Will Angley

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Will Angley

New summer, new photos!

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From Chelsea and Flatiron in Manhattan. Taken on Kodak T-Max 100 film.

This isn’t quite the order I took these in as I was walking; I’ve reordered the photos a bit to make the spacing work out on the Web. It’s easier to hold a camera on its side than a laptop.

Looking at these, it turns out it’s hard to take black-and-white photos of rainbow flags.

The sun’s started going down, so I’ve been taking longer and longer exposures. Now that we’re in Flatiron you’ll see the photos blur a bit from my hands shaking within the exposure.

At this point, the sun had set far enough that I wasn’t able to take photos any more. So I stopped and went out again the next day.

Fin.

Word of the day: kapnobatai

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Today’s word of the day is ancient Greek: kapnobatai, literally “smoke-treaders” or “those who walk on clouds.”

It comes to us as the nickname for an ancient people in Strabo’s Geography. The work Strabo cites is now lost, and scholars have advanced several theories to explain what the nickname referred to. One theory is that the people would enter trances walking in clouds of smoke.

It’s this theory that makes kapnobatai my word of the day, since it’s a word we need again, for modern engineers entranced by clouds of computers.

Ask Will: what WiFi router do you use?

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I use a Netgear R7800, running a release build of LEDE Reboot 17.01.2, and am happy with it.

It’s a powerful WiFi router, lets you load your own Linux on it, and will turn on WiFi once you do. And it has a recovery mode which lets you unload your own Linux if you mess up and put something on it that breaks it.

This was hard to figure out: I read a whole lot of forum threads that talked about discontinued routers, or routers that worked once but were now locked down, or routers that only worked in Europe, and then one forum thread that was enough to make a decision.

It took a couple hours in total, and that was with having some idea what to look for since I’d worked on WiFi for a few years. If I hadn’t, I’m not sure I would have gotten to an answer at all. (Anecdotally: I tried and failed to find an OpenWRT router once before, four years ago, and bought an Airport Express instead. I think I’ve changed more than the way the Table of Hardware works but it’s hard to be sure.)

Setting up the router with LEDE was straightforward once I got past this, and it’s been running smoothly for the past week.