I finally cleared off the counter so I could take a picture of all the loofahs we harvested a few months ago after having planting a few dozen seeds. Sadly, we only managed to get two specimens off a single vine, and they are small! I was excited to see them finally growing in the summer, but they clearly were missing something to reach their potential. Alan blames the poor soil in front of our house.

CG1_2983_v1.JPG

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I tried to post this review on the site where I booked this hotel, Agoda, but the character limit on their form meant not even half of this would fit. So here’s what I meant to post in full.

If the hotel properly advertised there is no Internet service, then it would have been a reasonable place to stay (though I would not have stayed, as I needed to do some work from the hotel during this rainy week).

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While I was traveling in Taiwan in March 2020 as the world was descending into Covid-19 chaos, I had some time to ponder improvements to my blogging and notetaking processes. At the time, my website was happily powered by the mostly static generator Movable Type, and my notetaking was strewn across text files, Google Docs and physical paper. I wanted to try to merge them as much as possible, so it seemed to make sense to do both in the same place: text files on my computer. I resisted moving away from MT for a long time, because I love its super intuitive templating system and ease of logging in and blogging from anywhere. MT has served me well for almost 20 years (wow!), and if this site had to support more than one author, I wouldn’t want to change.

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As has my life, my Runkeeper and Fitbit tracking has been a mess for more than a year. Most of my runs have two or even three copies in Runkeeper. My stats have therefore been useless, not that I’ve had time to look at them anyway.

I had been meaning to sit down and document some issues with the Runkeeper-Fitbit integration before I started tracking many GPS activities in Fitbit. I expected I would track each runs with my Fitbit Ionic and the Runkeeper app on the phone, and then delete one, leaving whichever was best. This hedged against GPS breakdowns, which have happened on any device I’ve ever tested. The first problem was Fitbit did not allow saving notes with the activity, so I would have to copy the notes from the Runkeeper tracked run to the Fitbit imported run on Runkeeper. Upon saving, often the miles would change, perhaps due to some algorithm Runkeeper has to smooth GPS jitter. Whether or not the miles changed, it seemed Runkeeper would then reimport the Fitbit activity since apparently the one resaved with the note was no longer connected to the original.

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I didn’t realize my fwupd installation was not working till I noticed my BIOS is still running 1.5.1 instead of the latest 1.6.3. Upon investigation, I realized I did not have the Linux Firmware Update boot entry above the Linux Boot Manager entry. When I fixed that, or tried to manually select after F12, it still was not working. It took some time to notice there was an extremely tiny message flashing for less than .1 seconds. I had to use my DSLR to zoom in and record a video of the corner of the screen to figure out what it says:

Found update fwupd-7ceaf7a8-0611-4480-9e30-64d8de420c7c-0 WARNING: No updates to process. Called in error?

I realized I could boot to the laptop’s native BIOS update utility with F12 and then navigate to the .pac file in \EFI\arch\fw\, so I did not need to solve this problem.

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The backup and sync saga never ends! Now on my desktop I have been unable to open the Insync UI or apparently get it to sync at all. I killed it and run it by console to see if there was any output, and it fails before it starts syncing anything with an error: GDAuthError: Access token refresher stopped. Only two search results appear for “GDAuthError Insync”. One from a year ago has no solution, but someone commented recently that it happened to them, so perhaps there was a regression.

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I’ve been using Dvorak full time on computer for 17 months, a number that shocked me just now when I initially wrote “5 months” and then realized I was off by a year. I have not deliberately practiced much in the last year, and am also not as fast as I hoped I would be by this point. Still, I have no regrets. I have also not had any typing related hand or finger pain, which was what led me to this originally.

I still use QWERTY on my phone, but I have been thinking about switching there, too. My brain does seem to treat them totally separately; I initially suck at typing QWERTY every time I try on computer but never think twice on the phone.

Since I want to do some more practice, I’ll continue to log some statistics to this entry just as I have in the past in Switching to Dvorak and Switching to Dvorak, Part 2.

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From https://www.xfinity.com/support/articles/cancel-my-xfinity-services:

How to Cancel Your Xfinity Account

• Chat with us online. Seven days a week (8:00 AM - 11:00 PM ET).
• Visit your local Xfinity Store or Comcast Service Center.
• Email your cancellation request by completing a simple form.

• Mail your cancellation …

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In preparation for the burn, it’s time to charge the batteries I use for my solar setup. I was surprised to find them registering only 5 volts on my multimeter; something in the solar regulator must have been discharging them. This at least gave me an opportunity to see how long they take to charge from empty and how much power that uses.

Power to charge 12V 140AH battery 10h

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For years I have generated rainbows using the Wheel() function in Adafruit‘s NeoPixels library. While convenient, the linear transition between the primary colors resulted in significantly dimmer colors in between the primaries. Playing around today, I improved the result by using a quadratic equation to accelerate each color component’s journey from 0 to 255.

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