Mike Pelley's Musings

Not to ridicule those who feel that radio frequency (RF) energy is affecting them as there likely is something going on but it isn’t RF (see the citations in the Wikipedia article Electromagnetic hypersensitivity) I found the following supposed incidents:

In the UK a few years ago. The residents in a rural area started complaining that a new cellphone tower was giving them headaches, etc. A public hearing was held with engineers from the phone company responsible for the tower present. After an hour or so of people listing the ailments they’d been suffering since the tower went up, one of the engineers stood up and said “That all sounds terrible. But I have to admit I’m going to be curious to see what happens when we actually connect it and turn it on.”

Here is another one:

We had an interesting incident near Humboldt State University. A new cell tower went up and the local newspaper asked a number of people what they thought of it. Some said they noticed their cell phone reception was better. Some said they noticed the tower was affecting their health. To paraphrase the bottom line: “think about how much more pronounced these effects will be once the tower is actually operational.”

I read this on BBCNews.com on December 30 which the BBC found in the Daily Mirror:

Dead passengers on British Airways flights used to be given sunglasses, a vodka and tonic and a copy of the Daily Mail to disguise them from other passengers.

Just in case someone else has the issue of the menus not showing up in Linux Mint 17.1 Cinnamon and VMware Workstation 10.0.4. Simple problem: The only menu item that shows up is File. The rest are there if you click on File and drag the mouse to the right but you cannot, it seemed to me, to be able to click where you think the menu item should be.

Anyway, I found the solution in the VMware Communities site in post https://communities.vmware.com/thread/414748. The issue is according to the post is that Workstation’s /usr/bin/vmware-xdg-detect-de detects GNOME but there are some packages missing. The solution is to install the extra packages (large) via:

apt-get install mint-meta-mate mint-meta-cinnamon

Seems that digging a little further that my problem may be solved by enabling the “Disable touchpad while typing” option.

Hopefully it works!

Dell XPS 15 L501X

After over four years my Dell XPS 15 laptop (L501X) had gotten a little long in the tooth. The video card – an nVidia GT350M – is only slightly faster, by the narrowest of margins, than the Intel® HD Graphics 4400 in my son’s Dell Inspiron 15 5000. The Intel
I7-740QM compared to the i5-4210U is, outside of the number of threads  (4 v. 2), is about the same horsepower and a uses a heck of a lot more power. And the XPS is heavy.

What I was looking for is:

• Intel i7 quad core (I run VMware Workstation regularly with multiple VMs running)
• 8 GB or more of RAM
• 500 GB hard drive, 7200 RPM
• nVidia GTX800-series graphics card (occasionally I like to play a game of Diablo III)

XPS 15 Touch Screen

I first looked at the current Dell XPS 15 however as nice as it is it is very expensive (about CDN$2,000). And it has a touch screen which, outside of a true tablet, I find slightly pointless. At least until my arms grow another 20 or so centimetres.

Alienware 14

The Alienware 14 had the right specifications but is a little heavy. It is a gaming machine but I was willing to live with that – it would not be much heavier than the old XPS 15 with the 9-cell battery.

And then Dell dropped the Alienware 14 and replaced it with the Alienware 13. The screen reduction did not impress me too much – I would be going from a 15 inch to a 14 inch screen as it was but I could likely live with it. I do okay with my 10 inch Asus TF300T tablet. But the dropping of a quad-core processor killed it for me. I need the multiple cores for running multiple VMs.

So, my search as on, again.

Lenovo Y50

After another six months of searching I found the Lenovo Y50-70. The reviews on the display are somewhat true. It is not a great display. It is better than the screen on my XPS 15 though so I can live with it.

It did not come with a DVD player but that seems to be standard course now. I picked one up for $60.00. I don’t know what it is for having the numeric keypad. It takes up room that could be better used for the arrow keys or other function keys. I don’t even use the numeric keyboard on my desktop machines – at home or at work. I do find that the USB3 ports work faster than those on my  XPS 15. But, then again, USB was it its early stages back then. And it comes with Windows 8.1. 8.1 is a nice try but Microsoft needs to get Windows 10 right. Anyway, with $500 off, the Y50-70 was mine. It is a nice set up for only $1,000: i7-4710HQ (quad-core) 2.5GHz; 16GB RAM, nVidia GTX860m with 4GB VRAM (not sure why anyone needs 4GB unless you are driving external monitors) and a 1TB/8GB SSD WD drive. I’m not sold on that hard drive yet. My old 500GB 7,200 RPM drive seems to have more, err… zip. Maybe I will get a 500GB SSD drive.

Oh, and the machine is light relative to the old XPS 15.

Anyone who has read my blog knows that I love Linux and run Linux as my day-to-day OS at home. My current favourite distribution is Linux Mint Cinnamon-edition.

This would be my first experience installing Linux on a UEFI system. Again, I am glad that I am a little late to the game with UEFI. My past reads have shown that this was a horror story.

Here’s what I have learned:

1. All that you need to do in the BIOS is to turn off secure boot. Otherwise you cannot, it seems, to seem to install GRUB in the EFI partition Of course you need a current distribution, with GRUB 2.00 or higher. You do not need to turn on legacy mode. In fact, don’t do it. It can make you make more mistakes than I could ever imagine.
2. The nVidia drivers with Intel Optimus SUCK. When I bought the XPS 15 one thing that I looked for was the lack of Optimus – e.g. no Intel HD graphics and only the nVidia card. You can install it by manually putting in the Edgers repository. I think I actually have the HD graphics turned off now.
3. The bloody touchpad cannot be turned off – or at least I cannot figure it out right now.
4. I do not know if this is a VMware Workstation (I’m still at v.10) or a Linux Mint 17.1 or an nVidia issue but when I try to make a VM go full screen it disappears. I had this happen before but I can’t remember how it was fixed.

Anyway, that is enough typing for now. I will update the blog on what I find in the future.

I found this article on Gizmodo while eating lunch about The World’s Biggest Cargo Ship Carrying Over 17,000 Crates, NBD. These are the Maersk Triple E class. Now this is is large however one commenter puts the maximum capacity of 18,270 TEU (twenty-foot equivalent units – the standard sized shipping container) shipping  containers into context:

• 18,270 TEU crates stood up the tall way would be 365,400′ tall. Or almost 70 miles stacked end-to-end
• 18,270 TEU crates have a total volume of 24,847,200 square feet, nearly twice the volume of Boeing’s Everett plant, or nearly seven times the size of NASA’s Vehicle Assembly Building, a building soo big it has weather systems
• 18,270 TEU crates spread out in a single layer would cover more than half of Vatican City

Now, that is big!

I found these pictures I took during winter 2000-2001. Now, THAT was a winter that I do NOT want to repeat. I found this report One for the History Books:
The Winter of 2000–01 in St. John’s, Newfoundland by Bruce Whiffen with the Meteorological Service of Canada, Environment Canada, Mount Pearl, Newfoundland, Canada. To quote Mr. Whiffen:

Canada’s most easterly city broke its all-time record for total snowfall, with 648.4cm (more than 21 feet), making it not only the highest total snowfall over 130 years of record but also the highest all-time snowfall among all major Canadian cities.

Below are some pictures that I took that winter in Paradise, a bedroom community of St. John’s.

Here are some pictures of one of a late-January storm:

January 27, 2001 – 9:00AM

January 27, 2001 – 5:00PM

January 28, 2001 – 8:30AM

January 28, 2001 – 4:30PM

Sunset 🙂

Where do you put any more snow?

(A much younger) Me on the pile of snow on the front lawn. It is about half-way up the height of the top floor of our old split-entry house.

If this was soil instead of snow it would be something like the trenches in World War I…

If the snow got any higher you wouldn’t be able to see any houses on our street!

This is the back of the house. You could almost climb onto the roof!

The fence on the left is actually 10 feet (3 m) high!

I have never been satisfied with the design of the websites. I have accepted a long, long, long time ago that I did not have much in the way of artistic ability.

However since getting a real smartphone for myself – a Google Nexus 5 which at only CDN$350 unlocked, having a “pure” Android interface, not having to wait on a carrier to provide the OS updates and not having carrier bloatware is a great deal – I quickly realized that I needed to redesign the site. It was simply not readable on a smartphone without zooming in and of course that would make navigation and viewing a chore.

So, it was time to brush of my HTML and PHP skills. And to force myself to learn CSS. I am (unfortunately) old enough to remember when CSS first came about. I was a web developer at that time (it was a long time ago before artistic skills were needed 🙂 ) and, frankly, CSS was somewhat a solution looking for a problem and it was not much of a solution at that. We were all pumping out text and tabular data with a few, now quaint, icons.

On of the very smart folks at work (Dan Shea from Dockridge Solutions) suggested using Bootstrap as the framework. It took a little while to figure it out (likely because I am not as sharp as I used to be) but the first conversion is now up. I used the Weather Page (wx.pelleys.com – Paradise Weather) as the starting point since that is the page I check most frequently on a mobile device.

Anyway, check it out and let me know what you think. And no, Bootstrap does not help the artistically challenged. Dunh!