the time to do just that. With the latest release of my Visual Studio project templates, you can now create a Theme for DNN. When doing so, you will be presented with a basic skin, using Bootstrap v3.1.1, based on my HammerFlex theme for DotNetNuke.

Over the past few years I’ve been threatening to get into remote control multi-rotor aircraft. Thanks to Andrew McMaster (www.clearuphere.com) I finally pulled the trigger and have built my first aircraft. I say first, because I am pretty sure it will be the first of many.

My first build was a DJI F450, using a kit ordered from UAVProducts.com, as well as many other parts from various sources. If you are looking to get into quadcopters/multi-rotors (don’t call them drones) you need to ask yourself a few questions.

It has been 3+ years since I’ve worked with the Insteon hardware that I acquired years ago (some of which was documented here), since the last time I gave Insteon a go, we have moved to from San Carlos, CA, to Half Moon Bay, Ca, to Ballwin, MO, and now we’ve purchased a home in Wildwood, Missouri.

In late June 2014, we took a family vacation. We left from St. Louis and drove west to the promise land. Colorado, that’s my promise land. The beautiful country, the place I would go if I were rich and could move all of our family (immediate and extended) to one place without thinking about the cost involved in such an undertaking.

Our family of four (myself and my wife, plus a 3 year old daughter, and recently turned 1yr old son) visited Denver, friends, family, and then we went further west, to a place 50 miles from the nearest town, at 9500’, deep into Wilderness country.

We went to Trapper’s Lake.

Just over 5 years after we purchased our first house, and almost 4 years to the day we sold that house, we are once again house hunting. This time, we are in St. Louis, as opposed to the last time around with https://going2colorado.com/ and ultimately https://ourcoloradolife.com/. I don’t envision building a full blown website like we did last time around, but who knows, maybe I’ll get creative one evening and do it.

So, why St. Louis? With all the bad stories lately (#Ferguson and the fact that Missouri is rated poorly) you might think, “Who in their right mind would want to live in Missouri?”.

One of the best things I love about the DNN platform is the ease of building, releasing, and updating Extensions for your website. If you need custom functionality you can either build something yourself, or likely find something that someone else has developed previously that might fit your needs.

If you are an extension developer for DNN (previously DotNetNuke), you have many options for how you can get those modules into the hands of potential customers. If you want to get your modules into the hands of as many different users as possible, you can’t just stick to one distribution mechanism, you need to reach out and try to get your extension available in as many places as possible.

Some of the ways for distributing your modules include: 1) Hosting on your own website, 2) Hosting on GitHub, 3) Hosting on Codeplex. The often overlooked one however, especially for free and open source modules, is 4) The DNN Store.

The Store is a great marketplace for DNN extensions, and while it primarily is used to “sell” extensions, there was even a time free extensions were discouraged or even removed, that is not the case anymore. You can list your extensions, modules, skins, or even providers, to get your products out in front of more customers. Some of the benefits of doing so

1. More exposure – Besides searching on Google, the Store is the single most accessed place when people are looking for an extension for DNN.
2. Customer downloads - By uploading your extensions to the Store, people can “purchase” them, with $0 pricing. This allows for those customers to easily find those downloads again in the future, as products that they have purchased and download them again.
3. Customer updates – You can put out a new release of your extensions, and using the Patch tools provided within the Store you can easily get that patch out to customers as well.
4. Customer email option - After someone purchases one of your modules, you can have the Store automatically send them an email with information related to the module, resources on how to use the module, what your support policy is, etc.
5. Customer list – One of the biggest benefits of people purchasing your extensions, you can build up a customer list. What you do with that list might vary.
6. Referrals – Finally, and one of the biggest items, is the ability to earn some cash from your free extensions? How you might ask? Referrals, if you link to the Store with referral codes included in the links, if a customer actually pays for a module, in addition to downloading your free extensions, you can earn a percentage of that sale. You won’t likely get rich from this, but if you do things right you can get yourself a bottle of Jack Daniels here or there!

One thing I would highly suggest, if you are selling modules, DO not use the Store as a way to get people to “try” your modules, and then point them to your own website to do the selling. That is just not cool.

Please be sure to check out some of my free extensions in the Store: HammerFlex and DNNCHAT being the two most popular extensions I have there. And yes, to be upfront, those links have referral codes embedded in them!

With the release of DNN 7.3.0 this week, it was time for me to get my sites upgraded. I upgraded most of the sites without any issues, but wanted to point out a few errors that I received on sites, and how I resolved them.

The very first upgrade I did started out bad, it was for this site, and while the upgrade was 100% successful, as soon as I tried to load the site I got a generic 500 error. Accessing the site from the webserver gave me a little more information, seen below, but not much.

I used to be a Microsoft fanboy, really, used to be. I had Windows Phone back when it was SmartPhone or Windows Mobile, or whatever they wanted to call it (too long ago to remember, and it was always changing). I purchased a 30gb Zune the day they came out (unboxing video), I purchased a 4gb zune after those devices came out. I had a Zune Pass for too many years to count.