A Geek Goes Flying

December 20th, 2021, we had an intruder in the office. A homeless man who had obviously had prior experience with involuntary psychiatric hospitalization, he remained, naked, in our reception area, for almost two hours after we placed a call to 911 (he refused to leave). Our area has become - along with most of the metro area - regrettably overrun with the mentally ill homeless, who have attempted to live in our office building, have barricaded themselves in our parking structure behind dumpsters etc. to use intravenous drugs, etc., etc. Calls to 911 frequently get us nowhere, and our staff are afraid. We have a .45 in the office, but it belongs to one of the other shareholders. I decided to get my own handgun to keep at the office for self defense. Hope I never need it! Shortly after our naked intruder was escorted, handcuffed to a stretcher, to his next psychiatric ward, I went to the local gun store to see what they had that was in the range of what I wanted to spend. I could get a

I haven’t had amazing luck with hosting providers . After moving my main system over to a new host about 8 months ago , things have been running pretty smoothly, except, today I searched one of my databases for something that should have been captured, and it wasn’t there. I’ve been monitoring the  status reports generated by the automated capture process, and everything seemed fine ... Except it wasn’t capturing documents updated at the last minute, as this one was. Even though I’d coded it to do so. The culprit: The new VPS was set to eastern time, and this process was time-sensitive to a certain window local time. I tweaked the crontab entry and changed the local timezone: # timedatectl set-timezone America/Los_Angeles Problem solved, but I should have caught it earlier. Need to gather up all my random notes and documentation snippets into a runbook . The sort of thing you forget to do when you haven’t worked professionally in IT in over a decade and just dabble on your personal sys

I have an eBay-sourced, flashed, GTX 680  (an EVGA card) in my MacPro5,1 . A while ago it started having an issue where certain black pixels would flicker red, sometimes with horizontal red lines of flickering dots starting at those pixels. (If you moved the window with the black areas around, the lines would follow.) As it got worse the longer the machine was on, I suspected it was heat related. The screen would also black out for 1-2 seconds every few minutes. Annoying! I finally carved out a half hour this morning and disassembled the card, cleaned off all the old thermal paste (first with ArctiClean 1 Thermal Paste Remover, then prepared the surfaces with ArctiClean 2 Thermal Surface Purifier, and applied a dollop of Arctic MX-5. Reassembled everything, crossed my fingers, powered it up and ... Not only did I not kill it, everything’s working perfectly now! Sweet. I used: ArctiClean kit with microfiber cleaning cloth  ($9) Arctic MX-5 Paste (2G syringe, more than enough for this j

I’ve had this inexpensive Logitech C270 webcam for almost a year and just realized it had software available that, among other tweaks, enables a “widescreen” mode that eliminates (well, alleviates) one of my chief complaints - perched atop my monitor, about 2' from my face, it was way too close in. It’s still a little too close, but significantly improved and usable in a pinch. (And, because Logitech has a habit of removing perfectly functional software somewhat capriciously, here’s a link to the archive.org capture of the installer package:  LogiCameraSettings_3.0.23.pkg . This same application will change the settings on the C930e and C920e cameras as well, toggling widescreen, etc.)

Store passwords (e.g., in a database) as salted hashes, with built-in PHP functionality (using my super 3l33t system operator password ): $hash_to_store_in_db = password_hash ('god',  PASSWORD_DEFAULT); To verify a user-submitted password against the salted hash: if( password_verify ($password, $hash) ) { ... } To generate such a hash from the command line (e.g., to manually update a database table if necessary): $ echo "<?php echo password_hash('god',  PASSWORD_DEFAULT); ?>" | php Easy.

Swapped the Boba U4 RGB 62g switches into a Keychron K8 . Holy isht, these things really are silent! Like, this is probably quieter than the rubber dome OEM Dell board our receptionist uses. Nicely tactile, though lighter than what I'm used to (daily drivers are an RK71 with Box Pinks, another K8 with Box Jades, a K6 with Box Royals, and I have a couple of Box Navy / White / Pale Blue boards I tried out while I was transitioning from buckling spring). So far, this is my GOAT. There is zero keycap wobble with this setup (stock Keychron keycaps), the “bump” is right at the top of the travel, and my typing accuracy is where I expect it to be. I’m sold. Why did it take me this long to discover and finally try these switches? One thing to note: Ali Express ships them loose in a bag, just like the switches I’ve ordered from NovelKeys etc., but for some reason it seemed like an inordinate number of these arrived with askew pins I had to gently bend back into place. I also had a tough tim