Blog/June 2021/Jun 11th
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Happy (Hebrew calendar) birthday to my עזר כנגדו; the one in this world on whom I rely every day, my lovely wife Esther. Her birthday falls on shabbat this year, so we'll have to have an extra glass of wine!
Geek alert!
I spent some time this week trying to track down a solution to an irritating problem with my laptop. It’s an excellent laptop with “hybrid graphics”, meaning two different graphics processors (GPUs): an Intel one for low-power usage, and an NVIDIA one for high-performance. Until recently, I ran in “hybrid mode” without any problems; but suddenly, it stopped working nicely: the system would freeze up with the fan running at high speed even though the machine wasn’t hot.
After considerable back and forth with System76 tech-support, they insisted it must be a hardware issue, and wanted me to return the laptop to them for a motherboard replacement. I insisted it couldn’t be a hardware issue, because running in non-hybrid mode worked fine, and because the problem only showed up after some software updates.
Neither Google not the Linux Mint forum helped; I searched far and wide for a solution, to no avail. Finally, I realized I was using the System76 version of the NVIDIA driver instead of the Mint version. After changing drivers and installing Mint's NVIDIA switcher, it works perfectly now!
I suppose you want a moral to the story. Well, first of all: “tech support” people don’t know very much about the systems they support and tend to have technical tunnel-vision. Second: the Internet gurus may or may not help. Third: if you don’t find help online, don’t give up!
Extreme weather-geek alert!
I’ve been asked by my users to create an “all in one” kind of project, to show off 8th’s abilities across different kinds of systems. So I started one: a “weather station”. I spent a couple days putting together the hardware, testing it, and writing the 8th code (almost all the time was spent writing the code and debugging it). At the moment, the sensor sits in my office, where it reliably informs me the temperature at the moment is 27.8C and 30.9% relative humidity.
Now that the sensor-reading part works, I’ll put together a weatherproof housing so a sensor can be placed outside, and I’ll add code to upload our local weather information to “Weather Underground”. After that, I’ll make a mobile and desktop application to access the information (from the code running against the sensor, not from the Weather Underground).
It’s a pretty comprehensive project, and hopefully will bring in new users. I thank my son-in-law Jeremy for being the inspiration for this particular kind of project.
Back to our regular programming…
In other news: our new government is supposed to get “sworn in” this coming week. Bibi still has a chance to derail it, which I’m sure he’s working on assiduously.
I found an Arab who is interested in learning Hebrew and who is willing to help me with my Arabic. So I spent an hour on “Zoom” this week with the person, trying to figure out what the best approach might be. Seems that learning “MSA” (modern standard Arabic) is a better choice than learning local dialect, because it is widely understood (so when I get bought-out by a company from the UAE they’ll understand me…). It was an interesting exchange, and I hope we continue.
Other than that, it was mostly quiet and routine this week. That’s a good thing.
The weather was somewhat warm this week, but it’s supposed to be cooler and also warmer on shabbat, cooling a bit into the week. You never can tell!
This shabbat’s menu includes:
homemade ḥalla,
“hot-and-sour” soup with tofu and pineapple,
schnitzel,
rice,
various salatim,
and melon.
Until next time,
shabbat shalom and ḥodesh ṭov!
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