My father in-law

Robert G. (Bob) Myers

       Bob never shared the story of the last combat sortie of the war with me. After all, he was a typical humble "greatest generation" type of guy. I have now confirmed his aircraft commander's name is on that board row marked "66 and Aircraft Commander Chasey". See graphic at bottom of web page below, and Bob was on board that aircraft doing his job keeping all those big Pratt-Whitney engines humming and the fuel,oil and air coming. Some have speculated this Akita raid may have foiled a military coup that could have kept the war going on for many more bloody months. We may never know if that is true. The Japanese surrender was announced as the planes flew back to north field on Guam.

        I have borrowed this information liberally from several other internet sources. I've done this to help give a better idea of their family history to my two children. Also to give them a sense just what a great man their maternal grandfather was since they were not fortunate enough to ever know him in this life. Most of my edits contain a "jtc" reference so you can tell what is going on with these borrowed resources. I hope that someone will stumble across this page someday and maybe provide additional missing details. I have now figured out his aircraft commander's name and the plane serial number for the "Ten Knights in a Bar Room" B-29 that Bob Myers flew in. I've also filled in the blanks of the other nine  crew members. I have links to most of their memorials on findagrave.com towards the bottom of the page. Any information pertaining to the remaining one would also be welcome. If any of this information should not be used as I have on this page, let me know which portions are involved and I will gladly remove any infringing material.

Here is the link for where I got the mission details and much of the other information shared below from: www.315bw.org also portions from pages 422-424 of "Air Force Combat Units of World War II"

Very interesting diary of an aircraft tech can be found there under this link: Herb Bach story at www.315bw.org

This diary can give anyone a sense of what is was like to be deployed on that lonely hot spec in the pacific ocean all those years ago.

Get control of your cellular data usage for savings and better utilization of carrier services

Steps to Cellular Data Savings

• Get an unlocked decent cell phone that meets your needs
• Get a sim card for one of the top three * (pay for what you need only) providers:

Google Fi 

Consumer Cellular

Ting (one I use)

• Read and follow these free and mostly comprehensive recommendations from Ting...

Ting cut your data free e-book

Do more with your smartphone without paying more for mobile data

How to save data – Six tips to save data and money

Six (more) simple tips to save money on smartphone mobile data

All those links are pretty much generic to any provider even though they are thoughtfully provided by Ting. Yes it is a lot to take in but we live in a complex world don't we.

* per Consumer Reports

Virtual 5AD European Tour (Glen Shulfer "Following the 5th Armored Division Trek" videos in order)

Part 1 - Utah Beach

Part 2 - Utah Beach Villages

Part 3 - Normandy Hedgerows

Part 4 - Utah to Coutances

Part 5 - Avranches to Lemans

Part 6 - Lemans to Versailles

Part 7 - Castle at Sedan, France

Part 8 - 5th Amored Division Monument in Luxembourg

Part 9 - Stolzembourg to Wallendorf

Sorry part 10 is somehow missing.

Part 11 - Tribute To My Dad ~ Hurtgen Forest Final

Disabling my latest anti-feature in lubuntu 16.04

Goto: System Tools->Settings->Display

Turn the awful "Sticky edges" switch to a non-default of "off" then hit apply. Problem solved!

Automated muting - Android Nougat (7.1.1)

Up until very recently I've always enjoyed others' discomfort when they forgot to mute their mobile device in a public settings where electronic intrusions are frowned upon, you know like church or a lecture hall or a movie theater. The laws of averages or karma finally caught up to me and I got bit by this modern annoyance this week. I used the knee jerk reaction, there is an app for that right? Not so fast cliche-man. Turns out after loading 2 of those silly things and wrestling for quite a little while with poorly written application screens I decided neither one was meeting my needs. Uninstall and Uninstall. Then I started digging into the sound settings of my phone Android 7.1.1 (Nougat) OS, Lo and behold...

settings -> sound -> do not disturb -> automatic rules

Here you can add as many time framed rules as you like. My needs are pretty simple, I just have a couple of recurring weekly times where I want to set DND and vibrate notifications only. Here is a screen shot of one of them:

Notes: 1) You can set it to recur based on day of week for any or all of the seven weekdays 2) start and end times for DND period. 3) DND style: Priority notifications only, Alarm notifications only, or Total Silence (not sure how useful the first two are to most folks but they are there if you want to investigate... doctors on call maybe? I am guessing at a potential use case here). 4) Alarm overriding end-time maybe for those that want an alarm sent first to kill the "DND notification firewall" and then sender follows with actual voice or text call maybe? Again, not real sure what real world use of this setting is... feel free to enlighten me in the comments.

One final note of interest here: I also discovered you don't need to try and slide the volume down with the touch screen or hold the volume down button. Doing it with the volume down key means waiting for the auto-repeat to kick in and slowly reduce the volume to vibrate while the annoying advertising electronic "music" in my case fades away like a bad sound effect in a B movie. Android already has a single touch mute if you know the secret handshake...

1) power up device and unlock screen
2) volume down once only
3) touch the bell graphic on the left of the volume slider.... boom muted.

This single touch mute has been around since at least android nougat (5.1) BTW.

Fixing google cloud print issues + ubuntu (google classic printers)

Step 1...

sudo cps-auth

copy paste URL into your browser on GCP server

Step 2...

journalctl -xe

examine log to ensure all is well with GCP daemon

NOTES:

Sad to say but Google in their wisdom, or is it greed, has decided to kick "Google Cloud Print" to the curb at the end of calendar year 2020.

Never fear sports fans (and linux folks too!), these folks have ridden to our rescue with a pretty much fully functional replacement for GCP.... www.papercut.com (the mobility print product)

Beautify already correct xml content with easy vi/vim spell...

Need to edit out nodes from massive computer generated xml files that don't feature formatting for human eyes in the interest of preventing early onset blindness? Use this handy vi trick (requires xmllint be installed)...

:%!xmllint --format %

presto human friendly formatting for monolithic xml files with no indenting or newlines etc.

Before....

and voila....

If this throws an error on ubuntu (indicating not installed), install libxml2-utils and all will be well.