Posts
Fixing Intel GPU crash on Linux Mint 17
(mention firefox) The older ThinkPad I’m using now has an Intel 965 graphics processor, and is running Linux Mint 17.1. Today I decided to try installing Google Chrome because of a Firefox problem I was having with a particular web site’s buggy Javascript. When I visited the Chrome site, the screen went black.
March 11, 2015
Using Linux with a weather station
We have a Davis VantageVue weather station, which is a pricey but excellent outdoor weather sensor that communicates with an indoor console via radio. The station has survived two Vermont winters so far, which is a testament to its reliability. Davis also sells an optional WeatherLink, which is a data logging card that plugs into the console. The card stores weather data and has a USB connector so that a computer can read the logged data. The CD that comes with the WeatherLink is designed for Windows, so it is just another useless Microsoft tax. But fortunately there is a fine software package called weewx that works with the VantageVue and many other weather stations.
October 27, 2014
Nexus One and Consumer Cellular
We have two Nexus One phones, one of which is used as our internet connection (no broadband here) and long-distance phone. The other is almost never used as a phone or an internet terminal. Both of these phones are on an AT&T family plan, which is ridiculously expensive given the poor quality of the service (internet almost unusable during the day). So I started looking for alternate services, and decided to try Consumer Cellular.
October 18, 2014
Using a Linux laptop as a router
Despite the governor’s promise that every house in Vermont would have broadband by the end of 2013, our little rural village still has nothing besides satellite and very flaky cell service. Consequently, we have been using an Android cell phone (a Nexus One) as our internet connection for the last couple of years.
October 14, 2014
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
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
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
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