Peter Beens
Welcome to my new website — beens.ca!
I have an existing site at www.beens.org (and an older site at www2.beens.org) that are dedicated to my school work but I wanted to start something new, with a way of emphasizing different content.
With that in mind, and with wanting to try out a new web hosting service, beens.ca is born! Continue reading “Welcome!”
From https://youtu.be/3_5MnvCUvDU:
“The Art of Listening is a documentary film about the journey music takes to reach a listener’s ear, from the intent of an instrument maker and composer, to the producers and engineers who capture and preserve an artist’s voice. This journey is narrated by intimate conversations with artists, engineers and producers about the philosophy of their work and the intent behind each musical note they create.
This film is an invitation for music fans to rediscover the intricacies and details available in the sounds of their favorite recordings. The Art of Listening is the beginning of a conversation of how the quality of our listening experiences define the medium.”
Read more here.
“LED lamps are great for the environment, but bad for our health”
Harsh words. I can’t dispute whether flickering lights are truly bad for our health, but it should be fairly easy to quantify the varying qualities of LED lamps by the amount they flicker1.
This would make for an interesting project at school. In my Computer Tech class, for instance, we could build a simple circuit with a light sensor and then display it on an oscilloscope (yes, I still use one!) or sample it into a computer at a high enough rate to measure the flicker rate.
Anyone else up to the challenge?
1 I keep wanting to type “flickr”. It’s the photographer in me trying to get out…
After applying an update to my UnRAID server a message popped up telling me that I didn’t have system notifications turned on.
I popped into Settings > Notifications Settings only to have discovered that I didn’t have any notifications turned on. Well, that’s not good.
In the SMTP Settings sections Gmail was already listed, so this should be easy. Nope, it never passed the test. A quick search helped me find this forum where it showed me the proper SMTP settings for Gmail:
It still wasn’t passing the test however, likely because I have 2-factor authentication turned on. A little more digging on the forum, and that is where I learned about Google app passwords:
An App password is a 16-digit passcode that gives an app or device permission to access your Google Account. If you use 2-Step-Verification and are seeing a “password incorrect” error when trying to access your Google Account, an App password may solve the problem. Most of the time, you’ll only have to enter an App password once per app or device, so don’t worry about memorizing it.
I had never heard of this before, but it was the solution I was looking for. The service generated a simple 16 digit password that allowed me to send notification emails using my Gmail account.
This process only has to be done one time, and the password is never used anywhere else (I assume it’s locked to the sending device) so I don’t have to remember it.
The SMTP test passed. Problem solved.
Every so often I hear my CPU fan spinning up wildly. A quick check of the Windows Task Manager reveals the culprit to be the Windows Photo App, an app I never use so I decide to delete it.
A quick Google search and I find the basic instructions to do so, summarized here:
Get-AppxPackage *photo* | Remove-AppxPackage
My CPU can now rest peacefully.
Featured image courtesy Wikimedia Commons.