General – Page 5 – The Wacky World of Chris Knight

2017/06/29

Memory. It’s a funny thing.

Memory is such a funny thing. Scrambled and chaotic, it doesn’t have a user accessible file structure or an index, and the search engine is for crap. Sherlock referred to it as his Mind Palace. I find that term particularly apt, because in reality you are not standing in the middle of a field with your memories stretching out in all directions and plainly visible if you just look in the right direction. Rather, it seems like my memories are piled up in corners, stacked on flat surfaces, and wedged between unrelated volumes. My point of reference seems to dictate what I can perceive, and due to the chaos I might be standing in the middle of a room of related memories, but I can’t see the one I left in the hallway. This framework was painfully reinforced today.

It’s been a rough week. I’ve spent a lot of it wracked with grief. This morning was different, though. Instead of grief I have been high strung with anxiety. I couldn’t figure out the source. I vacillated between wanting to go to work to be around people, and wanting to stay home and hide. At the top of my thoughts was that I had a package arriving today, and did I want to be home for it or did I just want to get it later. Over and over, round and round, it was diving me crazy. In the end, I went to work because it was the least financially impacting decision when all the other factors kept cancelling each other out over and over.

What was the package? Does it matter? It was a cute kickstarter I bought into a few months ago. Custom designed coins done in the style of depression era hobo coins. Hobo coins were crafted works of art that used coins as the base, but with intricate designs inlaid over the original design of the coin. I saw the kickstarter on BoingBoing, and thought they would make really cool trinkets to give to friends and strangers.

So, having decided to do something, rather than get stuck in an indecision loop, I headed to work. I’m walking own Market Street, on my way to my office, and my phone chimes with a delivery notice. My hobo coins have arrived. Cool, right?

My next thought was “Now I can give Sam and Elliot… the… coins… I… got… them…” and Boom! I’m leaning against a lamp post on Market Street bawling my eyes out. Sure, I’ve been thinking about Elliot, and thinking about the coins arriving, but as my conscious mind moved around my Mind Palace, it was never at the right spot to see the various memories in the same frame. My subconscious mind, on the other hand, really wanted me to just go back to bed and avoid this day all together.

Memory. It’s a funny thing.

2015/09/142017/09/15

Installing MacPorts on OS X 10.11 ‘El Capitan’

High Sierra Update: If you are looking for instructions on how to manually install MacPorts onto the High Sierra GM release, check here: Installing MacPorts on MacOS “High Sierra”

Update: MacPorts has released their official El Capitan installer. You should probably use it instead. 🙂

Update: Since people are ignoring my above comment, I have updated the below instructions to reflect the version changes reported by Chrisp in the comments.

Another year, another OS X update. If you are like me, you’ve weaseled a copy of the OS X 10.11 ‘El Capitan’ Gold Master installer, and you have started checking to see how much of your software is going to break if and when you install. Given the issues I’ve had in the past, MacPorts is the very first thing I test. 🙂

The first thing I noticed is that there is no El Capitan installer for MacPorts, and the Yosemite installer will not run on OS X 10.11. So, we are back to compiling it ourselves. Fortunately, this goes pretty smoothly.

The first caveat is that in addition to needing access to OS X 10.11 ‘El Capitan’ , you will need a copy of Xcode 7 (beta, RC, etc). You won’t be able to compile MacPorts for El Capitan with Xcode 6 because of changes to one or more of the header files that ship with the OS X 10.11.

The second caveat is that I did a clean install of OS X 10.11 ‘El Capitan’, so my instructions may not adequately deal with any cruft left over by previous installs. If you have an upgrade issue, please comment here and I’ll do my best to help you out and improve the instructions. You may want to follow the MacPorts uninstall instructions before starting the below steps.

Install OS X 10.11 ‘El Capitan’
Install Xcode 7
Launch Xcode:
1. Agree to the license.
2. Let it install the extra components it says it needs.
3. Quit xcode.

Open a terminal window:

```
sudo bash
```

export PATH=/usr/bin:/bin:/usr/sbin:/sbin:/usr/local/bin

```
xcode-select --install
```
```
cd Desktop
```
```
mkdir macports
```
```
cd macports
```

curl -O https://distfiles.macports.org/MacPorts/MacPorts-2.3.4.tar.gz

```
tar xzvf MacPorts-2.3.4.tar.gz
```
```
cd MacPorts-2.3.4
```
```
./configure --enable-readline
```
```
make && make install
```

echo 'export PATH=/opt/local/bin:/opt/local/sbin:$PATH' >> ~/.profile

```
source ~/.profile
```
```
port -v selfupdate
```

At this point, you should be ready to start reinstalling your ports! Wee!

If you see this error at step 4-10:

checking for Apple Foundation library... no
configure: WARNING: GNUSTEP_SYSTEM_ROOT is not defined in your environment, preventing the use of GNUstep's Foundation library
configure: error: Could not find a working Foundation implementation

It means you either have not installed Xcode 7 GM, or that you are running Xcode 7 Beta. Xcode 6 doesn’t know how to handle the changes to /System/Library/Frameworks/Foundation.framework/Headers/Foundation.h that happened with El Capitan. The configure script is able to find the header file, but the test compile fails so it reports that the Apple Foundation library isn’t there.

If you are running Xcode Beta, you can get around this by using the following command in the shell you opened above, and then going back to step 4-10: (Thank you SadDigger for the comment on Reddit!)

xcode-select -s /Applications/Xcode-beta.app

Update 2015-09-15 11:06AM – Fixed a typo in instruction 4-3 where WordPress was converting a double-hyphen into an extended hyphen. I have also updated it to the latest version of MacPorts, so that the final just updates the ports rather than rebuilding the whole thing. Sorry about that!

2014/05/28

The Cheap Parts Paradox

Every hobbyist has experienced it, and yet it seems to be the hardest lesson to retain over time: The more money you save by going with cheap parts, the more of your time you will waste getting them to work… if you can.

I was recently reminded of this rule while adding GPS to a Raspberry Pi project on which I was working. One of my co-workers had recently had good results with a GlobalSat USB dongle on a Pi project, and even though I had an Adafruit Ultimate GPS Breakout in my wishlist I was enticed by the price and the plug-n-play state that didn’t require me to do any additional wiring. So, I ordered a GlobalSat BU-353-S4 from Amazon.

Getting gpsd set up was pretty trivial, but the results I was getting from ‘cgps -s’ was inconsistent. Despite the GPS unit reporting that it had a lock, the clock display was several hours off from the displayed timezone, and the ‘Speed Err’ was +/- 300MPH. The unit, which was marketed as having a start time of less than 15 seconds, needed to run for an hour or more to finally settle down. Meanwhile, ‘cgps -s’ would keep crashing after a few minutes at most.

At the time, since this was my first experience with gpsd, I assumed cgps was just unstable. After a bit of googling, and reading other people’s tutorials, it became clear that cgps wasn’t unstable and that something was frak’d with my rig. That’s when I visited the gpsd hardware compatibility table. On the entire table, the only device with a ‘do not buy’ rating is the BU-353-S4. (Turns out my co-worker has bought the GlobalSat BU-353, which doesn’t have the ‘do not buy’ rating’)

I’ve since wired up an Adafruit Ultimate GPS Breakout directly to my Pi project. It just works. GPS lock was quick, time reported was correct, margin for error was reasonable, and I was able to run ‘cgps -s’ for hours without issue.

It’s easy to be tempted by the plethora of cheap parts on Amazon and eBay. Not to mention that sweet perk of free shipping… But sometimes it just isn’t worth it. There is a huge value in buying parts that have been fully vetted by someone with more expertise, even if it does mean you have to solder eight measly wires.