Well worth your time! https://theprepared.org/features/2019/4/28/building-a-cathedral
Category: recommendations
Today I learned the iPhone’s excellent document scanner can be controlled from a Mac – The Verge
Cool trick – as they say, no wires required, and I just tried it out to import a receipt for reimbursement. Works really well.
Excellent news and a reading recommendation
For years, I read the absolutely amazing ‘Do the Math’ blog by Tom Murphy, a UCSD physicist carefully explaining so! many! things! (Energy: generation, storage, usage, loss. Details of his lead-acid solar/battery home setup. So much more)
Now the good news – his dormant blog tells us that he’s written a textbook based on on that work, and even better its been vetted and revised and best yet? Free online and inexpensive if you want a print copy. I cannot recommend this enough. https://dothemath.ucsd.edu/2021/03/textbook-debut/
ignore the code: Bookfeed.io
As I keep saying, RSS is awesome.
You should’ve asked | Emma
Even before COVID-19, our home was wrestling with the division of chores, emotional labor and of course money. This comic brilliantly lays it out. Here’s a single pane from the middle:
Seriously, go read the whole thing. It’ll change your mind.
PSA: Don’t buy Synology with Atom CPUs
Expensive mistake that their site encourages: only the models (typically the ‘plus’ ones) with Intel CPUs can run Docker and the much-improved btrfs. My DS1817, despite having 10gigabit Ethernet and eight drive slots, cannot and that’s an expensive and frustrating mistake.
Their site ellides this when shopping so, caveat emptor, and save yourself money.
Internet speed tests
So you’re online and you wonder how your network is doing. How do you measure it? I’m here for you.
- (Updated 11/2021) Ubiquiti’s oddly named http://wifiman.com is my new standby – cleanest UI, most consistent at measuring up to gigabit.
- Fast.com is my go-to for quick checks. It measures using only Netflix connections so bypasses some ISP fuckery with DPI and slowdowns. Elegant UI.
- Speed.cloudflare.com is excellent. Detailed and capable of saturating my 1 gigabit downlink. Lots of details.
- Testmy.net is decent but uglier.
- Speedtest.net is ad laden.
- Sourceforge.net/speedtest is ok and used to be my favorite. Lots of ads now.
As explained in my series of gigabit posts, making a fast, reliable network takes time and effort, and these sites don’t magically make it happen. However, having a way to measure your changes is super helpful, and I probably use these weekly.
I got an email 11/28/2021 – if you’re having WiFi speed issues, sometimes you need to change the frequency or band used by your access point/router, and Bill Hess wrote this nice how-to here, for both Mac and Windows.
First ebike ride
My neighbor is in our COVID-19 pod and kindly let me try out his Specialized Turbo Vado. It’s his commute bike.
I just finished a 16.4 mile ride with 1,300 feet of vertical and I feel great. This would have left me mostly dead if not for the motor.
I’ve been wanting the Luna bikes Enduro X-1, mostly based on this review as well as this one by a man who’s nearly my height at 6’9”. Sold out now but I am feeling the want. It’s magical to blast up hills again. At 3 to 5 thousand for a nice one, they’re expensive but as I said, I’m a convert.
iPhone or iPad on Ethernet
This falls between stupid party trick or total clutch move. Two apple dongles plus a lightning cable and your iDevice is online at 100megabits.
Part numbers are A1277 (usb Ethernet) and A1619 (lightning to usb). I’ve heard of sysadmin uses for this, you could combine with the Prompt app for ssh for example.
Ways to get an RSS feed
As I’ve written about before, I use RSS several times a day to keep track of news from hundreds of feeds. A key part of making that work is the underlying question of “Where’s the RSS feed for this?”
Usually the Fever bookmarklet can find it, there’s a defined HTML tag that it can parse from a page. But sometimes the page doesn’t have a feed. Here are a couple of ways to find or create one.
- YouTube – create an RSS feed from a content creator. Don’t forget to pair this with YouTube-dl.
- RSS Box handles Twitter, YouTube Instagram and others.
- RSS Hub – bookmarked but haven’t tried it yet.
ultracrepidarian 