Category: geekery

Using Slack for CW Academy

During the latter part of my Basic class, when students were becoming more engaged, we ran into several problems with the email and text messaging. As an experiment, we used Slack in my intermediate class the most recent term.  Feedback was overwhelmingly positive.  In the spirit of trying to give back, I thought it would be helpful relating our experience. 73, […]

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Experiences from jailbreaking my iPhone – Part 1

I used the Evasi0n program for jailbreaking the phone. In brief, it involves backing up the phone to iTunes, letting Evasi0n do its thin Reasons for jailbreaking: Curiosity. The seductress of “let’s break something” whispered sweet-nothings in my ear. Use a different browser. More specifically, I want to install ad-blocking because some of the sites are too painfully slow to […]

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Mac FizzyCalc

During the summer of 2011, I had some mythical Spare Time to blow the centimeter-thick layer of dust off my programming skills and port FizzyCalc, a Windows-based geocoordinate conversion utility that I’ve used for solving several puzzles in my obsessive hobby, geocaching, to the Mac. Mac FizzyCalc celebrated its 2500th download in November, a year after it was released. Cupcakes […]

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GoogleSoftwareUp clearing CS_VALID and Mac Freezes

PSA: In case someone else encounters similar symptoms where your MacBook freezes and the only indication is an error GoogleSoftwareUp clearing CS_VALID, I hope to save you a wasted evening of trying things and reading forums… Symptom: My heretofore reliable MacBook started going into “beach ball” mode.  The active application remained responsive to keyboard, mouse and screen input but only […]

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Email patterns

Despite a concerted effort to keep my inbox tamed, it’s now back above 30 undealt-with emails.  While falling behind, I’ve noticed some recurring – and annoying – behavioral patterns.  I’m sure the list is incomplete, so feel free to share! “The two-for” – a person who always — always— sends a second mail with the attachment they forgot to include […]

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WPEngine experiment

Executive summary: Dissatisfied with my blog’s response time, I looked into a variety of options.  For about a month, I tried a wpengine experiment whereby I moved everything to them.  It didn’t work out, but I learned a lot along the way.  I’ve been dissatisfied about the page load times of my blog for a long time. After some pent-up annoyance, […]

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