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Memory Management
I don’t mean this to be metaphorical, but maybe 10 or 20 years from now it will be. Computers and computing require memory. The reason is they need to keep quick calculations and values close at hand, because of communication speeds, because we need them to be quick and responsive, particularly for video displays and…
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More on Home Automation, Homebridge, Nest, and Apple’s HomeKit
I got Homebridge, the Node.js-based software Bridge for use with home automation and Nest (and other Internet of Things – aka IoT) home automation devices, working and running in my environment. And then my WeMo bridge started failing. But more herein about getting Nest to work with Homebridge and Apple Homekit because, as usual, the…
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Getting better at customizing WordPress
Since last year, I’ve been volunteering on a Taproot Foundation Website grant, and we’ve been setting up WordPress for a nonprofit that got awarded the grant for them to use as a replacement website for their content and publications. I’ve been working as the “lead developer” and my various hard and soft skills (including mentoring…
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Adventures in Home Automation
For me, it started with the Nest Protects (Smoke and CO detectors), then a Nest Thermostat, then more Protects, now some cameras, and some other products: A WeMo (Belkin) smart outlet plug, and now a Philips Hue bridge and two lights. It’s a slippery slope. A gateway drug. But it’s also a huge technical PITA.…
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Still seeking a good CrashPlan Home Unlimited Family replacement
As you may or may not know, CrashPlan, in April 2017, announced intent to mothball the CrashPlan Home service by October 2018, so since then I’ve been looking for a suitable replacement for my family.
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Toxic Masculinity, the Real Scoop on What it’s Like to be a Man in it, and Related Thoughts
Let me start by laying my cards out and saying why I’m writing this. I was assigned male at birth. I was raised a feminist boy in the late 60s, early 70s. I have a strong and assertive mother. I have a minor in Women’s Studies, I’m trans, and non binary (since I was 19).…
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2017 Thanks Taking
Let me start with a statement about “Thanksgiving”. We’re supposed to give thanks for all that we have. That’s great, but it elides the genocides, massacres, and wars that US settlers had with the natives of North America before taking possession. It elides the biological warfare. It elides centuries of neglect, abuse, and outright murder…
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What happens when Facebook goes down?
Answer: Then Twitter goes down, then Livejournal, then Blogger (briefly), then YouTube (briefly), then LinkedIn (briefer than Facebook and Twitter). I think part of this is user migration, but probably a lot of it was that one of the big Content Data Networks (CDNs) may have gone down. I don’t have proof. I was watching…
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Time to upgrade Mediawikis again!
I did this last year and took notes and made observations. This time I’m upgrading three mediawiki installations:
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A modern dev’s Git/GitHub centric process to change a file
Just so you know, and this probably isn’t the most modern/bleeding edge process or platform, but as a modern-ish dev who’s interested in using and leveraging the cloud service equivalent for tracking changes to my self-hosted WordPress files, this is my process.
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The dreaded rebuild
I don’t know about you, but I am rough on computers. In the course of the weeks and months I spend doing geeky shit, I tend to load and overload and reload and reconfigure and rebuild and reinstall a bunch of different kinds of development tools and platforms and language interpreters for different purposes and…
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Javascript geeking – p5.js and matter.js
I haven’t done HTML/Javascript geeking in a while, but thought while I’m in downtime between courses for my Data Science studies, I’d noodle around. I’ve been idly watching instructional videos by The Coding Train (Dan Shiffman) on YouTube for a while, but I was intrigued by both p5.js and matter.js (as an aside, there are other…
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Making a Home WiFi Network faster
My friend Deb came by yesterday and after some fiddling we got her computer on my wired Ethernet network, which is pretty fast (150 Mbps to the Internet), and 15 times faster than her computer’s usual 10 Mbps WiFi connection. Anyway, she asked how to improve her home WiFi, and by the end of the…
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Taoism and the Sage
By sagely, what I mean is that there is an oft forgotten set of ethics that are meant to apply to all Taoists, especially the successful ones. It’s a mix of altruism, governance, manipulation, idealism, and pragmatism, and the idea is that each Taoist follower, each potential sage, is supposed to be doing a lot…
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About Pupusas
Said I on some social medium somewhere, “If you ever come to California and find yourself driving ‘the 5’ (highway 5) from south to north or north to south, time it so you get to Tita’s Pupuseria in Buttonwillow for lunch or snack or dinner. Hands down the best I’ve ever had. They often have…
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Tools
Just a note: I’d like to thank the freeware program, Lyx, for helping create LaTeX markup for various mathy-sciency things I post about. Very helpful. You have to know what to include/not for Jetpack’s LaTeX interpreter, Beautiful Math (most especially the preamble that makes a Lyx document a document, and various carriage returns that tend…
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Statistics – This could be you! – Bayesian Conditional Probability and Medical Tests
As many of you know, I’m taking, for career change and self improvement, a certified curriculum offered by Columbia University and Microsoft and edX.org, on Data Science. With this, I hope to be able to change careers from Systems Engineering (which I love, but had become limiting) to a job in Data Analysis/Data Science, which…
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MacBook Pro slow shutdown (macOS Sierra)
Just a quick tech note. If you have macOS Sierra and you’re a coding/geeky/programming type and your OS is taking a huge amount of time to shut down, update your MySQL to 5.7 (I had to reinstall Homebrew to do that). If you’re not, maybe tweak your ExitTimeOuts (or get your pet geek to do…
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Testing connections
This is a test of the Emergency Malcolm Broadcast. This is only a test.
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Upgrading MediaWiki
Just a note about a day in the life of a geek. This all starts with the fact that I maintain two MediaWiki servers on my hosting plan. One is for my food-related experiments, recipes, and other household cooking and food info. The other is for game-playing. For a look at the cooking and food…
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The notability of $latex (82,000)_{10}$
The title is meant to read , but WordPress’s Jetpack Plugin’s Beautiful Math component doesn’t execute latex markup in the Title/Subject. I’m still keeping it in the subject, though. This post is about bases and numbers and elitism and of course, math and meta discussion. If you are interested, please read on!
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Home Networking 3 – A review of the basics
This writeup is inspired by the remote geek consulting I’m doing for my sweetie while she’s visiting Mom and trying to bring her Mom’s computing platform and infrastructure up to speed. Here I will review the basics of a good home network with some solid and useful upgrades for certain purposes.
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Visual Rhetoric – Some feedback for MSNBC
Over the years, MSNBC has been using and reusing a particular visual rhetorical style for presenting job growth numbers since Obama’s taken office. And it’s not bad for presenting good data consistently over time, for keeping the range of values within a reasonable scale. All good things, but what it lacks is punch.
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Misascribed – Chinese things
Fire drills, whispers, curses, checkers – since I’m half Chinese, I know how often these things get misattributed to folks of my ancestry. The fire drill article on Wikipedia provides a pretty whitewashed version of the fire drill’s origin from the one taught me by oral history from my elders. I don’t really fault folks for…
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Measuring and Calibration – Science Geek Series
A lot of bakers and chefs and chemists will tell you that they’re in the same business. So, in a way, are bartenders and cheese makers and drug dealers and brewers and vintners. Because we all need to measure things a lot and we need both accuracy (the ability to measure amounts reliably) and precision (the…
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Administrative note: User Accounts
If you register here for a user account, please use it to comment immediately. If you do not comment immediately (in a non-spammy way – I use Akismet), I will delete your account.
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Reporting Issues – Geek-as-a-Trade series
One of the geeky intersections I have in personal and professional geekery is that of reporting issues. Sometimes this is with an online shop or app or web service. Sometimes it’s with a network provider, or a cell phone service provider. Sometimes I have to report to a professional IT Networking team. Other times I’m…
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Philosophy and Introduction – Geek-as-a-Trade series
I’ve been a geek all my life. My work, my play, my housekeeping all involve geeking at some level. While plenty of geeks involve geekery in all parts of life, here is how I think I differ from most geeks especially at work and what’s important and valuable about that difference: I write stuff down and…
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Mirror
It wasn’t until I’d been sharpening knives for more than 40 years that I figured out that the sharpest knife has the most reflective mirror finish on the bevel on both sides of the edge.
