How to ignore Port on the Grand Forks Herald website

(Updated 2022-11-10) If you really don’t care what Rob Port has to say, here’s a Greasemonkey script to hide his articles from appearing on the Grand Forks Herald website:

// ==UserScript==
// @name _Remove Port
// @include https://www.grandforksherald.com/*
// @require http://ajax.googleapis.com/ajax/libs/jquery/2.1.0/jquery.min.js
// @grant GM_addStyle
// ==/UserScript==
//- The @grant directive is needed to restore the proper sandbox.

/*--- Use the jQuery contains selector to find content to remove.
Beware that not all whitespace is as it appears.
*/

$(".PromoA:contains('Plain Talk:')").remove();
$(".PromoB:contains('Plain Talk:')").remove();
$(".PromoC:contains('Plain Talk:')").remove();
$(".PromoF:contains('Plain Talk:')").remove();
$(".PromoLatestNews:contains('Plain Talk:')").remove();
$(".PromoA:contains('Port:')").remove();
$(".PromoB:contains('Port:')").remove();
$(".PromoC:contains('Port:')").remove();
$(".PromoF:contains('Port:')").remove();
$(".PromoLatestNews:contains('Port:')").remove();
$(".PromoA:contains('Mailbag:')").remove();
$(".PromoB:contains('Mailbag:')").remove();
$(".PromoC:contains('Mailbag:')").remove();
$(".PromoF:contains('Mailbag:')").remove();
$(".PromoLatestNews:contains('Mailbag:')").remove();

//-- Or use badDivs.hide(); to just hide the content.

Taken almost entirely from https://stackoverflow.com/a/9169236/2152245.

Redis server weirdness and workaround

Don’t have a better title yet. Sometimes bug email lists are the best way to find answers!

After installing Nextcloud using yunohost (which is awesome so far), the Redis server crashed and couldn’t be restarted. Turns out a couple cifs (Samba) drives I was mounting in fstab were preventing Redis from starting.

I unmounted the drives, started Redis through yunohost, and then remounted the drives. If I have to reboot, will probably have to go through this again, so not an ideal solution.

Error message:

Jul 19 22:14:46 systemd[1]: Failed to start Advanced key-value store.

Solution figured out from: https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=834551#27.

Blogging to do?

It’s been a while since I’ve written anything long-form that isn’t related to work. Although “technical and boring” seems to be my wheelhouse, it’s not my entire goal in life.

Nothing long-form is coming today, however. Instead I present a list of things I have written down (in Joplin or Trello) under “to blog about someday.” Enjoy!

This post in some cases counts as “the ghost of done,” so…rad?

  • blog about prediction interval
  • report on eHam how Wilderman went and put on blog
    • I guess the simple answer to that is: https://www.eham.net/community/smf/index.php/topic,120178.msg1147755.html#msg1147755
  • do wasteful people subsidize the rest of us?
  • blog formula for number of downspouts
  • Babboe City review blog series
  • sum both time and distance approaching recent races
  • pro-cycling arguments
  • chronomen
    • This one is pretty neat, you can see some chronomen charts in my dissertation, however I guess I need to change the name so it doesn’t clash with a watch brand and whatever else might be using it.
  • residential roundabouts
  • KML file of Wallace’s line or biogeographic regions
    • Surely this must exist by now. It’s probably SaaS somewhere.
  • “DEM thing I did for NCRDS”
    • Not sure which thing this is…
  • expressing your software/method/procedure in layman’s terms
    • Less jargon is good. I’m looking at you, modeling or “computational geoscience” software.
  • physical activity as a way to see new things
    • I literally seem to have meant “see new physical things because you are physically somewhere you usually aren’t.”

Location Tracking: Off

Hi folks,

Reading through this piece in the New York Times was pretty scary: Twelve Million Phones, One Dataset, Zero Privacy.

This website has long had a feature that would center the map on your location so you could more easily find events close to you. I’ve never sold your location data (nor ever been asked for this or any other data–being small has its perks), but to help us all feel slightly better, I’ve turned this feature off. You’ll have to pan and zoom to see what’s happening in your neck of the woods.

In other news, I’m not as active as I once was about keeping the event list up to date, and for that I apologize. One reason is that I’m not as active in racing as I once was (young kids seem to have that effect), but I will keep working on it.

Thanks for the support,

Matt