It was so much fun to visit Mürren, a little Alpine village in Switzerland. In the foreground you can see a rectangular wooden water trough. The mountain spring water tastes great!
This village is not accessible by car – you have to take a lift to get there. Lifts are quite safe, safer than trains and planes even, while providing stunning views.
When I visited Japan, I noticed so many people in costume. Here’s one I met on the bus, posing as a Ghostbuster:
Love it! Gotta admire this guy’s dedication to accurate proton pack projector guns, uniform, even goggles and ghost traps!
I recently received an Eve Room HomeKit Air Quality monitor. But when I plugged it in, nothing happened. I let it charge overnight, and it remained stuck on the charging screen. I reset it with a paperclip multiple times. Tried multiple chargers. Tried a different micro-USB cable. All to no effect. The battery either seemed completely discharged upon arrival, or something was broken inside the unit.
That’s when I emailed Eve Support. They suggested resetting it again and waiting a few hours. I did, to no avail. After I sent them a photo of the non-working unit, they agreed to a quick, free replacement.
And the replacement worked great!
My experience with Volker and Sarah at Eve Support couldn’t have been better. Polite, prompt, professional, and a free replacement. I liked their service so much that I went out and bought a second Eve Room for the lower level of my house. I’m also planning to get one as a gift for a family member.
What does the $85 Eve Room (2nd Gen) get you over a $15 AcuRite?
What are some downsides?
Charging is easy. It takes less than 2 hours and only needs to be done once every couple months. You can also use it with the charger plugged in, though it’s possible this will reduce the battery lifespan a bit. With the AcuRite, you need to replace the 2x AAA batteries every other year. (Though my first AcuRite started reporting obviously incorrect temperatures after a few years – I just bought another one since it was so cheap.)
Are the air quality measurements any good? The only thing I have to compare it to are the measurements from my Withings scale downstairs. The Withings reacts pretty fast to cooking in the kitchen. The Eve Room seems to be a bit more … optimistic on air quality, even when the air seems a bit stale. (a quick blast of the air conditioner clears this up though) It doesn’t care much about soiled diapers, but it does react when people are in the room breathing out carbon dioxide for half an hour or so.
Overall, fun little gadget, and I’m looking forward to setting up automations with it!
I have a small Dell E310DW laser printer, which is a rebranded Brother L2340DW wireless printer. Bought it for $90 three years ago. Today, I discovered the printer’s internal status page. Here’s how to get to it:
You can also get this info by doing a status print out.
After I bought this printer, I sold my old non-wireless HP LaserJet P1006 printer for $40 on Craigslist. Even though it needed toner, I still had 4 people competing to buy it.
A few more things I love about this Dell/Brother laser:
After 3 years, I’ve printed 265 pages. That’s 88 pages a year, or 7 pages a month. I have roughly 60% of my “starter toner” remaining. At this rate, I’ll be be able to use the original toner for at least another 3-4 years! This would be unheard of in the inkjet world.
During the pandemic, many of us are forced to work from home – myself included. Time to put away the dining room seat and get a real office chair.
By far the most comfortable chair at any of the various employers I’ve had has been made by Steelcase – the Steelcase Leap and Amia seats specifically. But these cost around $700 new. (Though as of this writing, the Amia is $399 renewed on Amazon)
So I setup a saved search alert on Craigslist to let me know when any Steelcase Amias come along below $350. Steelcase chairs pop up every month in my city, but often at a high price. I was patient, and six months later, I’m sitting on an almost new Steelcase Amia for $200. I can sit in this thing for hours and not get tired or have a sore back. Love it!
What I like about the Steelcase Amia:
There’s really nothing I dislike about it, and I’m kind of picky. Colleagues at work have also gotten Steelcases, but also recommended the X-Chairs, the IKEA Markus ($199), and the Herman Miller Aeron. The only one of those I’ve tried is the Aeron. I thought the Aeron was surprisingly uncomfortable for such an expensive chair, and it looks weird. Many people disagree, so be sure to try before you buy, if you can.
Say you want to go to example.com. What happens under the hood after you type the page’s address into your browser?
fd = socket(AF_INET, SOCK_STREAM)fd, 1.2.3.4:80)write (fd, "GET /index.html HTTP/1.1)index.file=read(fd ...))I used the following resources in researching this:
Jeff Smith’s DNS Explained tutorial
Steven Bradley’s What Happens When Your Browser Requests a Web Page
Julia Evan’s Bite Size Networking wizard zine
Hope this helps anyone curious for a deeper level understanding of this!
Update: A week after posting this, I happened across a page dedicated to explaining this process in exhaustive detail, right down to what happens when you press the first key! (on a physical or virtual keyboard)
I was recently asked how to troubleshoot layers 4-7 of the OSI model.
Layer 4 (Transport) : Most problems at the transport layer have to do with blocked ports. Ensure there are no firewalls (ex. iptables) blocking the TCP/UDP ports you’re trying to troubleshoot. You can also try temporarily disabling quality of service (QoS).
Layer 5 (Session) and Layer 6 (Presentation) : Example protocols in these layers include sockets in the session layer and MIME in the presentation layer. These two layers play a less active role in the functioning of the network compared to the other layers of the OSI model. There usually isn’t anything here to troubleshoot.
Layer 7 (Application) : The app layer is where client-server apps are used. For example, HTTP, HTTPS, SMTP, SSH, DNS. Regarding DNS, use the dig or nslookup commands as a starting point to figuring out why DNS is failing. For HTTP, you might use Apache’s or NGINX’s stats pages. (Be sure to turn these off when you’re done using them though, for security.) For SSH, SMTP, and all cases: check the logs. Temporarily enable debug logging if you have to. You can also use tcpdump to filter TCP/IP packets and analyze the protocols used.
There is certainly more that could be said here, but I just wanted to write down what I’ve learned so far. Credit for much of the above info goes to:
Sukesh Mudrakola at Techgenix
Brendan Gregg’s book on Systems Performance
One of the prayers I try to say every day is the Glory Be:
Glory be to the Father
and to the Son
and to the Holy Spirit,
as it was in the beginning
is now, and ever shall be
world without end. Amen.
This is a doxology, or a liturgical formula of praise to God. The Glory Be has been used in a form similar to what we see above since around the year 529, but it actually comes straight from Sacred Scripture. For example, see 1 Chron 29:11, Phil 4:20, and 2 Cor 13:14.
From Catholic Answers: If at any point in our lives, in joy or in sorrow, in the middle of troubles or struggles, in hope and in fear, when perhaps we cannot find the words, we can always pray perfectly that God may be glorified always, and so we will be praying for all we really want. In a way, we will be praying as God “prays,” since the Savior prayed in the face of his deepest suffering, “Now, Father, glorify your Son with the glory he had before the world began”—that is, “as it was in the beginning, is now, and ever shall be, world without end. Amen.”
I woke my Mac after it had been sleeping for a while and I noticed it was slower than usual. Clicking browser tabs felt like pushing through molasses.
I opened a Terminal window and typed: top, and immediately1 saw photoanalysisd consuming 95% CPU. It showed no signs of letting up, after several minutes of watching it.
I opened Photos. Now two CPU hungry processes were going: Photos itself and photoanalysisd.
After a quick web search, I went straight to the first hit at Stack Exchange, and found this gem:
Not sure how this guy figured this out, but this tip worked great. It did indeed stop photoanalysisd. Hopefully this trouble won’t crop up again.
I was asked about vmstat recently and didn’t know as much as I should. I’m writing a brief post to help myself learn it a little more.
Here’s an excerpt of the manual:
So what can you do with vmstat? If you run it without specifying any parameters, it gives you an average view of virtual memory and system usage since your last reboot.
If you run it with the 1 parameter (vmstat 1), it runs (and re-measures) every 1 second, until you break out of it:
procs -----------memory---------- ---swap-- -----io---- --system-- -----cpu------
r b swpd free buff cache si so bi bo in cs us sy id wa st
3 0 0 44712 110052 623096 0 0 30 28 217 888 13 3 83 1 0
0 0 0 44408 110052 623096 0 0 0 0 88 1446 31 4 65 0 0
0 0 0 44524 110052 623096 0 0 0 0 84 872 11 2 87 0 0If you want to see how much memory is swapped in/out from disk, check out the si/so (swapped in/swapped out) columns.
If the amount of memory in the free column is low, you’ll want to check which processes are consuming the most memory. (with top, for example)
But wait – you can also troubleshoot CPU and disk bottlenecks with vmstat:
For disk bottlenecks, look at the b (blocked) column. This tells you the number of threads that were blocked/waiting on IO completion. It should be 0 most of the time, but if it’s not, you can investigate further with iostat.
For CPU bottlenecks, look at the r (run queue) column. These are the threads that were waiting for a CPU to become available in order to run. If you see more than 2-5 times the number of CPUs on the system listed in this column, there may be a CPU bottleneck.
For more info, see The Geek Diary’s guide to troubleshooting with vmstat – it’s an excellent resource. And if you want to know how to run something slightly similar to vmstat on macOS, try vm_stat.
