Year: 2020

Raspberry Pi Zero Network Monitor

Steven Guccione

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

Steven Guccione

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.

Phone Holder

Steven Guccione

I saw David Lynch made a wooden holder for his iPhone. It is made for filming and attaching to a tripod (see YouTube video below). I had a similar idea for my Google phone.  When I am working in the yard and using my bluetooth headphones I tend to set the phone on a rock.  I used to use this piece of webbing I had to hang it from a tree branch but it was too complicated. Inspired by Mr Lynch I made a similar phone holder, with a more pastoral use.

Popular Names 2020

Steven Guccione

In a somewhat bizarre turn, the Social Security Administration  is not releasing its  popular names for newborn American babies in 2020.  This list has been published every year on Mothers Day for almost a quarter of a century.  The official reason is the COVID-19  crisis.  Rumor has it that the real reason is the plummeting popularity of the boys name “Donald”. In California the popularity of “Donald” has dropped from #560 in 2016 to #640 in 2017 to #720 in 2018.  This is a blue state, but data available for other Red states indicates a declining popularity.  If this is the real reason for stopping this Mothers Day tradition it is a new level of pettiness for this administration.

Coronavirus delays list of most popular baby names this year

 

Sloppy Joe

Steven Guccione

I know the usual story of Joe McCarthy the 1950s senator and anti-communist crusader.  Seems it was a little different than I realized.  I had assumed it started at some reasonable, or at least legitimate, place and grew out of control.  Maybe the witch-hunt analogy gave it a bit more legitimacy that it should have.  A good one from the New Yorker.

Joseph McCarthy and the Force of Political Falsehoods

McCarthy never sent a single “subversive” to jail, but, decades later, the spirit of his conspiracy-mongering endures.

The Money Printers

Steven Guccione

Very seldom have I seen an issue that brings out such diverse and strong opinions as federal debt.  This is especially odd because it is about numbers, which usually involve firm answers and results.  But these numbers aren’t just ordinary numbers, they are  dollars.  Much of the fear, doubt and uncertainty is manufactured by vested interests on this topic.  A very good read from The Baffler with some ideas everyone ought to at least consider.  I will note that the people in the US government that scream the loudest about the debt quickly turn into the ones unapologetically running up that debt.

The Money Printers

Congress’s greatest con: “We can’t afford it”

Spectrum Outage Outrage

Steven Guccione

We has only one choice for internet: Spectrum, formerly Time Warner. It has been very erratic, irregular service literally for years.  My neighors have the same problems and we even believe we know the exact piece of equipment failing.  Still no fixes.  I found this Spectrum Outage Map on line.  How is this allowed to happen?  Vast numbers of people without internet in just about every major city in the US. And other providers don’t do this.  And yet they were just allowed to merge with Charter.  What is our FCC doing?  People pay a lot for this service.

Screenshot_20200826-173455_Chrome