Functional Threshold Power

Posted on by Daniel Kirstenpfad

I am cycling for fun and for the effect it has on my body and well-being. I do about 30km of cycling every day on average.

After my first stationary trainer broke I bought a new one with the capability to measure wattage and also to apply resistance measured by the watt.

After looking at my average speeds, heart-rates and times on the device I was able to build a quite detailed understanding of the broader picture. What effects my power output and what does not. The effects of nutrition and health to what the body will deliver while being asked the exact same power output curve than the last time.

In a nutshell the numbers tell me that I am usually at a mediocre wattage of 150W constant load doing about 40 km/h average. My reserves usually allow me to go for 1-2 hours without a break doing this.

So far so good. Now I’ve found out from more serious cyclers that there’s something like “Functional Threshold Power“. I do regular have tests at the doctors to check for any heart-rate issues.

Reading about this Functional Threshold Power my curiousity is sparked.

How much could I do? Should I even go for measuring it?

a throw-away remote VNC linux desktop in a docker container

Posted on by Daniel Kirstenpfad

I am running most of my in-house infrastructure based on Docker these days…

Docker is a set of platform-as-a-service (PaaS) products that use operating-system-level virtualization to deliver software in packages called containers. Containers are isolated from one another and bundle their own software, libraries and configuration files; they can communicate with each other through well-defined channels.

All containers are run by a single operating-system kernel and are thus more lightweight than virtual machines.

Wikipedia: Docker

And given the above definition it’s fairly easy to create and run containers of things like command-line tools and background servers/services. But due to the nature of Docker being “terminal only” by default it’s quite hard to do anything UI related.

But there is a way. By using the VNC protocol to get access to the graphical user interface we can set-up a container running a fully-fledge Linux Desktop and we can connect directly to this container.

I am using something I call “throw-away linux desktop containers” all day every day for various needs and uses. Everytime I start such a container this container is brand-new and ready to be used.

Actually when I start it the process looks like this:

As you can see when the container starts-up it asks for a password to be set. This is the password needed to be entered when the VNC client connects to the container.

And when you are connected, this is what you get:

this is what you see after connecting to the desktop container by VNC

I am sharing my scripts and Dockerfile with you so you can use it yourself. If you put a bit more time into it you can even customize it to your specific needs. At this point it’s based on Ubuntu 18.04 and starts-up a ubuntu-mate desktop environment in it’s default configuration.

When you log into the container it will log you in as root – but effectively you won’t be able to really screw around with the host machine as the container is still isolating you from the host. Nevertheless be aware that the container has some quirks and is run in extended privileges mode.

Chromium will be pre-installed as a browser but you will find that it won’t start up. That’s because Chromium won’t start up if you attempt a start as root user.

The workaround:

“–no-sandbox” parameter for Chromium

Now get the scripts and container here and build it yourself!

housekeeping with NodeJS

Posted on by Daniel Kirstenpfad

When you are using or developing NodeJS applications and the Node Package manager (npm) over time a lot of old crusty libraries will accrue.

A lot means, a lot:

To have a chance to get on top of things and save space, try this:

npm i -g npkill

By then using npkill you will get an overview (after a looong scan) of how much disk space there is to be saved.

Great tip!

Password Managers…

Posted on by Daniel Kirstenpfad

I am using 1Password for years now. It’s a great tool. So far.

As I am using it locally synced across my own infrastructure I feel like I am getting slowly but surely pushed out of their target-customer group. What does that mean?

The current pricing scheme, if you buy new, for 1Password looks like this:

So it’s always going to be a subscription if you want to start with it and if you want it in a straight line.

It used to be a one-time purchase per platform and you could set-up syncing across other cloud services as you saw fit. If you really start from scratch the 1Password apps still give you the option to create and sync locally but the direction is set and clear: they want you to sign up to a subscription.

I am not going to purchase a subscription. With some searching I found a software which is extremely similar to 1Password and fully featured. And is available as 1-time purchase per platform for all platforms I am using.

Also. This one is the first that could import my 1Password export files straight away without any issues. Even One-Time-Passwords (OTP) worked immediately.

The name is Enpass and it’s available for Mac, Windows, Linux, iOS, Android and basically acts as a step in replacement for 1Password. It directly imports what 1Password is exporting. And its pricing is:

much more reasonable and without subscriptions.

Subscriptions for services as this are a no-go for me. It’s a commodity service which I am willing to pay for trailing updates and maintenance every year or so in a major update.

I am not willing to pay a substantial amount of money per user per month to just keep having access to my Passwords. And having them synced onto some companies infrastructure does not make this deal sweeter.

Enpass on the other hand comes with peace-of-mind that no data leaves your infrastructure and that you can get the data in and out any time.

It can import from these:

As mentioned I’ve migrated from 1Password in the mere of minutes and was able to plug-in-replace it immediately.

an OS in your browser

Posted on by Daniel Kirstenpfad

So I leave this right here:

OS.js is an open-source JavaScript Web Desktop implementation for your browser with a fully-fledged window manager, Application APIs, GUI toolkits and filesystem abstraction.

It really does implement a lot of what an operating system UI and portions of the backends are supposed to be. It looks quite funky and there are applications to this. Of course it’s open source

I want all electron Apps to start existing there so I can call all of them with just a browser from anywhere.

If you want to give it a spin, click here:

Circuit Board Design in your browser

Posted on by Daniel Kirstenpfad

Once every while when you make things you actually need to make things. Things like PCBs – printed circuit boards to hold and wire your chips.

bold claim

Maybe you want to give EasyEDA a try as it’s in-browser experience is better than anything I had come across so far. Granted I am not doing PCBs regularly but nevertheless – whenever I tried with the programs I’ve got recommended it wasn’t as straight forward as it is with this tool.

host GIT repositories painlessly

Posted on by Daniel Kirstenpfad

As people around me discuss what to go for in regards to manage their growing number of private GIT repositories I joined their discussion.

A couple of years ago I assessed how I would want to store my collection of almost 100 GIT private repositories and all those cloned mirrors I want to keep for archival and sentimental reasons.

An option was to pay for GitHub. Another option, which most seemed to prefer, was going for a local Gitlab set-up.

All seemed not desirable. Like chaining my workflows to GitHub as a provider or adopting a new hobby to operate and maintain a private GitLab server. And as it might have become easier to operate a GitLab server with the introduction of container management systems. But I’ve always seemed to have to update to a new version when I actually wanted to use it.

So this was when I had to make the call for my own set-up about 4 years ago. We were using a rather well working GitLab set-up for work back then. But it all seemed overkill to me also back then.

So I found: gogs.io

It runs with one command, the only dependency is two file system directories with (a) the settings of gogs and (b) your repositories.

It’ll deploy as literally a SINGLE BINARY without any other things to consider. With the provided dockerfile you are up and running in seconds.

It has never let me down. It’s running and providing it’s service. And that’s the end of it.

I am using it, as said, for 95 private repositories and a lot of additionally mirrored GIT repositories. Gogs will support you by keeping those mirrors in sync for you in the background. It’s even multi-user multi-organization.

Walk through Tokyo

Posted on by Daniel Kirstenpfad

Let me introduce you to a wonderful concept. We are using these movies as backdrop when on the stepper or spinning, essentially when doing sports or as a screensaver that plays whenever nothing else is playing on the screens around the house.

What is it you ask?

The thing I am talking about is: Walking Videos! Especially from people who walk through Tokyo / Japan. And there are lots of them!

Think of it as a relaxing walk around a neighborhood you might not know. Take in the sounds and sights and enjoy. That’s the idea of it.

If you want the immediate experience, try this:

Of course there are a couple of different such YouTube channels waiting for your subscription. The most prominent ones I know are:

In addition to attract your interest there’s a map with recent such walks in Tokyo. So you can specifically pick a walk you want to see by a map!

don’t forget to zoom out – there is more than just the Tokyo area

Train Melody / 武蔵小杉駅

Posted on by Daniel Kirstenpfad

In hearing distance of the place I am usually staying when in Tokyo is a train station. So if the wind is right and the window is open I hear all these train station chimes and sounds.

If you don’t know what it is, let Wikipedia educate you:

A train melody is a succession of musically expressive tones played when a train is arriving at or about to depart from a train station. As part of train passenger operations, a train melody includes a parade of single notes organized to follow each other rhythmically to form a lilting, singular musical thought.

In Japan, departing train melodies are arranged to invoke a relief feeling in a train passenger after sitting down and moving with the departing train. In contrast, arriving train melodies are configured to cause alertness, such as to help travelers shake off sleepiness experienced by morning commuters.

発車メロディ

With this post I also want to have you hear what I mean. These sounds are having interesting pavlovian effects anyways.

before the train exits the station
played beforehand any announcement
doors are closing

Find more here and here and here.

code autocomplete with deep learning

Posted on by Daniel Kirstenpfad

When you are writing code the patterns seem to repeat every once in a while. Not only the patterns but also the occasion you are going to apply certain code styles and methods while developing.

To support a developer with this creative work the tedious and repetitious tasks of typing out what is thought can be supported by machine learning.

Chances are your favourite IDE already supports an somehow AI driven code autocomplete feature. And if it does not, read on as there are ways to integrate products like TabNine into any editor you can think of…

Visual Studio IntelliCode is a set of AI-assisted capabilities that improve developer productivity with features like contextual IntelliSense, argument completion, code formatting, and style rule inference.

IntelliCode augments existing developer workflows with machine-learning services that provide an understanding of code and its context. It’s applicable for C#, C++ (in preview), JavaScript/TypeScript (in preview), and XAML code today, and will be updated in the future to support more languages.

Visual Studio IntelliCode

Of course there are some new contenders to the scene, like TabNine:

TL;DR: TabNine is an autocompleter that helps you write code faster. We’re adding a deep learning model which significantly improves suggestion quality. You can see videos below and you can sign up for it here.

TabNine

Deep TabNine requires a lot of computing power: running the model on a laptop would not deliver the low latency that TabNine’s users have come to expect. So we are offering a service that will allow you to use TabNine’s servers for GPU-accelerated autocompletion. It’s called TabNine Cloud, …

TabNine

Hack-The-Planet Podcast: Episode 0

Posted on by Daniel Kirstenpfad

A friend of mine started something and I have the honor to be part of it. The world now has one additional podcast to listen to. It’s in german though. For now at least.

We are still working on the website, the feed and the audio mixing and recording quality. So bear with us.

And now: Episode 0 is upon us!

fiddle with .NET in your browser

Posted on by Daniel Kirstenpfad

There are a lot of different “fiddles”. There’s JSFiddle, SQLFiddle, HTMLFiddle, RegExFiddle, PythonFiddle, R-Fiddle, GoFiddle. There is even a page that curates a list of fiddles.

For .NET there’s one too. It supports C#, F# and VB.NET. For trying something quickly or sharing it online this is a nice way to do it:

Hello World C#
MVC even

electronic fireworks

Posted on by Daniel Kirstenpfad

The firecracker exploded. Apparently after 2 weeks of usage of the Chuwi Hi10 Air the eMMC flash is malfunctioning.

In a totally strange way: Every byte on the eMMC can be read, seemingly. Even Windows 10 boots. But after a while it will hang and blue screen. Apparently because it tries to write to the eMMC and when those writes fail and pile up in the caches at some point the system calls it quits.

Anyhow: It means that no byte that is right now on this eMMC can be deleted / overwritten but only be read.

The great chinese support is really helpful and offered to replace the device free of charge right away. That’s very nice! But I came to the conclusion that I cannot send the device in, because:

It contains a full set of synched private data that I cannot remove by all means because the freaking soldered-on eMMC flash is broken.

The recipient of this broken tablet in china would be able to read all my data and I could not do anything about it.

Only an extremely small fraction of data is on there unencrypted. Only that much I hadn’t yet switched on encryption on during the initial set-up I was still doing on the device. And that little piece of data already is what won’t let me send out the device.

Now, what can we learn from this? We can learn: Never ever ever work with anything, even during set-up, without full encryption.

Es ist egal, aber

Posted on by Daniel Kirstenpfad

Tocotronic is one of the bands I listened to during my teens/twenties. That dates me, that dates the band.

It’s very german. You’ll find their music on most streaming platforms. I recommend starting with the albums “wir kommen um uns zu beschweren” and “es ist egal aber”.

Anyhow. Now one member of the band starts a podcast!

Jan Müller ist seit über 25 Jahren Mitglied der Band Tocotronic. Er ist mit dem Format des Interviews bestens vertraut und kann sich als Fragender gut in die Perspektive seiner Gäste hineinversetzen. Die persönliche Auswahl seiner Gesprächspartner*innen bildet die Grundlage für authentische Gespräche, die stets von Interesse und Respekt geprägt sind. Mit “Reflektor” startet Jan seinen ersten Podcast. 

https://viertausendhertz.de/reflektor

easily draw text based flowcharts

Posted on by Daniel Kirstenpfad

As I am mainly producing text and markdown notes throughout the day I am always interested in ways to quickly create simple text-based flow-charts.

I did write about a couple of tools to accomplish this previously but I want to take note of the most recent addition to the toolbox: ASCIIFlow Infinity.

You open it in your browser and start drawing with the simple tools provided.

When you are done you export it to plain text and do what you feel like with it.

Here’s a feature overview:

retrofit an old printer to be available on the network

Posted on by Daniel Kirstenpfad

In 2007 I had become proud owner of a Samsung ML-2010 mono laser printer. It’s done a great job ever since and I can recall changing the toner just once so far.

So you can tell: I am not a heavy printer user. Every so often I gotta print out a sheet of paper to put on a package or to fill out a form. A laser printer is the perfect fit for this pattern as it’s toner is not going-bad or evaporating like ink does in ink-printers.

So I still like the printer and it’s in perfect working condition. I’ve just recently filled up the toner for almost no money. But – but this printer needs to be physically connected to the computer that wants to print.

As the usage patterns have significantly changed in the last 12 years this printer needs to be brought into todays networked world.

Replacing it with a new printer is not an option. All printers I could potentially purchase are both more expensive to purchase and the toner is much more expensive to refill. No-can-do.

If only there was an easy way to get the printer network ready. Well, turns out, there is!

First let’s start introducing an opensource project: CUPS

CUPS (formerly an acronym for Common UNIX Printing System) is a modular printing system for Unix-like computer operating systems which allows a computer to act as a print server. A computer running CUPS is a host that can accept print jobs from client computers, process them, and send them to the appropriate printer.

Wikipedia

A good, cheap and energy-efficient way to run a CUPS host is a Raspberry Pi. I do own several first-generation models that have been replaced by much more powerful ones in the previous years.

So I’ve taken one Raspberry Pi and did the set-up steps: Installing the Raspberry Pi Print Server Software.

And now – what did I get?

I got a networked Samsung Laser Printer. No thrills, no problems at all.

the CUPS web interface
the printer shows up on Linux (Ubuntu here)
on iOS and macOS the printer magically appears
on Windows 10.

train sounds in Japan

Posted on by Daniel Kirstenpfad

If you’ve ever been to Japan you must have noticed that everything and anything makes sounds and talks. Elevators, escalators, doors, train stations, gates, vending machines – you name it, it makes sounds and talks.

It’s so apparent but yet quite comforting that I enjoyed it. It became an additional channel of information without the need of point-and-call all the time. Highly effective for me.

Japan utilizes sounds to a degree that every detail seems to count. Take the station gates you rush through to get to your train platform. It’ll sound differently depending on how you pay, what status your ticket had and even how close your IC-cards balance is to being empty.

Or just the fact that the ticket gates make sounds at all to make you find them easily.

A good portion of this sounds you can find on places like YouTube or specialized websites. One of those specialized websites is hatsumelo.com:

For some routes and stations you find here:

  • Station melody – departing and arrival melodies that are played on the occasion
  • In-car chime – chimes played before and after information broadcasts mainly in the Shinkansen and limited express trains.
  • Door opening and closing – doors make sounds too!

brain simulators

Posted on by Daniel Kirstenpfad

With recent announcements around human brain and brain-machine interface research like Neuralink the topic is seemingly seeing some more investments now.

As this whole topic is special to my heart I am interested in all things brain simulations. Thus here’s my personal “logbook entry” on the re-appearance of this topic:

This leads to one of the arguments for whole-brain simulation: it’ll help us solve the “biological imitation game,” a Turing test-like assay that pits digitally reconstructed brains against real ones. Iterations of the test help select increasingly more accurate models for a given task, which eventually become the most promising ideas for how specific biological networks operate. And because these models are based on mathematical equations, they could become the heart of next-generation AI.

Singularity Hub

There’s also a paper! – Unfortunately I cannot link directly to the paper as it is behind paywalls. Neuralink on the other side was so kind to publish open-access:

The Fastest journey from Roma to Londinium..

Posted on by Daniel Kirstenpfad

…in July takes 27.1 days, covering 2967 kilometers. At least if you would have taken the challenge in times of the Roman Empire.

ORBIS: The Stanford Geospatial Network Model of the Roman World reconstructs the time cost and financial expense associated with a wide range of different types of travel in antiquity. The model is based on a simplified version of the giant network of cities, roads, rivers and sea lanes that framed movement across the Roman Empire. It broadly reflects conditions around 200 CE but also covers a few sites and roads created in late antiquity.

ORBIS: The Stanford Geospatial Network Model of the Roman World

By simulating movement along the principal routes of the Roman road network, the main navigable rivers, and hundreds of sea routes in the Mediterranean, Black Sea and coastal Atlantic, this interactive model reconstructs the duration and financial cost of travel in antiquity.