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Joe's Journal

joe
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12/05/2016 23:56 #60725

Erie County fiber survey
Category: internet
Not fiber like celery fiber but fiber optic.

Erie County is doing a survey of internet speeds right now at

Take it and show them how pathetic Buffalo's speeds, are especially if you're with the extortion that is Time Warner!

Personally I'd love a municipal or county owned fiber network but I doubt they're build that out. I'd definitely take something like the private Greenlight networks in Rochester. 100/20Mbps for only $50, less than we're paying Time Warner for a third of the speed.

11/30/2016 23:57 #60723

Refactoring e:strip
Category: programming
The past week or so when I have the time, I've been going through the source of (e:strip) and cleaning it up.

So far I've:
  • Moved a lot of the concatted PHP views into more HTML-y templates
  • Cleaned up some of the registration process and updated the confirmation process
  • Removed dead code
  • Given a controller to most of the views

I still want to pull out all of the inline styles and refactor the CSS into something useable, maybe with flexbox.

I also want to try out multimedia websockets for the Talkbox. And maybe add Schema.org descriptions for users and posts, so we can get structured data to crawlers.

Not that anyone is really posting - but there's something satisfying about cleaning up retro code. It's almost Zen, seeing how much code you can condense into the simplest few lines.

11/30/2016 13:59 #60722

Thanksgiving
Category: family
For Thanksgiving, (e:terry) came with me for the first round to my parents. I didn't really take too many pictures.

Here's the crumbly falafel turkey with veggie stuffing my mom made us. It lost it's turkey shape.
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My mom has gone full 90's mom. It looks like she could be in on a alt 90s band cover.
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I can't count how many pictures we've taken in this spot now.
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Afterwards we headed over to (e:paul)'s parents' to make our stomachs explode and play catchphrase.

Did you know they sell militarized My Little Pony dolls now? A pony named cheese sandwich has a "party tank".
I always thought Equestria needed an armed conflict.
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11/25/2016 19:05 #60720

New monitor
Category: tech
I have a new monitor. Well. (e:paul)'s not so old 4k monitor which he bought last year, because he's already bought a newer ridiculous 4k TV to use as a monitor.

Since my Dell only has one HDMI display output, I've replaced the previous 1080p Paul monitor monster hand me down.

I didn't think my laptop would let me do a built in 1080p and 4k monitor because it's so old and limited to HDMI 1.3. But thanks to the magic of Linux configuration, I now have the builtin 1080p at 60Hz and the 4k displaying scaled 2k at 30hz.

I couldn't figure how to add custom resolutions with Wayland and Mutter in Fedora 25 so I've reverted back to Xorg for now.

Here's how I did it with xrandr and cvt:

Run cvt verbose with your desired x and y resolution and refresh rate. It retuns a list of X settings along with the calculated bandwidth it needs to display. This helps you figure out if your output can carry the signal. in this case I was conservative with 2k at 30Hz.
cvt -v 2048 1556 30

Take that output and pipe it to xrandr --newmode. After that you add that mode as a x setting for an output device with --addmode. You can then set the mode with --output or in the Gnome display settings.
xrandr --newmode "2560x1440_30.00"  146.25  2560 2680 2944 3328  1440 1443 1448 1468 -hsync +vsync
  xrandr --addmode HDMI1 2560x1440_30.00 
  xrandr --output HDMI1 --mode 2048x1440_30.00


11/20/2016 11:00 #60713

Cranksgiving
Category: bikes
Last Saturday I convinced (e:paul) and (e:terry) to get on their bikes on the windiest day for Cranksgiving. It's a scavanger hunt/race where you ride around to different stores, trying to get as many items on the list as possible for Food not Bombs.

We didn't stick around for the results at the GoBike shop at the end but I'm convinced we were in the top third at least.

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