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!

Transcranial Direct Current Stimulation!

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I recently attended a Quantified Self meetup at the Microsoft NERD center in Kendall. It was very well organized – thanks to Joshua Kotfila and Maggie Delano. Hopefully future meetups have more people presenting!

The event consists of two main parts – a pre-talk social session and a series of talks. There were a few people and companies showing off their projects before the talk.

One of the groups showing before the talk was a company called Thync. They are attempting to bring a Trans-cranial Direct Current Stimulation (TDCS) device to the market. TDCS has been shown in a number of studies to have positive effects on learning – language learning if I recall correctly. It’s also supposedly safe. They were offering demonstrations of their new device at the event.

New GnuPG Keys for the New Year

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-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- Hash: SHA256

I changed my PGP keys today and revoked my older keys. There are several
of my other keys on the PGP keyservers that were created some time ago
which have been lost. All the other keys that I still have access to
have been revoked. Most of the others should have expired but not all of
them had an expiry date set.

The new fingerprint for the key is:

A23A 038E D110 7F45 E2A3 FA3F 75A9 046F D5A1 B8AE

The key can be downloaded off of the [[http://pgp.mit.edu][MIT Keyserver]] or at [[https://www.bostonenginerd.com/pgp_key.asc][this URL]]

-----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE----- Version: GnuPG v2

iQEcBAEBCAAGBQJUtxDBAAoJECYF3VdrZ+YTCYUIAI0Gv7BzVQvz8C7Nw6Q1QXme
o4xtvJV+rlnNIhdue2taDFHke98AfvEvTOIr0aEa7WSxD4ZO1+t4zg74755wErZV
y7TGUn2EM3zvos40o+upkbqXdB+Y/54nEADgxod+OegOpnintNlwk94hGlOI7yTQ
T24vdiXPjLs28n6FLj+ovM6QM2SM9njCF0la4/5eHnVqkXvLtAVz+oCKQJJgAYz1
BCxEOH2ePmj9c7x9rKUBw2kLhZ+E8DsDnQlmzhzslpXGmVNmMQbKUpMLkqAGPYLN
G9Ea2U0RBszA53TQuhoBUgG5xooOhviJJ2ToRQ26E2D6cXfU0Y0rgkXrKQwUoZk= =DLXQ
-----END PGP SIGNATURE-----

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!