Tyler Uebele

Dehydrators are useful for drying food quickly so that it can be stored longer without spoiling. Foods like beef jerky, banana chips, "fruit-roll-ups" and dried herbs may be familiar examples. A solar dehydrator would, of course, dehydrate your food with solar energy.

Two friends of mine have a garden and like to dehydrate some of its produce. They also are interested in being kinder to the environment, but without all the "Green" hype. These two interests together inspired the idea of using a solar dehydrator, and consequently, my building one.

The design is simple and found in variations all over the internet. I've checked out various designs and settled on my own variation. The solar dehydrator has two main parts: the heat collector, and the food chamber. The heat collector is a long channel painted black inside with a clear top which is heated by direct sun, since hot air rises, a steady flow of hot air passes through the food chamber at the top of the heat collector. The food chamber has a vent at the top to allow air to leave after passing over screen trays of food to be dried. Ideally, the temperature in the food chamber should be hot enough to dry the food quickly, but not so hot that it cooks the food.

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I was working with an old VB6 app that was integrating with an older legacy system when I encountered this message:

I am not sure what Catastrophe I am ignoring here, but I wonder if I'll have as much ease ignoring the Apocalypse.

Trying to install a popular remote desktop program proved to be quicker than I expected, screen 1:

Unfortunately this express install didn't include options such as Standard Functionality.

I was working on a userscript last week to facilitate downloading and saving images from a facebook album. I wanted to automate this, rather than have to manually open and save each picture. The Greasemonkey add-on to Firefox seemed like the best way to get this done, and before long I had a bit of JavaScript that could fetch and save a file to my local disk with no user interaction. In the spirit of logging things I might want to come back to later, join saving other people the frustration I experienced with all my searches finding metablogs referring to the same ghostblog, I briefly document what I needed.

First, it seems sensible to cover downloading binary data via Javascript. I used the XMLHttpRequest object for this, which I created in this cross-browser way:

var oXML=window.ActiveXObject?new ActiveXObject("Microsoft.XMLHTTP"):new XMLHttpRequest();

My first attempts at downloading images would produce data, but not a viable image. It turned out to be affected by the way XMLHttpRequest process the HTTP response, which seemed hopeless at first, but proved to be easy to resolve, given the right information. Fetching binary data is a two-step process. The request needs to be configured properly, and the response requires some processing to restore the data to it's original form. The configuration of the request is simple, one additional line of code:

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