Tag Archives: hack

A useful trick when photographing food in the kitchen

Always buy plain white paper towels. When you want to photograph something you’re preparing, just crumple up a paper towel and make sure you get it in the frame. Then you have an accurate reference for white-balancing your photograph, without … Continue reading →

Aside | Posted on 2014-04-02 by | Tagged ,

Fun with SQL: The U.S. city with the most AM stations

Posted on 2014-03-27 by

A friend asked me a radio trivia question with a surprising answer: what U.S. city has the most licensed AM radio stations? (This question had apparently stumped him when a friend asked him, and now he was trying to stump … Continue reading →

Posted in Broadcasting & Media, Computing | Tagged , , ,

An addendum to the findslowdisks DTrace hack

In the previous installment, I posted a script that will output a series of lines that look like this: multipath/s33d7: 417.3 ms > 372.9 ms multipath/s25d22: 682.9 ms > 372.9 ms multipath/s29d5: 699.2 ms > 372.9 ms multipath/s25d4: 1449.1 ms … Continue reading →

Aside | Posted on 2013-10-31 by | Tagged , , ,

My first (well, ok, third) DTrace hack

Posted on 2013-10-29 by

We have a storage server with a bunch of marginal disks in it. They aren’t bad enough to return read errors, and of course the SMART data claims they’re just fine, but the built-in error-recovery takes much too long (sometimes … Continue reading →

Posted in Computing, FreeBSD | Tagged , ,