
Starfish requires third party cookies
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…
Running a task at a specified time on a Mac
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…

Raspberry Pi WiFi Access Point
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…

This Building Sucks (Literally)!
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…

Cosmic Watch: Initial Cost Estimate
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…

Summer Solstice in Wooster Hall
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…

Raspberry Pi Access Point Routing
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…

DHCP daemon on Raspberry Pi
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…

The Compartment Box Trick
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…

Configuring hostapd on Raspberry Pi
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 …
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