After almost twenty years Segway’s will stop production next month, according to Fastcompany. There was allot of hype around this product back in the day. It never not take off – at all.
One of his past owners had really bad luck with the product. But what probably killed is, that you look really stupid riding it. There is no real good look using it. I think it had its best media appearance in Jenji Kohan’s Weeds. Specially since it was so brief and quirky. Much like the device itself.
There is probably a thing one does for the first post. Just like a first program should output “hello world”.
Instead I might just mention what this blog is running on: An AWS tiny instance. Actually cheap*. Latest WordPress as per June 2020. Actually free. It has been more than 15 years since I installed WordPress the first time. Over the last ten I had little reason to deal with it. After this hiatus it was interesting to see what has changed. And what has not.
Getting the technology stack going today was the usual mix out of ‘oh this is nice’ and ‘wth – why is this broken now’. The actual work is not even that much or particularly complicated. Just that there are these unpredictable potholes where one can get stuck for hours on end. Without having the faintest idea when and how a solution might emerge.
It appears in the end it worked out OK. I don’t think I would want to work on WordPress ‘powered’ sites for a living though. Hacking (like in axe, not as in computer skill) the extraneous items off from the default theme was cumbersome enough. Trying to chase specifics out of a mediocre theme is probably not much a fun.
*and as it turns out not sufficient. I got everything ‘up’. But running things was not pleasant / possible. MariaDB liked crashing. Not wanting to make a project from it I asked
mysqltuner.pl
and it laconically replied:
Variables to adjust: *** MySQL's maximum memory usage is dangerously high *** *** Add RAM before increasing MySQL buffer variables ***
Stoping the aws instance, starting it at – now as a tiny instance – gives me the same reply. But it is work trying, since the next level up gets me into even higher monthly costs.
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Under Mac OS X 10.12.1 aka macOS Sierra attempting to put files into the trash results in an error message:
The operation can't be completed because one or more required items can't be found. (Error code -43)
Currently a solution can not be googled that well: As general as the error message sounds there is a large heap of well meaning system care advice.
In my situation the problem seems to have been caused by no cleanly un-mounting CF cards and/or external hard drives.
A reboot makes the issue go away. Nothing more and nothing less required.
in a random sub reddit.
It turns that you can ask a running dd command how it is doing.
In the terminal that runs it simply enter a CTRL^T command.
The dd will react to the SIGINFO that this sinds with statistics of the running process.
Quiet handy since dd can take a while if you start it with a lower block size.
In order to obtain todays dow jones index (DJIA) in a google spreadsheet one can use:
=GOOGLEFINANCE(".DJI")
The quotes matter. Indexes would be for example:
.DJI Dow jones Index
.INX S&P 500
.IXIC Nasdaq Composite
Getting the dow for a specific date is a bit more involved. This worked for me, but there might be an easier way:
=index(GOOGLEFINANCE(".DJI", "price", to_date(DATEVALUE("11/26/2013"))),2,2)
The date (11/26/2013) was actually a cell reference.
Not related, yet interesting was this page that showed how relative popular search terms are.
Others yielded interesting insights. For instance it seems that Cars are a seasonal product. Even though people tend to use them every day, they care more for them in the months leading up to summer.
Other extremely seasonal terms include: Travel, Shopping, Real Estate, Jobs and Durable Goods.
I really like my Vesterby frames.
When I needed spare parts I got in touch, and they sent them right away and to the address where I would be.
Awesome service. I can only recommend them: Vesterby
Somehow Apples cloud based photo system got enabled on my iPhone. Which also meant that the delete button in the OS X application “Image capture” got grayed out.
To re-enable it had to turn off iCloud Photo Library and My Photo stream via Settings -> Photos & Camera
And then I had to reboot the phone (running IOS 8.1.3)
I am old enough to remember that any change on a Windows machine last century also required a reboot.
3rd robo phishing call in as many days.
Today it spoofed my own number as it’s caller ID
and pretended to be AT&T. Telling me to enter
the last 4 of my social. Their scheme was that
my account had been “flaggedâ€. Entering
false four digits prompted in a “flag has been removedâ€
message. So that people easier forget. I wonder what
people want to do with the combination of my
phone number and the last 4 of my social.
It is frightening to think that they might a have a success
rate in the double digit percentages with this scheme.