Somewhere a while back I read that the difference between NAD 27 and NAD 83 was on the order of a few feet at most and thus I had ignored it. Turns out I was very misinformed. NOAA has a site where you can calculate the difference between NAD 27 and NAD 83 which I tried today and my coordinate varied by more than 50 meters. That's pretty significant. So, lesson learned.

Catalyst and Rsync don't seem to get along well. That is to say, the built-in development server doesn't notice when rsync changes source files. The upshot is Catalyst won't automatically reload the application on change, and that's just plain annoying.

The solution is to use the --inplace option to rsync. This alters how rsync propagates changes and plays nice with Catalyst.

There are two Windows applications that I use regularly via Wine. One is Winbox from Mikrotik and works great. The other is a phone/chat application which is buggier than a hive of bees. Anyhow, they seem to conflict with each other, which is a problem. Luckily Wine provides a solution: WINEPREFIX.

I'm a member of the local search and rescue patrol, and as such I use portable radios when out on missions. I wanted to get an earpiece so I could listen to radio traffic. Of course, I could have bought one but they're like $40 each and why buy when you can make a reasonable replica for a fraction of the price?

IPv6 has a neat feature called Duplicate Address Detection (DAD). When you add an IPv6 address to an interface, it checks to be sure that nobody else is already using that address. That's a Good Thing®. But if you're using IPv6 addresses for anycast and two (or more) devices are on the same subnet it can cause problems. The solution is to not put your anycasted addresses on the shared interface (e.g. eth0); rather, put them on the loopback interface.