Up until a couple months ago, I've been pretty tied up with [[Kwartzlab]]. Kwartzlab is awesome and I loved serving on
the board, but being an administrator was taking away from actually making or doing things.
(Video by Bob Jonkman. For whatever reason, that ogv video sometimes doesn't work so great
for me in GStreamer. But you can click on the little Internet Archive icon at the top and download to play in VLC or
something. It's going to be me unpreparedly rambling regardless).
It was mostly done at the time and I uploaded the code to github. Mark pulled
it down and pretty much rewrote it. And then I came along and added some twitter API stuff, figuring out the basics of
OAUTH for no better reason than I wanted to figure out OAUTH (basic authentication would've worked just fine).
But it still languished for a while. Mark was running it every week and sending me updates about what restaurants it
uncovered.
Then the Kwartzlab board elections came along and I decided not to run again. Not coincidentally, I decided I wanted to
dust off old projects and actually ship some. NewEatsKW was the first one.
Last night it tweeted its first tweet all on its own.
It would've been sooner, but there haven't been any new restauarants in the dataset in weeks. I still need to do a bit
of work to get it running in a cron job where it can download the data from the Region itself, but it works and I'm
happy with it. Despite being a weird combination of being both horrendously slapdash and ridiculously overengineered.
And so far it's made something of a splash, picking up nearly 40 followers on its first day.
Coolest new local tweeter: @NewEatsKW Using Waterloo Region Open Data to tell you about new restaurants. @psywisdom— Midtown KW (@MidtownKW) August 18, 2014
Hurray! I've got some ideas of things I can do to make it better, but for now I'm happy that a small, simple, useful
thing finally made it out the door and into the world.
B-Div was always a bit of an odd duck in WCRI. One of the few options for one- and two-bedroom apartments near UW, you
needed something like 13 terms seniority to get in when I was there.
So it was mostly grad students and alumni. I managed to get a summer sublet from a guy who'd graduated. That allowed me
to stick around even though I only had about 11 terms.
So it was where I hid, secluding myself, finishing my degree and recovering from five unhappy years at university.
My old desktop was seeing random drive errors on multiple drives, including a drive I only got a few months ago. And
since my motherboard was about 5 years old, I decided it was time to replace it.
I asked
the KWLUGmailing list if
they had any advice on picking motherboards. The consensus seems to be pretty much "it's still a crapshoot." But I bit
the bullet and reported back:
Mostly because I wanted
Intel integrated graphics and I've got 3 monitors it needs to drive. And I was hoping the mSATA SSD card I got to
replace the one in my Dell Mini 9 (that didn't work) would fit in the m.2 slot. It doesn't. Oh well.
I wanted to get
it all set up while I was off for Canada Day. Except Canada Computers didn't have any of my preferred CPU options. So
I'll be waiting for that to come in via NewEgg.
I gave myself a budget of
about $500 for mobo, CPU and RAM and I'll end up going over a little bit (mostly tax and shipping), and tried to
build the best machine I could for that.
One of the things I did this time that I hadn't done before was spec out a desktop machine at System76 and used that
as a starting point. System76 is more explicit about things like chipsets for desktops than
Zareason is. Which would be great, except they're using the older H87 chipsets.
...Like the latest Ars System Guide Hot Rod
But that's over 6 months old now. And >they're balancing their budget against having to buy a graphics card, which I
don't want to do.
I still have some unanswered questions about the Z97 chipset. It's only been out for about a month. So who knows?
My laptop has mostly been my desktop for the last few years. But I want to knock that off because I've been developing
back and neck problems. My desktop layout is okay ergonomically, at least better than anything I have for the laptop
(including and especially my easy chair with a lapdesk, which is comfy, but kind of horrible on the neck). One of the
things that's holding me back is my desktop is 5 years old and was built cheap because I was mostly using it as a
server by that point. I really want to make it something I want to use over the laptop (which is
a very nice laptop). Which is why I ended up going somewhat upper-mid range.
That's one of the nice things about building from parts, despite the lack of useful information: This is the 3rd
motherboard I've put in this case. I replaced the PSU once a couple years ago so it's quite sufficient to handle the
new stuff. I'm keeping my old harddrives. I could keep the graphics card. I'll need to buy an adapter for the DVD
burner (and I've yet to decide if I'm going to do that, or buy a new SATA one or just go without). And I can keep my
(frankly pretty awesome) monitors. So $500 gets me a kick-ass whole new machine.
Anyway, long story short, I still have a lot of questions about whether
this was the best purchase, but I'm hopeful it's a good one.
Aside:
is Canada Computers really the only store in town that keeps desktop CPUs in stock
anymore? I couldn't get into the UW Tech Shop, but since they're mostly iPads and crap now, I'm not optimistic. Computer
XS doesn't (at least the Waterloo one). Future Shop and Best Buy don't. I even went into Neutron for the first time in
over 15 years. Nope. Nobody.
It... didn't go as well as I'd hoped:
So, anyway, I got the motherboard, CPU and put it all in my old case.
I booted up and all three monitors came up
without any fuss, which has never happened for me. Awesome! This is great!
Then I tried to play game.
Apparently the current snd_intel_hda ALSA drivers don't like H97 and Z97 chipsets. The sound was staticky, crackly and
distorted.
I've spent more than a few hours over the last week hunting around for a fix. I installed Windows on a
spare harddrive to make sure it wasn't a hardware problem (for which I needed to spend the $20 to get a new SATA DVD
drive so I could run the Windows driver disk to actually get actual video, networking and sound support :P). And I found
this thing on the Arch WIki which,
while not fixing the problem, did actually make it worse, leading me to conclude there was some sort of sound
driver/pulseaudio problem.
Top tip: when trying to sort out sound driver problems for specific hardware the best
thing to do is search for the hardware product id (in my case "8ca0"). That's how I found
this:
Hurray! The workaround works great and now I'm back in business!
So I got burned by going with the bleeding edge, and I should know better. But, even though the information isn't widely
disseminated yet, there is a fix. And a workaround. I'm sure Ubuntu 14.10 will have no problem with it. It's not as bad
as the bleeding edge was years ago. If the fix was easier to find (and I'm going to work on that), it was easier getting
going with Ubuntu than it was with Windows.
![[COMING SOON]](http://flyingsquirrel.ca/blog/wp-content/uploads/2014/08/IMG_20140812_120552_cropped.jpg)
