Category Archives: Administrative

Home Ownership

Doing some plumbing stuff, and the gate valve that controls water to the house won’t open. Handle turns nicely, though. Probably stripped threads or broken spindle. I’m cursing the plumber who installed it, as opposed to a ball lever.

And of course, we’re going out tonight to see Climate Hustle. So I guess no shower for her in the morning. I’ll have to fix it tomorrow.

[Wednesday-morning update]

For those curious, I did end up replacing the valve with a ball valve. The handle had sheared off, and I couldn’t even get it apart to see if there were replaceable parts. It turned out to be sort of a PITA, because I didn’t have a lot of length to work with on the pipe, due to it bending as it came out of the ground, but I managed to solder it in. It will be a huge improvement for future plumbing projects. Including the current one, in which I’m replacing a charcoal water filter with a four-stage reverse-osmosis system.

[Bumped]

Email Issue

I’m trying to send myself email from my own Linux machine, via SMPT. I’ve written the following Python program:

#!/usr/bin/env python3

# Import smtplib for the actual sending function
import smtplib

# Import the email modules we’ll need
from email.mime.text import MIMEText

# Open a plain text file for reading. For this example, assume that
# the text file contains only ASCII characters.
with open(“test.txt”) as fp:
# Create a text/plain message
msg = MIMEText(fp.read())

# me == the sender’s email address
# you == the recipient’s email address
msg[‘Subject’] = “Test”
msg[‘From’] = “simberg@interglobal.org”
msg[‘To’] = “simberg@interglobal.org”

# Send the message via our own SMTP server.
s = smtplib.SMTP(‘localhost’)
print(“s has been opened”)
s.send_message(msg)
print(“after send_message”)
s.quit()
print(“End script”)

It runs with no errors, prints the statements to the terminal, but no email appears. How do I diagnose this?

[Update a while later]

Thanks for the help in comments. Still haven’t solved it, but the need for the application that I needed it for has gone away. Nonetheless, it would be good in general to know how to email from a Python script.

Light Posting

…may continue until Monday night. We’re in Stinson Beach for the weekend for a mini-vacation.

[Sunday-evening update]

We have no television here, other than a big screen with a DVD player, but I’m not sure I’d watch the president’s latest attack on the American people even if I did.