Cyclopedia Square

This is my comment on the Utah Department of Transportation's plans to "to provide an integrated transportation system that improves the reliability, mobility and safety for residents, visitors, and commuters who use S.R. 210." This is long, but I have tried to order it in such a way that the most important points come first, so don't give up now.  At least read the first 3 paragraphs, please. First and foremost I'd like to ask, what problem are we really trying to solve?  Roughly 355 days a year there are no reliability, mobility, or safety problems on S.R. 210.  The weather is good, the roads are clean and clear, and traffic flows at or above the speed limit of the road.  We all need to understand that the problems with reliability, mobility, and safety only happen about 10 days a year, if the skiers are lucky and we get that many big snow storms. Mobility Congestion on roads is annoying, but we need to seek to understand it before we try to fix it.  Congesti...

A child of mine finally asked for a 3d printer.  I knew that if I tried to push it, no kid would be interested, so I didn't.  But finally, one of them asked for one.  We ordered the Creality Ender 3 that night from their website and some filament from Amazon.  It all arrived a couple days later and we enjoyed the process of assembling it and then finally printing the gcode files that were on the SD card that came with the printer.  Including those was a really nice touch.  Once we got the bed close enough to the nozzle it all worked great. After the initial success we found some models on thingiverse, sliced them with Cura , and then saw the printer do something like this (not my video) over and over.  Too much filament in the wrong place, no filament in the wrong place.  It was a strange and bewildering start-up sequence to watch.  I searched the internet for advice and didn't find much.  I finally just opened up the gcode file that C...

  Linux Environment Management: direnv does it all A few years back I wrote about different options for linux environment management .  I recently learned about another option, direnv.  I think I'm convinced that it is the only tool you need.  Read this as if it's another section added to that previous post. Use direnv Straight from  the direnv website : "direnv is an extension for your shell. It augments existing shells with a new feature that can load and unload environment variables depending on the current directory.  Before each prompt, direnv checks for the existence of a .envrc file in the current and parent directories. If the file exists (and is authorized), it is loaded" This happens automatically, so it solves the problem of the "Explicit Environment Files" solution above in a way that is much more convenient than the "Per-command Environment Files" solution. The .envrc files are in standard shell syntax and it properly unloads environme...

(To skip my rambling intro and get to the nitty gritties, search this page for, "After that long introduction") In college, back when the internet was young, I hated the clumsy ineffective internet filtering that was in place on campus. It often blocked sites that were perfectly fine, and did not catch all the sites of the type that they were trying to block. Fast forward 10 years or so and I saw my children stumbling upon some content that I didn't want them to see on my unfiltered home internet and my attitude changed a bit. Back then web filtering was pretty easy. Nothing was encrypted and DansGuardian was the go-to tool. You set up a transparent web proxy and DansGuardian would scan the entire content of every website that you downloaded in your home. Incriminating words and phrases would trigger its blocking and it would replace the website you were downloading with an explanatory message. The beauty was that there was no need to scour the web, categorize every web...

UPDATE : With current versions of git, I no longer recommend git annex or git LFS unless you really need to store your large files on a separate server from your git repository. Just add your large files to git like any other file and when you clone, you can avoid downloading the full repository history with git clone --filter=blob:none and use git as normal. Table of Contents How To Retroactively Annex Files Already in a Git Repo First Tries: filter-branch, filter-repo Success with git rebase –interactive Added binary files Deleted binary files Modified binary files Moved binary files Dealing with Tags Clean Up and Results How To Retroactively Annex Files Already in a Git Repo In my last post I talked about how surprisingly easy it is to use git annex to manage your large binary files (or even small ones). In this post, I'm going to show how hard it is to go back and fix the mistake you made when you decided not to learn and use git annex at the start of your p...

UPDATE : With current versions of git, I no longer recommend git annex or git LFS unless you really need to store your large files on a separate server from your git repository. For the simple use I describe here, just add your large files to git like any other file and when you clone, you can avoid downloading the full repository history with git clone --filter=blob:none and use git as normal. I'm developing the website for my business and I have a mix of code an images in my git repository. Since everyone seems to know that you shouldn't keep large binary files in your git repo, I decide to see what the current solutions to that problem are. After doing a little bit of searching, I narrowed things down to git lfs and git annex . Git lfs looks so nice and simple, except I'm not using github. Sure, you can set up your own central git lfs server yourself, but that sounded suddenly not so nice and simple. The website for git annex immediately hits you with all the ...

I promise I'm not turning this into a spam blog for my business (see the business twitter account for all my self-promotion), but I want to get the word out about early-adopter discount codes that I have made available.  I'll start an MSD specific blog and continue promoting things there as well. The discount code is for $99 off, which is a free Self-support subscription.  There are only 20 purchases available with this code: a5b2758959 Please give it a try, download and install the product, go through the Hello World tutorial , let me know how it all works. Thank you!