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Rest In Peace Duron Jr.

With all the other news of the global Coronavirus pandemic, police killings, and riots, I want to take a moment to make sure a important local story doesn’t get lost.

It was recently brought to my attention that Duron Jr. has died. This apparently happened at the end of April, but I just found about it last week. This young man was only in the 5th grade when he was struck by an SUV while crossing 61st from Fridley Middle School to the Fridley Community Center.

Immediately after he was struck the city took temporary action to limit pedestrian travel across 61st while they figured things out.

Next the city took down the (useless) plastic fences and erected bollards on the road to keep cars from passing each other on the shoulder.

I wondered how long they’d be there, and I now know Fridley has bollards as one of the tools in its toolboxes for testing changes without doing anything permanent.

Then throughout 2019 the city took action to apply more treatment to the 61st. Ave. They added a median with a pedestrian refuge to give pedestrians a little more priority at the intersection.

There is now a marked bike lane on both shoulders as parking was never allowed there previously. And there’s double white-striped paint to reinforce that passing is not allowed.

61st is a city-owned street. No county or state policies or politics stand in the way of making the street safe for everyone. I’m glad they took what was relatively swift action for a government agency.

But why do we wait until someone is struck by a vehicle – so severely that they risk death – to take action?

As car-loving Americans, we tend to have this have our cake and eat it too mentality when it comes to roads. Do we want safety? Yeah, sure, but dammit I’ll bitch to the mayor if I had to wait a minute longer in my car while dropping my kid off at school.

We cannot continue to prioritize throughput of vehicles over anyone’s life. This should go for all streets, not just this one. We don’t have to bankrupt the city while fixing it. As we fix it, it will make the city more prosperous.

Fatal Crash(?)

This last part is an unknown – I don’t know what the answer is right now, but I intend to find out. Sadly almost all of our government agencies, from city to federal, aren’t set up to proactively address problems in our built environment until somebody dies.

Will the crash that ended Duron’s life be recorded as a fatality? He sustained his injuries for over two years. But undoubtedly he would still be a thriving young student if he wasn’t struck that day.

Until we find out, if you can, please give to Duron’s funeral fund.

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Just what we need… another class

Most of the chatter about this video is positive, but the first and last comments in this screenshot are what I want to talk about: I get mad when I hear things like “just what we need – another class” or that something is too juvenile for them to have fun. No matter how you […]

The post Just what we need… another class appeared first on Meatball Racing.

Most of the chatter about this video is positive, but the first and last comments in this screenshot are what I want to talk about:

I get mad when I hear things like “just what we need – another class” or that something is too juvenile for them to have fun. No matter how you cut it, RC racing at its core is toy cars. Yes they’re expensive, configurable, luxury toy cars. But they’re still toy cars as much as a $400 magnesium yo-yo is still a skill toy.

Let’s look at the reality and see if can’t all get along or at least agree to disagree without starting a flame-war

Yet Another Class

Part of me understands their complaint – adding another race on race day means it will add more time to the racing schedule. Which means more time waiting between their races, and the possibility of getting home later in the day.

But let’s break down the argument. Does it really mean more time? If more 2wd buggy drivers show up, it means adding an E-Main and another qualifying heat, so if there are more drivers it means more time no matter what. It doesn’t matter if they’re driving rally cars, formula one, tamiya mini, euro trucks, short course trucks, etc. More drivers is more time.

Why not welcome new classes? There are so many aspects to the hobby, but the common thread is racing. Track owners across the country don’t care if they’re announcing on the tone for the E-Main of 2wd Buggy or the A-Main of Euro Trucks. They want as many (paying) racers at the track as possible. I for one, would love to watch a 2wd Spec Stampede race like in that JConcepts video.

Track owners and race directors recognize this and most have a policy that if at least 3-5 guys show up with the same type of vehicle, they’ll run it as a class of its own. The belly-aching by the other drivers simply needs to stop. It does not help grow the hobby, it just makes us look like elitist jerks. It comes off sounding like: If you’re not good enough to afford or compete with the type of car I have, you should just stay home.

Racing on the Cheap

“Yet Another Class” usually means someone is testing the waters to try something different and see if it sticks. More often than not, it is something affordable. Tamiya Euro Trucks are a hit because they’re just over $100 and they look awesome. My favorite class of racing is currently Spec Slash. It’s right next to Euro Trucks as one of the cheaper ways to race. I also have a 2wd buggy, which is always popular at any track, but that platform is expensive. The idea of a 2wd Spec Stampede monster truck class sound like a great way to get kids (young and old) into some fun monster truck racing.

Heads-Up Mixed-Class Racing

Another option that is rarely exercised, but should be, is mixed-class racing. It’s literally running two or more types of classes in the same race. It’s already happening at your track during open practice and it makes everyone a better driver if they’re actively looking out for slower/faster traffic. Many drivers pay zero attention to anything that isn’t traveling at their speed. To combat it, more tracks should host heads-up races like this:

When running multiple classes in the same heat, there are two schools of thought. You can run cars of similar speed together, or run cars of different speed together – each has pros and cons.

Running cars of similar speeds together is easy. Maybe it’s VTA & Euro Truck or Stadium Truck and Open Short Course. The race director likely knows generally what the lap times are for a specific class. Hopefully the two classes lacking a full field of drivers wind up being a good match.

The other option would be to run classes with different speeds together. This happens in several real world races, but most famously at LeMans. Why do I like the speed differential? It allows for the faster cars, usually piloted by better drivers, to pass quickly. If slower drivers are predictable in their racing line, the faster cars can use just about any line to overtake. Is it going to slow everyone’s lap times? Sure, but not significantly and the racing will be even more exciting.

Talk to your track

As a rule of thumb, always check with the track owner and/or the race director. At bigger events like trophy races they’ll be clear on what classes are getting trophies and it probably doesn’t include your new class. The guys running a new class aren’t there for trophies anyway. They’re there to race against their friends and build some interest around what could be a fun racing series.

Don’t listen to the naysayers. If you want to run a class of Tamiya Dancing Riders, get some people interested and head to the track. You could even ask your local hobby shop to give the racing info to others buying that model. Even if no has joined you (yet), bring your car to the track. If there’s a Sportsman class, which is usually a smorgasbord of classes, run it in that. Or when you’re racing in a different class, run your new model during open practice time or before/after the race. Sometimes just seeing something new go ’round is all it takes to get others interested. I did this with my F1 car in 2016 and it has been a regular class in my area since.

The post Just what we need… another class appeared first on Meatball Racing.

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IncrediblePBX and the Linksys RTP-300

I started my voice over IP (VOIP) installation with the pre-configured for raspberry pi – “Incredible PBX” software – care of the Nerd Vittles crew.

For phones I have a Linksys RTP300 analog telephone adapter (ATA) that I purchased at a local thrift store. It’s a discontinued product, but they’re easy to find for cheap on eBay.

The one I purchased had firmware that was coded to only work with Vonage. Years ago I was able to hack it and unlock it. https://thegeekoftheworld.com/unlock-rtp300/

I hacked mine the old-fashioned way (circa 2012) by editing the bin file using emacs ‘hexl-mode’ http://www.dslreports.com/forum/r21133882-

Since I did this years ago, some of the instructions and firmware files are getting hard to find, but if you need instructions – let me know in the comments and I’ll try to help as best I can.

Getting into the RTP-300 admin panel

It had been at least a year since I’ve logged into the admin interface on my RTP-300. Luckily, there are some fun things you can do to help figure out how to get in. If you have a phone hooked up to it and it’s powered on, you can use the Interactive Voice Response (IVR) to get information. This article from Cisco (who purchased Linksys) has many of the available codes.

Pick up the phone and dial #### to get into the IVR menu. Then press 110# and the nice lady will read back to you the IP of your ATA.

Good info, but it wasn’t running the web interface on port 80, so I had to figure that out. The IVR option for port wasn’t working, so I did an nmap scan of all ports 1-65535 from the command line – you could use the raspberry pi or any other computer on the same network as your RTP-300:

$ nmap 172.16.0.11 -Pn
Starting Nmap 7.60 ( https://nmap.org ) at 2020-04-04 18:02 CDT
Nmap scan report for voip.lan (172.16.0.11)
Host is up (0.0048s latency).
Not shown: 999 filtered ports
PORT STATE SERVICE
8080/tcp open http-proxy

There it is, port 8080. I made sure to add the address (with port) in my password manager. Then I had to use Firefox to finally connect to the ATA admin because Chrome wouldn’t complete the connection – likely because the RTP300 doesn’t have support for HTTPS. ¯_(ツ)_/¯

But we’re in! We’ll first do some configuration in Asterisk and then come back to the RTP300 configuration.

Connecting the RTP-300 to IncrediblePBX

IncrediblePBX comes with some SIP extensions pre-configured, so I roll with the defaults. I use extensions 701 and 702 for the two lines on my RTP-300. To navigate to them in IncrediblePBX, visit your IncredbilePBX address in your browser. Then use the “Incredible PBX Admin” credentials you set up when you initially installed IncrediblPBX.

Once you’re logged in to the IncrediblePBX/Asterisk web admin, navigate to Extensions (under Applications).

There you can see there are a few extensions pre-configured for you, including 701 & 702, which will work great with the RTP-300.

Click the Edit button to the right (paper/pencil icon) to edit and view more information about that extension. You’ll need to do two things in here. First, copy the “Secret” key for each extension.

Second, for extension 702, also change the SIP port to 5061. There’s a note in there about how 5061 is sometimes used for “Line 2” on ATAs – and that’s exactly the case for the RTP-300.

RTP-300 Admin Navigation

The RTP-300 admin interface is little weird. Once you’re logged in you’ll want to navigate to the voice menu item on the far right.

Click the “Admin Login” link to switch from an informational view to one where we can actually make changes. Then click “switch to advanced view”.

Advanced view will show all of the extensions and settings.

RTP-300 Extension Configuration for IncrediblePBX

Configuring phone lines 1 & 2 is fairly simple despite the overwhelming number of settings fields on the admin. We just need to enter three values:

The IP address or domain name of our IncrediblePBX server as the SIP “Proxy”
This is the SIP server the ATA is going to register this line with.
The Incredible PBX extension number as the “User ID”
The extension secret as the “Password”

Test!

Once you have these settings saved, the ATA should now register itself with Asterisk on your IncrediblePBX system. The best way to know if it worked is to pick up the receiver one of your lines – you should hear a dial tone 📞

If you’ve got a dial-tone and a phone on each port, you should be able to dial each extension with 701# or 702#. The # isn’t strictly necessary, it just instructs the ATA that you’re done dialing so it can stop waiting for further input. If you’re feeling fancy you could add a 70X entry to the dialplan on the line configuration of the ATA.

If that’s working, try one of the pre-configured Nerdvittles custom extensions. You can see them in the IncrediblePBX/Asterisk web admin by going to “Admin” and “Custom Extensions.”

Try 947# for weather by zip code ⛈️ or 951# for the latest news 📰

← Summary Only

RaspberryPi + IncrediblePBX = Phone/Fax/NAS

I replaced an 11-bay mega-tower computer, that had a 1000-watt power supply, with this:

While this setup still looks a little crazy, it’s more adapter wires than anything:

This write-up covers installation of IncrediblePBX 2020.3 on a RaspberryPi 3. The latest instructions are always available on NerdVittles and incrediblepbx.com, but I wanted to document my experience here for posterity. This article will cover installing X Windows for a GUI, and Samba & SSHFS for cross-platform file sharing on your home network.

IncrediblePBX Image

To put the IncrediblePBX image onto an SD card after you’ve downloaded it, use dd from the command line:

$ sudo dd bs=1M if=/path/to/incrediblepbx2020.3/incrediblepbx2020.3.img of=/dev/mmcblk0 status=progress

Eject the SD card and put it into your Raspberry Pi and boot it up.

Initial Setup

Follow the on-screen instructions carefully. I like to connect my RaspberryPi to the network, then ssh into it and run most of the configuration commands from a terminal on my main computer because:

I can select/copy/paste any instructions from the terminal into a document for later reference.
I don’t have to stand next to the cat’s litter box (where my Pi is located in the laundry room) 🤧

Because the IncrediblePBX installation is geared specifically towards having a turn-key phone system, it lacks some of the pre-installed stuff you normally get in a vanilla Raspbian installation, but that’s why were here (and we’ll fix it).

Caveats

You’ll inevitably use raspi-config to change the settings for your Pi. For IncrediblePBX, don’t enable predictable names on network interfaces unless you know what you’re doing. Some of the IncrediblePBX scripts are looking for good ol’ eth0.

For some reason IncrediblePBX didn’t include ntp so I installed it with:

# apt install ntp ntpdate

Both of those are needed before running /root/timezone-setup (specified by the on-screen instructions).

X Windows

Before setting up your PBX-equipped Pi to run X, you should add a “regular” user as having the system automatically log into X as root is a categorically bad idea. All of my examples in this article use the username as justin, but you should replace every instance with your own name 😀

# adduser justin

Follow the prompts for adduser, then add that user to the sudo group so you can still do useful stuff as a privileged user.

# usermod –aG sudo justin

Then log out and log in as your user, and run sudo raspi-config. Under “Boot Options” and set the “Desktop / CLI” option to “Desktop GUI, automatically logged in as ‘justin’ user.” raspi-config will prompt you to install X (follow those instructions). It will also ask you to reboot after changing that setting.

X Windows “Black Screen” Issue

When I went to log into X, I saw a black screen with the pointer mouse cursor and then it would log me out and show the login manager (LightDM). 🤔

After getting some clues about the error from my ~/.xsession-errors file, I found that I needed to remove this file out of /etc/profile.d in order to be able to log in to X:

$ mkdir ~/bin
$ mv /etc/profile.d/helloworld.sh ~/bin

Samba for Read-Only Access

I use samba to share files read-only across the network. This is especially useful for watching videos via VLC on devices like AppleTV and Amazon FireTV. Install samba by running:

$ sudo apt install samba

The Pi3, when set to boot up and log into the UI, will automatically mount any USB-attached drives under /media/justin, so I share my media folder read-only to the network.

$ sudo vi /etc/samba/smb.conf

To the bottom of the smb.conf file add:

[media]
  comment = Media
  path = /media/justin
  browseable = yes
  guest ok = yes
  read only = yes
  force user = justin
  force group = justin

SSHFS for Read-Write Access

For read-write access to any of the drives on the Raspberry Pi, I use SSHFS.

Linux (Ubuntu)

In Ubuntu 18.04 you can connect to a sshfs URL in Nautilus by going to “Other Locations” and typing in the location in the “Connect to Server” box in the status bar at the bottom of this screen. Everything on my home network gets a .lan DNS name care of OpenWRT, so I connect to raspberrypi.lan – you can substitute your IP address. Your URL might look something like: sshfs://yourusername@X.X.X.X/media/yourusername

MacOS

For MacOS you’ll need to install FUSE for MacOS / OSXFuse and their SSHFS extension. Unfortunately the options for connecting through a GUI aren’t supported in recent versions of MacOS.

To connect you must “mount” the remote location. Make a folder in your home directory that will serve as the mount point. I created a folder called sshfs-Media.

$ mkdir ~/sshfs-Media

It doesn’t matter what it’s named, you just need to use it for the sshfs command. You’ll see that once it’s mounted, OSXFUSE will give it a different name in the Finder.

I had to use a defer_permissions option to OSXFUSE to get it to work, your mileage may vary.

$ sshfs justin@raspberrypi.lan:/media/justin ~/sshfs-Media -o defer_permissions

The remote location will show up as “OSXFUSE Volume X” in the Finder under your home directory and under “Volumes.” You can”Eject” (un-mount) the remote location if you wish to disconnect.

Windows 10

For access in windows I installed sshfs-win. Once it’s installed you can map a network drive over the SSHFS protocol. Right click “This PC” and select “Map network drive…”

That will bring up a dialog where you can enter the drive letter you want it to show up as, and the path information. sshfs-win has a protocol shortcut called sshfs.r if you want to map a path that is outside of your home directory (/home/justin) on the remote system. In my case I want to mount /media/justin. Remember to use backslashes for paths in Windows!

Test

At this point you should have a RaspberryPi on your network that boots into a UI, automatically mounts external USB drives, and shares them read-only on your network. You should also be able to connect read-write using your Pi username and password for authentication from any computer.

We haven’t even touched the fully blown PBX that is already installed – we’ll get into that next! Stay tuned.

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Join the Quaranteam

With almost everyone quarantined in their homes for the Coronavirus pandemic, RC racing (along with everything else) has come to a halt. I enjoy competitive RC club racing and I can’t wait to get back into it. Until then there’s two things we all can do: Buy a shirt and support your local track: https://tssmt.liverc.com/ […]

The post Join the Quaranteam appeared first on Meatball Racing.

Buy a shirt and support your local track: https://tssmt.liverc.com/
Play VRC to stay sharp

Continue reading “Join the Quaranteam”

Get (your files) organized & have a (backup) plan!

Suddenly I find myself trapped in my own home due to COVID-19. It’s not really a big deal because I work from home normally. But it has changed my weekend plans drastically. So it’s time to start tackling one of my 2020 goals:

Organizing all of our digital files and having a consistent back-up strategy.

Organization

At our house important files mostly fall into two realms: Photos and Music. Many people have at one point decided to keep all of their photos or music with a 3rd party service like Flickr or iTunes. That’s fine, but you just have to be prepared to commit to them like a marriage – except they decide all of the terms – it’s not a mutual agreement. Personally, no matter if I upload my photos to a 3rd party service, I always keep the originals on a disk in my home so I can own my own content.

But this becomes an issue when everyone in your family isn’t on the same page. I have some photos on a USB drive and on my computer, and my wife has done the same on a different USB drive and computer. We need a way to have photos accessible in a consistent place, and make sure they’re getting backed-up.

When it comes to shopping for a big hard drive to store all of this stuff, I try to find whatever is the best space-per-cost within my budget. At one point I had devised a “2×100” rule: I get the biggest drive I can for $100 and consider buying two of them (for redundancy). As disk sizes increase, once a drive is available that is 2x the size of my current one for $100, I replace them. Currently you can get up to 4TB drives for $100.

I bought a 4TB drive to use as network attached storage to act as our central storage place. I attached it to a Raspberry Pi using a USB/SATA hard drive dock and share it read-only over the network using Samba. It shows up as a Windows-style network share on all computers and other devices like AppleTV & FireTV (using VLC). For read-write access, I use SSHFS so authenticated peeps can write to the disk and move files around.

We’re still working on how to consistently name our photo albums, but having them in one place that gets backed up off-site is a big win.

Backups

I used to be an amateur network administrator. In my back-office (laundry room) I had a tower server that had 6 disk drives. A 3-disk RAID5 for backups, a 2-disk RAID0 for temporary storage (for MythTV recordings), all in swappable drive trays. Then there was one more disk hard-mounted for operating system boot-up. It worked for a while, but when I was going to have to replace the 1000-Watt power supply for the second time, I thought maybe there’s a better way. One thing I hadn’t considered before is: the more disk drives you have, the higher chance of having a drive fail – an increased chance of the click of death was always in the back of my mind. Using one big disk with a Raspberry Pi is much simpler, smaller, and uses much less power.

With all disks on-site, there is still the chance of everything getting destroyed by fire. To handle off-site backup I had used CrashPlan, but that didn’t pan out – time to look for something different. Since we have quite the collection of different computers here – Linux, MacOS & Windows, I looked for a consistent backup solution that is operating system agnostic. I wound up going with Duplicati using Backblaze’s B2 for off-site storage.

All of our computers use Duplicati independently to backup to B2. The Raspberry Pi does as well to backup our photos and music.

The Setup

I’m still working out (and documenting) the details of our setup, but I’ll list the specifics of our setup here as I get to them:

Installing IncrediblePBX & file sharing with Samba & SSFS

If you have any tips or strategies you could offer, please let me know in the comments!

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What’s in my WGI (Drum Corps/Marching Band) instructor’s bag?

While I proclaimed myself to be the 40 year-old WGI virgin, I’m really not new to the whole scene. I’ve been a member of several marching organizations, both winter and summer, since 1991. I’ve also had the privilege of working on the instructional staff of a few groups. One thing a new instructor can do correctly out-of-the-gate is being prepared. Here is what is in my bag that I bring to every rehearsal. There are some extras that you can include for summer drum corps & marching band as well.

Continue reading “What’s in my WGI (Drum Corps/Marching Band) instructor’s bag?”

Gock block

The Latin Percussion Jam Block Medium (Red) is the gold standard of all things pageantry.

Drum stick

You’re going to need something to hit said gock block. I picked up a pair of marching snare sticks at a drum corps show. They’re much beefier than a normal snare stick and you can tape them with electrical tape for even more durability.

Hearing protection

Some people say they can’t hear all the detail with earplugs in. It’s probably time for an upgrade. I have a set of Earasers and they’re amazing. Yes, they’re $50 and they’re worth it. Also, if you loose one, you can buy the missing side for $25. Personally I can hear more detail with them in as it filters out a lot of the background noise and echo.

If $50 is too steep, at least get a free pair of the foam plugs offered at literally every music venue. It will save your eardrums from all that gock-blocking you’ll be doing.

3-ring binder with drill and music score

I’ve tried electronic drill books on e-readers and tablets, but a printed score and drill sheets never run out of battery. Also, they’re visible in bright light and you can easily annotate them with changes. Sometimes old school is the way to go. Even if it’s not your preferred choice, it’s a great back-up. I put my pages in sheet protectors and always print double-sided to keep the weight (and waste) to a minimum.

Pencil

For making annotations, duh. Also good to have if your members forget one – and they will.

Competition Badge

Being on staff, you probably have a badge to get into shows. They don’t give out replacements, so always put it back into your bag so you have it on contest days.

Valve Oil

This is more of a courtesy to brass players. Yes it’s their responsibility to oil their own valves. But inevitably someone will need something in the warm-up arc before a contest, when their case is a million miles away. I bring this to warm-up at the contest as extra insurance.

9v Battery

This is for Dr. Beat. Love him or hate him, the doctor is in the house, and he’s here to stay. If you are a percussionist, you probably already have a Dr. Beat – if not, get one. If you’re everyone else that relies on someone bringing a Dr. Beat, do them a solid and bring an extra 9v battery for it. That thing can go through a 9v like nobody’s business.

Pro-tip: instead of clicking “stop” on your Dr. Beat at the end of your rep, get in the habit of pressing the power button for extra battery savings.

Smartphone Apps

Here are my favorite apps:

Peterson iStrobosoft – Best, easiest to read, stand-alone tuner app. Period. Yes, it’s expensive at $10. Best $10 tuner you’ll ever buy.

TonalEnergy Tuner – Wicked awesome app. Fantastic tone generator for getting your drone on. Great for members as well – put it on a tablet and start practicing and it will tell you what is out of tune.

Metronome – lots of choices here. I’m currently using Frozen Ape’s Tempo.

Competition Suite – A service for judges tapes. Make sure you’re set up with the right permissions before you go to your first competition.

Voice Recording – whatever voice recorder app is included is fine. Useful for making rudimentary recordings or even doing a mock judges tape.

Spotify – Or something else to play music if you want to do a visual warm-up to music (or just jam out in general).

GroupMe / Facebook Messenger – Something to keep in touch with the other staff.

Notes – An app to make notes for things you’d like to fix (and how) and ideas for next rehearsal. I like Simplenote.

Drillbook Next – I prefer printed charts, but that’s me. If you’re going all-in with paperless make sure everyone is on board.

Headphones & Adapter

Bring your headphones if you want to listen to judges tapes before critique. If you’ve got an iPhone, don’t forget the 3.5mm dongle adapter in case you want to plug it into a sound system and blast to some tunes.

Bluetooth Speaker

Useful for listening to judges tapes aloud with staff or for sharing them with the members.

DCT

I’m old school. I love DCT for keeping lips working. I keep it in my winter bag because it can be very dry, even indoors. A must for summer – bonus that it has sun protection built-in.

Summer Stuff

These are things I add to my bag when summer rolls around. Most of this is for weather – in particular the sun.

Hat

Must have – keep that sun off of your face.

Sunscreen

There are some dummies out there that are still looking to work on their tan. Skin cancer is real. If you’re planning on marching or teaching for multiple summer seasons and you want to have a normal lifespan, put some damn sunscreen on, and do it on the regular. I consider SPF-50 to be the minimum, 30 if there’s absolutely nothing else available. If I can, I go for SPF 70-100 broad spectrum.

Sunglasses

While you’re at it, protect those baby blues.

Sun sleeves

These are the best inventions ever. Put on a t-shirt, then put on your sun sleeves. Columbia has these wicked Freezer Zero sleeves that have a cooling sensation when they get wet (from sweat). Fantastic, 💯, A+, would wear again.

Rain Poncho

This doesn’t have to be fancy, just something that will keep you dry. Ideally it can roll up and be stashed in your bag without taking too much space.

Extra socks

For when it’s rainy. Never underestimate how miserable you’ll feel with wet feet. Fresh, dry socks are the answer to a rainy day’s misery.

Anything else?

Did I forget something? A small first aid kit comes to mind, but I bet there’s more. Let me know in the comments what you consider essential.

← Summary Only

Mississippi St. Road Diet Plan

It’s been a while since I’ve written about any urban design stuff. Part of it is because I’ve realized that real change is never sweeping, it is incremental, which can be incredibly frustrating. But I’ve learned to to have patience, as long as things look like they’re heading in the right direction. Also, as part of Fridley’s Environmental Quality and Energy Commission (EQEC), I’ve seen several of the cities’ initiatives first hand, and and I feel like they are generally heading in the right direction.

It’s Happening!

I wrote about the idea of a road diet on Mississippi St. over 6 years ago. I told myself that if it ever happened, I had done my job. And as it stands, here we are:

Continue reading “Mississippi St. Road Diet Plan”

Fatal Crash(?)

Yet Another Class

Racing on the Cheap

Heads-Up Mixed-Class Racing

Talk to your track

Getting into the RTP-300 admin panel

Connecting the RTP-300 to IncrediblePBX

RTP-300 Admin Navigation

RTP-300 Extension Configuration for IncrediblePBX

Test!

IncrediblePBX Image

Initial Setup

Caveats

X Windows

X Windows “Black Screen” Issue

Samba for Read-Only Access

SSHFS for Read-Write Access

Linux (Ubuntu)

MacOS

Windows 10

Test

Organization

Backups

The Setup

Gock block

Drum stick

Hearing protection

3-ring binder with drill and music score

Pencil

Competition Badge

Valve Oil

9v Battery

Smartphone Apps

Headphones & Adapter

Bluetooth Speaker

DCT

Summer Stuff

Hat

Sunscreen

Sunglasses

Sun sleeves

Rain Poncho

Extra socks

Anything else?

It’s Happening!

Feature Request: Acknowledgement