Current progress on the MG RX-77-2 Guncannon.
I’ve had my Macbook Pro ever since my wife bought it for me back in 2014 for Christmas. It’s been a great machine for me and has provided years of reliable service. Unfortunately, it has gotten to the point where the battery will only last about an hour while unplugged.
After I started working from home, I moved my office to the space that was previously my wife’s studio. And since I am now separated from the main house by a garage, I need reliable mobile computing to move around the house. Yes, the other macbook works, but it’s SO SLOW.
ifixit.com made this task easy. I bought the appropriate battery replacement kit from them and followed this guide of theirs.
Once I had the parts and the instructions printed out, I got to work on a Saturday morning. First, I drained the battery to the point that the laptop went to sleep to reduce power hazards as much as possible. Then, using the stardriver provided in ifixit’s kit, and under Bandit’s supervision, removed the back plate and was greeted with the laptop’s innards.
After working for a bit, my stomach reminded me that it was lunch time. However, my workspace was a mess of tiny screws, disassembled components, and tools. I could just see Bandit jumping down and causing a problem or two while I went in to eat. I couldn’t take him inside with me because he was comfortable and cat law was in effect. Then I realized the incredibly fortuitous fact that my desk is a roll top! I just dropped the cover and my workspace was protected.
Getting back to the project after eating, the biggest part
I am happy to report it has survived it’s first complete power cycle and lasts MUCH longer than previously. Very good investment of time for this project.
I finally got tired of manually typing out all of the characters in the branch names that JIRA was creating for my projects on the M1 Macbook Pro that work has provided for me.
Solution is really simple and I’m kicking myself for not having done it earlier now.
Inside a Zshell terminal, type the following two lines:
echo 'autoload -Uz compinit && compinit' >> ~/.zshrc
source ~/.zshrc
That will enable tab autocomplete and reload the shell so the change takes effect immediately.
I am fortunate to live on an area that I have a few options for Internet Service Providers. Of the Comcast, AT&T, and WOW options that can choose from, I have been a happy WOW customer for years.
Their service is cheap and relatively reliable. They have rolled out some free speed upgrades in my area. I started as a customer back in 2015 paying for 25 Mbps down, and now, still paying roughtly the same rate, give me 200 Mbps down.
That would be great and all, except for the infrastructure upgrades WOW has done over the past year or so resulted in random outages that appear to be localized to my house. Calling tech support only results in wasted troubleshooting time and being told a technician would have to be dispatched to find the problem. Since the problem pretty consistently resolves itself after 3-12 hours, this would be a waste of time and the minimum $50 for a tech visit. Additionally, it only seems to show up when it’s raining outside. So unless I can schedule a technician to show up during a rainstorm, I don’t think they’re going to be able to diagnose the problem.
According to Motorola, my cable modem’s manufacturer, the upstream levels should be 37 to 48 dBmV for my 4 downstream channels. Mine was averaging 55 dBmV! The equivalent of my modem “screaming” at WOW and them just barely hearing it.
So how do you get those numbers down? The same way you increase volume of your own voice in a noisy situation, an amplifier. Whereas a human voice can use a megaphone or microphone and speakers to increase its volume, a cable modem needs an amplifier with active return to increase its signal back to the ISP. The active return is the important part, that is the bit of tech that actually shouts back to WOW. An amp by itself only increases incoming signal, kind of like only wearing a hearing aid.
A few Youtube videos and web searches later and I’d made up my mind on the PCT-MA-81010-1A. Simple, cheap, and available. The device arrived quickly and without issue, I’d recommend doing business with PCT without hesistation.
Biggest problem I encountered once I received the device was figuring out what ends to connect to which coax cables. The power coax was pretty self-evident, but the end to connect to my cable modem and the end to connect to the utility were less so. Fortunately I was able to find the answer on some YouTube channel.
Below, you can see that my upstream power levels are a good 10dBmV lower than without the amp.
A friend recently gave me an old macbook, [from about 2009-ish?]
TL;DR
Linux Mint with it’s Cinnamon desktop resulted in the fewest headaches out of the box for me and my needs.
I’ve been looking for a lightweight PC to serve as a dock for my portable hard drives, kind of functioning as an ugly sort of NAS. I have been using my 2011 Macbook Pro with a USB hub. However, it is a pain to disconnect all the USB drives from it if I need to move. But with another small computer I can permanently untether the Macbook and use it around the house again!
So when I was gifted another old Macbook, I set about finding what Linux distro would work best with it.
TIP: To get to the boot select screen on this version of a Macbook, press and hold the Option key when the machine is first booted until the boot device selection menu appears.
As I dabbled, I came up with a list of features I was looking for.
These are the distros I ended up trying
| Boots? | Resume from sleep? | Resume from lid close? | Bluetooth? | Wifi OOTB? | Notes | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Manjaro KDE | Yes, but with errors | Yes | No | not tested | Yes | |
| Manjaro XFCE | Yes | Yes | Yes | No, headphones not recognized as output | No/Yes, when installed on Ethernet | No option to add nVidia drivers from install disc Wifi works OOB |
| elementaryOS | Yes | No | No | not tested | No | |
| Pop! OS | Yes | Yes | No | not tested | No | |
| Ubuntu | Yes | Yes | No | Yes | No/Yes, when installed on Ethernet | |
| Linux Mint | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes | No, but an easy add from disc | wifi & nVidia drivers easily added from disc |
| Deepin | Yes, but slow | No | No | Yes | Yes | trackpad X-axis input is Y-axis cursor movement & no x-axis cursor movement possible App Store and default browser don’t work |
The most difficult hurdle for any of these distros to overcome was resuming from sleep due to the lid being closed. All but Mint and Manjaro XFCE failed this test. I imagine this is more of a desktop environment issue than related to any particular underlying Linux distro.
The results of these simple tests put Linux Mint with it’s default Cinnamon desktop as the clear winner for my needs.
Worth noting is the utter failure of the Deepin distro. It was unusable on this Macbook and disappointing to such a degree that I doubt I’ll bother with it ever again.
UPDATE: 09/22/21 – added technique for non-admins to perform this action
Here’s how I open two instances of unity on the same project
There are numerous times that I’ve wanted to compare two scenes in the same unity project. Unfortunately, Unity doesn’t allow an already open Unity project to be opened again. However, I found a hack that lets me open the same project more than once. So let’s open an elevated Windows Powershell and get started.
Copy-Item -Path .\GameProject\ -Destination .\GameProjectCopy\ -Recurse -ForceRemove-Item .\GameProjectCopy\Assets\ -RecurseNew-Item -Path .\GameProjectCopy\Assets\ -ItemType SymbolicLink -Value .\GameProject\Assets\mklink /J .\GameProjectCopy\Assets\ .\GameProject\Assets\Junction created for .\GameProjectCopy\Assets\ <<===>> .\GameProject\Assets\This should be enough to trick Unity into opening the same project in two different Editors. The advantage of this technique over just copying the project to another folder is that changes saved in one editor are immediately available in the other one. Both Editors are always in sync!
I just designed and printed my first 3D object.
I have several window mounted cat shelves throughout the house. They are held in place by a series of four suction cups. There are two cups that provide support for straps that hold the bed parallel to the ground and create a surface for the cat to lounge on. This design means that these strapped cups provide most of the support to keep the bed’s occupant resting comfortably in a sunbeam and not catastrophically dumped into the floor. To that end, they have an outer plastic shell that holds the strap in place as well as providing reinforcement for the suction cup underneath.
I just finished my first serious papercraft model.
It definitely not perfect, but I think it turned out decently.
Source is here.
Usually, when modeling for 3D printing, you will be using millimeters, so make sure that the scene is using “Metric” units and, specifically, set to millimeters.
When zooming in close to these small models, the view clipping is sometimes too far out from the camera. This can cause some visual oddities, like the following. The camera is outside of the isosphere’s mesh, but the clipping of the camera hides the faces of the sphere closest to the camera, making it appear as though the camera is inside the mesh.
To fix this, adjust the properties of the view.
A “3D-Print Toolbox” plugin is available. I haven’t used it yet, so I don’t know anything about it yet.
Right now, I’m spending some of my free time getting up to speed with Spring Boot. Opinionated frameworks like Spring seem like they’d be a great way to build some quick prototypes for some ideas I’ve got bouncing around my head without having to go through the learning curve a whole new language. I’m already overwhelmed enough with my operations (Linux, networking, security, application servers, etc) and Unity automation for work. And now I’m throwing some AWS into the mix for some side work with a friend.
In my experimentation with Spring Boot, I threw together a quick cat fact web service. Running mvn spring-boot:run and accessing the endpoint at http://localhost:8080/getcatfact returns some super-simple JSON with a random cat fact. Yay kitties!
I created another package, based on the Spring Boot tutorial, designed to be a “Hello, World” example. When I run the application, everything starts up fine, and the Cat Fact endpoint still works. But trying to access the http://localhost:8080/greeting endpoint results in a weird “White Label Error Page”. After some internet searching, I found a decent answer. It seems the error is related to having my packages at the wrong level. Spring will search for and load Boot applications at the initial application’s package level and any sub-packages. Since the net.bencarson.catfact and net.bencarson.hello packages were siblings and didn’t share a parent, it was obvious how to fix my problem. I just needed to create a common parent SpringBootApplication and package and move these existing applications underneath.
I created a new class for net.bencarson.services.MyServicesApplication and moved the catfacts and hello packages under the new net.bencarson.services package, the application was still throwing the White Label error for ‘greeting’.
The final piece I was missing was that I needed to modify my pom.xml. Inside, I had to change the <start-class> element.
<start-class>net.bencarson.services.MyServicesApplication</start-class>
Now the service starts correctly and both ‘catfacts’ and ‘greeting’ endpoints are accessible!
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