Dependence on the “cloud”
I’ve been thinking a lot about “cloud” services I’m at least partially dependent on. And they fall into three general categories: Services I use to make my own personal computing easier (Evernote,...
View ArticleMy 3 most used pairs of headphones
Sony MDR-V600 I bought back around 1999. I used these constantly until the hinge on the headband failed after 5 or 6 years. The earpads were significantly trashed at that point. Some unidentifiable...
View ArticleI’m still here
I’ve become disillusioned with the constant churn of websites-controlled-by-other-entities which I’m somehow compelled to participate in. They’ve developed a very effective value proposition for...
View ArticleNo obvious advantage to buying things from target.com versus other online...
I bought a window air conditioner from target.com, primarly because if I was told I could return it in a local store. Last Friday (May 11) it arrived, and it was the right tracking number, but it was...
View ArticleFastest way to check for an empty hash in Perl?
Recently motivated out of curiosity, I and a coworker were benchmarking different approaches to determining if a hash is empty in Perl. Expanding on this a little I present these curious results. In...
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First time PC board design success (LED cabinet / closet lighting)
Though I’ve designed a PC board for my own production using a toner-transfer etching resist and no holes drilled, I haven’t actually designed a board before for actual commercial production. It’s...
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Bad UI: Error messages you cannot copy and paste
If I get some kind of mysterious error, don’t make me manually retype into my web browser to search. That’s completely ridiculous. An example: Admittedly, there’s a link that searches help for the...
View ArticleDebian Wheezy (7.1) on Lenovo Ideapad S12
Here’s what I needed to do to get it to work. First, you need proprietary drivers for the 802.11bgn chipset (BCM4312 with LP-PHY). It should be possible to provide this non-free firmware at install...
View ArticleSome impressions of Ubuntu 13.10 “Saucy Salamander”
Since I have plenty of RAM in my Mac Mini and a fast connection, I decided to torrent the ISO and install it in VirtualBox. Unlike current versions of Debian, fresh out of the “box” it doesn’t grok...
View ArticleDebugging why pps line discipline gets removed after 5 seconds
I got my udev rules all set up to use an NMEA GPS board which provides PPS with ntpd: SUBSYSTEM=="pps", MODE="0664" GROUP="dialout" KERNEL=="ttyS0" SYMLINK+="gps0" KERNEL=="ttyS0", RUN+="/bin/setserial...
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Test equipment to repair, part 1
I like old test equipment, particularly of the era where they had switched fully over to silicon transistors and achieved truly modern levels of performance but hadn’t gotten completely into...
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