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No Dragon*Con this year

My social media streams are filled with people posting about Dragon*Con now, and I imagine it will be for at least the next few weeks.

I’ll be skipping DC this year and travelling back home to Edmonton instead the following week. Feelings about missing DC are kind of mixed. On the one hand, I’m going to miss not being there. It’s always exciting to see the crowds, all the costumes and to hit all the different tracks and fan panels. The first couple of days are always a rush and full of excitement about being around your own kind. On the other hand, this would have been my 5th Dragon*Con, and part of me feels like it’s becoming old and routine, and that there isn’t much new to experience. Sure, there’s always something different to see, but the over all experience is still the same. Of course once I’m there, I’m sure all that would go out the window and it would again be an awesome and fun time.

Maybe it’s good that I’m taking a break from D*C this time. I’ll probably go back next year, but undecided at the moment.

I’m looking forward to being back in Edmonton again and seeing my friends. Hoping for an uneventful trip there and back, but given my recent past traveling history, not terribly optimistic.

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Freeze the adapter

The charging adapter for my Transformer Prime decided to stop working last night. Plugged in the tablet, but no charging was happening. Uh oh.

Put the volt meter on it and saw that it was providing 5V USB power. There are 5 other contacts that I’m guessing provide the actual charging voltage for the batteries, which I think are rated at something like 7.2V and thus won’t charge using regular USB power. I wasn’t able to easily access them with the probes on my volt meter, and it was late at night so I didn’t feel like futzing around with it too much. The cable seemed fine, since the tablet recognized that I had plugged it into a computer USB port. That meant either the charger was bad or the port on the tablet was bad. 

It was off to Amazon.com to see how much a replacement would be. In the one of the reviews for the ASUS charger, the reviewer suggested putting it in the freezer could help fix a charger gone bad. I thought it probably wouldn’t hurt to try, so I stuck it in a Ziploc freezer bag and left it in the freezer overnight.

Took it out of the freezer the next day and left it on the desk for a few hours to let it come back up to room temperature. When I plugged it into the power squid and connected the tablet, it started charging again! Freezing the charger actually worked, much to my surprise. Not sure what exactly the freezing did, but whatever it was seems to have worked. Hopefully it stays that way.

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Mason jar cold brew coffee

I’ve been experimenting with cold-brew coffee and have come up with something that I like. If you have a source of freshly roasted coffee beans (as in still warm from the roaster), all the better. I’ve only tried this starting with whole beans rather than pre-ground. YMMV.

  • 60-65 g of your favourite whole bean coffee
  • 1 quart sized mason jar
  • water

Grind the coffee beans and put them into the mason jar. The ground coffee usually ends up taking up about 1/3 of the jar.

FIll with water and put the lid on (not too tightly) and shake lightly to mix. The grounds will float up at the top for a while, but eventually will sink down to the bottom of the jar. Leave it in the fridge 1-2 days, but at least 8 hours or overnight. Give it a shake every now and then.

After a day or two, strain out the grounds. I use my coffee maker for this. Place a filter into the bowl like you normally would, and pour the coffee in. Most of the grounds will stay in the jar, which is a good thing. Let the coffee drip through into a coffee pot or some other suitable container.

Pour over ice and enjoy. You can drink it straight up, or dilute it a bit. I like to use chocolate milk in mine.

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Traipsing down memory lane – Apple //e

A conversation on IRC about 6502 assembly led me on a trip down memory lane. It made me start thinking about playing with the Apple ][+ and //e back in the day. Remembering typing in programs from Nibble magazine prompted me to search the interwebs a bit, and I found www.nibblemagazine.net, a complete collection of 12 1/2 years worth of Nibble Magazine, from the very same person who originally published Nibble. Made me wish I still had my collection of Nibble magazines

And then to go along with it, someone in another IRC channel posted a link to a government surplus auction site for a late model Apple //e with dual disk drives (no monitor) with a $10 starting bid. No info on if it was working or not. To say I was very tempted would be an understatement.

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Learning SELinux

Security Enhanced Linux (SELinux).

For the longest time, I’ve always considered SELinux a bit of a PITA, in large part because I didn’t take the time to learn anything about it. It was always spitting out these annoying error messages, and keeping things from working properly. Anytime I installed/reinstalled Fedora on a machine, disabling SELinux was usually the first thing I did.

I decided it was about time I changed that and learned how to use SELinux properly.

At Flock to Fedora this past weekend, two of the talks were on SELinux: SELinux for Mere Mortals and What’s New in SELinux. On top of the smattering I picked up on my own by following the troubleshooting prompts provided by sealert(1), it was enough to make the light bulb in my head start to glow dimly. Still lots more to figure out, but it’s starting to make a little more sense to me now.

Maybe if I learn enough about it, I can give a blurb about it at BarcampCHS, or at a CHUUG meeting.