Assorted Nerdery

Blog posts - hastily written with poor grammar.

I’m an engineer living in a small city north of Boston with my wife, two kids and two cats.

My webdesign-fu is pretty weak, but I’m aiming for a adequately readable experience with minimal cruft. I recently discovered the Zen Hugo theme and have modified it here. Any suggestions are very welcome!

Getting the Wolfson Audio Card working with Volumio

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Update <2020-10-17 Sat>:

The documentation described here is obsolete. Modern versions of the Linux kernel distributed with Raspbian have this driver included. You will still need the configuration scripts to setup the correct routing through the audio chip. Mattias Reichl distributes the files here:

I purchased a Raspberry Pi some years ago to use as a media player in my home. For a while, it was setup Raspbmc. This worked very well for sometime and was even able to stream Amazon Prime video. Unfortunately my video library is quite small here and Amazon turned on DRM on their video streams, making the media center not particularly useful. My 15 year old CRT television didn’t help either.

Using Git and git-annex as a podcast client

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A year or so ago I started using Joey Hess’s Git-Annex to manage backing up and synchronizing files across several computers. It’s worked quite well for me. It has an “Assistant” feature which enables you to create something akin to a Dropbox replacement. There are some special features which allow backing up files to Rsync.net, Amazon S3, and Box.net among others. Files uploaded to cloud services are transparently encrypted. It’s pretty neat stuff.

One feature that I recently learned about git-annex is that it can be used as a podcatcher. This is pretty neat. You can download a podcast once and synchronize it to your various devices. I may listen to a podcast on:

Happy Holidays!

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Happy Holidays to you and yours!

Security for That Family Member

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We all have a few family members that aren’t quite up to date with technology. Feel free to use this letter. No attribution required.

Dear %FAMILYMEMBER% ,

Thanks for your Internet Security question.

  • Gmail is probably better than AOL security-wise, but it’s not a magic bullet. Security is a process, not a thing you do once. Plenty of my friends have had their Gmail accounts hacked.

  • If you do get a Gmail account, Two Factor Authentication is a necessity. Even though it’s sometimes a pain, you should enable this on all the accounts it’s available for. Facebook supports it, as well as gmail. Please do this, it’s really important. Seriously.

Trip to the Oregon Coast

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At the beginning of the month, I went out to the PDX area with a colleague. We had some nice productive meetings and were able to get out to the Oregon Coast. The Pacific NW is really a wonderful place — good food, good coffee, beautiful scenery.

United Airlines provided some good adventures on the way home. I had to fly a rather ridiculous routing for this trip — BOS-EWR-SFO-PDX and then PDX-SFO-IAD-BOS. I don’t actually mind routings like this too much since I can get a lot of work done during the flights. The flights out were thoroughly uneventful. UA provided some good entertainment on the way back.