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Home Page for Jeffrey Knauth

Last Updated:   11/16/24  18:10

I am a former IBM programmer, having retired in 1997. I spent the first 15 years with IBM in Kingston, NY and the next 15 with IBM in Raleigh, NC and RTP, NC. I moved to the North Bend Townhomes subdivision of north Raleigh in 1982. In 2013 I moved to the Heritage South subdivision of Wake Forest, NC (aka Heritage Two or Heritage 2).

Google Photos albums containing pictures with many comments in the sidebar

(Google Photos hints has info about album navigation, viewing full comments, magnifying pictures, etc.)

Heritage South Subdivision  (Heritage 2)

Three or more days each week I do litter pick-up around Heritage South, including parts of Rogers Road and the Sanford Creek Greenway. See litter pick-up for more on this, including a route map, pictures, and a list of some of the interesting items I have found.

This is a map with directions to Heritage South.

Here is a streams and trails diagram for the Heritage South greenways.

In the above animals album, the ant moat shown above the hummingbird feeder has proved to be very useful. I have made some extra ant moats and put a post on Nextdoor to give them away to Heritage South residents while I have any left.

Wake County Board of Elections

. In 2002 I started as a Wake County Assistant Precinct Official for precinct 01‑43 in north Raleigh, becoming a Judge in 2007 and Chief Judge in 2011. After I moved to Wake Forest in 2013 I was appointed Chief Judge for precinct 19‑09 in Rolesville (outside my home precinct). In 2017 I was appointed Chief Judge for the new 19‑19 precinct (now my home precinct), which includes parts of Wake Forest and Rolesville. Over the years I have helped the Wake County Board of Elections (WCBOE) develop some of their procedures and election manuals, as well as providing postmortem documentation for each election. Some of my more recent files associated with this are in Board of Elections work. See elections archive for information about past elections.

The "Information Mainly for Precinct 19-19 Voters" web page changes relatively little from election to election. It includes such things as maps and parking lot diagrams, links to access and change voter registration information, links for early voting sites and absentee voting, instructions for proper use of the Tabulator, Stanford Creek Elementary School considerations, and an iMAPS tutorial. Although some of this page is specific to 19-19 voters, a good portion is relevant to 19-18 (and other) voters as well.

PC and Internet Information

. I occasionally have helped relatives, friends, and neighbors with Information Technology questions. Here are a few PC/Windows/internet files associated with that work, now mainly oriented toward Windows 10. Included is information about doing full system backups/restores, as well as notes on a tool I wrote to easily back up critical user files.

I had my ISP-based email address for almost twenty years; the ISP was Time Warner (Road Runner), later taken over by Charter Communications (Spectrum). Because I planned to change my ISP to Ting when Ting became available, I decided to change to an ISP-independent email address and did that in the Spring of 2019, notifying my correspondents (people, companies, and organizations) of the change. This was made more difficult because the old address has been widely distributed. To help others faced with a similar challenge, I put together "Considerations for Changing Your Email Address". Still, long after the change, occasionally some emails still dribble in to that old address from companies/organizations that had been told (and retold) about the change years ago. Apparently they have trouble finding all the places where they stored an address and don't update them all when notified of a change.

Programming

KEDIT

The following zip files contain macros I have written for the Mansfield KEDIT for Windows text editor. Mansfield's support for this flexible and reliable product is now being phased out, but it is still my main editor, primarily because of the many macros I have written for it over the years.

PCCON Text Flow Tools Version 2.2.2 (updated on  9/13/21)
ENHSRCH Enhanced Search Tools Version 3.2 (updated on  7/04/23)
Miscellaneous Miscellaneous Macros   (updated on  9/08/23)
Python

Here are some of my Python efforts to date:

pack_grid Provides easy way to experiment with tkinter label packing
(On 7/8/23, fixed documentation display bug that Python version 3.8
had let slip by; pack_grid now works on Python versions thru 3.11.)
Version 2.2
BL_CSV Analyzes precinct distribution of voter names to pollbooks Version 1.4
HTML and CSS

Here is introductory HTML and CSS material for a class I once taught. The original intent was to show people how to create web pages for the North Bend Townhouse Homeowners Association website (see below) and for their own websites. It is very much at a high level, but is enough for people to get a feel for the subject and then be able to start reading and experimenting to learn more.

World Community Grid

The World Community Grid (WCG) had been a philanthropic initiative of IBM since 2004. In early 2022 the system was turned over to the Krembil Research Institute in Canada. [Note: After many hardware and software problems that caused the system to break frequently and be unavailable for long periods of time after the transfer to Krembil, the system now seems to be working again (sometimes).] WCG allows participants to transparently donate spare capacity of their computers, e.g., PCs, to numerous research projects. Past projects have included doing calculations for cancer markers, proteome folding, clean energy, clean water, HIV/AIDs, ebola, dengue, malaria, muscular dystrophy, and many others. Anyone can become a member.

All this takes place without affecting the computer user. When you become a member, you first download and install a program on your PC; this is easy to do. From then on the program automatically downloads pieces of work from the internet to your computer, runs the calculations when you don't need the computer cycles for something else, and then uploads the results upon completion; it then downloads another piece to work on. Depending on the number of CPUs (cores) in your computer and the number of threads each can run, multiple such pieces can be worked on simultaneously. You can tailor the program to constrain the amount of computer resources it will use and also can easily suspend the program entirely any time you want.

I have been a WCG member since 2004. When WCG is running, I have four PCs doing calculations (eight threads each running on three of them, nineteen on the other) when the PCs are not doing other work for me. At last count, WCG had over 808,000 members around the world (number now active?), donating in total almost 2.5 million years of computer time from over 7.6 million "devices" (number now active?).

Miscellaneous

. Here are some useful links (click on entry in left column):

This gives some hints for viewing a Google Photos album.

Here is a recent CPI history (Excel .xlsx file) using statistics from the US Bureau of Labor Statistics.

These are links to some space websites.

These are instructions for using

This describes some work I did for the North Bend Townhouse Homeowners Association (NBTHA) when I lived in Raleigh.


Send website comments to Jeffrey Knauth.

I  Accept

(something)

"I  Accept"   NOT !

For all those web pages which require you to press an "I Accept" button to acknowledge reading some unreadable document, here is a link to my proposed "I  Accept" Agreement Extension document to lay some things back on those "I  Accept" requirers.

Press the I  Accept button if you hate "I  Accept"s.