Had occasion to send a certified mail letter just down the road, not even across town. We can track it on line and it was sent August 25 and today (Sept 7) it is still being delivered. Almost two weeks. Seems like the vandalizing of the USPS by the current administration is real. Isn’t this a problem for business?
Month: September 2020
Netflix Culture
Had heard about Netflix and their culture for a while. Of course every tech firm loves to tell you what a great “culture” they have. Most fall well short of their stated goals. This looks like good advice on how to keep a growing tech firm from imploding.
Netflix Culture: Freedom and Responsibility
Louisiana: Images of the Pelican State
from The Atlantic.
Louisiana: Images of the Pelican State
Abolish the Senate
Reading an article in the (hardcopy) of The Baffler by Thomas Geoghegan about the need to abolish the US Senate. I did find a decade old article by the same author in the New York Times that makes similar points, but more focused on the fillibuster. Among them:
“Forty-one senators from our 21 smallest states just over 10 percent of our population can block bills”
Raspberry Pi Zero Network Monitor
We have been having trouble with our home internet for years. Lately it just drops off every hour or two for a few minutes at a time. I wrote a little script to ping a remote site every minute and log the results. The plan was I could graph the results and “share” them with my internet provider.
I was logging from my desktop Raspberry Pi 4 running Ubuntu and realized it would be better to used a dedicated, wired machine, lest my internet provider protest that the problem is with my router, etc.
I had this $5 Raspberry Pi Zero that I bought not realizing I actually wanted a Raspberry Pi Zero W with built in WiFi. I figured I could use this as a dedicated machine hooked directly to my router. I bought a USB to Ethernet adapter and a USB cable for power, that I just plugged into the USB slot in my router.
Amazing how fast it came together. Going to clean up the software a bit and post it to github. Will post when it is out there.
Raspberry Pi Ubuntu and Evolution
I have been using a Raspberry Pi 4 running Ubuntu as my desktop for almost a year now. I don’t use it for anything too heavy and it has been adequate. But just adequate. I started doing a bit of coding and became more and more frustrated with performance and instability. At first I blamed the Google Chrome browser, a known memory hog. I was seeing 80% of my memory used (I have 4 GB) and that seemed to be at the root of the problem. But I noticed lots of cycles and memory were being taken up by some built in calendar application. It seems this is part of the Ubuntu Evolution email / calendar default application. it also seems like it is difficult to remove (come on, Ubuntu). I did finally find a good way to remove Evolution and since then, memory use is half of what it was and performance is noticeably better.
Steven A. Guccione 