Speed Bump
New MacBook Pro day here! I'm finally retiring my mid-2014 x86 based 15" MacBook Pro in Silver with a 14" MacBook Pro with the M5 Pro CPU.
I've heard a lot about the speed improvements of the various M-series chips since their debut (and use a M2 MacBook Pro at work). But I was really curious how much faster the new laptop is.
So I did the only reasonable thing, I loaded Geekbench 6 on both an ran a benchmark. The results are impressive:
I'm certain I'm going to love this laptop for a long time. But I hope it isn't for 12 years this time.
An Elegant Solution
Even though I don't have formal engineering training, I do have a long history of building and maintaining solutions and so I've learned the benefits of over building a solution. But, sometimes a simple solution is much better. With that in mind, let me outline my loss of power shutdown plan for my Raspberry PI server.
The Initial Plan:
My Raspberry PI is plugged into a APC UPS that doesn't have a USB port to trigger a system shutdown based on a lost of main power and low battery level. But, my wife's Windows PC is plugged into one. So I have been exploring the NUT service and plugged the PC's APC into the Raspberry PI with a long USB cable. Unfortunately that long cord caused some connection instability. And, even if it was stable there was still some risk. The NUT service on the Raspberry PI was going to have to wait for a power loss and then trigger a shutdown of the PC and then of the Raspberry PI. That plan included running the NUT software on both systems.
The Elegant Solution:
Instead of all of that, I'm going to plug the PC back into the UPC directly and let the Windows settings control the power. But how will the Raspberry PI know to shutdown? Ping the PC! The PC is constantly on, so when the ping fails it should be safe to assume that there is a power issue.
One Twist:
But what if the PC is down for another reason? I think I'll make it so that if the PI is restarted and the PC is offline, it will delay further checks so that I can keep it online. I'll just have to accept the risk that the PI could run out of battery power if the power does go down.
We're Doing It Live
I've decided to go live.
For the last year I've slowly and occasionally worked on this site's features and just haven't finished things. And I even started to add new things, while others remain unfinished.
Enough of that - I'm going live and I'll clean it up later.
Power Graph
I recently purchased a new (pre-owned) car and was amazed at how much power it had. That got me wondering what a graph of the power from all my cars would look like over time. So...
I've excluded details about the particular cars to make sure I'm not giving away to much PII, but I will say that the first car was a Geo Metro that I bought after a summer job. It had a measly 52 hoursepower and only 39 lbs/ft of torque.
The new car has a 365 horsepower and 309 lbs/ft of torque. A 700% increase in horsepower and a 800% in torque! No wonder I was amazed.
First Post!
My goal for this blog is to share ideas and details of the projects I am working on in a space I own. You can read more about those goals on the "About" page.
In this post, I want to describe how I'm doing that.
Static Content
Like the ol' 'Blogger sites, this site is generated as a series of static HTML pages. Unlike the original 'Blogger, I'm using 11ty, a Node-based static content generator. As a former .Net developer, I tried a few .Net-based site generators, but I had one main goal: a personal blog's home page should be a long list of posts with all the content from each blog post. I'm not going for pageviews or trying to lighten the load on the database. Old-school blogs did it this way, and so should mine.
As I explored various engines, I was unsuccessful when I tried editing templates and configs to get a home page with all of a blog post's content. I finally found 11ty and the eleventy-duo template and figured out how to do it; that is what I'm using. But the more I've customized my template and its functionality, the happier I've become with the 11ty.
Hosting
When I started building websites, publishing an update consisted of selecting all the local files in WS_FTP and pressing the copy to the server button. Source control was a .zip file or a copy of a particularly complicated script file.
I'm happy to have git and release pipelines to make things safer and more secure. I'm using GitHub for my private repo and Cloudflare for my build pipeline and hosting. Right now, my Cloudflare service is free; I hope it stays that way.