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#Allinwashington and congrats
Wow, congrats to friends Tony and Michelle and everyone else for a cool concert, nothing like seeing 30K simultaneous views and some great music too. https://www.twitch.tv/amazonmusic is the streaming location To check it out. at https://allinwa.org to donate and I’m having some trouble streaming from that site, so use the first link Nice work all
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Great but not expensive Scotch
Well, I guess you can always buy a really expensive Scotch in the hundreds of dollars and of course there are of course less expensive. But if you want a good bottle as a gift, there isn’t a lot of help. Scotch Noob I think is a good intermediate site for this. He has a…
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Life suckers: Run don’t walk to calling Comcast Downgrade
Ok Comcast is constantly lowering prices but they don’t tell their current customers. There is the reverse of price protection. Old customers pay more. So call a special number 1 (800) 934-6489 and not the main Comcast one and select ‘down grade service’ This will get you to some reasonable. If you ask for it…
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Getting ready for Summer Room Air Conditioning
Well, many folks are going to be holed up in their apartments instead of offices, so time now to get a room air conditioner. Even when you get one, you will want to make sure it has a good seal. You need three things A mount so the thing doesn’t fall out the window. Although…
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Yet more light bulb types S8 and more
Ok just when I thought I knew everything. From knowing that a light bulb shape such as E26 is the common lightbulb base (mean Edison screw type with is 26mm wide) also know and medium to the light bulb shape (an A19 which is the familiar “normal light bulb) A shape. There are many more…
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Why are all these numbers so close? Relationships, genetic diversity and survival minimum
Genetic diversity shows you need need 50-500 people to maintain enough diversity to prevent gene drift and too much inbreeding Social relationship. The number of relationships you can keep in your head is about 150 called the Dunbar number. The number is actually between 100-250. So surprisingly close. Tribal relationships. The smallest size is 50…
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Best CO Detectors, replacing Kidde CO and Smoke Alarms, Chopping Boards
Ok I’ve been busy so this is a combo post of all the questions I’ve been asked this week: Smoke Alarms. Our Kidde COSM-IBA finally started beeping. It wasn’t the battery, turns out that it will die seven years after being plugged in so you need a new one. I don’t know if this is…
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Comcast downgrading is hard a guide
Wow, they are such a piece of work. First of all during this COVID-19 thing, suddenly the bill rises 40% without any notification (I’m sure I rolled off of some plan). It is so difficult, here are some things to know: Add a notification on auto payment. Comcast does not provide any notification when you…
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More Vim tricks with Python
Well using Python quite a bit more and while my Vi was well tuned for Javascript there are some things to know with Python. First somethings that are reminders of features of Vi that I don’t use enough: gqq which means reformat the current like, this let’s you do rewrapping properly particularly in README.md files…
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If you are doing a quick resume
Not that anyone should need it any more, but LinkedIn does a nice job of spewing your profile into a PDF, it’s available in the More tab of your profile. If you then push this into Google Docs, they can read PDFs decently well and you can hack from there.
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iPod and iPhone Nostalgia
Well, I’m finally having (no) time for old projects, but sometimes they beckon. In this case, I have a very early iPod with a Touchwheel. Actually, I have two. But the very most original one from the original HP partnership seems to have a crashed drive. But the second with the original skin and songs…
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Silicon Valley Bank Discounts
Wow, SVB sure has a great collection of discounts for startups. These are mainly about existing programs, but there are some good ones: AWS. They have a startup program that gets you $1K off on the first charges. Google Cloud. Similar one, up to $100K depending on how much they like you. Zoom. 20% you…
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More Vi tips get the pipe output of a command
OK, this is kind of a neat trick. If you want to get the output of a shell command into Vi for further editing, there is an extension to the read command where you can say take the output of a pipe. What this says is to do a read like a traditional file, but…
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Editing Markdown with Vi and copying in Email
Many times, when you are documenting a project, you just want to copy in some email. This turns out to be quite difficult to do, so here’s a guide: If you do a simple copy and paste into a text file, the indents are going to be horrible as is the word wrap. A simple…
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Using DocuSign as a repository for startups
Well, if you are not going to pay for DocuSign in all it’s glory, here’s a simple way to manage critical documents. That is things with signatures for your startup that you are worried about. Send from admin account but don’t sign there The process is a little convoluted because you want to make sure…
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Using Google Colab with Github
Ok this is a pretty awesome tool, you can use a free virtual machine with GPUs and TPUs for small Jupyter notebooks. Some quick notes on how to be successful with it: They include full version control in the Jupyter Notebook itself, but if you want full version control, the best thing to do is…
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Google Calendar does not handle multiple identities well
Ok, this thing is super confusing because Google Calendars are super unclear on how auto accept invites works. They change in April 2019 their options, so there is no more specific “auto accept invites”, it just says “yes” accept which The current defaults for in https://calendar.google.com/calendar/b/1/r/settings and you can see Automatically add invitations and you…
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Cleaning your Black & Decker Hand Vacuum
It seems nuts in this crazy time of COVID and unrest to talk about your Vacuum cleaner, but maybe that’s because I have to find something to do. First of all, we’ve had this for ten year and have always shaken it loose But finally there is just no suction. Come to find out that…
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Do not use MacOS Calendar on Catalina
You would think that after 50 years of the calendaring madness that it would end, but with two non-profits, a for-profit and two personal calendars, like is just not easy and conflicts are happening everywhere. So starting at 2AM last night, I finally resolved to try to fix this problems, but the main issue is…
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COVID-19 Music
OK, in these times, sometime it seems like a good music playlist is just so vital, so here are some that we’ve been listening to: Hotel Costes Curated Lists. If you sometime need to feel like you in the 1st arrondissement of Paris, there is nothing like the playlist that this cool boutique hotel has.…
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Memorial Day Sales and buying HomePod, AirPod Pro
Well there are some decent Memorial Day sales, but when you are buying electronics, you also have to pay attention to obsolesce because sometimes the reason for the sale is that they are going to get rid of the product. So with that said, what are some pretty good deals here, so using the MacRumors…
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What happens if a submodule repo name changes
OK this is kind of an edge case, but if you have a submodule and someone upstream changes it’s name, what should you do? First you probably want to change the location of the module, so you can now just do a git mv old_name new_name and it will be correct in your directory. Then…
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iPhone SE vs iPhone 11
Wow Apple has actually made it pretty hard to figure out what to buy. The iPhone 11 is pricey but has premium features. I think that for most regular users, the iPhone SE is super compelling if you really need a new phone. And of course we are about 4-5 months away from the iPhone…
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Finally fixing AFP vs SMB on MacOS
OK, we know that AFP is not a reliable long term protocol. When I try to do a long running rsync for instance, it fails after a few hours. What you want is to use SMB but it isn’t easy to force it. There are two ways that both involve some hackery: Remove all AFP…
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Getting Mail to work properly from WordPress
Well this has always been a little bit of a mystery to me. When you work with WordPress, it eventually does like to send mail to folks as an administrator. How do you make this work. If you are using Amazon AWS Lightsail, the default Bitnami image has something called WP Mail SMTP preloaded. You…
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Using Zoom with Slack
Well this a cool feature, you can just say /zoom meeting standup and it will automatically create a Zoom call from within Slack. There are a few tricks though: Connect to Slack with your main administrator account so that you are not using a personal one if you are in a corporation. Then you have…
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Vuescan hangs on Calibrate with MacOS Catalina probably due to Grain Dissolver
I had this problem a few years ago Sierra, but Vuescan, an image scanner, hangs on calibrate and results are wrong. I never did get to the bottom of it and just switched to USB from Firewire, but how it is back. I think it is probably some bad parameters, so how to reset Vuescan…
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Doing versions numbers right SemVar
I had never thought much about it, but Semvar.org has. This is a way to think about creating version numbers of your projects. That is to give real meaning to 1.2.1 and there are some great ideas here all based about what is stable in the API set. For an Excel spreadsheet you can think…
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Mac Long-running network shares use SMB and Finder connection problems
Ok I’m trying to do something a little crazy. I want a reliable way to copy things and maintain checksums on long term backups. It’s a project that I’ve done off an on for a long time and it is nearly done! Here are some notes: Rsync is a great utility for copying things. The…