Over the last 5 days my wife and I cruised from Port San Luis to San Francisco. The total distance was 228 Nautical Miles (nm). We recently purchased the boat and decided to relocate it to a Marina closer to where we live. We knew the trip would relatively difficult. The majority of the journey would be against the wind and waves. For this reason we decided to motor the entire distance up North.
For winter 2016 I made Lichenberg Figures. I used a 5kV 10mA (50W) neon light transformer. I also experimented with a 2kW microwave oven transformer, but found that the lower powered neon transformer produced finer, better, and safer results.
To produce the figures, I would first apply the electricity to the wood, often at the corners. Initially the resistance of the wood is not sufficient to allow any burning. Then I would use a spray bottle full of water/baking soda to moisten the surface of the wood until the electricity could find the path of least resistance and start the burning reaction.
Intro Who browses on the terminal now-a-days? However you are, you are crazy, but you might appreciate this comparison of text-based web browsers, with screenshots of a few different popular sites.
I wanted to test these browsers with more than just simple pages, so where possible I actually logged into places and took screenshots of the actual webpage in a realistic state.
Methodology All browsers were set to use xterm with TERM=xterm-256color.
I recently read “Why Are SO Many Millennials SO Uncool?”. Let’s start with a quote:
*For the purpose of this writing, I’m defining “cool” as those who don’t conform, who don’t always fit in nor do they try to, and who follow their own path; and “uncool” as those who dress, act, and have the same tastes as the masses and are vulnerable to corporate influences.
Now, I’m by no means some sort of authority on coolness.
I recently finished my Intermediate Sensu Training on Udemy. It was a ton of work but I’m glad I got it all together. Part of that training includes how to deploy and configure Sensu with four of the most popular open-source configuration management tools: Puppet, Chef, Ansible, and Salt.
TOC {:toc} The Sensu Decree In order to do the training I had to learn each of these tools enough so I could install a baseline Sensu installation.
Inspired by ponysay, I think wicked ascii/ansi artwork on the terminal is great.
I decided to survey all the tools I could find that aid in this conversion to see if there were any dramatic differences in results.
Methodology For these tests I used an image with a 160px width, twice that of a standard terminal. Then I cat’d the image in plain xterm and took a screenshot of the results.
I like Bluetooth Low Energy (BTLE). I also like IPv6. Did you know you could but both together?
Technically 6LoWPAN
Requirements modprobe bluetooth_6lowpan echo 'bluetooth_6lowpan' >> /etc/modules Establishing the Connection Set the Bluetooth L2CAP PSM First you need to set the Protocol/Service Multiplexer value on both sides to “62” (0x3E) on both sides:
echo 62 > /sys/kernel/debug/bluetooth/6lowpan_psm This PSM value lets the driver know that you are going to multiplex this special new protocol on top of whatever your bluetooth device mith also be doing.
The software that powers the Etherhouse project is open source. This blog post describes that software and how it interacts with all the pieces.
Client You can see the Client software that runs on the Arduino. This uses one external library and is in the native Arduino C++.
The Arduino runs a limited TCP/IP stack and interacts with the http api.
The code plenty of defensive code in place to ensure the client continues to run without interruption or interaction.
Etherhouse a project of mine involving eight Christmas gifts. Each gift involved a display of some model houses made from folded paper, each representing the home of a friend or family member.
The houses light up, depending on whether that family member is home or not. Their presence is detected based on if their smartphone is on the same network the etherhouse is on.
See the GitHub page for more details.
Beaker is a test framework created by Puppetlabs to run tests against puppet modules on real servers (vm, containers whatever) and test that they do what they say they should do.
This is a quick tutorial on how to use this framework. At the time of this writing, Beaker is under heavy development, so this could all change.
The Gem The first thing you need to do is install beaker. Usually this is as simple as adding it to your Gemfile and running bundle install.