Notes: Time, USPS
Time
For some reason my computer’s clock got set a good 12 minutes ahead. I’m not exactly sure why, but it appears to have happened around a restart, perhaps due to a hardware clock that’s off, and the NTP daemon didn’t correct it. To manually reset the time based on a time server in Ubuntu, run
sudo /etc/init.d/ntp stop sudo ntpdate ntp.ubuntu.com sudo /etc/init.d/ntp start
If you don’t stop the NTP daemon first, you’ll get “ntpdate[pid]: the NTP socket is in use, exiting”. Notably, don’t do this in a cron job, as ntpd should be enough. (It’s not clear why ntpd didn’t resolve the issue in the first place, but I’m blaming that on some configuration bug.)
BOINC and Time
BOINC seems to have had a bit of a problem with the time shift. (It was normally set at 80% usage, and jumped to 100% with absurd remaining times.) That turns out to be pretty easy to fix:
sudo /etc/init.d/boinc-client restart
And it should be good to go. It may still have some strange estimates for time (it would likely be safer to stop boinc-client before updating the time and then start it afterward, if I realized that would be an issue), but that’ll be fixed after the current workunits complete.
USPS Tracking
If you have a label number for a USPS package you want to track, you can bookmark this URL (obviously, put your number at the end) or keep it open in a tab. It’s not the result of a form submission, so refreshing won’t prompt for a resubmit, and loading the page again won’t ask for the tracking number.
http://trkcnfrm1.smi.usps.com/PTSInternetWeb/InterLabelInquiry.do?origTrackNum=[Your tracking number]
