Traffic Question 11:

What can you do about a slow driver in front of you?

A. Drive as closely behind them as possible

B. Honk and flash your headlights

C. Make a phone call

D. Nothing. Drive normally, a normal distance behind.

Moliner’s Answer:

A. Drive as closely as possible.

Everyone knows that driving on someone’s tail makes them go faster. This is due to the law of gravity (large bodies attract each other). Wait, that doesn’t work... umm...

Driving on their tail has an effect that gets you where you’re going faster, due to reduced proximity between vehicles. Physicists don’t have an explanation for this effect, yet.

Conventional Answer:

D. Nothing

If the driver in front doesn’t pulll over or let you pass, you’ll just have to be patient until you can legally and safely go past.

Driving on someone’s tail does NOT make them go faster.  In fact, if you annoy them enough, they might slow down more (that would be me, because, hey, I’m usually over the speed limit by a few mph, anyway).

You are not going to get there any faster by driving too close.

Tags

Selecting PHP command line version on HostGator shared host

This took me a while to find, so I'm saving it somewhere I can find it again.

The easy way to select the PHP version used for web applications is to use the CPanel configuration tool. However, that doesn't work if you're using SSH and need PHP on the command line. Also, on HostGator, you can't create a symlink outside of your directory (such as to the global php).

You can find out what version you have with

$ php --version

If that's not the version you want, try a specific version like this (php55 is 5.5, etc):

Book Scanning Process

 

Just to document this for next time. For reference, my books are 8 x 10.75 inches and other dimension below work for this. For approximately 100 pages, It takes me about 45 minutes to scan, an hour to crop and rotate, and 30 minutes to organize and generate the PDF.

Fixing features for hotfolder

Here is some documentation about the process I used to solve some issues with hotfolder and the features module. I was doing this partly through the web interface and partly through a console, so this is a reconstruction of what I remember and the console log. 

 

I was getting the following error message when I tried to check hotfolder watches (see https://www.drupal.org/node/2453659):

Notice: Undefined property: stdClass::$field_watch_config_scheme

 

GIMP for Kids

 

My daughter likes to draw on the computer. I don't remember exactly how it started, but she draws in GIMP using my Genius pen tablet, on my secondary monitor. I used to have Linux running in a VirtualBox with GIMP running on my second monitor for her, but VB doesn't completely work in Windows 10 yet. A while back I tried running GIMP on one of my Raspberry Pi's but it was just too sluggish to be useful, frustratingly slow for a (then) 3-year-old. It runs much better on a Raspberry Pi 2. It still lags if she goes crazy with a big brush, but it works.

Die Fly: Designing a better fly swatter

I was looking through some of my old stuff for something and ran across this gem. If you need to put together a quick flyswatter, try this one I designed for a class in college (the famous Rube Goldberg project).

Here are a few excerpts from the attached PDF. If this doesn't convince you to build one (perhaps with several improvements as noted in the document), I don't know what will.