Blog from the Loft | PK Shiu Personal Blog » technology

My First CFL Bulb

PK — Sat, 24 Dec 2011 15:30:49 +0000

I installed my very first CFL Bulb in the loft today. It is not that I am not energy conscious, it is that we have ZWave controlled home lighting system in the Loft. Non of the CFL’s, and most of the LED bulbs do not work with electronic dimmers. Only the bathrooms’ lights are normal switched lights. So I installed my first 3.7+ years CFL there. Let’s see if it last that long.

Listening to OnPoint last week, the editor-in-chief Kimberly Kleman said we should keep the receipt and call the manufacturer on it if the bulb fails.

Itunes Music Match Resource Usage

PK — Thu, 17 Nov 2011 03:41:08 +0000

My main music library is on my 2011 Mac Mini, 2.3GHz 8G ram Core i5 CPU. Right now it is half way matching my 9000+ songs. Looking at the activity monitor, it is using up one entire CPU, with 35 threads and about 500 Meg of real memory. I assume the matching process is some sort of checksum computation and then a network query, which is why it is CPU intensive but not network intensive.

iPhone Day Light Savings Bug strikes again November 2011

PK — Sun, 06 Nov 2011 13:11:54 +0000

If you have your phone’s date and time settings set to “automatic”, meaning it will automatically determine your time zone, you would be one hour early to your appointments today! For some reason, if you set your timezone yourself then the phone gets the day light savings change correctly. See the two screenshots I took flipping the automatic switch back and forth.

How to use siri and Reminder effectively

PK — Mon, 17 Oct 2011 14:15:47 +0000

We all love Siri, and scheduling reminders verbally, right? But you are not getting the most out of it unless you do the following, if you are a iCloud user with other devices and macs:

Delete your local Reminder list in Reminder, leaving the iCloud reminder list
On your Mac(s) calendar program, go to View / Show Reminders
(optionally) on your iPhone change Settings/Sound for reminders so that you know a reminder has gone off as oppose to other events.

Now when you schedule a reminder with siri, it will automatically synced to your macs and ipads, and it will show up on all devices!

siri is amazing

PK — Sat, 15 Oct 2011 02:30:18 +0000

There, I said it. Siri really is amazing. People who think it is just voice recognition software need to try it before passing judgement.

This is BETA according to Apple, learning a trick from Google. That just means they are going to tweak it with user data. Some of these things are not working (yet):

It does not work with third party app. “Play Norah Jones” only work if you have her music on your music library. We need it to work with Rdio or Spotify, like Dragon Go does.
It does not take multiple calendars into account. I have 25 appointments next week according to “check my schedule”, what I really want is “check my work schedule”
You would think you can send tweets from siri, with all the twitter integration, but you cannot. You can say “text twitter” if you have twitter setup as an account with code 40404, the standard twitter SMS interface. You will be using your SMS credits though.
It will be nice if it interface with either the calculator app or something more streamlined for basic calculation, and then read back the result instead of showing me a wolfram alpha page.

How to Change Colors for ls command in xterm

PK — Fri, 09 Sep 2011 13:25:18 +0000

I like to us a dark background on my ssh terminal. On WebFaction, their terminal environment is setup to output colors on commands like “ls”. That is great except the default directory names ended up in blue, which is impossible to read on a black background.

There is a easy way to fix this:

copy the system default color settings from /etc/DIR_COLORS into your home directory and name it .dir_colors
edit your copy of .dir_colors file to change the colors.
For example, I change it to white:


cp /etc/DIR_COLORS ~/.dir_colors

# than change this line from DIR 01;34    to:
DIR 01;37       # directory

Original Screen:

WebFaction server down for almost a day

PK — Wed, 13 Jul 2011 02:07:12 +0000

Do not get me wrong. I love webfaction. Half of our apps (including our clients) are running there. Over the last few years we have had small outages. But usually be back within the hour. This time, the web194 server has been down for almost a day now. I sincerely hope that:

they tell us what happened
and more importantly, why it took so long to recover
why they wouldn’t just swap in a new machine, especially this is one of the newer server

We lucked out in that our site is still in alpha mode ( Boston Private School Search ), but some much larger site like the bucketlist.org is on the same server. For us, it stopped our design process for a day as we use the alpha site for design testing and we run a virtual team with our designers.

Update 7/13/2011

Site is backup. Seems like the machine was restored from a backup that is more than one day old.

How to clean up your gmail account

PK — Wed, 06 Jul 2011 16:25:10 +0000

I glanced down at the bottom on my gmail account. My mailbox is 30% full, almost 3G. While I have a very long way to go before the account become 100% full, the organized part of me just want to clean things up!

If you want to delete very old emails in GMail, use this search filter:

is:unread before:2011/01/01

This will return all mail that is unread and older than Jan 1st of 2011. I actually add in additional filter, as I organize most of my emails by label. So since I follow a large email list call “python”, I can select and delete all the emails from that list by adding label:python to my search criteria. Noting that I created a automatic filter to label all emails from that mailing list with the label “python”.

Day 5: Sorting out NPR and PBS on the iPad

PK — Mon, 11 Apr 2011 21:57:02 +0000

There are too many apps for NPR and PBS, for iPhone and iPad. I spend half an hour cleaning up all the apps. There are two pair of apps that are useful:

The official PBS (tv) apps published by PBS, for iPhone or iPad
The official NPR (radio) apps published by PBS for iPhone or iPad

The NPR (radio) apps both let you do live streaming or catch up on old shows. The Video program has selected content for viewing, but obviously no life streaming. These apps are confusing because they use the same icon for both iPhone and iPad, but the apps are different. On first sync I have both versions on the iPad and I need to launch them to figure out what is what.

There are other apps out there, the Public Radio Tuner will stream radio, and WBUR has their own apps. But I am not sure if they are necessary if you have the official apps.

How to Find a iPad 2 using Python

PK — Mon, 21 Mar 2011 13:12:44 +0000

I did not buy the version 1 iPad because an iPad without a front facing camera just does not seem right. At iPad 2 launch day, I was going to go stand in line (as I did for my iPhone 3GS) for one, as my office is about a mile away from the Boston Apple Store. However real work got in the way.

I did not anticipate the demand for this thing. I guess a lot of people were like me, skipping the iPad 1 and waited for the iPad 2. I did place an order order days after, which is of course too late.

Python to the rescue! Someone posted the links to check for stock on the Target mobile site. I threw together a quick python script, using BeautifulSoup (Don’t you love BeautifulSoup ?) to scrape the site. Saturday night, I found a 32G black iPad 2 available in a Target close by ! I drove over almost first thing Sunday morning, only to find that the two that they had in stock was already purchased by someone who got there, waited for the store to open, at 8am.

Lesson here? Programming is easy. Actually getting up in the morning and driving over to wait in line is, well, a bit overkill. I think I will just wait for the online shipment.

Meanwhile, you can try out the python program here. Rename to .py for running.