Category: geekery

Lion Rock viewpoint taken on 2021-06-25 while geocaching.

Using Slack for CW Academy

2021-07-142021-08-12 wt8p

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, […]

Determining the exact file python is using

geekery

2019-12-042019-12-14 wt8p 1 comment

Python searches a variety of directories for its libraries, something I had largely lived in peace with until I had to modify some legacy code to address a suspected timing bug. The overall task is to produce a set of charts for a customer. Python loads an Excel workbook, a time-series data set is updated from a third-party source, and […]

Experiences from jailbreaking my iPhone – Part 2

geekery

2013-04-10 wt8p 1 comment

After getting things mostly back to where they were, I had a jail-broken phone with ad-blocking software. The next task was to find some cool, prohibited apps and put it to The Man. Here’s a partial list of what I liked: Ad Blocker and Ad Blocker Networks — this was my first purchase. The latter, an additional add-on by the provider of the […]

Experiences from jailbreaking my iPhone – Part 1

geekery

2013-04-02 wt8p

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 […]

Mac FizzyCalc

2013-01-13 wt8p 4 comments

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 […]

GoogleSoftwareUp clearing CS_VALID and Mac Freezes

geekery

2012-12-31 wt8p 5 comments

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 […]

Email patterns

geekery

2012-07-23 wt8p 1 comment

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 […]

WPEngine experiment

geekery
rant

2012-06-06 wt8p 5 comments

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, […]