The Massachusetts State Police Airwing operates four helicopters. I just learned some interesting trivia–the last two characters of the tail numbers of each of them honor the four people killed when an MSP helicopter crashed in 1995. MSP's four helicopters: N822PPN823JMN824AHN825MMAnd the four victims of the 1995 crash in…
It took me a long time to really pay them any attention, but Motorola has offered Impres-branded batteries for their handheld radios for a long time, and they're actually pretty nifty. The idea is that there's a chip on the batteries giving them some "smarts." Particularly in the days of…
Subtitle: Deciphering WTF RISC and SSE are. This is a published work in progress. I was recently asked to help with a RISC project. After wondering if that meant I'd finally get a SPARCstation, I was relieved to learn that the acronym now refers to Risk Incident Sharing and Coordination…
It's apparently been five years since I last updated These Songs I Like, and I started to gravitate away from Tumblr as a whole when their "adult content" restrictions turned into restricting non-sexual LGBTQ-related content. Anyway, here's Wonderwall. Err, an almost-2-hour Smashing Pumpkins concert from 1993: As someone who generally…
I'm a Rails engineer working on a Flask app. We use alembic and SQLAlchemy against a Postgres database. Even though I miss ActiveRecord dearly, for the most part what I know has mapped pretty well. Until today. I've been trying to create a pg_trgm index on one of our…
I wanted to hack together a little weather app, and here's a few services I've found that look interesting. OpenWeatherСurrent weather and forecast - OpenWeatherMapGet current weather, hourly forecast, daily forecast for 16 days, and 3-hourly forecast 5 days for your city. Historical weather data for 40 years back for…
I was recently prescribed a CPAP for sleep apnea. I ended up with CPAP machine called the Luna by 3B. As many machines do, it records data to an SD card. The idea is useful: the CPAP machine can display a QR code on-screen which you can scan with a…
Someone just asked me about receiving an error like this one: You don't have permission to access "http://www.gap.com/" on this server. Reference #18.c6a50517.1514639126.176b29aThere are several garbage articles out there talking about this without any indication of what is actually generating this error message. This…