Our campus has recently started using a tool called Starfish Early Alert to track students who are having difficulties, especially those in danger of failing. It can also be used to give kudos, and for other things, like scheduling office hours or meetings outside of office hours, or recording attendance. Having previously taught at West […]
Unix computers have a simple command-line feature called “at” which lets you schedule a command, or a series of commands, to be run at a specific time. For example, if you want to download a large file in the middle of the night, when there is less congestion on the network, you can easily […]
I have an old iPad which has been dropped so many times that a piece of wire fell out the side, and I think that wire was the WiFi antenna. The iPad can only connect to WiFi when it’s close to the access point or when the signal is very strong. I figured out that […]
Today the doors to the new Science Hall at SUNY New Paltz are really hard to open. There is a howling sound as wind screams its way through the cracks between the doors, which goes away temporarily as you open the door (if you can!) and returns immediately when the doors close. The problem is […]
CosmicWatch is a small, inexpensive, home-built (or lab-built) cosmic ray detector designed by the Laboratory for Nuclear Science at MIT. I’ve set out to build one, and this is Episode 2 of the adventure. The claim is that “single detector costs approximately 100 USD”,1 though I learned later that this estimate does not include […]
Wooster Hall at SUNY New Paltz has a neat feature. The main staircase is exactly aligned along a north-south line, and skylight windows in the ceiling were placed so that light from those windows lines up at the bottom of the staircase at solar noon on the equinoxes. In the summer the sun is […]
This is the last step required to turn a Raspberry Pi into a WiFi Access Point. If you want to see all the previous steps, start with “Raspberry Pi Wifi Access Point“. When you get to this page you should already have done the following: Configured both network interfaces, Set up hostapd (a daemon which lets […]
DHCP stands for “Dynamic Host Configuration Protocol”. The DHCP daemon is the process which assigns IP addresses to computers when they join a network, and gives them other important information about the network, including DNS server addresses. A local network used for a wireless Access Point usually has a DHCP server associated with it. […]
Have you ever taken something apart and then put it back together and had parts left over? Me too. Sometimes it’s something I know isn’t needed, but it’s still better to get everything back in the right place. A few years ago I discovered a little trick that helps me do that. What I do […]
The daemon hostapd is a Linux service which enables a “host” computer to become a WiFi Access Point (AP). Thus “host” + “AP” + “d” (for daemon) gives the name hostapd. I originally learned to set up hostapd from instructions on Pastebin written by user Dryfire117,1 andlater found useful instructions on the Raspberry Pi […]