Chris M.

We had a garden a few years ago but didn't keep it up in 2014 or 2015. We moved to North Reading, MA in March and I finally made some time to setup a new garden. It's great having fresh home grown vegetables and I'm excited to get started growing them. With the help of my assistant it took about two hours to cut the wood sides of the garden box, set them up, level them, stake them, and fill the box with soil. It's a bit late in the season to plant but at the least the garden box is ready for next year. I planted some peas, beets, peppers, and basil and it seems likely we'll get some small amount of production this year. Figuring out the garden dimensions, trimming boards and leveling them Building some stakes to hold the pine boards in position. My assistant taking a break after working hard Some water and ice cubes to keep cool Leveling the soil. Look at the cute little fence to keep the dogs out Transplanted the Zucchini I start...

Got a GoPro Hero4 to record some video for YouTube. It's a great camera. Small, waterproof, great quality video, a ton of different mounting types. The Hero4 I have has an odd issue where videos recorded with WiFi enabled have ticking sound throughout the recording. Googling for the issue turned up a ton of similar  issues , some reported a year ago across a range of GoPro cameras. It was surprising to me that new models like the Hero4 would have the same issue. Update : Received a replacement through Amazon, where I ordered it from, and it has the same issue. I had contacted GoPro but they won't do cross shipping, even if you offer to pay for the replacement. Without cross shipping it would have been a couple of weeks wait for the shipment there and back on a camera I've had for less than a week. It seems like there might be something wrong with the design of these cameras and I'm surprised GoPro hasn't owned up to it. Its not a debilitating defect...

I got a Tesla Model S at the beginning of June and we recently took our first long-ish range trip, a visit to my parents house in Connecticut. Electric vehicles are still relatively limited in range and more importantly in locations where you can charge. Normally I charge in the garage each evening after commuting to and from where I work in New Hampshire. I'm still new to trips that require a mid-destination charge. To mitigate some worry about where to charge I did some planning that I wouldn't consider if we were driving a gasoline or diesel fueled car. Tesla Model S P90 Tesla has a series of Supercharger locations  to allow long distance trips with their electric cars. If you do need to charge during your trip you'll want to route through these or other locations where you can charge. Picture by Jeff Cooper (jecoopr) [ CC BY 2.0 ], via Wikimedia Commons There are other options for charging your EV, both free and fee based charging locations, but these typ...

Looking to run Linux on your computer but preserve the current Windows installation as a virtual machine? Trying to virtualize a Windows installation so you can transfer it to another computer? Using these steps you are likely to be able to take your existing physical Windows partition and convert it into a working virtual machine. I did this with a Windows 7 physical image then installing  Fedora 23 and using VirtualBox  to run Windows 7. Amazingly, to me at least, the process of creating the virtual disk image is performed from the running Windows system you'd like to virtualize. This is really convenient and much nicer than having to reinstall from scratch. disk2vhd is what enables you to do this on-the-fly virtual disk creation. It is created by Microsoft, so its kind of funny to use their tool to make it easy to convert a computer to Linux. NOTE - This level of monkeying around with operating systems and file systems does not always end well. You should back...

Taylor Swift is easy to like. She's polite in interviews, she's nice  on Twitter . Even if you aren't a fan you can appreciate how nice she is in an industry filled with privileged people engaging in bad behavior. I've noticed that some of Taylor's songs seem to be similar to other hit songs. Maybe its coincidence. She's had several big hits that have had a lot of airtime but she has several albums of songs. If some percentage of all songs sound alike, her music's popularity is providing ample opportunity for us to observe those similarities. Here are a couple of examples of songs that I found to be similar. Lorde's Royals was a top 100 hit when it was released in 2013 When I first heard Taylor Swift's 'Blank Space' a year or two ago I was surprised by its similarities to Royals. Here are the YouTube videos so you can compare. Recently Taylor released "Wildest Dreams". It was so similar sounding to Lana Del Rey t...

The surprising results of a performance comparison between std::vector<> operator= and memcpy() with a raw array. An application profiling effort by a colleague and I led us to investigate the performance tradeoffs between std::vector<> and a raw array ( uint8_t blah[] ). The application was a c++ rewrite of a c# application. The rewrite was undertaken because the overhead of running a c# application on our memory and cpu constrained ARM Linux system was affecting system performance and responsiveness. Using Mono to run C# applications on Linux resulted in ~40MB of ram overhead for our application that itself allocated tens of thousands of bytes at most. Startup time left much to be desired. It took a few seconds to start the application up from mmc on the 1GHz ARM processor. We verified the long startup time by printing an “I’m started” string as the first function in Main. We tried upgrading to a newer version of Mono to see if that would improve performance. We las...