BigSmoke

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Increasing the number of reps on my pull-ups

Update June 16, 2023, regarding my misuse of the N-word. I’ve come to regret my use of the N-word in the below. I was, ten years ago, quite ignorant of how it could and could not be used. As a Dutch customer weaned on an intellectual diet of popular American music (rap music in particular), I was under the impression that saying “nigger” in the context were I used it was a legitimate way to express admiration for the prowess of certain black men. I was wrong, and could have known that I was wrong if I had spent more time educating myself rather than just being brainwashed by American mass media.

I’m growing increasingly frustrated with my inability to increase the number of pull-ups I can do in one set. And, after so many years, I’m still not even close to doing a single one-hand pull-up or one of those muscle-ups all the niggers on YouTube seem to be doing these days. That’s why I’m going to let one of those black dudes guide me and my puny, little white frame:

That’s Ed from Barstarzz demonstrating a program developed by Major Charles Lewis Armstrong.

The program

I’m going to try the Armstrong workout program [PDF mirror from www.lamarineofficerprograms.com] for this month.

Every day morning routine

During my morning routine, I’ll perform 3 sets of push-ups until exhaustion. The program doesn’t mention this, but I’m going to use a different push-up technique every day.

Progress on the program

I started yesterday with Day 2 of the program so that I can follow it from Monday to Friday. Here I’ll track my progress during the weeks to come.

Pull-up progress
Day 1 Day 2 Day 3 Day 4 Day 5
Description: 5 sets of max. reps Piramid sets (1 rep, 10 secs rest, 2 reps, 20 secs rest, etc. until failure; rest 60 sec and repeat last no. of reps same no. reps for 3*3 sets (3 different techniques; 60 sec. intervals) Same as day 3 + 1 rep/set Repeat hardest routine of the week
Week 1: Didn’t start yet 7 reps max 7 reps 8 reps 8 reps
Week 2: Pieterpad 7 reps max 8 reps (too optimistic) Left for Zeeland on Thu-night
Week 3: 12+8+6+7+8 7 reps max asleep 9*8 reps some reps
Week 4: drinking and partying too tired 9*8 reps
Week 5: Kampkater depressed depressed 9*10 reps 2*7+3*5 reps explosive pull-ups (chest to bar)
Week 6: 15+14+12+10+15 reps 10 reps max 9*11 reps
Week 7: 20+20+15+12+12 reps 9*11 reps 3*12 reps
Week 8: 12+19+10+10+9 reps 12 reps max
Push-up progress
Day 1 Day 2 Day 3 Day 4 Day 5
Description: Diamond push-ups Small push-ups Wide push-ups One-armed push-ups Hindu push-ups
Week 1: I only started with the routine on Day 2 50+20+20+10 reps 3*15 reps 50+60+20 reps
Week 2: 50+50+30 reps ?+?+? reps ?+?+? reps 3*10 reps Zeeland
Week 3: 80+40+40 reps 3*50 reps 50+50+30 reps 3*15 reps 3*50 reps
Week 4: 50+70+70 reps 3*70 reps 120(140?)+100+70 reps 20 reps
Week 5: 30+20+20 reps 3*70 reps
Week 6: 80+80 reps 100+70+50 reps 3*30 reps
Week 7: 100+70+100 reps 3*80 reps 10+20+30 reps ? reps
Week 8: 100 reps 110+100 reps 15+20 reps 100 reps
Week 9: 120+100 reps 3*50 reps 30+50+50 reps [pansy-ass sore knuckles] 100+ reps

Converting a Subversion repository to Git

I just used the instructions in this article by John Albin to archive an old svn project on my private machine.

A shell summary (see the John’s article for details):

svn log -q | awk -F '|' '/^r/ {sub("^ ", "", $2); sub(" $", "", $2); print $2" = "$2" <"$2">"}' | sort -u > authors-transform.txt
 
vim authors-transform.txt
# Make changes
 
git svn clone [SVN repo URL] --no-metadata -A authors-transform.txt --stdlayout ~/temp
 ~/temp
git svn show-ignore > .gitignore
git add .gitignore
git commit -m 'Convert svn:ignore properties to .gitignore.'
 
git init --bare ~/new-bare.git ~/new-bare.git
git symbolic-ref HEAD refs/heads/trunk
 ~/temp
git remote add bare ~/new-bare.git
git config remote.bare.push 'refs/remotes/*:refs/heads/*'
git push bare
 ~
rm -rf ~/temp
 ~/new-bare.git
git branch -m trunk master
 ~/new-bare.git
git for-each-ref --format='%(refname)' refs/heads/tags |
cut -d / -f 4 | ref
  git tag "$ref" "refs/heads/tags/$ref";
  git branch -D "tags/$ref";

John has also put all this into a number of scripts published on GitHub.

Design: The Scourge of the Web

When the printing press was invented, we had the understanding that text is best read when contrast is high. They didn’t use black ink on paper for nothing. I bet they didn’t even consider any other color.

Then came the mass legions of web designers, and these self-anointed experts of visual attractiveness keep no HTML element from their rightful aesthetic salvation, regardless of pragmatic considerations. In other words, do these designers even read? Or is everything just a shape with a color?

I was again confronted with this when reading the Mozilla site. It uses a white background, with text in the color “rgb(109, 117, 129)”. In other words, not even gray, but lighter than gray.

So, when you’re reading a privacy policy, which would you choose? This:

or this:

Time to install Blacken: “It seems to be fashionable these days to use faded text on many web sites. Some sites are so faded that they are unreadable. This extension will change the colour of grey text back to black so that it is easier to read.”

Creative Audigy 2 ZS design flaws

I would really like to know what the designers at Creative Labs have in mind when they design sound cards. Their cards seem to be broken by design. The Live card was bad enough with its random collection of DACs and DPS’s, but the Audigy 2 ZS seems no better. Aside from the fact that it’s advertised as 96 kHz and 24 bit, which it isn’t, it has serious design issues. I had some sound anomalies, so I decided to measure and test. I found:

  • The output for LFE and center actually should output LFE and center on separate channels, but it outputs them mono, in the center channel… This makes it impossible to connect to an external amplifier and have it apply the proper 10 dB boost on the LFE signal.
  • The LFE and Center channel distort at maximum gain (or minimum attenuation: 0 dB), which is easily heard by sine testing. I had to reduce all channels by 3.2 dB to avoid distortion.
  • The center and LFE channels are 6 dB quiter than the other channels when they’re all the same in the mixer. With a test tone, all channels measured 0.78V, while LFE or center measured 0.39V. That is, LFE measured 0, center measured 0.39V with both center and LFE signal.
  • The LFE/center output has a significantly louder noise floor than the other channels.

Really, what monkey designs this?

Postfix, SASL and rimap: making sure the domain is not stripped from the user name

When you want to use your IMAP account as authentication for Postfix, you can set the SASL mechanism to “rimap”. However, by default, it will not supply the realm (domain) and therefore will authenticate with an incomplete username (john instead of john@bla.com).

To fix that, you need to add “-r” to the options in /etc/default/saslauthd (in Debian based distro’s):

OPTIONS="-r -c -m /var/run/saslauthd"

HP Officejet 6600 in Ubuntu (derivates)

A reminder which printer type I have to select when I reinstall my mom’s Officejet in Linux: HP Officejet 6600 E-all-in-one Printer – h711a.

At the time of installation, last week, the printer wasn’t supported by the version of hplip that’s shipped with Mint Linux 13 (Maya), so I had to download a newer version. This probably won’t be an issue with the next reinstall, which hopefully won’t be soon; gladly, release 13 is an LTS.

Disabling http(s) trimming from Firefox address bar

Some time ago, the Firefox developers decided it was a good idea to trim the http(s):// from the address in the address bar. Since then, I’ve been getting HTTPS site where I don’t want it, because I can’t see what I’m doing. Especially so because HTTPS has no concept of virtual host names, and putting https:// in front of any domain might put you on a completely different web site. So, when I accidentally typed https:// in front of an URL once, it will remember that, but not show me…

Luckily it can be disabled, by setting browser.urlbar.trimURLs to false in about:config.

This annoying feature is right up there with the removal of the RSS icon from the address bar.

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