Submitted by drew on

Traffic Question 16:

How can you make the traffic light turn green faster?

  1. Keep creeping forward
  2. Flash your headlights
  3. Make a phone call
  4. Nothing; you can’t change its timing

Moliner's Answer:

More than likely, you are already on the phone, so....

A. Creep forward

The aliens who live in and control the traffic light will see that you are in a hurry and make the light change faster. Option B would work, too, except the aliens ignore flashing lights.

But of course, if you’re not already on the phone, option C is great for passing the time while waiting.

Note:

  • Some lights have faries or leprechauns living in them instead of aliens.
  • Even if you're several cars away from the light, you should creep up some more, every 10-20 seconds, until you're right on the bumper of the car ahead of you.

 

Conventional Answer

D. Be patient

As long as you have already triggered the sensor, there’s nothing you can do to change the light’s timing.

There are several technologies of sensors, but the only one I recall ever seeing in Moline is the inductive loop. You can see where the sensor is by looking for the cuts in the pavement. An inductive sensor is triggered by the presence of metal, not by movement.

Here's a pretty clear description of how inductive sensors work: auto.howstuffworks.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.