Ove's nerd testing ground

Despite having no formal training in the areas of geography or astronomy, I seem to find great interest in time zones and what an equinox looks like in different parts of the world. See my previous posts: EET time zone anomalies and The sun, the Earth, and their relation.

Today's post was sparked by reading a Wikipedia (surprise) article about the International Date Line. It was one of the main news items because Samoa and American Samoa switched over to the other side of it. And by doing so they skipped a full day - December 30 2011 altogether. I wonder if their calendars for 2011 didn't even have December 30 in them. I would want one for sure if that was the case. But this was the second time they did it. In 1892, they did the same thing, but instead of switching to the west side of the International Date Line, they moved to the east side. By doing so, they had July 4 twice that year. So they were initially on the same side as they now are again. The reasons for switching sides are purely economical; in 1892 the Americans convinced the Samoans to switch to the eastern side due to trade with them. Now in 2011, they had the same reason, but this time they were trading mostly with Australians and New Zealanders. Here's a quote from the Wikipedia article:

The change was made because Australia and New Zealand have increasingly become Samoa's biggest trading partners and home to large communities of expatriates. Being 21 hours behind made business difficult because having weekends on different days meant only four days of the week were shared workdays.

This was just one of the interesting things that I found out about the IDL. Continue reading "More interesting facts about time zones and UTC"

Symptom: The Intel 8254x-based gigabit network adapter is not visible in ifconfig, which is frustrating. Usually the hardware is well supported in Linux but sometimes you encounter unsupported/problematic hardware. BTW, the driver for this network controller isn't part of Windows 7 either.

Solution: This procedure was done with Slax Linux (running off of a USB drive), but will most likely be very similar for other distributions. The right thing to do is to download the e1000e driver from Intel's website. You will probably need another computer for downloading that since the network interface isn't working yet. Put it on a USB stick and copy it to the computer you want the network interface working. cd to that directory. There, follow these steps:


tar xf e100*
cd e100*
cd src
rmmod e1000e
make install
modprobe e1000e
ifconfig -a

Now you should see eth0. You might have to run alias eth0 e1000e to see it as eth0, I did not have to do that.

This was obviously not invented by me, but rather reading forums and combining information. I thought I'd make a post about it since it's a pretty major problem. The main source for this post came form this Slax forum thread.

If you are a Windows user, there's nothing for you here.

I had a problem with formatting a hard drive properly within the KDE environment I am using. These new modern graphical environments do so much for you that I think that was the problem. I mean they automount external media and also recognize unmounted hard drive partitions, which I think was the reason behind the mess. Even closing X altogether and doing it all from the good old command-line didn't work. So I decided to go ahead and run a live-cd and do it from there. Surely that would work, if anything. But I didn't have any live distros nor blank cds, so I thought it's high time for me to learn how to boot off of a USB drive. Before you embark on this, make sure your BIOS has support for USB booting, I don't know where the approximate starting point for such motherboards is, but not all BIOSes support it, most newer ones do. Continue reading "Booting Puppy from a USB drive"

Today when I was going to make some pasta, I came to the same problem I have suffered from so many times: measuring it. I bought a weigh scale in Finland primarily to address this problem, because with weighing you can determine pretty reliably any kind of pasta amounts. Anyway, since I don't have one here in the U.S., I had to go online to see if there were any diameters for spaghetti. You know those nifty little gauges with different sized holes in them that you use to measure portions. I found one page that had them written down. So I ended up with pretty much the right amount for two persons. But what this post is about, is that I decided to make a printable gauge for all of you pasta-cookers who don't have one of those measuring gauges yet. I don't know if it will be useful or not, at least it's out here for anyone who needs one. Click on the picture and you'll get to the pdf-file. Yet another gaping hole on the internet is addressed

It's made with Inkscape, which I'm not an expert at, but with which I was easily able to make this simple piece. The pdf is made for US Letter, but should print well on A4 as well; the margins are quite large.

This is my second post regarding Finnish food within a short period of time. Leah went to help out somebody at a farmers' market yesterday and we decided to buy some produce. Among them was a little basket of beets (we did not actually get the basket). I recalled not having satisfactory results with beets and thought I'd be able to address the problem by canning them myself. This post is just about that.

So the process is quite easy. You need beets, vinegar, sugar and salt, and preferably some spices. I got a pickling spice mix that is likely intended for pickles as the name suggests, but I reckoned it would do the job. Here's my unscientific recipe:

Yields three one-pint jars

• 14 beets (as counted from the picture)
• start with a tablespoon of salt, and add later if needed
• 3 dl sugar (~1¼ cups)
• one tablespoon of pickling spice
• plain vinegar, rougly one half of the amount of water

To get started, wash the beets but don't peel them yet. Put them in a large pan and cover with water. Bring to a boil and keep simmering for 45 minutes.
Continue reading "Canning beets, the Finnish way"