Updated 03-Aug-2025 Note: other titles (with different duties) for the household staff include: Au Pair, Governor/Tutor, Nanny, &c. We are looking (again) for someone to perform the duties of Au Pair. Unfortunately there are two aspects we've been getting wrong: - An Au Pair is not usually expected to do general cleaning, and - An ... Read more
Updated 03-Aug-2025 Note mid-March 2025 This page needs a workover, as it is no longer accurate in several ways. For one, while we did get rid of the Mi Box, we have since aquired a Mi Smart Speaker, which is better sounding than the Google Nest Mini. I also still appreciate the backpacks, wired earbuds, ... Read more
Updated 03-Aug-2025 This is about linux desktop issues (as opposed to server), and mainly deals with desktop-style configuration. See this post about shell and command-line utilities and environments. See also ChromeOS - Apps, Config, Utilities for the companion article on ChromeOS. Android Apps Android Emulators for Linux This is pretty much unneeded these days. Apps ... Read more
Updated 03-Aug-2025 Update early 2021 - Apparently ChromeOS outsold OSX in 2020. This makes sense as the strength of the ChromeOS is primarily in the education market, and that market exploded with demand because of Covid-19 school closures and the need for devices for remote schooling. This is an overview of what Chromebooks, Chromeboxes, and ... Read more
Updated 03-Aug-2025 First steps after logging into an Amazon Linux box: Set up the Name Services (DNS, Hostname) Properly Note there are several places this needs to be set. nano /etc/sysconfig/network-scripts/ifcfg-eth0 Make this look as follows: DEVICE=eth0 BOOTPROTO=dhcp ONBOOT=yes TYPE=Ethernet USERCTL=yes PEERDNS=no DNS1=84.200.69.80 DNS2=84.200.70.40 DHCPV6C=yes DHCPV6C_OPTIONS=-nw PERSISTENT_DHCLIENT=yes RES_OPTIONS="timeout:2 attempts:5" DHCP_ARP_CHECK=no Note that this fixes the ... Read more
Updated 03-Aug-2025 Asia Rollout of the Nissan Leaf 2018 Nissan Leaf First Drive Review Nissan set to release Leaf in the Thai Market Nissan Leaf EV to go on sale in Thailand 2019 Nissan Leaf specs (unconfirmed) Nissan IMx Next Generation Platform
Updated 03-Aug-2025 A site called Living Montessori is a prime example of the kind of nonsense that goes by the name of Montessori Inspired. This site is particularly pernicious because the author claims legitimacy by having been a Montessori teacher and school director. The fact that the Montessori training was in the UK, which only ... Read more
Updated 03-Aug-2025 Tesseract OCR is a library and engine for optical character recognition. Version 4.0 has a greater facility for neural network training. The Tesseract Wiki is a good place to start. The Tesseract V4.0 neural network in particular implements an LSTM engine.
Updated 03-Aug-2025 DeepSpeech Speech Recognition Machine Learning These are notes to the project, which seem to me worth pursuing. Having recently seen a number of AWS re:invent videos on Vision and Language Machine Learning tools at Amazon, I have ML-envy. Time to start a project, but while I wait for the Amazon Transcribe and Amazon ... Read more
Updated 03-Aug-2025 Babies do many things in the womb, including hiccup, urinate, and even masturbate.
Updated 03-Aug-2025 Dropbox is a cloud storage and sync service, with additional editors/apps, such as Paper and Showcase. For various reasons, those additional Dropbox apps are not useful for our use cases. However, storage and sync are excellent in and of themselves, and generally superior to Google Drive which is the only real alternative. What ... Read more
Updated 03-Aug-2025 Dropbox Paper is a product I really want to like. For one thing, the promise of better editor is something long unfulfilled. And taking some design cues (or perhaps merely unrelated similarities), Medium did do something nice for the blogging environment. By extending it as essentially a wysiwyg Markdown+ editor, drag and drop-friendly, ... Read more
Updated 03-Aug-2025 We can call this Tsuite, inspired by Toot Sweet (a Chitty Chitty Bang Bang candy invention), and is meant to provide some functionality offered through third party collaborative documents. The main point is to have a self-hosted, free-and-open-source alternative, albeit with more bare bones functionality. Ultimately the goal is to be functional enough ... Read more
Updated 03-Aug-2025 AWS DHCP options are set on a per-VPC (Virtual Private Cloud) basis. By default, things like the search scope and DNS servers used by a given AWS Instance are set by DHCP which also provides the private IP address (but not any Elastic IP Addresses). Indeed, the Amazon Virtual Private Cloud is a ... Read more
Updated 03-Aug-2025 The current system of analytics tracking is so very broken, let us count the ways: Most solutions require third party trackers These are easily blocked by third-party ad blockers/privacy tools They are mostly javascript (and javascript can be disabled) They are a privacy nightmare, even when implemented properly They slow a site down ... Read more
Updated 03-Aug-2025 By rogue I mean those processes which are not beneficial (at least for my configuration). To start with there are those processes which actual communicate over the network. View Processes on OSX with nettop nettop Nettop is a built in process communication display utility, useful, especially with seeing what network interfaces are being ... Read more
Updated 03-Aug-2025 What is Montessori? I am a great fan of Maria Montessori and her ideas about education. That said, she is long-dead and the Montessori we have is not her ideas (though we do have her books) but rather a set of institutions, schools, and teachers. We must look closer to see clearly. Because ... Read more
Updated 03-Aug-2025 A big part of speed is managing the browser cache. This usually means setting compression (gzip/deflate) and expirations of cached content. Compression takes place at the web server (generally after minification). Minification usually also combines files together, so that that there are fewer requests. Compression provides enormous advantages (much more than minification), however, ... Read more
Updated 03-Aug-2025 MySQL is good for large multi-user databases. However, when dealing with few changes to the database, and many reads, it is far from a great solution (in fact, is a terrible solution). SQLite is far superior in that situation, and for serial/sequential edits. MySQL 5.6 vs. 5.7 For those with minimal database needs, ... Read more
Updated 03-Aug-2025 Two words time-based automation: cron and crontabs (and other apps such as anacron) are needed for so many things on a server. Here is how to use cron and crontabs on Amazon Linux AMI. Install crontabs This will in addition install several dependencies, including cron. yum -y install crontabs chkconfig crond on service ... Read more