Author: Darcy Casselman

@NewEatsKW

[COMING SOON] 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.

Way back in February, the lab hosted [Open Data Waterloo Region](http://opendatawr.ca/) for [Open Data Day](http://wiki.opendataday.org/Waterloo_Region). For a while, a coworker (Mark Sherry, [@alfedenzo](http://twitter.com/alfedenzo)) and I had been kicking around the idea of using the [Waterloo Region Food Inspection dataset](http://www.regionofwaterloo.ca/en/regionalGovernment/FoodPremiseDataset.asp) and using it to figure out when a new restaurant opens in town. So when Open Data Day happened, that’s what I worked on.

(Video by [Bob Jonkman](http://sobac.com/bjonkman). 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](https://github.com/dscassel/neweatskw). 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](http://twitter.com/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.

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.

Farewell, B-Div

This was my home for nearly 2 years.

2014-07-28%2013.04.26

[WCRI](http://wcri.coop) is in the process of demolishing B-Division.

2014-07-28%2013.07.06

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.

2014-07-28%2013.04.53

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.

2014-07-28%2013.03.16

So it was where I hid, secluding myself, finishing my degree and recovering from five unhappy years at university.

2014-07-28%2013.02.39

And now it’s gone.

2014-07-28%2013.06.07

New Motherboard: ASUS Z97-A (and Ubuntu)

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 [KWLUG](http://kwlug.org/) [mailing list](http://kwlug.org/pipermail/kwlug-disc_kwlug.org/2014-June/012807.html) 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:

>I bought a motherboard! An [ASUS Z97-A](http://www.newegg.ca/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16813132118&ignorebbr=1)
>
>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](http://system76.com) is more explicit about things like chipsets for desktops than [Zareason](http://zareason.com) is. Which would be great, except they’re using the older H87 chipsets.
>
>…Like the latest [Ars System Guide Hot Rod](http://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2013/11/ars-technica-system-guide-november-2013/3/) 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](https://zareason.com/shop/Verix-2.5.html)). 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](http://canadacomputers.com/) 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](https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/PulseAudio#Glitches.2C_skips_or_crackling) 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:
>
>[https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/linux/+bug/1321421](https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/linux/+bug/1321421)
>
>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 diseminated 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.

Too Close to Call

[election lawn signs]

Sometimes I get excited about elections. I mean, I *like* talking about policy stuff I’m passionate about and I often find the democratic process invigorating and exciting. Other times, it just fills me with dread.

[When last we met](http://flyingsquirrel.ca/index.php/2012/09/02/by-election/), Kitchener—Waterloo was holding a by-election to replace long-standing PC MPP Elizabeth Witmer. The victor in that race was NDP candidate Catherine Fife, which I felt pretty happy with, for reasons you can read about in the aforelinkedto blog post.

Now things are a bit different. The Liberals aren’t being complete jerk-asses. They’ve got a new leader I actually rather like and they’re running on a platform that’s pretty much everything I want them to run on. Even high speed rail between KW and Toronto, which I acknowledge is somewhat implausible, but I’ll take “we’re gonna do it! don’t ask me how” over “it’ll never happen; we hate you.” any day.

The PCs, however, have fallen back on faith-based economics and populist vitriol and stand in opposition to pretty much everything I believe in. They’d cancel Places to Grow and clean energy subsidies. They’d cancel all surface transit projects. They’d cut absolutely everything anyone cares about. Their plan, in a nutshell, seems to be to pour out as much gasoline as they can find, chuck a match and walk away with a smug grin.

I don’t like them very much.

Let’s dive into the candidates
Continue reading Too Close to Call

Enable Two-Factor Authentication

So everybody’s really excited about [[wiki:Heartbleed]] and now we’re seeing helpful folks on social media urging all their friends and family to [change their passwords](http://mashable.com/2014/04/09/heartbleed-bug-websites-affected/).

Leaving aside that your Instagram password is probably one of the least interesting things an attacker might get through Heartbleed, changing your password will only help you until the next time a security breach leaks a (hopefully) hashed password database.

Passwords alone aren’t good enough for security anymore. Fortunately, more and more sites have implemented [two-factor authentication](http://lifehacker.com/5938565/heres-everywhere-you-should-enable-two-factor-authentication-right-now/all) or [[wiki:two-step verification]].

Continue reading Enable Two-Factor Authentication