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Watch my speech NOW!
Tune in to my very important speech NOW! #TrumpTV
Also saw eclipse
Anyway, the park consists of two areas, the Teton range of mountains which goes something like 20-40 miles (30-65km) and has a impressive vertical rise (up to 6000 feet or around 1800 meters) over the second part of the park, a very level valley which runs along the entire east side of the range. There are several lakes in the valley area including the fairly large Jackson Lake of which Colter Bay is a part.
We had scouted the Grand Tetons the day before. The authorities had done a relatively good job of managing the situation. There were five areas where visitors were encouraged to go (which in theory would handle a good portion of the visitors the park was expecting to receive) and everything in the park was scheduled to open at 6am this morning (Mountain Daylight Time). It still sounded like way too many people for too small a space, but I'm not seeing what the park could do better. I guess I'll hear how things went later in news or the local Yellowstone rumor mill.
I and some friends managed to find a vantage point near the marina located there to view both the Tetons with the bay in the foreground and the sky where the Sun would be situated during the eclipse. I'd say about 200-300 other people also found this spot, so it was a bit crowded.
We got lucky, the clouds completely vacated the area around 10am and there were no clouds to interfere with our viewing from start to finish of the full eclipse period (about 3 hours in length).
One interesting aspect was the changing of the sky behind the Tetons. My digital camera didn't do it justice since it automatically adjusted for light levels, but you could see the shadow approaching from the west behind the range and later the lifting of the shadow, providing a sort of weird false dawn near the end of the eclipse.
Prior to this expedition, I had prepared some observation tools. I didn't finish the ambitious scheme I vaguely outlined in this post (ran out of time and energy), but I did come up with a nice, simple projection method (small telescope projecting normal image into a box) by which I could count six sunspots on the Sun and partially melt the plastic frames on two very cheap eyepieces of a very cheap telescope that I acquired for this purpose (when the telescope was off-center, the sunlight going through the scope was brushing the edges of the eyepiece holders). Worth the price, but not a problem that I was aware of from reading up on this sort of telescope design. I didn't bother with it at later stages of the eclipse since I had also brought solar glasses and one could observe the total eclipse itself with the naked eye.
The final interesting aspect of this was the traffic. I have never witnessed heavy traffic so purposeful as today. We must have traveled 50 miles in heavy traffic (on single lane roads) that was at or above the speed limit aside from occasional burps. That is unheard of either in Yellowstone or Grand Tetons National Parks (we started our trip in the former around 4am). Usually some animal ambles onto the road or an RV putters along at 25 MPH, putting a halt to that. Not this time.
Seeking Beta Testers for Warp Life for iOS
Warp Life is a particularly fast implementation of Conway's Game of Life. Golly may be faster but it doesn't run on the smaller devices, just the iPad.
If you're willing to help, I'll need the UDIDs of each device you want to test with. Follow these instructions to obtain your device's UDID.
Mail your UDID(s) to mdcrawford@gmail.com.
You could really help a brother out if you would forward the URL to my beta test page to anyone you genuinely feel would be interested in or would benefit from it:
I think I gained weight
No wonder so many Americans are overweight: at Disney World, I was drinking all you can drink Powerade because they didn't have club soda available.
We've been drinking water in the car driving, but when you stop, it's huge amounts of food, washed down with cuke.
I rediscovered catfish at the Cracker barrel, though. Haven't had it in about 40 years: sooooo good! We used to catch perch for breakfast as kids, but the catfish was nice.
Americans love their fireworks, snacks and GUNS, if you go by their roadside advertisements.
It's been fun, but our timeline took us off the perfect eclipse viewing track. We'll still be in the US, though, so we'll see something anyways, lol. I'm going to try to video it for shits and giggles.
Almost home: going to go through Niagara Falls. Love that place.
partial Linux support for Corsair Glaive RGB mouse
This is written from the perspective of a Gentoo user.
So, my trusty if not pedestrian Logitech 3 button wheel mouse started giving out. It's not quite dead yet, but it'll be stone dead any moment! So last weekend I went to Best Buy to see what they had. The Corsair Glaive stood out: not overly complex, good weight, and only slightly too big for my hands. Eh, nothing's perfect, but it was good enough.
I grabbed it, got home, plugged it in, and was promptly disappointed as nothing happened! After having flashbacks to the bad old days—I can barely remember the last time I had something as basic as a mouse not work under Linux—I accepted my fate. I had purchased a mouse that was not supported under Linux. It even works in my EFI BIOS, but not Linux! Depressed, I skulked over to Windows, turned the mouse LEDs pretty pink, and realized while playing $current_waste_of_time that this mouse was awesome. I simply could not return it!
So, I scoured DuckDuckGo and even begrudgingly took Google out of my hosts file temporarily. I upgraded to sys-kernel/gentoo-sources-4.12.6, but no such luck. The hid-corsair module did not even attempt to load, but at least I was getting HID errors in dmesg. I found the ckb-next project, a fork of app-misc/ckb in my Portage tree, but still no support for my new mouse!
Without attempting to learn too much about Linux's HID system, I noted that hid-corsair has support for other Corsair mice, such as the Corsair Scimitar. So I rolled up my sleeves and gave the first obvious thing a try: compile a kernel that sees my Glaive as a Scimitar.
Have a uuencoded patch! (Note: This is after the Gentoo patches have already been handily applied by emerge. Follow cafebabe's usual instructions or install app-arch/sharutils for uuencode/uudecode.)
begin 644 glaive.patch.gz
M'XL(".79F5D``V=L86EV92YP871C:`"]5NMNVC`8_9T^A;5)5<N28#MWJE8*
MD%*K@;`$NE7;9'5)*-$JZ!+8JG5]]SF!%$*!CG2=!8%\]OF.+^?8#J+!``A^
M#*K3)*XFL5^]B4;3.T$6$195X3H<3<;C:A!'/\(XJ0ZC(/T*_C@.17\K1KB^
MN6*@#="]2J52AI+#$&D"9!\,D%@UB$>8%"%"&<$\0A!=T;4ZA"Q@"A&NR
M7)-U49,E%4J2AN<4E6+)AH,,+/'LH8,LE/8B#QF`O0E[`+R-!H!XU.J8==MJ
M'C2<SBEIT3/2I`W']4SB'K)&W#U((WVO3IO6!6E8!^G?"ZO3=%RZ:,J#18NE
M,#TWX"%XX%^>R&N0-NF9+NVZ#G5;]2SKNY=F;=DFN;`*.=F\A*,@&FR?H"Y&
M"/_5_%RV.J;]A#^+YFE2VJ"L]I.K*"XO_QFZE`-FT-<V08'ET0=*3=%%`ZF&
M9"CR-A^HAL%K4%ZX8!90<@]P'*A4L]_D9S3QA^!@&(0_A)/;>!Q,_<DAN,\J
M_:LD_$MAUE)5;@,4-5?+\G-,:0>5.(E^A>#D&"#F[?U]$`=AXG_2E"_@^!C`
M.Z0L!;4\J,X2+&KT>0W3TR)HS(-PD`^)X]@,TV@T&&=#YL&;T^@N&EV#Z2V(
MP]MQ/`$I-(YN)^/X\^C-X=':"=:0QFL8+R980SH++$TP!V8E'W_?L])M@=;-
MQKE-6F>]W?:'/5`HK[);L*;/<ZS=.[C[!_9\.&*/DI:.@D0<EG)+AMS=RAGL
M56V\S/!H8:DF(U$RV%$&5=G88F&L*SPVX$)ALP!Z/,:"<!"--KGM7(-L=:AK
M=DGSE+@62#WS5=*?!ZK*.J#Q+'!5>W-@R$2U'5@4U!PFITHJ4B[IU;7,'L/8
M9MWCF+EE%&[NWKPM95&GW2'4Z[NNT^\TJ8(85L+8+Z'8:?(U7^7OTRC^EI0X
MBM;DV$W%:Q*\FIXW<RU=TI`F,L5B5==4;8NR=9G7C86NV2N3>;YOWJ^N]3,7
MK16=\]E.][Y/W'/:<2CID!YUK:[C]CSP>ZG.M#^8EQ[M.K;]N`_O1KSBD_]&
MO.JSDL3O=B8N^O0?CG?)S4^XM[BWV(.6U=N0OVG93RZB:8QVR4?3[67'HM/M
AD0:[F;8==DSS.W6_V29/LK<)NSTWUG;P#S>UH6/M#0``
`
end
Hmm, should that be GLAIVE instead of GLAIVE_PRO? Anyway, after rebooting with my fresh kernel, I noted that I still received errors in dmesg:
[ 1344.597093] usb 10-2: new full-speed USB device number 5 using xhci_hcd
[ 1344.893040] usb 10-2: New USB device found, idVendor=1b1c, idProduct=1b34
[ 1344.893045] usb 10-2: New USB device strings: Mfr=1, Product=2, SerialNumber=3
[ 1344.893047] usb 10-2: Product: Corsair Gaming GLAIVE RGB Mouse
[ 1344.893050] usb 10-2: Manufacturer: Corsair
[ 1344.893052] usb 10-2: SerialNumber: [redacted]
[ 1344.896435] input: Corsair Corsair Gaming GLAIVE RGB Mouse as /devices/pci0000:00/0000:00:07.0/0000:04:00.0/usb10/10-2/10-2:1.0/0003:1B1C:1B34.000D/input/input28
[ 1344.896962] hid-generic 0003:1B1C:1B34.000D: input,hidraw0: USB HID v1.11 Mouse [Corsair Corsair Gaming GLAIVE RGB Mouse] on usb-0000:04:00.0-2/input0
[ 1344.898989] hid-generic 0003:1B1C:1B34.000E: item 0 1 0 8 parsing failed
[ 1344.899004] hid-generic: probe of 0003:1B1C:1B34.000E failed with error -22
[ 1344.899012] corsair 0003:1B1C:1B34.000E: Fixing up report descriptor
[ 1344.900019] input: Corsair Corsair Gaming GLAIVE RGB Mouse as /devices/pci0000:00/0000:00:07.0/0000:04:00.0/usb10/10-2/10-2:1.1/0003:1B1C:1B34.000E/input/input29
[ 1344.954935] corsair 0003:1B1C:1B34.000E: input,hiddev96,hidraw5: USB HID v1.11 Mouse [Corsair Corsair Gaming GLAIVE RGB Mouse] on usb-0000:04:00.0-2/input1
[ 1344.955015] usbhid 10-2:1.2: couldn't find an input interrupt endpoint
The errors reported by hid-generic and usbhid are the same as before (highlighted), but then corsair fixes up the report descriptor and (almost) all is well.
My mouse is at least working as an input device. I was surprised that the button under the mouse wheel to adjust sensitivity works as well.
The only major problem left for me is that by default, the mouse LEDs have this sickly neon piss yellow color instead of pretty pink! This is where ckb-next will come in to the picture.
I did some quick hacks on ckb-next using the same strategy of trying to interface with the Glaive as though it were a Scimitar. It sees my Glaive, shuts off the LEDs, and then promptly disables the mouse! So that's not quite working yet. Turning it off and on again (unplugging and re-plugging) restores the mouse to working order. If I can figure this out, I'll post a part 2.
Clowns VS Nazis in DC. What a time to be alive!
Socialist Juggalos gear up to fight pro-Trump ‘Nazis,’ and the internet is loving it
The Juggalo March on Washington, a protest against the government’s classification of Juggalos as a gang, will take place at the National Mall on Sept. 16, the same day as the pro-Trump “Mother of All Rallies.” There’s no love lost between the two sides.
Moderator Hall of Fame
So, I know you all have read the moderator guidelines and remember the very important "Concentrate more on promoting than on demoting." bit, yes? Well, I went looking for who the worst offenders were against that out of curiousity. I'm not sure it's really proper to shame them here though. You lot can leave your opinions on that here and us staff types will discuss it later.
What I absolutely can and will post are the badasses who have most excellent ratios of upmods to downmods. Without further ado, here's everyone with over a thousand upmods to their credit and a downmod percentage of less than 10%.
+--------------+-----------------+
| percent_down | nickname |
+--------------+-----------------+
| 0.0865 | VLM |
| 0.1188 | anubi |
| 0.1209 | AnonTechie |
| 0.2067 | tonyPick |
| 0.4737 | redneckmother |
| 0.5438 | Reziac |
| 0.6222 | CoolHand |
| 0.6494 | Bobs |
| 0.7171 | WillAdams |
| 0.8937 | McGruber |
| 1.1099 | GlennC |
| 1.1341 | fritsd |
| 1.2910 | maxwell demon |
| 1.3060 | pinchy |
| 1.3723 | HiThere |
| 1.4609 | monster |
| 1.8067 | DannyB |
| 1.8447 | J053 |
| 1.8601 | quacking duck |
| 2.2772 | deimtee |
| 2.4750 | mhajicek |
| 2.5053 | Unixnut |
| 2.6012 | dak664 |
| 2.6693 | zocalo |
| 2.8353 | Yog-Yogguth |
| 2.8932 | rts008 |
| 3.1125 | khchung |
| 3.2325 | The Archon V2.0 |
| 3.5069 | GungnirSniper |
| 3.5307 | canopic jug |
| 3.7419 | Freeman |
| 3.7582 | jelizondo |
| 4.3070 | turgid |
| 4.3096 | hubie |
| 4.5095 | bradley13 |
| 4.8469 | Scruffy Beard 2 |
| 4.9924 | Nerdfest |
| 5.1967 | Kymation |
| 6.1929 | Bloopie |
| 6.2708 | linkdude64 |
| 7.2055 | SpockLogic |
| 7.2575 | acid andy |
| 7.3139 | NotSanguine |
| 7.4517 | Ethanol-fueled |
| 8.5932 | KiloByte |
| 9.5238 | Hawkwind |
| 9.6141 | bart9h |
+--------------+-----------------+
Congrats to VLM. He is currently Da Man.
Disney redemption: Best. Day. Ever.
Typed on my crappy tablet: took fracking forever.
Welp, as the title says, Disney can fuck my telemetry up the ass for all I care (I'll care in a few days), my son (which means me, lol) just had a Game of Thrones quality day (or a Tom Baker-Doctor Who day?)
First of all, stay at a resort: when we booked (aug. 15-18), it was hurricane/thunder storm season so we got a free meal plan which my wife upgraded to a dinner plan with sit down meals: smart woman. (Plan ahead and book ahead, of the restaurants fill up quickly). We have had mostly cloudy days, so less sun to burn, but high temps with high humidity (93, feels like 109).
When you register, tell them about any food allergies and it will follow you around!
Our first dinner was at the Rainforest cafe at 9pm (first time we could get for the first day): steak dinner that would have cost us $34 each was free. A 'chef' came out to explain what we could order to avoid gluten and dairy, and it was an excellent meal.
Second dinner was a buffet at Boma restaurant: buffet that would have been $43 each: waiter took us to table and then sat down with us, took allergy info, talked with us (thought he was going to eat with us, lol) then brought out a chef to walk us through the buffet to tell us what we could eat and not.
Xcellent service and food.
Third dinner was Best. Dinner. Ever. at Chef Mickey's: personalized service again, but had a MOB of characters at the tables and doing dances. Mickey, Minnie, Donald, Goofy, Pluto all came to our table for pictures, hugs and high fives (although I should have punched Goofy for missing my wife, lol).
Our son loves it all, and the buffet took second place (they have gluten free waffles that were amazing, though).
We got free snacks with our plan and a free cup with, I guess a chip, for free drinks (except, there's no club soda, so the calories aren't great: I drank the Powerade). Cup sits on platform/scanner and won't dispense drink unless it senses a valid cup. I tried to fill my son's water bottle with Powerade, but it cuts you off after a fill and a bit of the cup and makes you wait 3 minutes before you can dispense another cup. Free, but semi-limited. Dang!
The snacks: we were really too full to use them, and only started using them just to use them (cinnamon glazed almonds...yesssssss!)
Stay at a resort if you can:
We stayed at all star music: you can go to the park (if you don't bring a bag, you don't have to go through the bag check, but do have to do the metal detector thing).
We put drinks, etc, in a backpack and put the backpack on the wheelchair!
Go to the park in the morning and hit what you want with little wait and use pre-booked fast pass too.
When the heat and rain is coming, go back to the resort for a rest/swim, then back to park in afternoon.
If you stay outside the park (like we did years ago), if you get tired, you trek back to your car, drive back tired, then probably too tired to go back at night.....
Much better this vacation.
You can skip the meet and greet character things if you go to chef Mickey's.
Rides for kids and kids at heart:
Go to The trouble with bugs' thing: bad smells wafted down at you, my wife got a poke in the back, but I wasn't sitting with my back against the chair back so I missed it. You also get this funny/creepy 'bugs running under your butt' thing which is really kind of just cool.
Our son liked the Buzz light-year spin ride thing, but he likes Buzz so he's biased, lol.
Small world ride is aging and looking it, but it's a long ride to relax on.
Carousel of progress has been my wife and my favourite since we went as not quite newlyweds.
Fun ride, until you get to the modern/future time: then I get lost a bit. I like the simple format of the guy sitting in his chair with the dog on the floor, and he narrates with things happening behind screens on either side. The modern/future one is the whole family at once, and seems chaotic and not as interesting for me. But would watch over again...... because!
Skip the animal kingdom: not that interesting for us, but we did not see Pandora, so....
Haunted house is a skip: it seems darker (to keep paint from fading?) and ghosts dimmer. Or I'm getting old. Anyways, not worth the wait, we decided.
So, if we ever go again, note to self: (especially if grand kids ever come along)
Stay at resort and upgrade meal to dinners.
Book chef Mickey restaurant, absolutely! Book restaurants ahead of time (2weeks or more ahead, if possible).
Skip animal kingdom.
Go to Trouble with bugs.
Ride monorail, but only the air conditioned ones.
I am not affiliated with Disney at all, this is just some things I wish I had known years ago.
Next, off to Mammoth Caves: we went there years ago: it is so deep underground, they turn the lights off, light a match, then blow it out and drop it. You can hear the match hit the ground like your ear is right beside it.
Better than my stay at home vacation last summer!
My Clients Are Happy Therefore I Am Happy
I'm working on a macOS - it's not Mac OS X anymore - USB Video driver. This is by far the most complex driver that I've ever developed.
It works now, but only for a hardwired resolution and pixel depths. There are lots of other problems, the worst one being that it doesn't play nice with power management. There are vast quantities of "// TODO:" comments.
When I get it to beta - hopefully Real Soon Now - I'll be getting a huge paycheck. When it's completely finished, I'll get another one.
My client is a fabless semiconductor firm. They sell chips to manufacturers who sell finished products to end-users. Hopefully my whizzy new driver will enable them to sell lots more chips.
We're big in China.
I told my client about my mental illness. They were totally cool with it. But I haven't mentioned my experience with homelessness.
In other news, I have a mad crush on a barista, but as yet she doesn't seem to return my interest.
Well, Shit
So, yesterday I moved my car into The Roomie's parking space, moved my boat out of the yard and into mine, and mowed the yard. All was good and celebratory beer was drank.
Enter today. I go outside for a smoke and while enjoying it I think to myself, "Self, TR's going to be back from his customer service road trip today. You should jockey things back around before he gets home." This sounded like a fine and courteous idea, so I got up and proceeded towards said goal.
Unfortunately when I went to lift up the tongue of my boat trailer (Well balanced. Boat and trailer together weigh maybe 500lbs. Load on my arms maybe 50lbs.) that I'd moved easily the day before and wag it back over into the grass beside TR's boat. For some unknown reason, my back takes that specific moment to remind me that I started having birthdays beyond my 40th within the past few years; or, to put it more succinctly, it just shit right out on me.
Damned traitorous body parts. If it weren't for all the skills and wisdom you tend to pick up along the way, I'd say getting older sucked.
This has put me entirely not in the mood to bandy words with my peers and adversaries. My apologies to those who will likely never know how utterly wrong some comment of theirs is. To those in need of mocking, leave a note here and I'll get to you as soon as the pain's lessened enough to think through. See you lot in a week or so, I expect.
