Author: Paul Hubbard

Computer engineer from San Diego. Obsessed with hardware, software, timekeeping and elegance.

Slumgullion!

On By Paul HubbardIn SlumgullionLeave a comment

and by ‘Slumgullion’ I mean

a cheap stew made by throwing anything handy into a pot with water and boiling it, an improvised dish which has had many other names…

http://www.worldwidewords.org/weirdwords/ww-slu2.htm

so yeah, lots to share! In no particular order then.

Forget silver spoons

Metal spoons, photo credit Zoe Laughlin

Different metals change the flavor of the food. More than you might think, especially if like me you’ve been dining from stainless steel your entire life. This fantastic post and accompanying Gastropod podcast will, if you’re like me, inspire you go go in search of less-expensive gold plated spoons. My lovely wife humored me and found a set of four for around $40 but I don’t know the source. Sorry. Don’t be fooled by gold-colored ones made from a titanium film – no idea how that’ll taste.

One spoon ruled them all, however: as Laughlin put it, “The gold spoon is just sort of divine. It tastes incredibly delicious and it makes everything you eat seem more delicious.” After tasting mango sorbet off a gold spoon, Laughlin told us, with a note of regret in her voice, “I thought, I can’t believe I’m ever going to eat off anything other than gold ever again. Sadly, of course, I do.”

https://gastropod.com/episode-1-the-golden-spoon/

Electric paraglider

I miss flying. The higher land-use density and cost of living here in San Diego combine to keep me grounded but the dream endures. A co-worker flies powered paragliders like these, basically a small gas motor + prop worn like a backpack plus a glider wing. As usual, Wikipedia has a decent article about them.

(Aside: Please donate to Wikipedia! Can you think of any other site on the internet that has stayed true to its mission, useful and honest? Short list, isn’t it? Do us all a favor and toss them a few bucks. I too find the Jimmy ads annoying but still donate every year.)

I find paramotoring compelling – the equipment is small and affordable enough to be purchased and carried around in the back of an SUV or trailer hitch carrier. You’re even more constrained by weather and flight rules; it’s really recreation only. That matches how I flew fixed-wing at the Fox Flying Club, though, so no worries there.

Anyway, I’ve been keeping an eye out and it looks like the electric vehicle revolution has made it to paragliding – and open source no less! Voila, OpenPPG.

https://openppg.com/shop/paramotors/openppg-22/

It’s what you think it is, a scaled-up drone-style quadcopter. It folds down, packable into the back seat of a car. You can scale the battery pack from about 20 to 40 minutes of flight, with all of the advantages of direct-drive motors. I so want one.

So now I gotta convince my wife and get lessons. Co-worker went to this place and recommends them if you’re in the San Diego area.

On a related note, the local glider port has a nice, Raspberry-Pi-powered site showing glider conditions. As I write:

http://gliderport.thilenius.com/#/Home

Synology hassles and solutions

We’re on our third Synology NAS. We got a 2-bay in 2015, a 4-bay in 2017 and an 8-bay in 2019.I’ve used the NAS migration built into their software to migrate the data from NAS to NAS, so when I got a volume-full warning I simply ordered two more WD 4TB drives and dropped them in, assuming I could grow the volume.

Nope. 16T limit, not the 18 expected. There’s an issue with migrated volumes with no known fix. Here’s the workaround, which took two weekends of fiddling/waiting:

  1. Move shared directories from volume1 to volume2 as explained here. You have to do this manually, one at a time, so it takes forever. (Note that volume2 is my internal backup drive, so yes you need free space to do this.)
  2. Create a new, small-dish volume for applications such as DNS. I went with 128GB just to leave room. Follow these instructions to move the applications to that new volume.
  3. Delete volume1 and create a new volume, which magically will be the full 18TB or whatever.
  4. Repeat step 1 instructions to move file shares onto the new volume.
  5. Curse the programmers at Synology.
  6. Bless the kind folks who posted answers like the above.

CLink

One very enjoyable job years ago had me writing LabVIEW software for a new, state of the art ultra-high-vacuum mass spectrometer at the UNM Advanced Materials Lab. The instrument designer and my boss was an amazing guy named Janos Farkas, and his latest project is a very interesting idea around more-robust hyperlinks. Consent, payment, attribution – lots of ideas in there. There’s a WordPress plugin too, so I’ve got a project to add them here as well. Have a look at https://what.clink.is and see what you think.

It took few seconds for Janos to make his post available for reuse and less than a minute for Gulzar to make the request, get his website verified, accept the license offer (he knew the license terms and conditions because the license templates are published online), receive the post to his WordPress backend and publish the linked post.  In the meantime, electronic records of the transaction were created both for Janos and Gulzar. The referent, linked posts, license transaction, and rights status have been given persistent identifiers and are trackable in the CLink registry.

https://what.clink.is

Auto build your code on save with entr

On By Paul HubbardIn Computer science, recommendationsLeave a comment

So I’m working on a project at work where I want to rebuild my code whenever I save a source code file. Today I found the tool ‘entr’ and it’s a great thing to learn about. (I should totally send this to Julia Evans!)

All I needed to do is run

ls *.src | entr make

And that’s it. It’ll re-run make every time I save from the editor. Simple, helpful, open source.

Good looking field watch

On By Paul HubbardIn WatchesLeave a comment

Way back in 2012 (or was it 2011?) I exchanged a few emails with Leo Padron about starting his own watch company. At the time, he was restoring vintage watches and had the urge to start his own brand. He’d found my “Design and make your own watch” page and I wrote a blog post about him as well (lost due to Confluence’s shitty export code).

This month, he emailed me with an interesting update. He’s at Drop now and designed a field watch, the Felix.

The Felix is here on Drop; the image gallery above is from their site. Specs, also from their site:

  • Case Size: 39.5mm x 11mm (42mm lug to lug)
  • Water Resist: 100 Meters (10 ATM)
  • Case Material: 316L Stainless Steel with bead blasted finish
  • Crown: Screw-down crown located at 16H.
  • Crystal: Double Dome Sapphire Crystal with Antireflective coating Movement: Sellita SW-200 Automatic Movement 26 Jewels 28,800 BPH 39 Hour Power Reserve Hack lever Made in Switzerland
  • Band: 20mm brown leather band (with add-on canvas band)
  • Warranty: 2 Year International Warranty
  • MSRP: $349 ($299 preorder)

That’s a decent MSRP, and very good to excellent IMHO at the $300 preorder price. I quite like the rounded shape for comfort, and at 39mm this should wear like a dream. It’s got enough design in it to not be boring or me-too as well. Good lume, well sized hands, and a delightful ring of color on the offset crown too.

On the minus side, I’ve never been a fan of the 13 to 24 numbering on a dial, though that’s a pretty small complaint.

Nice work Leo!

drop.com

Grim reading

On By Paul HubbardIn Random, recommendationsLeave a comment

Three long reads – or at least bookmark:

Takeaways? Install pi-hole at home, use 1Blocker on iOS, uBlock Origin on your desktop, reconsider if you use Android at all, and always have a 6-digit PIN on your phone. It’s probably worse than you thought.

You should buy a PurpleAir air quality monitor

On By Paul HubbardIn recommendations1 Comment

Check this out:

Air quality right now in SoCol. One of those is my house.

In July of 2018 I paid $244 to a company called Adrionics for a chunk of PVC stuffed with electronics, the PA-II:

Mine, mounted next to the garage door

It’s a sophisticated, lab-grade piece of hardware – twin laser-based light scattering particulate sensors, and it measures how much junk is in your air. In particular (a pun I am delighted with), the “PM2.5” size range most important to your health and lungs.

It’s rated for indoor or outdoor use. I put mine next to the garage door mainly due to the difficulty of running a power wire outside. Outside is better but you could benefit by having indoor and outdoor if you’re feeling fancy.

You can read about the PMS5003 sensor here, it’s pretty nifty. The PA-II uses twin sensors so you can plot and compare the two readings and thus get better data:

Science! You can connect directly to the sensor (it uses WiFi) and see the full details as well as temp, RH% and breakouts of counts per size range.

Leftover smoke from distant fires, I think.

And even if you don’t own one, head over to https://purpleair.com/ and try their map – you can see see local and regional quality at a snap, as with the top image in this post. I can tell, for example, that we’re in fire season as the quality is usually much much better. And if your health is affected (asthma, seasonal allergies or the like) then a sensor makes even more sense. There are other ‘smart home’ air quality monitors with designer enclosures; I don’t recommend them. Do your own research but I found that PurpleAir was a guy who started making these for himself and then for others who asked.

Which, yeah, is a lot like Paul Scurfield in another post in this series. Or Dan Fock.

Each sensor automatically shares its data so you benefit others too – I like that. I’ve done a few experiments with cheap air quality sensors and have come to believe that you can’t get good data without spending a chunk of money, so while this is a non-trivial expense I consider them a good value and recommend buying one.

Or maybe check the map – if someone nearby has one already, then just bookmark the map and benefit from some citizen science.

Wide angle

On By Paul HubbardIn Photography1 Comment

So a few months ago I bought macro and wide lenses from Moment for my iPhone X. They work great and I was hoping to get a few years from them but Apple changed the 11 and to everyone’s surprise added wide. It’s great! Here’s normal and wide at work.

Conveys place well.

And nothing to carry etc. anyone want some moment lenses?

California’s wildfire blackouts are a mess. Here are 3 key solutions. – Vox

On By Paul HubbardIn WeatherLeave a comment

This is a very good post about the current mess here in California where PG&E shut off power for 800,000 people to cover its ass and avoid starting another fire. It sounds as if my local utility, SDG&E, actually got its shit together after starting a fire in 2007 and being forced to actually pay for it:

n 2007, San Diego Gas & Electric (SDG&E) was blamed for wildfires in San Diego County; investigators found it hadn’t done proper vegetation management. It ultimately paid $2.4 billion to settle lawsuits related to those fires. It wanted to pass on remaining costs, some $379 million, to ratepayers in the form of higher rates, but the California Public Utility Commission (CPUC) wouldn’t let it. The case was appealed all the way up to the California Supreme Court, which found against SDG&E. Earlier this month, the US Supreme Court announced that it would not take the case, leaving SDG&E to eat the costs. (This ruling is relevant to how PG&E’s liability will ultimately be divided up.)

Vox

Since 2007, the scare of those lawsuits has prompted SDG&E to spend $1.5 billion upgrading its fire detection and response capabilities. And in its recently announced wildfire mitigation plan, it proposes spending $3 million more on such measures as aggressive grid hardening and vegetation management, improved meteorology with more weather stations, more remote, high-definition cameras for fire-detection, a multi-level community outreach and education program, and a series of community resource centers where people can go when power is shut off to receive information and basic needs.

Vox

The other state trend driving this is housing prices – for years, ‘drive till you qualify‘ was received wisdom for years. The result, combined with the desire for a yard, was sprawl. Sprawl + climate change = burning homes.

Anyway, the Vox piece does an excellent job of laying out the utility and fire side of the story – have a read.