dynamic procedural dance

Gotta be Houdini.

goodbye letter

Hey Mom,

Just now, I was looking at the calendar and realizing that tomorrow marks the 1 year anniversary since I last saw you. It was the last time I was able to hug you. The goodbye was more rushed than I would have liked, but we stretched the moment out as much as we could. I had to rush off to use the printers at FedEx before they closed. Time.

Like that day, today I’m running around collecting and printing documents. Putting together the final pieces of paperwork for the largest (volume wise) document I have ever created, much larger than the few pages we tried to print at your house.

That last night in Michigan was a Wednesday. I remember being quite frustrated when your printer wasn’t working. I apologized to you for being so childish about it. You said that it was OK that I was upset, and you said that you knew I wasn’t upset with you. I was relieved, but apologized again anyway. In some subtle way, I regretted during a moment where I could let go. When you saw that, you subtly let me know that it wasn’t necessary to beat myself up about it. I remember you freeing me from that thought. It was a subtle thing, but I still cherish that example of forgiveness.

I was about to drive across the country. I remember feeling good about us and our ability to move through that extremely frustrating moment. Both us noticing it in the other, then giving them silent permission to let it go. Broken computer accessories are good at creating frustrations, which is only amplified when I’m in a rush. That was awesome, Mom.

You’ve taught me a lot. I want you/me/us to know that I’ve being doing what I can to find the gifts in your absence. It really doesn’t feel like you are “gone”, but I know something has significantly changed. There are gaps in my life that I will have to make my own paths for. I can no longer find you outside of myself.

This past weekend, I was having dinner with an old friend of mine who I met over a decade ago, in Vancouver. I met him again in Toronto about 6 years later, and now recently, in Edmonton. We’re apparently subconsciously following each other around the country.  Epic Two-Finger Pushup Dave. One day I’m going to accidentally call him “Bruce”.

Anyhow, as Dave and I ate through piles of fish, we spoke of you. At one point, we both became very quiet, then silent. Dave looked into my face and said, “I can see her right now. I see her looking at me. She’s wonderful.” I felt as he saw. Powerful silent moment.
You were the initial inspiration for this blog. I wanted to record my travels and discoveries. Perhaps it was a just a way of yelling, “Here I am!” Published in a form that doesn’t set an expectation for a response. The travel blog then morphed into an online technical study journal.

This website no longer serves any of these purposes very well. I require something more minimal and more flexible than WordPress. I dig text files. Ok, I’m getting technical again.

I last spoke to you on the phone, two weeks before you passed. You knew I was happy and living in peace. You didn’t sound so optimistic about your own surroundings. However, I supposed it’s safe to say that you are in a better place now.

No clue what that means exactly…  but I’m guessing it doesn’t include blog posts.

<3
Jer

P.S. I saw on your computer that all your recent photos were adjusted using GIMP instead of Photoshop.   I didn’t know you were liking that program!! It made me smile to see all those open-source-created image files on your PC hard drive. Nice one, Mom.

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Blender – 1 Year Later

Last week marks the one year anniversary of when I decided to finally buckle down and dive into Blender. Looking back, can see how much I have learned and I’m quite happy with how far I have come. Comfy with all the departments. I do miss my old desk though.

blenderFaceCrop

my render / comp test

Excuses aside, I can tell you that things have not stopped progressing. I’ve developed a few new unique effects, played a LOT with rendering, and cleaned it all up in compositing. I’m blown away.  I really am.

One of the beautiful attributes of open software is that it grows with the community. Sometimes independently developed add-ons become features. Sometimes core features cause a complete overhaul. Through all this, the tool more and more represents the users.

Multiple times, I thought this software was reading my mind.

The sky is the limit and development is accelerating. We are talking about multiple feature release sets per year, that aren’t just bug fixes.

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HP Printer in Ubuntu 14.04

I’ve installed HP printers on a laptop prior… though by “install”, I mean that I plugged a printer in and it just worked. Ubuntu uses the open source HPLIP drivers.

This wasn’t the case for my home computer.

I was recently gifted a HP LaserJet P1005 and although it popped up in the printer list, I was unable to print to it. Ubuntu told me the print jobs were sent, but nothing comes out. Some online searching revealed the solution(s).

First, I found this article, which has a commandline sample that ensures my hp-setup command would work.

sudo apt-get install hplip-dbg hplip-gui

Apparently, this is related to a broken printer driver, which can be fixed with the following command.

sudo hp-setup

This install didn’t initially work for me, as I was receiving the following error.

… hplip-3.15.2-plugin.run file does not match its checksum. File may have been corrupted or altered.

To fix this, I followed these instructions and went to the HPLIP website and grabbed the two corresponding files (.run and .asc). Now, when running the hp-setup wizard, it asks if I want to download drivers or use local files.  Go with the local option and browse to the path of the files you just downloaded.

That was it.  Internet saves the day yet again.

Hackathon

Hey YEG, that was a pretty cool open data Hackathon. The potentials demonstrated by the participants in that room had me shivering with excitement. So many useful and brilliantly simple ideas.  The future is bright.

Need some evidence of the potentials of open data? I recommend starting with Jennifer Pahlka’s TED talk on Code for America.

“…platform for people to help themselves and help others.”


At Saturday’s Hackaton, I had the pleasure of meeting some incredible people, super-geeks. I appreciate techs that seem to be almost immune to any technological aversion.

So, back to Saturday’s event…

While at the all-day hacking festival, something was shared with me… and it’s only just now hitting me.

We love this open data. It’s great and more and more of this public/government data is becoming open and available for everyone to plug into.

However, I was told what happens whenever one of these independent volunteers comes up with a great way to present and grant access  to these goldmines of information: The government responds by rebuilding the information tool internally, themselves. This results in the indie project being unsupported, and fading away, unfunded and unappreciated. There’s something about this that doesn’t make sense to me.

It’s not really about “fairness”. It’s about failing to recognize that the idea came from a method. Ideas like this usually grow from a fertile garden of even MORE ideas. It’s about encouraging this open data culture, speeding it’s development.

trystal

Finally, just wanted to highlight Trystal.net, which is based on the speedy node.js, this text editor is… well…  how does one glorify a text editor? Well, after playing around with it for a bit, I’m pretty excited about the direction it’s going. Document writing in a more procedural fashion. No more scrolling through pages of documents and re-organizing content is super simple with tried and tested keyboard shortcuts. Super efficient document creation / conversion. Looking forward to seeing where Terry takes this.

Don’t take my word for it.  If you are feeling adventurous, create yourself an account and Open file -> my files -> home … then play around a bit after reading some of the docs. It won’t take more than a few minutes to get comfy with this way of document creation.

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Folder & File Structure Visualization

You may have realized that I’m primarily a Linux user, but this post is for anyone managing files on a Windows computer or server.

I have used SequoiaView for managing file space on Windows servers for almost a decade. This tool allows you to visualize your disk usage by creating boxes that represent files and folders.  The larger the box, the bigger the file.  Colors represent the different file types and can be customized.

If you’re wondering where all your drive space went, this is a priceless tool.

That being said, I’ve been stuck on this tool for years and it was time to see what other tools have become available.  Well, I was happy to find an open source alternative that is properly named Windows Directory Statistics (on SourceForge).

Here’s a usage example.

windirstat_hyperfile

I ran this on my laptop’s Windows partition (dual boot), and saw this massive file taking up WAAAAY too much room.  Selecting the large blue block, I saw that it’s called hyberfil.sys. A quick online search revealed this to be the file that Windows uses when it’s put into Hybernate mode…   which I never use (sparing my SSD the overuse). The online search also revealed a solution on How-To-Geek.

As an administrator, I ran the following command:

powercfg -h off

… and now I’ve got 12GB back!

windirstat_hyperfile_rem

Have fun managing those videos, MP3s and game installation folders.

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