I was asked to help with some math homework tonight, and the question was as follows:

Between 1pm and 2pm the minute hand will cross the hour hand, at what time will they cross?

Working it out

Another week, more parts have arrived for the coffee machine!

To save messing around with soldering and cutting more weird little cables I got myself an eBay knockoff of a RaspberryPi Prototyping Board, which exposes most of the pins I need as screw terminals. Once I get to the more permanent stage I can solder things to the included field.

After not receiving the MAX31855 breakout I tried for before xmas, I bought a MAX31865 breakout board from PlayingWithFusion.com. A neat, tiny little board which should get me some fine resolution temperature sensing!

I bought a new vacuum cleaner recently - the Miele Complete C3 Cat&Dog. A great unit, with a charcoal filter to save me from puppy smells when vacuuming. It also comes with a “Large Turbobrush”, model STB 205-3 which is quite handy for picking up fur. Today I thoughtlessly sucked up the control cord and half the runs-along-the-bottom cord for my vertical blinds (the dogs trashed them months ago).

Inhaled the cordage

I got 90% of the cord out of the brush wheel, but some of it had been sucked into the part that actually provides the power to the brush. I tried jiggling things back and forth, but nothing would budge. Time to disassemble!

I’m fairly sure I could respond to 80% of my incident reports with a summarised version of this, and it’s what I waste most of my time on.

The main problem with most people’s troubleshooting is that they don’t start by actually clarifying what’s wrong. Who, What, Where and When generally gives you a lot of information on how to find the Why.

Well that’s a pity. I had ordered a MAX31855 SPI thermocouple interface to capture temperatures on the coffee machine, and after waiting a month the sender’s just given me a refund because it didn’t get delivered. 🙁

Back to the drawing board - on a high note this means I might be able to get a MAX31865, which handles four wire PT100(0) sensors, which I have been told are much more reliable.

I’ve had a Rancilio Silvia for a bit over a year now, and it’s been great to make coffee while also saving money and reducing the amount of plastic I was dumping into the bin. One of the popular modifications to them is to install a PID controller to make the heater control more even, and because I’m always up for a challenge I wanted to make my own.

That, and I leave it on often enough that I’m grumpy with myself, as repeated most eloquently by a friend:

Money trickles in, which I have already spent. It flies away now.

A quick one, since there doesn’t seem to be an easy way to nuke this software…

1. Find the Razer processes: yaleman$ ps aux | grep -i rz yaleman           689   0.7  0.4  2828488  70516   ??  S     9:40am   0:00.96 /Library/Application Support/Razer/RzUpdater.app/Contents/MacOS/RzUpdater yaleman           469   0.0  0.3  2778036  58432   ??  S     9:39am   0:00.81 /Library/Application Support/Razer/RzDeviceEngine.app/Contents/MacOS/RzDeviceEngine

2. Because it’s pesky software that won’t die, first remove the software: yaleman$ sudo rm -rf /Library/Application\ Support/Razer

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A great concept, Taco Bell Programming. Take simple, known elements and mix to get what you need.

Here’s a concrete example: suppose you have millions of web pages that you want to download and save to disk for later processing. How do you do it? The cool-kids answer is to write a distributed crawler in Clojure and run it on EC2, handing out jobs with a message queue like SQS or ZeroMQ.

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It’s Santa Claus, come to deliver presents!