Submitted by drew on

Traffic Question 14:

A traffic light turns yellow and you’re not quite going to make it through before it turns red... what do you do?

  1. Stomp on the gas pedal and zoom through
  2. Continue through the intersection without any change in speed
  3. Wait until the last second and then stomp on the brake
  4. Start coming to a gradual stop immediately
  5. None of the above

Moliner's Answer:

A. Stomp on the gas pedal

That way we will beat the “red” by a mile.

Conventional Answer

D. Start stopping immediately

This is the “safe” answer, so we’ll go with it.

I think stomping on the gas is really what people’s first instinct is. There are several things that don’t quite mesh if you think about them.

  • Yes, you will be going faster, but it takes too long to accelerate, so it doesn’t really make much difference. (You are likely saving less than 1 second; see image.)
  • Whatever speed you get up to... if it makes any real difference, you're likely to be significantly over the speed limit.
  • You are crossing several more sight lines, so it is that much more likely for a police officer to see you.
  • Is it really safe to go through an intersection at twice the speed limit?

For more information about signal timing, see the Signal Timing Manual (section 4) at www.signaltiming.com.

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Selecting PHP command line version on HostGator shared host

Submitted by drew on

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

Submitted by drew on

 

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

Submitted by drew on

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

Submitted by drew on

 

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

Submitted by drew on

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.