T440s Have Some Wonderful Cooling

It’s safe to say that I’ve seen my fair share of T440 ThinkPads in my time, and there’s one common element on all of them that just downright bugs me.

If you ever take the back off one (and not snap it off somehow), and decide to unscrew the heatsink, you’ll see two dies: a larger one on the right (CPU) and a smaller one on the left (GPU). Those little shiny blocks are the heart of that machine… and they’re so tiny too!

Now if you look closer, you’ll see that the GPU die is bare. Oops.

Python: Multithreading, Multiprocessing, and the GIL Explained

One of the many things that make Python such a popular and powerful language is that you can easily divide your code into multiple concurrent threads rather easily, take this for example:

from threading import Thread

def thread_func(n):
    print(f"I'm thread number {n}!")

for t in range(4):
    t = Thread(target=thread_func, args=[t])
    t.start()

4 threads! Easy, right?

Well, not exactly.

DSLR Raw Editing: Dark Frames and Flat Fields

So I know I’ve already covered the basics of raw photos, but there’s a few things worth elaborating on that I think deserve a separate post, so here we are.

There’s three things that can be easily solved with raw photos, two of which are obnoxious and annoying and the other is.. less so. These are dead pixels, noise, and lens vignetting, solved by dark frames, and flat fields.

DSLR Raw Photos Explained

Many good-quality DSLR cameras I’ve seen will have the ability to save your photos in a few different formats, JPEG, TIFF, or some form of raw format.

If you’ve every tried to use one, you’ll quickly realize they’re not like normal photos and don’t quite work the same. So what exactly is this, and what is it used for?

MacOS Installers and .DS_Store

Programming Isn't a Skill, It's a Mindset

Minor Rant: Linux, Scripts, and SetUID

You know the feeling when a system that you’ve used for years, and trusted, suddenly throws a curveball at you with a fun “Yeah you know this simple and concrete rule that’s never broken? Well in this one exception, it is, and nobody ever points it out. Have fun!”

Adventures in HAProxy

For those of you that do not know, HAProxy is an amazing piece of kit that can proxy HTTP and arbitrary TCP connections. It’s also so customizable that I’m practically using it as my main entry point to my network, and do indeed refer to it internally as the “border gateway.” With two exceptions (SSH and SMTP, more on that later), everything that comes into the TD-StorageBay network, yes, that includes this site too, passes through that one process. However, HA cannot do everything… and I feel that I’m pushing its limits. Not in the “sheer workload” sense, no, I am way far off from that. I mean in the old Mythbusters style “using things in ways for which they were never intended” manner.

Fun Fact: Wax Seal Colors and Etiquette

Anyone reading this actually familiar with wax seals? No? Okay, it’s this:

For you young ones, this was how we used to seal envelopes. No lick-and-stick flaps, you took your envelope (or even, the back of your folded letter), and put some wax (not always actually wax) on it, and used the seal (the metal circle there) to make an imprint and press the wax down, sealing the envelope. Common seals would be either a motto or something novelty, a monogram / initial(s), or a family crest, each with slightly different meanings. Additionally, the stereotypical seal color is red, but the color was actually important: the seal was likely the first thing you’d see, so the color of the seal was a hint as to the contents of the letter.

The Beginnings