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End of sprint @restartpartners
Been way buried this last three months doing decision making tools for https://restart.us Aka @restartpartners. Great adventure learning how to write code and get my hands dirty leading a small but amazing group. Main observations: Pandemic was great. So many great CS undergrads with nothing to do. Yet another chapter in the book about how…
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Argh beware an nVidia Shield killed my AVR
Yikes what a strange story, but we’ve been using the original NVIDIA Shield for years and suddenly, our home theater’s audio-video receiver (AVR) died. It literally wouldn’t power up and the UPS also didn’t work. Replacing the UPS didn’t help. We also replaced the receiver and the Shield actually caused the processor to hard crash…
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Stability achieved. Cut over to Unifi Dream Machine Pro happiness and do not brick your EdgeMax by rebooting too fast
Well it took all night but finally cutover from a MacBook controller to a Dream Machine Pro and I’m glad I did: Unifi and Synology becoming the Apple of networking and storage. Yes you can hack away or buy cheap consumer gadgets but they are a headache. These two companies are taking the open source…
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Adding streaming to a 4K projector
Today just about all television have a smart client that is typically Android based, this makes it easy to get the big streaming services without having to add any more boxes. But if you bought a projector that’s barebones many of these do not have anything like that mainly for cost reasons so all you…
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Managing an internal Network 2020
Well, it does seem like a network at home has gotten really complicated. Our house has over 30 different IP devices alone and trying to manage all of them is definitely not easy. Here are some notes: Moving to Power over Ethernet using 802.11af. Lots of new devices support it, in particular the Unifi collection…
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Keeping up with a sea of Machine Learning research
Wow, there is just so much going on in technology for Machine Learning from the devops of making it run to the new applications that are shipping to the core research. So how do you keep up? In the past, I’ve mainly used Medium and the Data Science posting plus TWIML as a podcast, but…
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Getting 4K HDR Atmos Content because why not?
If you spend the dollars on this expensive audio/video then you should make sure to get your money’s worth with content: UHD Bluray. Yes you need a new player for this and these disks are still the highest quality with best uncompressed video. So it is still worthwhile to buy them.Ironically, the best choice is…
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Dealing with Broadband in Seattle and paying $30 to avoid data charges. Argh!
Well we are unlucky enough to live in a part of Seattle where Comcast has a monopoly. Literally across the street, CenturyLink has gigabit fiber and about a mile away, Wave and Centurylink are duking it out. So there are three problems with getting a great price: Comcast always bundles things and they definitely do…
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The Trials and Tribulations of Windows 10, HDR and Atmos and Zoom
OK given the pandemic, i”ve been spending alot of time at home. We have a dedicated gaming 4K HDR PC that I’ve used with a 5-channel Corsair Vengeance 1500 for years, but what if we want to make this into a mini home theater and have a dual use as a zoom center. Well, with…
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Smart Scales, Blood Pressure and other connected devices
Well I’ve had really good luck during this pandemic in connecting all these health devices together, but today, my GreaterGoods Wifi Scale finally broke. It’s always been pretty flaky. The Wifi couldn’t handle special characters and now it won’t connect to Wifi and the iOS application that programs it is definitely busted. Doesn’t even render…
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Ah the joys and horrors of using Windows 10 Driver and shortcut hell
Man I had forgotten how confusing Windows can be. Having loved windows and then been a Mac user for the last 10 years, I finally have a PC that I use mainly for gaming, but since it has a huge screen, it is also useful for other stuff and heck I’m a curious person. So…
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Advanced vim hacking with neovim, coc, fzf and ripgrep
This product is so deep that I can’t even say how powerful it is. I’ve actually used the very first version of vi (pronounced “vee-eye”) when Bill Joy did the first cut, Wikipedia says it was in the very first BSD version, but that’s a longer story that doesn’t provide the whole story on how…
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Upgrading your PC and display to a Home Theater
Well, computers and home theaters have really converged. Since the pandemic, I’ve been using a 55″ OLED television(thank you LG 55B9!) as a computer monitor. It’s awesome to have six (?!) windows open and to be able to write code in all of them. But what if in the evenings, you want to reuse this…
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What to do when Verizon fails you? T-Mobile Cellular Router or Wifi Hotspot
Well, if you are unlucky to be stuck during this COVID-19 pandemic without wifi, life is going to be pretty hard. What happens if you are back to school and your cable appointment blown. The only real solution after you use your tethering data on your phone is to look for what is called a…
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More linting is good
Well we’ve been using mypy and other python checking for a while, but just realized that there are ton more for just about any file type: Shellcheck. this is a a great utility that finds all kinds of errors. In my best written shell script, it identified two serious bugs I didn’t realize that I…
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Snapplates for Tesla
Well, we kind of agree with Elon, the front of a Model 3 is too pretty to mar with a front license plate. Well, there are a couple of removable license plate vendors, but they require screwing something into the bottom of the fender which doesn’t sound super great. Well thanks to Ryan McCaffrey, he…
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Various Vim and Bash tricks
OK, if you are doing some major hacking with vim as your toy IDE, here are some advanced things: Rewrapping text. There are a bunch of tricks here, the most important is to put in .vimrc the lines set tw=79 wm=2 which means wrap around line 79. If you need to rewrap then your friend…
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Making your MacBook a home station
Well there a few steps in this long COVID-19 isolation to make your MacBook Air a nice workstation. This has gotten much easier with the advent of USB C and televisions that works monitors, but here are all the pieces that you need: I will put on tongfamily but does your computer have usb c.…
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Ubiquiti Unifi Tuning Part Trois: AP Selection, Placement, Dream Machines et al
Well, we’ve always been a sort of half Synology and half Unifi house. That is we use Unifi APs and Synology does the data storage and video cameras. It’s sort of worked well with some notable failures: I bought a Cloud Key v1 to manage the Unifi APs, but this thing keeps rebooting itself over…
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Blown Line Conditioner, Blown Pre-Amp RIP
Argh, this is definitely a first-world problem, but when you Audio Video Receiver breaks down and you are living in COVID-19 hibernation, it seems like a life crisis. We bought a nice set more than 10 years ago when Dolby 5.2 was super amazing as was HD at 1080p and the miracle of BluRay. Back…
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T-Mobile CallerID plus Amex promotions and Credit Reports
Well as T-Mobile continues its merger with Sprint (sad that there is one less competitor, we need more for telecom :-), they are adding a few things: Scam Saver. You download this on your phone and it is supposed to block more scams we will see. Caller Id. This caused me to look at the…
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Backup LG Magic Remote Compatibility
OK, this is a confusing topic, but if you have an LG television and lose it, you can’t actually turn the TV on. I know this because I spent 30 minutes looking for a remote that was under a chair. We wanted to figure out what backup remote to buy. This is a confusing topic…
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Unifi Hacking Around V3
OK, so I’ve still been having problems with our Wifi. The big insight has been the turning on of Wifi AI and that at least our Windows machine can’t handle the so called DFS channels in 5GHz. The other thing is that I suspect there is a problem with longer range 5GHz where our Apple…
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A Good Laptop is you don’t want to spend a fortune
Well the choices are a little complex right now. Having gone back to Windows 10, I can say that you will get a low cost option, but you will have problems. If you go with Apple it will be largely trouble free, but expensive. So what’s a person to do. Well assuming that you are…
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Car washing and geek materials for windshields
I finally had a chance to wash our very dirty cars. Finally cleared up and to get the windshield washer fluid up to snuff. Here’s the quick (distracting from the COVID-19 epidemic list):OK, if you are going to get started, then if you love your car at all, getting a ceramic coating on top of…
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Windows Networking Still so clunky, big disk problems with Windows Server and 5GHz WiFi DFS Problems
Man, I don’t use Windows too much any more, but somehow I would have thought that simple things like discovery in a home network would be fixed by now. With a Mac, it is trivial to discover a server with something claleedd Bonjour (or mDNS Responder) for power nerds. This basically has each peer in…
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More Superhuman geek tricks
Ok they actually do answer you if you send mail to split inbox. Here is the trick: On their desktop applications, you create a “filter” first by doing a search with a / then you do a split inbox. So you can set this anyway you like with a huge number of different criteria including…
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Quarantine Purchases of Random Stuff:
OK totally miscellaneous things that are breaking around the house: PanaMax Failure. Our PowerMax line conditioner failed and took down our AVR. So that’s super depressing. They apparently have a lifetime warranty and lifetime downstream warranty, so good luck, maybe if I call their 800 number they might actually fix it at 800.472.5555 so we…
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Making email the proper center again
What a mess this quarantine lifestyle is. I have literally half a dozen channels I have to monitor from email to Slack to iMessage to Whatsapp to Signal to Teams. Then I have notifications from a host of products from Mac Calendar to Github to Trello. So one thing about this exploration of different mailers…
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Superhuman, vi, slack and keyboard shortcuts rule
I haven’t done really heavy programming in a few years and in the last week I was reminded how important typing is even in the age of visual applications. It is just faster to get around and worth the effort if you are doing it all the time. So some quick tips: Divvy. Yes I…