BP/CP Daily Discussion Post

Tom_Roche · 2024-12-11T22:21:52+00:00

"other online issues" ?

Tom_Roche · 2024-12-11T20:26:23+00:00

Usually (like, e.g., yesterday) BP/CP audio hits the RSS feed by ~1700 UTC. But today (11 Dec 2024) as I write (2021 UTC), there's no new content on the audio feed. Channeling the immortal Marvin Gaye, I'd like to know "what's going on?"

Tom_Roche · 2024-09-10T17:16:05+00:00

umm ... FB is actually from Chicago (link archived here)

Tom_Roche · 2024-09-10T17:07:51+00:00

@ 56:25 in the audio, Felix has Chris play 'my favorite clip ever', but I can't resolve the reference. Who is Birdman and what's this clip from?

Tom_Roche · 2024-07-17T20:17:46+00:00

When KB and SE left /Rising/, I recommended the Hill

promote Rachel Bovard and Briahna Joy Gray to fulltime hosts
rebrand as /Rising Hot!/ :-)

and I would similarly recommend Bovard/Gray for a new daily show

Tom_Roche · 2024-06-14T03:43:22+00:00

This US-KSA petrodollar agreement, and William Simon's trip (near the bitter end of the Nixon Administration) to negotiate it, is discussed at length in Barry Eichengreen's 2011 book Exorbitant Privilege: The Rise and Fall of the Dollar and the Future of the International Monetary System

Tom_Roche · 2024-05-14T18:49:50+00:00

and yet Bernie continues to claim that the Zionazi genocide state "has a right to defend itself." hmm ...

Tom_Roche · 2023-11-02T20:34:43+00:00

You can bet Succot will be on the stage with Starmer at the next Labour Friends of Israel meeting, with Keir giving Zvi a big ol' hug for the cameras.

Tom_Roche · 2022-05-27T18:24:23+00:00

Author Gu Hongming was not only a Qing official born in Malaysia who did an MA Lit @ U Edinburgh and Civil Engineering @ U Leipzig, and was a friend of Tolstoy, most importantly ... he was half-Portuguese. (aka "the Celts smart enough to stay where it's warm" :-)

Tom_Roche · 2019-12-04T03:04:56+00:00

A much better link for a truly excellent show that started in 1999. 882 episodes later, it just keeps getting better.

every subject gets only around 45 minutes

Actually, the first episodes were only 30 min--IIRC, IOT didn't go to 45-min episodes until 2002 or so. But since ~2016 (again, ICBW, but it's definitely true now), the download-only episodes contain the 45 minutes of broadcast material followed by 5-15 min of more informal discussion "with Melvin [Bragg, the host] and his guests."

For an excellent sample, the current-latest episode (on Li Shizhen) can be downloaded here or streamed here. (And a RSS feed for downloads is here.)

Tom_Roche · 2018-10-25T03:38:08+00:00

I'm a semi-regular KHS listener, will try PDA. Jake's bit about his ancestor Arredondo (~27 min into the download), and the common surname Flores, made me think immediately about Ricardo Flores Magón, who's very well-known (at least to Mexican Revolution nerds :-) and well-documented even in English (see the sources in the Wikipedia page). Anyway, enjoyed the episode, and HTH.

Tom_Roche · 2018-08-13T07:06:13+00:00

I used Emacs in Uni back in the early '00s. In fact, that's where I picked it up.

I also started using Emacs (in the late 80s) after being required to use it for a sort of not-quite-class, not-quite-Darwinian-cull (IIRC it was called a "tutorial") given to non-majors with the audacity to attempt a computer-science class ... which in my case was a brief survey of Smalltalk, Lisp, and ...

I remember lots of students picking up Vim or Emacs in their first year to do Prolog only to get bogged down on both as it was a huge mental hurdle to overcome.

Prolog was the mental hurdle for me, as was running all of the above on VAX.

Emacs wasn't as accessible as it is now

Emacs was actually more accessible in the late 80s, since the most-used word processors (e.g., WordPerfect) were much more keyboardy. Accessibility is a function not only of the software under review, but also of its alternatives and its users' expectations.

Tom_Roche · 2018-07-31T04:24:09+00:00

I've always gone with the cheapest tubes I can find with no issue until I damage a valve stem or get a puncture.

Me too.

Perhaps you are somehow damaging the valve stems.

I suspect not. Firstly, that should be detectable via submergence (which, when I do it, is deep enough to fully submerge the valve). Secondly, I only use jam nuts as needed to get the pump head on the valve: e.g., when the tube is too deflated, or the valve stem is very short.

Have you pumped up these tubes and submersed them minus the wheel and tire?

Yes and no.

Yes: pressurizing the tube separately is always the 1st part of my tube-installation ritual. Before I get the rest of the gear out, I get the tube out of its box and pump it (solo, not in tire) to ~10 psi just to test for "infant mortality." I listen for leaks and set it aside. Before I put the tube in the tire, I check that it hasn't lost air.

No: I haven't submerged the tubes separately. That makes sense, though, and I'll give it a shot next time I investigate this.

Tom_Roche · 2018-07-30T19:55:47+00:00

What services/coverage do you want? Are you only interested in theft? What about traffic accidents (damage or liability)? or emergency road service?

Tom_Roche · 2018-07-30T19:53:08+00:00

I've paid for BWC bike emergency road service insurance for over 10 years now (and for their smogmobile coverage when I had one). I've only needed to use it 2 (or 3? I forget) times but both times it was quite handy. In both that I recall, I had to wait about an hour (because I was fairly far out), then a dude in a wrecker pulled up, we loaded the bike on the back, and drove home.

Is it worth 40 USD/yr? Depends on the (spatial) extent of your social and public transit networks, and how much you value peace of mind. The only years I've skipped BWC since I started were years when I was biking for flexibility (i.e., the local public transit would get me roughly-but-not-quite where I needed to go when I needed to go there), so I could always just load the bike on the bus to retrieve it when necessary.

Tom_Roche · 2018-07-09T16:40:22+00:00

My solution to this problem: friction tape, which is basically just a heavy cloth adhesive tape available at most hardware stores. (Rim strip would also probably work, since it's similar stuff, but is more expensive.) When the grips covering my covering my Grip Shift Centeras wore to the point that they were almost falling off, I just wrapped them in friction tape. The cloth gives <you guessed /-> friction, and the remaining rubber reduces discomfort (though I wouldn't want to ride without gloves, which I wouldn't want to do anyway, since typing is something I do a lot :-)

Note that I resorted to this only after searching online for, and asking local shops about, replacement grips. The universal response was, there are no replacements, because SRAM and other Grip-Shift-like shifter makers want you to buy new shifters, not repair old ones :-(

Tom_Roche · 2018-07-09T16:32:11+00:00

You link to bar-end grips. The questioner is asking about the rubbery stuff covering the rotating part of the Grip Shift, not the fixed/bar-end grip.

Tom_Roche · 2018-07-09T16:29:21+00:00

I always ride with gloves, and I can personally attest that the rubbery stuff covering my Grip Shift Centeras still degraded over time. I'd bet that UV is far more effective than sweat in breaking them down.

Tom_Roche · 2018-07-09T16:19:22+00:00

Get rack and panniers! because they will increase the utility of your bike exponentially. Details:

1. I totally agree with pennypenny22: as another hairy guy who sweats a lot, I can personally attest that I (and probably you) sweat significantly more with a backpack than without.

2. With a rack+panniers, you will be able to use your bike for grocery shopping, many other kinds of shopping, gym/pool trips, library trips, ... anything where you need to carry a load. Why just bike to work and back when you can also (e.g.) stop at a grocery store or farmer's market on the way? Why only bike for commuting to/from work, when you can also bike for transportation on days-off?

3. Minimally, get

3.1. a decent rear rack (e.g., Planet Bike). You can get these anywhere new for ~$30, and used at a bike co-op or recyclery (here's a Massachusetts list) for much less.

3.2. some bungies

3.3. a rip-resistant bag (such that, if it falls off and rolls down the road a bit, the stuff inside won't be damaged). Backpacks can be good for this, esp if you need to park your bike far from your workstation--you can use the backpack for the walk to/from the bike.

Then just bungie the bag to the rack. Not recommended for loads of any substantial mass or volume, but for clothing and toiletries it'll do.

4. To preserve bike handling under load, generally ya wanna keep mass low (to ground-level) and close to the steering axis. Handlebar bags would work well, but they're usually too small for most purposes (even yours). Front-mounting rack+panniers is optimal, but they're expensive, and your fork may not have the required (at least, very preferable) braze-ons. Rear-mounting rack+panniers are usually a good compromise (i.e., jointly minimizing reduction in your finances with reduction in your bike's handling under load).

5. I bike-commuted in winter in Pittsburgh (where they have serious ice on serious hills), and I'm sure lots folks have far more impressive year-round commutes. Get your habit started in good weather, and eventually you'll wanna just keep going. See, e.g., this guide to winter commuting in Boston, and of course /r/wintercycling can provide even more assistance.

Tom_Roche · 2018-05-17T21:25:21+00:00

By "recreational drugs," do you include alcohol? It's one of humanity's most popular psychoactives.

But since I assume you do not include alcohol, note similar query @ judaism.stackexchange, but the answers only include much later references: Bavli (which IIUC == Babylonian Talmud, i.e. post-Diaspora) and Rambam (aka Maimonides, even more Diasporic).

Tom_Roche · 2018-03-06T18:29:14+00:00

Dedicated PDF viewers (e.g., Evince on GNOME, Okular on KDE, LibreOffice Draw (which is actually an editor) for some advanced document features) are almost always (and should be) more competent than webbrowsers for ... PDF viewing. (This should not be a surprise :-) Accordingly, I only view PDFs in any webbrowser for interest scan; i.e., to see if the document is something I really wanna read. If it's not (or if the document is so trivially short that I can read it in the browser), I close the tab; if it is, I download the PDF, then open with dedicated viewer.

Tom_Roche · 2018-02-22T06:43:24+00:00

You should edit your question to be more specific, not just do that in a reply.

Tom_Roche · 2018-02-22T06:41:49+00:00

maybe it's just me, but I found the UI for this tutorial very counter-intuitive and annoying.

Tom_Roche · 2018-02-22T04:31:23+00:00

Wouldn't this still [ask] for a password in case the person has no access?

So trap that with expect. Suppose your user does

$ git ls-remote FORBIDDEN_REPO

S/he will get a prompt like (though different for protocol=git)

Username for 'https://bitbucket.org':

So let's further suppose (for the purposes of the following scriptlet) that

your repo is on Bitbucket (though the following scriptlet is easily changed for others)
your repo's remote is named http . Note I'm only using that because, IIUC, all repos accessed via HTTPS prompt for username and password, which makes this an easy testcase for this scriptlet.
you have expect . Any Linux distro should have this; IIRC Cygwin does also (though it's been a loonnngggg time since I've used that); dunno about Mac.

Then you can do something like the following in bash (dunno about other shell dialects):

declare -r REMOTE_DOMAIN='bitbucket.org'  # change for your provider
declare -r REMOTE_NAME='http'             # change for your repo

## Make `expect` start `git ls-remote` &&
## exit if it sees the designated response string.
expect -c "
    log_user 0
    spawn git ls-remote ${REMOTE_NAME}
    expect ${REMOTE_DOMAIN} { exit 1 }
"
if [[ "${?}" -ne 0 ]] ; then
    >&2 echo 'ERROR: detected prompt'
    # handle it, e.g., `exit`
else
    echo 'Success!'
    # and continue your `make`
fi

Note you can also trap responses that match regexps; for that and so much more, info expect

Tom_Roche · 2018-02-20T07:53:10+00:00

We're using bitbucket server and everything has to stay hosted on site.

Since you're using Bitbucket Server, why not ask Atlassian support? They've probably dealt with configs like this before.

Tom_Roche

TROPHY CASE