I’ve blogged about those pictures taken day- and night-time before. I’ve also blogged about how they where produced.
With a picture spot freed at one of the walls in our house we decided to print the day and night pictures on canvas and have them side-by-side. And it looks great, I think.
The middle day of the year. Use only middle names, stay to the middle of the road, pat or rub your or someone else’s middle (this is a great day to apply to join The Order of the Holy Chao Belly Rubbers). Point to things with your middle finger. Visit a middle school and talk about the good old days of the Middle Ages. (If you want to get technical, on Leap Year this day would run from noon of July 2 to noon of July 3, but you don’t have to get that anal unless you really want to).
Mid Year’s Day
Seemingly short-message services are becoming the standard mode of communication for the powerful and rich. It seems that especially Twitter is capable of bringing the worst in those among us to the outside.
Of course the most controversial statements are being washed away by the sheer throughput. The next one always comes up quicker than you expect.
Helping the masses to keep track is a main task of journalism. That being said traditional journalism (as in newspapers, television) sees great difficulties to keep track as well. Too much, too quick.
So new forms of journalism develop. Often more tendentious then helpful for the cause so they require the cautious mind of the reader to add some more perspective.
This is the example of such a newly developing “tracking journalism” site around the dazzling public character that is Elon Musk. It is called “elonmusk.today“.
Editor’s note: others have done great work exposing Musk’s shameless charlatan carnival barking. If you enjoy this sort of thing, I highly recommend Niya White’s excellent article Musk Misses: The Stories You Don’t Hear About Tesla Anymore …
There are lists of things all over the internet. I’ve linked to some of these food related lists and maps already on this blog.
And of course there’s this list of craft beer breweries missing:
A microbrewery or craft brewery is a brewery that produces small amounts of beer, typically much smaller than large-scale corporate breweries, and is independently owned. Such breweries are generally characterized by their emphasis on quality, flavor and brewing technique.
Wikipedia
If there is any discussion or argument about electric mobility these days the topic of range and battery-aging is coming up rather quick.
Every once in a while you also hear these awesome stories about electric cars achieving total-driven-distances outrageously huge compared to combustion engine cars…
But what is it then, how does a battery in an electric car age over time and mileage? Given that car manufacturers seem to settle on a ca. 150.000km total-driven-miles baseline for giving a battery-capacity percentage guarantee. Something like…
The future owners of ID. models won’t need to worry about the durability of their batteries either, as Volkswagen will guarantee that the batteries will retain at least 70 per cent of their usable capacity even after eight years or 160,000 kilometres.
Volkswagen Newsroom
or
Model S and Model X – 8 years (with the exception of the original 60 kWh battery manufactured before 2015, which is covered for a period of 8 years or 125,000 miles, whichever comes first).
Model 3 – 8 years or 100,000 miles, whichever comes first, with minimum 70% retention of Battery capacity over the warranty period.
Model 3 with Long-Range Battery – 8 years or 120,000 miles, whichever comes first, with minimum 70% retention of Battery capacity over the warranty period.
Tesla
So. Guarantees are one thing. Reality another. There’s an interesting user-driven survey set-up where Tesla owners can hand in their cars data thus participate in the survey.
And it yields results (getting updated as you read…):
In a nutshell: It seems there is a good chance that your Tesla car might have an above 90% original-specified-battery-capacity after the guaranteed 100.000 miles and even after 150.000 miles (241.000km)…
Good news that is! Given that the average household will do about or less than 20.000 km/year it would mean over 12 years of use and the car still would hold 90% of battery charge. The battery being the most expensive single component on an electric car this is extremely good news as it’s unlikely that the battery will be the reason for the car to be scraped after this mileage.
tr -cd '0-9A_Za-z_-' < /dev/urandom|moreThank you Joel for bringing it up!
Recognize and credit your imaginary friend, whom you blame for everything on all the other days of the year. Or help someone anonymously, but in a way they’d never expect. (“Captain Tuttle” was the made-up buddy of Benjamin Franklin “Hawkeye” Pierce and “Trapper John” McIntire on the TV show M*A*S*H. They used the mythical captain’s identity to get supplies and funds from the U. S. Military which were then sent to help an orphanage).
Imaginary Friend Day
TOKYO — Japan’s government will allow NTT Docomo and its three major mobile rivals to set up 5G base stations on traffic signals, hoping to reduce the cost and time it takes to roll out the ultrafast networks by taking advantage of the nation’s high density of traffic lights.
Nikkei
Interesting. It seems that there is another way of doing things when you want to see success. Japan always seems very determined when the decision has been made to adopt something. In the curious case of the mobile communication standard 5G they have chosen a different way over countries like Germany.
Last year when I had asked for a new mobile plan here in Germany and I expressed my surprise about the enormous prices for just data quota I was told “That’s because we had to bid on the frequencies and that was soooo expensive that now we cannot offer the service cheaper”.
drop in replacement for tail -F that asks you if you are still watching
Just like Laura I am also was having a moment when I stumbled across tailflix.
For those not understanding the reference: At the end of an episode you’ve watched on Netflix you will be shown another one, and so on, and so on. Until if you have not touched the remote at all for several episodes Netflix will ask you “Are you still watching?”.
The Jupyter Notebook is an open-source web application that allows you to create and share documents that contain live code, equations, visualizations and narrative text. Uses include: data cleaning and transformation, numerical simulation, statistical modeling, data visualization, machine learning, and much more.
Voila serves live Jupyter notebook including Jupyter interactive widgets.
Unlike the usual HTML-converted notebooks, each user connecting to the Voila tornado application gets a dedicated Jupyter kernel which can execute the callbacks to changes in Jupyter interactive widgets.
https://github.com/QuantStack/voila
I am a happy user of the Apple Watch and iPhones in general. It’s working out great for me so far.
There are a couple of features that I would wish where there. And simple things like an hour-chime or hour/half-hour tap are frequently included into the WatchOS updates.
But some of the more specific features just won’t materialize on Apple Watch.
Think of this: You are doing your thing, you know, being a productive member of the society. And apart from the information “What’s next” the information of “When’s next and how long until then” is equally important.
I already had all information – like upcoming events – in my calendar. Why not have the watch display directly on the watch face how long I’ve got until then?!
This is where I’ve found an app called “Time Till” by Rachel Higley.
You’re downloading it on your iPhone and when opened up first it will show you a list of your calendars.
You can turn on/off any of them in this app and by doing so you are selecting which of the calendars will be included in the calculation “how long until the next meeting”.
I’ve only selected one calendar which holds those appointments that I need to know how long until then. So it’s not the next work meeting. It’s important things.
On the watch, however many calendars you’ve selected, it will show you something like this:
So in this case it’ll show the hours until I have to wake-up. Whatever I put into this calendar will show up there. If I want with the name of the event, but most commonly I am using the bottom right version: just the hours/minutes until.
Unfortunately Rachel is quite busy and so there’s no update for the app to also support the new Modular Infograph complications of WatchOS 5 and up.
If you don’t know how those look like, here is a picture I’ve put together from Apples developer documentation:
So I am thinking to rewrite the app and include the new complications. In fact: I’ve implemented my “Discordian Calendar Apple Watch Complication” app as a test and exercise to learn how I would be able to rewrite “Time Till”.
Now the only thing I need is to be kissed by the muse that fuels the urge to just get it done :-).
Addresses in Japan are fascinating. There’s a system to it, with lots of exceptions and special cases. And just recently there was an announcement about the city I am technically considering home-base when in Japan: Kawasaki (川崎).
As you see in the title of this post there’s a kanji character missing:
川崎 means “Kawasaki” – just the name itself, like used on signs and such.
川崎市 means “Kawasaki-shi” – the name got extended by -shi which in itself will signal that the name before is a city.
And then there is this other kanji in the title: 区. It is spoken as “ku” and basically means “ward”. It’s a bigger city broken down into separate wards.
Not all cities in Japan are required to differentiate into wards – just the ones considered big enough. Kawasaki was considered big enough by 1972 to name out it’s wards.
And so its the Nakahara-ward (中原区) I am usually staying to be more specific on the Kawasaki-home-base-statement at the beginning of this post.
And the designated cities are somehow ranked according to their population. The news here is that apparently given the 2019 population numbers Kawasaki has improved it’s position among all big designated cities by one rank:
Some more details then to the japanese addressing system:
Japanese addresses begin with the largest division of the country, the prefecture. Most of these are called ken (県), but there are also three other special prefecture designations: to (都) for Tokyo, dō (道) for Hokkaidō and fu (府) for the two urban prefectures of Osaka and Kyoto.
Following the prefecture is the municipality. For a large municipality this is the city (shi, 市). Cities with a large enough population, called designated cities, can be further broken down into wards (ku, 区). (In the prefecture of Tokyo, the designation special ward or tokubetsu-ku, 特別区, is also used for municipalities within the former city of Tokyo.) For smaller municipalities, the address includes the district (gun, 郡) followed by the town (chō or machi, 町) or village(mura or son, 村). In Japan, a city is separate from districts, which contain towns and villages.
Japanese addressing system
So let’s make an example, since it’s always great fun for me to figure out the address again when I try to order the SIM card to the hotel address. A good example would be a randomly selected and nice hotel in Nakahara-ku:
The typical english-language online order form / address entry form for shipping SIM cards to hotels gives you this interface:
Ha! Now that’s a challenge, right? At first glance its not obvious but if you take a look at the structure of the address it opens up:
And so, this will reach it’s destination:
Install multi-cursor-plus:
Hate reaching for the mouse?
multi-cursor-plusmulti-cursor-plusallows you to create multiple cursors anywhere in the buffer, using only your keyboard. Supports multiple selections and removing previous cursors at any time. Easy to use. Amazing!
We are using computers every day and we are doing this in many different environments. Some of us give their desk space and work environment some more thoughts.
If you want some inspiration regarding your desk and work space, take a look at this great Twitter Hashtag: #絵描きさんの作業環境が見たい
It means “I want to see artists’ work environments” and is used for some years now for japanese artists to post pictures of their work environments…
I also had posted mine, yet not being an artist.
In addition to the terminal recording tool “asciinema” there’s another one to take a look at:
termtosvg is a Unix terminal recorder written in Python that renders your command line sessions as standalone SVG animations.
https://github.com/nbedos/termtosvg
Multrin is a
found herecross-platformapp built on top ofElectron,React,styled-componentsandTypeScript, that lets you to organize apps in tabs, by just dropping them onto Multrin. It aims to greatly improve your productivity and organization.
And to spice things up a bit more:
There are new micro-projectors coming and they are looking good. After the first availability of really small and low-power but enough-light LED projectors (see here) manufacturers have apparently added a laser to the equation.
It is said that…
Unlike traditional projectors that constantly need to be focussed, the Nebra AnyBeam picture is always perfect. You can project onto curved or irregular surfaces with ease – perfect if you want to use it on the fly, or if you want to try your hand at a bit of projection mapping!
This thing will be available, according to the Kickstarter, as a all-in-one package with power and HDMI inputs. It’s got 720p inputs. Well. Well really?
And it will be available to the maker market as a RaspberryPi Hat…
Finally the top-down time of the year has started. This is how my day starts from now everyday…
I can never wrap my head around how people really only use audio to communicate within teams, across cultures and timezones.
I’ve experienced first hand what a difference it makes to use good video conferencing that actually works. And it makes such a difference on productivity and team collaboration.
Video conferencing never replaces real-life face-2-face meetings. It just does not start relationships.
If you already had your work and personal relationship started video conferencing will make all the difference to your work.
Anyhow: I am also a big believer in augmented-reality glasses. I have to wear glasses anyhow all the time – why not improving them with the ability to display stuff.
Now, think of this. You’ve got one of those AR glasses on and you start the video conference call. And this happens:
By many known as “High Availability” this elusive thing as a lot of different perspectives to consider…
All is good. No data has been harmed in the process. Now drive #8 needs to be replaced.
Catching up to some YouTube things during dinner made us see a Japanese TV commercial sporting the German DLG quality seal. Funny to see that these kind of quality seals carry over even to Japan…
The German Agricultural Society (Deutsche Landwirtschafts-Gesellschaft), commonly known as DLG, is an international non-profit organisation for agricultural industry in Germany. DLG was founded in 1885 by Max Eyth, has over 23,000 members as of 2011 and is headquartered in Frankfurt am Main. Its main purpose is to promote technical progress and scientific advances in the food and agricultural industry, including setting standards.
DLG
As the replacement drive for yesterdays hard drive crash was put into place the storage array started to re-silver the newly added empty drive. This process takes a while – about 8 hours for this particular type of array.
Interestingly just 2 minutes into the process another drive dropped a bombshell:
Apparently disk 8 holds together it’s business so far but dropped a couple of parity errors into the equation.
This is bad news. But so far science still is on my side of things and no data has been lost.
But now redundancy is down completely. There’s no redundancy for now – until the replaced hard disk is fully integrated. My policy for these sized drives demands a minimum of 2-disk redundancy and for today this policy saved the day (data).
Actually let’s dive a bit into what it’s doing there to achieve 2-disk redundancy:
Synology Hybrid RAID (SHR) is an automated RAID management system from Synology, designed to make storage volume deployment quick and easy. If you don’t know much about RAID, SHR is recommended to set up the storage volume on your Synology NAS.
You will learn different types of SHR and their advantages/disadvantages over classic single disk/RAID setups. In the end, you will be able to choose a type of RAID or SHR for the best interest of your storage volume. This article assumes that as the admin of your Synology NAS, you are also an experienced network administrator with a firm grasp of RAID management.
Synology Hybrid Raid
So you trade data redundancy and safety for useable disk space. Here this is compared to traditional RAID 5:
After the sudden death of a hard drive in one of the house’ storage arrays (after 55997 hours of service) beginning of this month it has happened again:
With less than half the runtime of the previously dead disk this one is an early failure. Well within the warranty. Therefore the disk is already en route to be replaced by an RMA (Western Digital RMA process so far is spotless!)
Anyhow: This was a 4 TB drive. It’s in an array with 2-disk redundancy and 8 other drives. So the array still is operating with redundancy right now. Additionally a full backup exists as well as a hot-standby (but slower) offsite mirror.
I am quite confident to not loose data. But this raid-sync is going to take a bit longer. As drives get bigger, syncs get longer.
The Podlove project once again leads the way to improve the experience and the way we interact with knowledge and thoughts. With the most current announcement and introduction of transcription-support for podcasts. Click on it right now and try it yourself.
Fulltext-search. Listening to podcasts by reading them. This-is-amazing!
Transcripts are coming
from the Podlove Publisher 2.8 announcement
Transcripts are an incredibly desirable thing to have for podcasts: they allow searching for specific parts, increase searchability by search sites when presented properly and they increase the accessibility of audio content significantly too.
However, transcripts have been considerably difficult to be created and used. Manually created transcripts are costly in terms of time and money and even if you spend the money there has been a lack of technical standards for storing and integrating transcripts into websites in a defined way.
This is now slowly changing: more and more automated speech-to-text systems are becoming available at reasonable costs and they are creating ever better transcripts with more and more languages being supported.
Still, automatic transcripts trail manually created transcripts in terms of accuracy, punctuation and so on but they are increasingly useful when they are primarily used for improving search results or helping you with your internal research when trying to find content in your older episodes.
New services are also coming up to deal with these problems by allowing users to quickly build on automatic transcripts and improve them manually in an assisted fashion. We will soon see a landscape of tools and services that will make creating transcripts easy and cheap enough for more and more podcasters so it’s time to come up with a good integration.
Last but not least, the WebVTT file format has become a de-facto common denominator for passing transcripts along, supporting time codes, speaker identification and a rudimentary set of meta data. While not perfect it’s enough to get a transcript infrastructure up and running and Podlove is leading the way.
かくれんぼ – kakurenbo – Hide and Seek
見つけた！- mitsuketa – I found you！
見つかった！- mitsukatta – You found me！
Labenz, das
https://labenz.neutsch.org/index.php
Ein allgemein bekannter Gegenstand oder eine vertraute Erfahrung, für den oder die bisher noch keine Bezeichnung existiert.
Douglas Adams, John Lloyd & Sven Böttcher: Der tiefere Sinn des Labenz
Im Leben gibt es unzählige Dinge, Gefühle, Menschentypen und Situationen, die jeder aus dem Alltag kennt, denen man aber bisher versäumt hat, einen Namen zu geben. Wer kennt das nicht: Man steht gedankenverloren in der Küche und fragt sich, was man dort eigentlich wollte. Oder wie heißt eigentlich dieser halblose Plastikrand unten an Kunststoffflaschenschraubdeckeln?
As for the english speaking audience: Douglas Adams, The meaning of Liff
The CPU/hardware related bugs surfacing the last couple of years have mostly been fixed by adjusting the software that is run. Sometimes only by disabling certain features of a CPU or patching the microcode in the CPU itself.
The issue with this is that by fixing these issues features got disabled and workarounds had been introduced that lowered performance. Dramatically so for some use-cases.
By how much? Well it really depends on your CPU and use-cases. But maybe you want to try yourself. If you want to know the most current parameters to pass to your kernel on boot-up to disable all the performance impacting fixes, go here:
It is not recommended to have this in productive use – as you can imagine. Those bugs where fixed for a reason.
As you might know humans are going to go “back to the moon“. At least when you ask a certain eCommerce mogul.
We have been there already. 40+ years ago. And since then we have unlearnt how to do it.
Just to give an impression of what we as humans where capable to achieve 40 years ago:
There’s a whole collection of these photos freely available for further digging. Go there and spend a day!
Imagine: Humans flew there and back. With 60s tech. What can we do now when we want it?
Of course. The important bit is not really flying there and back. The most important thing for me is perspective.
Look at that small blue-white marble. We should reset our perspectives regularly.
Sweetmorn 68 Discord: Celebrating the Birth of Malaclypse the Younger on this day in 3107 YOLD (1941 AD).
