planet g33k aotearoa

I haven’t posted here for a while. Usually because my google searches turn up the answers pretty quickly, so I don’t feel the need to add anything additional via this blog.

Nautilus 3.6 on 13.04 is inane! They have gotten rid of drop down menus as far as I can tell.

While trying to figure out how to connect to a file share via the file explorer – a completely reasonable and supposedly simple task – I discovered that it was no longer easily possible on the 13.04 file explorer. I lot of hunting and I finally discovered a post that gave me the magic keyboard combination in order to open a file location dialog: CTRL-L.

Once I had this is was relatively easily to connect to the remote server I wanted. After that right-click add bookmark is your friend.

It’s really stupid when the backend can still do things, but the power of the front end is reduced.

Edit: Sigh… It is worse that I thought. Dropping tree view is a particularly egregious crime.

new potatoes, a photo by Br3nda on Flickr.

so we “dug up” some of the spuds… really we just tipped them out of the bag they were growing in.

worked really well – didn’t take up land (just left the bags leaning on a brick wall) and were easy to get out. Will do again

There’s something so very christmasey about new potatoes, freshly dug from your own garden.

gopr4381, a photo by Br3nda on Flickr.

Christmas was stinky hot all over the place — so we spent a chunk of christmas day in a swimming pool – had some fun with the water proof camera and a gopro.

Tuatara, a photo by Br3nda on Flickr.

check out this old lady – she was just chilling by the track in Zealandia.

Turatara are awesome because they’re dinosaurs — all their cousin are extinct but tuatara are still hanging out in the sun.

And because they have a vestigial 3rd eye in the middle of their heads… yes. THREE EYES.

Li Gong from @mozilla talking about shift to mobile os, a photo by rejon on Flickr.

Cyberwar 80s style, a photo by 4nitsirk on Flickr.

Untitled, a photo by Br3nda on Flickr.

mushroom, a photo by Br3nda on Flickr.

Rimutaka Incline, a set on Flickr.

Michael Geist describes the changes the went into effect this week in Canada.
http://www.michaelgeist.ca/content/view/6692/125/

I’ve been using several different “run trackers”. They are mostly smartphone apps. Start the app on your phone, place in pocket, go for run, then see analysis when you return.

Here’s what I know of the state of the run tracking app world.

Runkeeper is still king (at least in the English speaking world). I think they deserve their status due to their API. They’ve got a good eco system of other parties adding to and reading data, in an open way — all behind an oauth2 api. They call it “HealthGraph”. I was able to sign up for an API key and instantly start reading and writing data from accounts that authorised me.

Runkeeper recieves data from it’s own app if you use it, but also several other smartphone apps that weren’t written by runkeeper. Once again that’s their API allowing this. They also recieve data from devices like Fitbit, and from garmin watches and bike computers.

On my bike i have a Garmin Edge 800 – this saves my route based on GPS and also data from candence sensors (magnets on my wheel and pedal) to work out how fast i’m pedalling. It also reads heart rate data if I wear the heart rate strap.

I couldn’t get Runkeeper to display Cadence info from my log files. For imports of data (e.g. from garmin) they only read gpx or tcx (my garmin bike computer saves into .fit files).

Another i’ve tried is Endomondo — which is pretty good tech. They read .fit files, and they display cadence data from my garmin, along with the heart rate. They have “Challenges”, which are great fun. You, or your team try to be the best at some goal, e.g. “Most km cycled”. A Team might be everyone in New Zealand. It might be by gender. The Challenge may only allow you to count activity that had heart rate data.

Unfortunately Endomondo doesn’t have an API, so you’re limited to only the features Endomondo implment. You can’t get your data out (Runkeeper allows export of your whole dataset as one zip file). If you haven’t joined up to paid membership then Endomondo has so many adverts it is nearly unusable.

Sports-tracker.com is another. I liked very much that you can see all the funcationliaty from the smartphone app: e.g. see your friends activities, and explore routes in your local area. Once again it has no API, and even ignores heartrate on imported data if you didn’t use their app to record it. Flash player is needed to see the data on the web.

Runtastic.com is yet another app. It appears to be popular in Germany. There’s also apps for recording pressups, situps, squats which make it quite run. Again no API means your data is trapped and functionality is limited. The set they have implemented is pretty good – the ui and the graphics are slick and nice. It won’t read .fit files from my Garmin (GPX and TCX only). It will record heart rate data from nearly any bluetooth heart rate monitor. I couldn’t get it to import or display cadence data.

It’s nice to take photos along the way if you’re recording a hike, or a scenic cycle ride. Runkeeper, Sportstracker and Runtastic all allow this, displaying the photo on the map afterwards. I prefer to take photos using my GoPro. this is mounted on my handlebars, and is safer than stopping to take photos on a busy road and then dropping the phone. Unfortunately only sportstracker allowsuploading photos after the activity – the others only allow photos taken with their app. Runkeepr might allow this through their API but i haven’t seen it implemented. Endomondo doesn’t support photos at all.

For statistics, Endomondo and runtastic are the best, but Runkeeper’s API allows you to use other apps, so Runkeeper win best stats.

Lastly, the social aspect. Runkeepr definitely has the most people as well as integrating with other apps that also bring in social aspect (e.g. fitocracy.com, fitbit.com). Endomondo has some social stuff going on thanks to the challenges, and you can send messages to friends while they’re running (these are played into their headphones). Runtastic is only really happening if you’re German. So if you’re motivated by friends i recommend runkeeper or endomondo.

gopr1571, a photo by Br3nda on Flickr.

I use munin for monitoring various aspects of my servers, and one of the things munin will monitor for me the amount of entropy available. On both my current server and my previous one I’ve noticed something unusual here:

According to munin, I’m almost perpetually running out of entropy. Munin monitors the available entropy by chekcing the value of /proc/sys/kernel/random/entropy_avail, which is the standard way you’d check it. My machine has several VMs running, and hosts a few services that use entropy at various times (imaps, ssmtp or smtp+tls, ssh, https), so it’s not unreasonable that I may have been entropy starved. If my entropy levels are always around the 160 mark, it’s likely that at any given time I’m totally starved of entropy, so anything using encryption will stall a bit.

I had a brief look into various entropy sources, such as timer_entropyd or haveged, but none of them seemed to help. I’d seen several references to Simtec’s entropykey, which looked very promising, so I ordered one from the UK, which arrived a week or so ago.

I’ve yet to arrange a trip to the datacentre to install it however, and after a bit of poking round today I’m not so sure it’s as desperately needed as I thought

I randomly checked on the contents of /proc/sys/kernel/random/entropy_avail, just to see what it was like. There were over 3000 bits of entropy present. Very odd. I repeated this several times, and watched the available entropy decrease from over 3000 down to around 150 or so, the same as in my munin graph above. I repeated this about a quarter of an hour later, with the same results – over 3000 entropy, rapidly decreasing to very little.

After a bit of further digging, I found this blog post, which mentioned that creating a process uses a small amount of entropy. The author of that post was seeing problems with his entropy pool not staying full, which sounds like what I was seeing. I’m still not clear on what requires entropy though, as some of my systems at work clearly don’t deplete the entropy pool during process creation.

So, I did some different monitoring: Check the value of entropy_avail every minute, through a different script. The graph below shows the results:

Clearly, entropy is normally very good, but is dropping down to very low levels every 5 minutes. It replenishes just fine in the intervening 5 minutes however, which suggests that I don’t really have a problem with entropy creation, just with using it too quickly.

As for the question, “why is my entropy running out so fast?”, the answer is quite simple: Munin. On my host machine, munin runs around 50 plugins, each of which generally calls other processes such as grep, awk, sed, tr, etc. I don’t have exact figures on how many processes were being kicked off every 5 minutes, but I wouldn’t be surprised to find it was hundreds, all of which used a little bit of entropy

I’ll still install the EntropyKey, and maybe it’ll help my pool recover quicker.

souvenirs, a set by michael_hughes on Flickr.

IMAG2891, a photo by Br3nda on Flickr.

Seeds sprouting on kitchen windowsill.

garden, a photo by Br3nda on Flickr.

in the middle of the lawn with the most sun – soon to be full of peas and lettuce.

dsc_5542, a photo by Br3nda on Flickr.

anticipating summer – here’s the strawberries we planted in a cheap canvas thingie from the warehouse.

my bike, a photo by Br3nda on Flickr.

i cycled home yesterday with my purchases from a gardening store. lettuce on the back, tomatoes and peas in the front.

I see on Stuff that some Australian dude spent six months training to break the world record on the arcade game Galaga, the successor to the original Space Invaders and it got me thinking - as gamers do we try and beat our high scores for...

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Time for a bit of a purge. These are the worst albums I have had to review this year (so far). Are any of these also on your list of terrible albums? Got others you care to add to this list? What has been your biggest disappointment of the year? I...

Read more @ http://www.stuff.co.nz/blogs/passthesource