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DrupalRecover Tech

TF300 becomes dogged slow with time

Apparently so does the 2012 Nexus 7.

Over time I’ve noticed that the TF300T tablet I have has become almost unusable. It just hangs and hangs. Looking into this it appears that with these newfangled devices you need to worry about how well the storage performs. I totally get that having gotten the Rasberry Pi. I bought the cheapest SD card so any disk access is dogged slow.

So it turns out that Android just freezes due to slow disk access on Asus tablets. Here are some benchmarks discussing that. Next time I buy a tablet or phone I’ll make sure and check how well the storage performs. Its been ages since that mattered but it does once again.

I was clued into this with this Ars article about Android 4.3 and its addition of TRIM support. iOS doesn’t need TRIM support (as far as I’ve found) as apparently the storage doesn’t suck. 3-5 years in and both the iPod touches (2nd and 4th gen) have no horid freezes like the 9 month old Android tablet.

So you do in a way get what you pay for and again Apple products may be again worth the premium (I say as I write on the perfectly functional 5 year old MacBook, about to watch movies on the 7 year old iMac both working perfectly fine still). I suppose considering how old the Apple products are I don’t know much about the newer ones…

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DrupalRecover Uncategorized

Tora Tora Tora!

The Tora Tora Tora group at Oshkosh 2013 was pretty impressive. Here’s a bit of it, it’s always so hard to believe these days being attacked from air. You really have to feel for the normal folk who really went through things like this, I can’t imagine living through the Battle of Britain, the bombing of Germany, you name it.

We were on a rowboat on Lake Wingra when that B-17 flew over on its way to the airshow. Glad it didn’t bomb us!

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BSD/Linux DrupalRecover Tech

Raspberry Pi!

I gave into impulse and bought a Raspberry Pi finally. Not sure what I’ll do with it but it cost around $60 (with case and SD card) so why not give it a try?

I have it running Drupal right now. Works fine but a bit slow. I think the slowness is the SD 4 Class SD card serving as the database filesystem though… Use an external USB disk and I bet it’d be decent. Once the pages are in memory its plenty fast.

It’s so tiny:

Who needs a big computer? Me still. Here the Pi is on top of a small box of a computer:

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BSD/Linux DrupalRecover Tech

Django, Ubuntu, and Nginx

So I switched back to Ubuntu so that I could do me some bitmining. That’s all I’ll say about bitmining, going swimingly.

Switching to Ubuntu I had to move my Django site over. We’re recording all sorts of trivialities there. Normally this goes easily. There was no problem moving from Ubuntu to FreeBSD or between OS X and those. You just copy the project directory over, simple!

But I had switch to Nginx which was a change from using Apache. And I kept randomly getting ‘Template not found’ errors. It’d always work if I connect with the MacBook, but connect with any other computer and I’d get the ‘Template not found’ errors. If the MacBook was on it all worked ok on other computers though. Still I didn’t know the MacBook was the reason it was working yet…

So I’ve been trying to figure out these darn errors. I’d been using FastCGI and was going to blame it so decided to switch from it to uWSGI. I went from FastCGI to uWSGI as the Django server. I thought that finally fixed it but then the errors came back!!! I connected on another random computer and it didn’t work. Then I ssh’d into the Ubuntu server as my user and it worked again!

Solved!

You see Ubuntu can encrypt your home folder. I’ve always just had the Django files in my home folder. The deal was whenever I was on the MacBook since Terminal automatically opens it connected to the Ubuntu server as me and unencrypted my home folder. That’s what happened today too on the other random computer. Tricky. Most of the time Ubuntu unmounted my home folder, encrypted it, and caused the ‘Template not found’ errors since the files were indeed gone. So I moved the folder to somewhere other than my home folder. Many hours wasted on that one!

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DrupalRecover Uncategorized

Busy bees!

All the bees appear to have survived the winter! Here’s Aquarius busily buzzing.

 

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BSD/Linux DrupalRecover Tech

Moving Drupal sites between servers is a piece of cake

(Seems like WordPress is this easy as well)

Just so anyone else can feel better about needing to do it, it’s a piece of cake to move a Drupal site from one server to another. I’m very pleased with how easy it is to do that. All you have to do is:

  1. Save off the database
  2. Save off the drupal folder
  3. Move the database and drupal folder to the new server
  4. Load the database to the new database server
  5. Move the drupal folder to the proper location to be served

It worked amazingly well! Not a single hiccup.

Categories
BSD/Linux DrupalRecover Tech

Google Reader is gone, Drupal saves the day!

A note from 2016 – I ended up using TTRSS and it works great!

Like many I recently found out that Google Reader is going away. So after a feeling of loss I set about finding a replacement. For some reason I couldn’t get Tiny Tiny Rich Site Summary to download onto FreeBSD. I think something must be amiss in the distribution files or whatnot.

No matter! It turns out Drupal has a just fine feed aggregator. Sure, it’s missing the ability to ‘star’ entries but I can do without that. So if you’ve lost Google Reader and have Drupal running your set anyhow. I’m just using the default feed aggregator and it seems fine for my needs.

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DrupalRecover Uncategorized

The End of an Era

The Gentle Giant died today. As with most deaths, though, it was a little more complicated than that.

The Gentle Giant got frostbitten every winter. This winter was colder and wetter, so it was worse. In January, his comb was frostbitten, which I expected, but then his foot swelled up, and he began limping around in the most pathetic fashion. Chickens are essentially cruel by nature, and everyone in the coop began to pick on him- literally. We have a little coop next door to the regular coop, for sick chickens and young chickens. So, I put him in the little hospital coop, expecting him to get better, if left alone.

When I carried him to the new coop, I examined him. His foot was swollen, but I couldn’t tell why. He was dirty. His comb was frostbitten and a little scabbed over.

Every day, I would visit him for a few minutes, and he would hobble around a little and eat and drink. Little Z went in and pet him and encouraged him to get better. Time passed.

Every time I saw him over the past few weeks, he was holding his bad foot up in his feathers, standing on one leg, eating, or he was just nestled in the hay I put down for him, relaxing. Something about him, though, was starting to seem really pathetic. He was not getting better.

I think I suggested a mercy killing about a week ago. But then, we were all thinking, what if it warms up and he just gets better?

We decided today. It was time.

I didn’t really know what was wrong with that foot. It could have been frostbitten or some sort of terrible, flesh eating fungus for all I knew, so I wore goggles, a face mask, and plastic gloves, as well as a washable rain coat over my wool sweater when I went out and got him. Normally, I hold chickens firmly by the feet, but I thought that would hurt him. I just hugged him gently. I did, however, look at “the foot”, but the foot was gone. He had only one foot. His other leg just ended in a little round nub. All those times I thought he had his foot up in his feathers, I was wrong. There was no foot.

And then I had no doubt. The Gentle Giant was not going to get better. There just is no place in this world for one footed roosters.

There was definitely some part of me, actually a huge part of me, that was terribly disturbed that someone – a chicken, but still – could just lose an entire foot within the space of two months! And I was suddenly really glad I was wearing all of that protection.

The march to the cone took quite a while. There I was, hugging my sick, favorite chicken, walking all around the sheep fence, because I accidentally partitioned it poorly, so that it was almost a quarter of a mile through deep snow to the killing tree. My goggles fogged up, and I staggered blindly up the hill, avoiding barbed wire and blackberry bushes. It was at this point that I thought of the book I’d read recently, The Endurance by Caroline Alexander. The book is about an expedition to discover the South Pole in 1916. The men on that expedition ended up stranded on an ice float for 17 months or so, eating penguins. So, when I was blindly staggering through the snow with my soon to be dead chicken, sharp knife tucked under my arm, I thought, at least I’m not stranded on an ice float, living on penguins. This really isn’t so bad.

The knife is one I inherited from Grandpa Al, who was a chef at Mel’s Diner in San Francisco. His name, “Al”, is carved into the handle. It is an excellent knife. I sharpened it this morning. And so, I can thankfully say, when we got to the killing tree, it was quick, it was clean, and the deed was done as well as it could be done. The Gentle Giant is, as they say, “in a better place” now. He was cremated, due to illness. His foot, though… I hope I don’t have another story about where his foot went.

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DrupalRecover Tech

Cleanliness and allergies

So I don’t know how well known or believed this is but I believe it. The cleaner we get as a species the more allergies we have. There is likely some good to having eaten dirt as a child. Little Z doesn’t seem to have any allergies and she gets plenty of contact with the dirt stuffs out here.

Anyhow, here’s a book review at ars techinica about An Epidemic of Absence: A New Way of Understanding Allergies and Autoimmune Diseases. 

Categories
DrupalRecover Tech

Original aluminum iMacs and failed hard drives

Apparently the original aluminum iMac does not boot from Firewire. No Mac from before 2008 apparently boots from Firewire. They only boot from USB.