Geeking

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My time-lapse camera in the attic is still working, though I resorted to adding an auto reboot once a week, because the Raspberry Pi is not acting too stable. And even then, sometimes it hangs. I blame the power supply. Because it’s always the power supply, right? Anyway watching the sun’s track northward as spring advances has given me a much better instinctive feel for celestial mechanics. And that made me pay closer attention to the moon rise last month. After 40 years on this planet I just realized that the moon, being in the same orbital plane as the sun and earth, traces the same track as the sun. Whoa. That means my attic window is perfectly oriented to catch a nice time-lapse of the moonrise! ...

You know you’ve been doing this too long when nothing in an article like this is new to you. The first TTY I ever saw and (maybe) used was a TI, like this one. The librarian at my junior high borrowed it and used it to connect into Lexis-Nexis or something. But the funny thing is, even in the late 80’s this was out of style. PCs were taking over and so I didn’t see a TTY again until university. There I saw plenty of DEC VT-100’s. And jarthur.cs.hmc.edu, our giant multi-processing machine from Sequent had an honest-to-god paper TTY attached to its /dev/console port. The sysadmins liked it that way so that they could see dumps on paper in the morning if the machine crashed at night. I learned about fsck that way, by watching one of them coax the filesystem back to health. (By the way, fsck is for babies. Real men fix filesystems with fsdb. Look it up.) ...

When I got my Raspberry Pi up and running, I reactivated my AICCU tunnel to Sixxs.net. But then I remembered that two years ago when I last touched IPv6, Swisscom was running a beta test to do IPv6 in the home. So today I went looking to see if the test still existed and if I could join it. Why? Well, to be honest, it never even occurred to me that IPv6 to the home was in production. The lack of IPv6 uptake has become one of those “so sad it’s funny” things in our industry. But guess what? ...

Your browser does not support the video tag. The last few days I’ve been working on a new home hacking project. The eventual plan is to create a panoramic time-lapse of sunrise as seen from my house each morning. We’ve got a wonderful view, and recording some of those beautiful morning colors as the sun comes up over the Alps should make them easier to appreciate – without setting my alarm for 6 AM! ...

The first step is to think of a really good name. Like Apertura! Then have your hubbie set up your blog. Then write stuff!

I love Quartz. however, I find that the best time/place for me to read it is on the train during my commute. And Quartz’s overly clever and overly dynamic website hates my phone’s browser. So I made Mobile Quartz to help me read it. The front page has the current top articles from Quartz. Click the links to see the article. I used this as a chance to write some Go on Google Appspot code, and it was really a pleasure. ...

Make a script like this called “save”. Make it executable. #!/bin/sh ct=0 if [ -f "ct" ]; then ct=`cat ct` fi ct=`expr $ct + 1` mv snap.jpg snap-$ct.jpg echo $ct > ct Run “uvccapture -x648 -y480 -c./save -t20” to take a photo every 20 seconds. Then you can use a script like this to continually re-encode it and send it to your webserver: #!/bin/sh while true do rm out.mpg cat snap-*.jpg | ./ffmpeg -f image2pipe -r 1 -r 20 -vcodec mjpeg -i - out.mpg scp out.mpg [email protected]:nella.org/jra/geek/3d done ...

Here’s what I want to do: See an error on a web page Select it and right click In the popup, choose “report a spelling error”. Have a box come up with three fields and a pair of ok/cancel buttons. The three fields are “change from”, “change to”, and Twitter id. The “change from” and Twitter id are auto-populated. The “change to” could be auto-populated using a web service that suggests spelling corrections. When I click on “OK”, it sends a Tweet announcing to the world that: ...

I had a great first Sugru experience! I scratched my finger on the way to work on my unicycle. I thought, dammit, I’m gonna fix that! So I bought some from my phone on the train. Cool! A few days later, it arrived in the post. I was having a hard time explaining why I was so excited about it to my wife. So I sat down, cut open my first packet and started fixing. My wife got interested, fast! She asked, would this stick to the door handle to make a bumper? I said, go try! And off she ran with my Sugru, leaving me grinning and cutting open a new packet… ...