Category: geekery

A month of QSOs

2017-08-13 wt8p 4 comments

I’ve finished a month of QSOs and thought it’d be fun to look at the results. Early (5pm) in the evening, I can hear activity along the east coast, Mexico, and Cuba(!), but I am unable to get through. Not surprisingly, most of my contacts have been between 7pm and 10pm (02 – 05 UTC), when the sun’s dropping and signal […]

Geobiking Philly to DC

2016-06-062021-03-21 wt8p 5 comments

The excitement of visiting colleges with my daughter, her applying to the short list, and waiting on the results has is over and I’m seriously craving a week unplugged from work. I’ll be taking an organized ride in October from Philadelphia to Washington, DC. Since these trips are as much about seeing different things as the Zen of cycling, I’ll also be stopping […]

Fitbit Charge HR review

2014-12-19 wt8p 4 comments

Since my Fitbit Force was recalled earlier this year, I’d been pining for a simple motivational aid. Microsoft’s Band looks awesome, but it’s sold out as soon as they get another batch of units. The Garmin VivoSmart had some interesting features, but lacks stair climbs (important to me because I do so much of that in a given day) and was at […]

Garage Door Automation

2014-04-17 wt8p 3 comments

A few times a year, the last person coming into the house via the garage will forget to shut the door, leaving its contents vulnerable to critters or the unruly, post-apocalyptic mobs speeding through our quiet suburban streets at night. The obvious solution is to check it each night before I go to bed. But that’s a lot of diligent peeking into […]

Nutrition Course External References

2013-03-16 wt8p 2 comments

… speaking of great Coursera offerings, I just finished Katie Ferraro’s excellent Nutrition for Health Promotion and Disease Prevention course. Its focus on evidence-based medicine was refreshing and helped clear up a lot of confusion I’ve had from contradictory sources over the years. Since Coursera content is prone to being archived, I wanted to preserve the extensive set of external references provided so […]

Pimping out the geomobiles

geekery

2012-08-20 wt8p 2 comments

A few days before we were going to leave on a week-long roadtrip, my spouse suggested we swap out her original radio for something that would play MP3s and, ideally, had an USB port. I did some quick research and found a JVC unit that work fine. The other requirement was maintaining compatibility with the steering wheel controls. For most […]

WPEngine experiment

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, […]

Online classes

2011-11-23 wt8p 6 comments

This fall, Stanford has been offering free online classes this fall in three subject areas of computing: Artificial Intelligence, Databases, and Machine Learning. It’s different from MIT’s excellent OpenCourseWare series in that Stanford is offering a course you can play along with while MIT is providing the materials for self-study. For two of the courses, two tracks were offered: “basic,” in […]