Posts
Literally
It has now become standard practice to use the word “literally” to mean its opposite, “figuratively.” Example: “I literally died when I saw that awful U2 album show up in my iTunes.” No, you did not literally die, because then you wouldn’t be writing that sentence. I do recognize that language evolves, but in this case we have lost a useful word, without a decent replacement. “Actually” doesn’t quite have the same feel to it.
September 16, 2014
Fixing a water-damaged cell phone
I own an ancient Android phone (four years is a long time in the tech world) that I keep trying to destroy. In December I left it on the roof of the car and drove away. A few blocks later, it fell off the car and was run over by another car. A replacement from eBay arrived a week later.
September 15, 2014
Leaving the walled gardens
#Crapification of Everything#Gmail#Kindle
Google, Amazon, Facebook, and the other huge Internet giants may have adhered to some kind of “do not be evil” policy in their early years, but as with all companies that exceed a certain size, they inevitably become evil. This is the natural course of large corporations and bureacracies. Even though the individuals that comprise such an organization may not be evil for the most part, the organization itself has a life of its own, and that life form inevitably becomes evil as it attempts to grow and exterminate its competitors.
August 1, 2014
Strategic alignment
#Crapification of Everything#Rants
If you work for a large company and happen to hear the higher-ups using the phrases “strategic alignment” or “workforce realignment” at a company all-hands meeting, you should prepare your resumé and maybe start looking for a new job. These innocuous-sounding words are the new jargon for “management made a bunch of stupid blunders recently that cost us a lot of money, but rather than laying off these extremely well-paid managers, we’re to lay off a bunch of engineers and other peons instead, because they’re so much cheaper.”
July 18, 2014
License plates and prime numbers
When I received a new license plate three years ago, I was delighted to learn that its numeric portion, 827, was a prime number that was also the sum of consecutive primes (103 + 107 + 109 +113 + 127 + 131 + 137). Then a couple of days ago, while staring at a friend’s license plate and wondering if it was also a prime (it wasn’t), I decided to find out if there were other license plates that had the same property as my 827. Without Googling the answer, I wrote the little program below. The results were quite interesting, especially for 863, which can be summed four different ways.
June 10, 2014
Fixing printing problems with HP Laserjet 3015
#Linux#Linux Mint#Ubuntu#Printers
It appears that the HP 3015 printer has bugs in its PostScript interpreter that have been exposed by recent versions of Linux. Using an ancient version of Linux Mint (from around 2010), the printer worked fine. But starting with Mint 13 (Ubuntu 12.04), certain PDF files, when printed from “Document Viewer” (evince or atril) would cause the printer to barf and print a page containing an obscure PostScript error message.
May 12, 2014
Tools for housebuilding
We started building our house two summers ago using the tools we already had lying around: some hammers, a primitive Makita chop saw, and an aging cordless drill and circular saw set. We also borrowed an old and somewhat weak table saw from a neighbor. Pretty quickly we realized that we needed better tools to make the building process go more quickly. This was important because building in Vermont is a race against time and the weather: the house had to be closed in before winter.
March 5, 2014
Using integrated card reader in Linux Mint on ThinkPad T61
#Linux#Linux Mint#Thinkpad#Ubuntu
The ThinkPad T61 has a built-in SD card reader that does not work with Linux Mint 15 out of the box. When you insert an SD card, dmesg reports thousands of errors looking like this: [166065.569415] mmcblk0: error -84 transferring data, sector 1, nr 7, cmd response 0x900, card status 0x0 The solution, which was given at the end of this forum discussion, is to install the libccid package, using this command:
February 21, 2014
Plumbing headaches
The electrical work we did last summer was fun, but the plumbing was not. Electrical wiring is pretty simple, for the most part. If you can keep a mental model of the three conductors (hot, neutral, and ground) and make sure they’re always connected properly, you’ve got 90% of it. And there aren’t that many different types of wires and conduits, at least in our house. But plumbing is a different beast.
February 5, 2014
Radon mitigation
Last summer we borrowed a radon tester from a friend and left it in the basement for a few weeks. We didn’t expect a problem because the old house, 400 feet away, had pretty low levels of radon in its basement. So we were alarmed to see the levels rising to around 18 pCi/L, more than four times higher than the amount the EPA says is its “action level”. We bought our own radon tester and it confirmed the high readings.
December 16, 2013