WordPress mobile will throw errors about missing XML-RPC functionality if your PHP installation is missing the ‘dom’ library.
Took a while, that did.
apt install php-dom
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DIY MagSafe stand
So there are fifty to one hundred dollar stands that hold a MagSafe puck for your phone on your desk. Save your money – this is a 20 dollar stand with a MagSafe attached using two 3M Command Strips.
I got the stand from Amazon(non referral link). Tablet Stand Adjustable, Lamicall. The strips are “Command Poster Hanging Strips Value-Pack, Small, White, 48-Pairs (17024-48ES)” which are eight dollars for 48, I used two here to hold the puck firmly. The magnets in the puck are strong, so this provides enough adhesion to keep it in place when I pull the phone away.
Simple, cheap, and the 3M strips remove cleanly for when things change. I can now just drop my phone here as I work and it’s visible and topped off. The AirPods also work well.
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iPad coding
It’s Saturday, and I wanted to do a bit of Python coding. Specifically, I want to use
- my iPad Pro with keyboard
- my home Raspberry Pi 4 server
- a full IDE with Python support
I’ve been 96% happy using my iPad as laptop replacement (note the arbitrary precision! So science-y!) and this is a continuation of that effort. Based on a six colors post, I’ve used the REST endpoint from my power monitor to build an iOS widget using Scriptable:
Today I want to extend that with timestamps. To do so, I need to edit Python (Flask and SQLite) that’s running on my Raspberry Pi.
There are a few ways to code on an iPad, and I’ve bought a few. In this case, I need remote development, where the code is remote and the iPad is a terminal.
Commence the searching! This post was a good start, and I dimly recalled that VS Code had a remote capability, which eventually led me to this post. He links to the code-server project, which in theory can run on my RPi. It looks great:
Well, that doesn’t work. NPM issues. More searching led me to the single-issue raspi-vscode project.
Nope, that fails too:
I found the log file and it appears that there’s no cloud-agent binary for the arm7l on the Raspberry Pi:
This leads to the saddest and loneliest page on the Internet:
Zero results. Gotta leave it there for now, but maybe someone else can move this forward. It’s worth noting that the code-server project now has a new open source project called ‘coder’ but it doesn’t have arm binaries either.
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Worth a read: 99 problems
Ever wondered about your rights? Can, for example, you say no when the police ask to search your car?
Caleb Mason is here to help. (PDF)
This is a line-by-line analysis of the second verse of 99 Problems by Jay-Z, from the perspective of a criminal procedure professor. It’s intended as a resource for law students and teachers, and for anyone who’s interested in what pop culture gets right about criminal justice, and what it gets wrong.
http://pdf.textfiles.com/academics/lj56-2_mason_article.pdf
The song is often known for it’s crude language. I had avoided it, but according to Jay-Z and this article, it’s a reference to a K-9 search dog, not a woman or women. Also, you can’t refuse to exit the car, a locked trunk doesn’t require a warrant, and my home state is 2-party-recording consent.
Well worth a read. I’m no lawyer, but this was entertaining and informative.
The reactionary world view is based fundamentally on the idea that the past was much better than the present, because people were happier. And why were they happier? Because they knew their place in an unquestioned and unquestionable social hierarchy that gave their lives meaning and structure, and that specific kind of happiness is much more valuable than the shallower kind of happiness provided by general anesthesia and plentiful food and central air conditioning and the Internet and what have you.
That’s what every reactionary believes in his bones. That’s what fuels contemporary American fascism and contemporary American evangelical Christianity and right wing Catholicism (but I repeat myself).
— Read on www.lawyersgunsmoneyblog.com/2022/06/was-the-past-better-or-worse-than-the-present
It’s an ad for Switzerland, but really it’s an ad for life.
— Read on www.adventure-journal.com/2022/06/swiss-tourism-ad-is-simply-the-best-commercial-youll-see/
This resonates right now. Summer is looking busy at work, family visits are quite difficult and my head is super crowded. This is an excellent, excellent pitch.
Customize Spatial Audio with TrueDepth Camera
This announcement came and went fairly quickly, but it had us scratching our heads immediately. The idea, it seems, is that spatial audio sounds more realistic if it can take into account aspects of the physicality of the listener that affect their perception of space. Apparently, this is a thing—called Head-Related Transfer Functions—and by capturing data using the iPhone’s TrueDepth camera, Apple could personalize the otherwise average HRTF that combines data from thousands of people.
— Read on tidbits.com/2022/06/13/seven-head-scratching-features-from-wwdc-2022/
I worked with HRTFs in grad school, trying to implement the filters in the wavelet domain (More here) so this is interesting to me. Looks like we’ll be able to use some combination of camera + lidar to capture the pinnae and derive personal HRTFs from that.
I cannot wait. Guess I’ll need to explore the spatial music and maybe movies now.
Since I got this iPad Pro (M1, 10”) a year or so ago, it’s been my primary machine for almost everything. SSH, Remote Desktop, video of course, even video editing and uploads with the GoPro and Quik. It’s a fast, silent, long-battery machine and I love it. Paired with the trackpad/keyboard, I don’t miss my MBP13.
Except. Some websites, typically e-commerce ones, never load. You’ll see a spinner in the upper right corner, next to the cell/Wi-Fi icons, and it never loads. Today I found the fix!!
The problem is the iOS 15 privacy feature ‘Hide IP address’. Disabling it fixes every site I’ve had fail on me. Before finding this fix, I had cleared cookies, erased history, disabled extensions, bypassed the Pi-hole and sometimes used Firefox. Note that Firefox doesn’t have this problem, but I prefer Safari just a bit on iOS.
Go to Settings / Safari and scroll down.
Click on ‘Hide IP address’:
Disable it, go back to Safari and you’ll find that the mystery spinner is banished. Bizarre.
Maybe this’ll be fixed in iOS 16… due to be announced in a couple of days, but I found this so frustrating that I should share the fix.
upptime
— Read on simonwillison.net/2022/May/26/upptime/
Setup one for me – check it out at https://GitHub.com/phubbard/upptime
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Matt’s Off Road Recovery
When the Olympics come around, I’ll often watch sports I am 100% ignorant of, just to see the best in the world doing their thing. It’s the competence at work, the striving, that I find compelling.
Like the Olympics, where NBC will strive to deliver narratives about athletes and their paths, good video or books can take you into another life/job/existence. It allows us, the reader/viewer, to visualize another existence; you even see it in museum dioramas and I think it’s a deep human trait.
Since discovering the Vinegar extension for Safari, I’ve found it a lot easier to browse YouTube. I uninstalled the YouTube app, and now solely use Safari on both iPad and desktop; this app is so good. Anyway, that’s what led me to today’s topic, Matt’s Off Road Recovery.
MORR, as I’ll call it here, is a YouTube channel started in 2019. It’s a family business in Hurricane, Utah, that does off-road towing, primarily for vehicles that get stuck in Sand Hollow State Park. Sounds boring? It’s not. Let me explain.
First off, the people are outstandingly competent. Owner Matt, son Rudy and Lizzy, are damned good at the work they do. Sand, snow, crazy steep rock, snow, trailers – oh my god they can back a trailer on a mountainside that looks like Everest – clever use of winches, pulleys and rigging, combining vehicle vectors… it’s a visual feast of ad-hoc problem solving to revel in. And that’s before you detour into the build videos and related channels doing advanced vehicle work.
There’s a host of supporting characters to recognize and enjoy, and the creators have done solid, careful work in establishing recurring patterns & motifs as well as investing in cameras, drones and lights to make the contents better. Like the canonical genius Clickspring, MORR is good at both videos and the work they do.
Lastly, they clearly have gone to a lot of trouble to remain apolitical and kind. In the work they do, often towing people who made bad decisions, lacked skills or inadequate vehicles, it would be simple to mock the customers but they never do. In 2022, when our national media is mainly afire with hate and status games, this is a wonderful thing to find.
I have no interest whatsoever in becoming an off-road recovery person. At the same time, I greatly enjoy watching them do so, and maybe you will too. Hit shuffle on his recovery playlist and be taken to another life.
On a purely personal note, my family owned two Corvair convertibles, so it was amazing to me to watch them create a monster off-road towing rig out of a Corvair wagon. Mad props.
And yeah, I am tempted to buy some swag.
ultracrepidarian 