jws

Having done this…

- don’t make your camera the highest thing around. My dome was showing scratches. Eventually I got a nice photo of the inside of a juvenile bald eagle’s talon. A bird’s gonna perch where a bird’s gonna perch. Sacrifice some sky and put a better perch next to it.

- the manual focus cameras seem to be temperature dependent. Maybe get something that can be auto focused or add a heater to control night time lows.

- for long exposure low light work, you may find you get much better pictures in very cold weather. This relates to charge leakage in the sensor. If you decide to try keeping your sensor cold, consider condensation. Maybe have something in there that is colder.

- also for long exposures, the noise in the image from leakage tends to be device pixel specific. You can make a dark view map at a given temperature and use it to denoise your images. You’ll need a shutter though, or do something clever with multiple frames as stars move around to get “darkest sample” or something

In my experience, the hubs listed tend to be obsolete. For instance, that LinkSys one I just looked up and its manual is copyright 15 years ago.

Someone on Amazon is boldly offering to sell you one, a 4 port USB 2.0 hub, for $72, but whether they actually have it or are a robot planning to order one from another robot that doesn’t have it but thinks it can get it for $60 is anyone’s guess.

Last time I went through hubctl’s list, none were available new, and lots of the ones listed have “issues” where later buyers can’t make them work (probably because the manufacturer changed the design but kept the model number). But that’s been a few years.

I just like to tell the manufacturers that I’m a niche, but I will happily pay double for them to put the current sense shunts and power switching transistors from the IC reference design on their board.

Or https://www.dryicedelivered.com/ I wonder if they pack it in dry ice to keep it cold while it ships?

Edit: They do.

It works fabulously. If a McDonalds has a "broken" milkshake machine it most likely means the workers did not maintain it in a hygienic manner. Stop eating food from that store. Requiring these machines in the stores is a hidden gift from McDonalds corporate to your intestinal tract.

If you live some place with a winter, you will have a barren patch of dirt then. If you live somewhere with a long, cold, wet fall or early spring, then you hill have a tiny field of mud for the local animals to wallow in.

If you live within throwing distance of a neighbor who does not wish to have a lawn of dandelions, you will be a target of ill feelings for your invasive weed colony.

Lawn grasses have been selected to keep the ground covered and tolerate being walked on and played on. If you don't want to walk on or play on your yard, then there is a wide choice of ground cover that keeps the ground covered all year long and isn't a wildly airborne spreading invasive weed.

0 mi in 4 guesses. The funny part was I forgot to look at the photos after the first two and had to go back and look at the photos to see what I missed. The first photo has a bridge, so that informed the clicks a bit since I knew I needed a stream, so some help from the content.

In this case, Swift is being, lets say suboptimal, compiling an 8MB array of integers.

It's worth mentioning another, more common, cause. There can be computational cost explosion when Swift resolves the types for function calls (and operators). You notice it when you get the "too complex" error, but you may be tolerating slow compiles which are just slightly less than too complex. A few explicit type annotations in these situations can do wonders for speeding your development cycle.

Edit: redact I unfortunately can't tell you how to find these. Maybe a "give it a go with reduced complexity limit" compiler flag would help find them.

Edit: Add see reply below for answer.

Maybe we should take a page from farm subsidies and have pharmaceutical subsidies where the government will buy some quantity of expired inventory of important medicines. Price it at kind of the low end of what insurance companies would pay the pharmaceutical company, so they'd rather sell it to a consumer, but they can still make money on the government planned over supply.

I've seen it a couple times, but not with Apple cables. Some of the 3rd party cables have the exterior metal of the connector just sort of snapped/crimped/pressed on and that pulls off to be left in the socket. You have to dig that out before you can put a cable in. To make things more confusing, the broken cable end usually goes in, so the user tells you "I only have one cable that works and it doesn't charge."

It's a fundamentally unsolvable problem. There exist names with multiple valid pronunciations for the same spelling.

You can tell Siri how to pronounce (and recognize) your name by adding a pronunciation field to your Contact card in the address book.

People don't have much feel for sound decibels. This is going to be loud, but for context, both "The Who" and "Deep Purple" have played concerts that were louder than the sample and thunder (which animals are exposed to even in wildlife refuges) is literaly 100 times more sound energy.

Animals survive thunder.

Ultimately, maybe not, but I finally dabbled in geolocation on a property that was receiving comment spam. I ended up eliminated 100%, not nearly 100%, actually 100% of the spam by blocking anonymous content from one country.

In another application I got rid of 90% of the flash wear on an IoT device by blocking a single country from a port.

A determined, targeted attack will go around a geoblock, but I have to reluctantly admit that it can be useful for the high volume attacks.

I have failed to find the parasitic draw on an RV (slower than this one, it takes a couple weeks to kill the battery). I finally got a "Top Post Battery Master Disconnect Switch", which is a little dinglebob that goes between the battery post and cable and lets you easily break the circuit. I highly recommend the $12 solution for an intermittently used vehicle.

In the US you are unlikely to get metric threaded legs at a local hardware store.

But yeah, knobs are knobs. From time to time I help assemble scores of tiny Ikea dressers for a charity. About 1 in 6 ends up needing rework because something is either machined poorly or breaks during assembly. The most common failure is split knobs, so I bring a sack of fun hand painted knobs off of Amazon and give the top drawers "accent knobs" on enough units to complete the assembly run. I'm told the accent drawer units are very popular with the end recipients.

That “farmland” number is next to meaningless. The vast majority of animal land is useless for other agriculture. If you are visualizing a green grassy field full of cows, that is nice and they might even support one cow per acre (2/hectare). Those area numbers are completely swamped by the huge areas you don’t see where someone is grazing one skinny cow per 200 acres (100 hectares) of high desert.

A more useful number might discount the grazing/fodder lands which are not useful for other agriculture.

A billion is three groups of three zeroes. So for visualizing I would think of a cubic meter compared to a cubic millimeter.

A grain of sand serves for a cubic millimeter. For the cubic meter you can either visualize a cube that size, or four oil drums, or a small hot tub.

Now for the 30 out front, That’s about 27 which is 3^3 so let’s just size a smaller grain of sand which is only 1/3mm on a side. Maybe table salt would be good.

So a grain of table salt in a small hot tub.

If you perform this thought experiment with actual solar masses, use sufficiently long tongs and wear eye protection.

As you get to small image sizes, the relative size of the quantization table and the Huffman encoding table becomes significant. You can easily just pick a standard version of these, leave them out of the image (which is no longer a valid JPEG), and then put them in at the destination to make a valid JPEG again.

I'm not finding a source, but I think I remember the tables being in the 1-2kB range.

Cheap MJPEG USB cameras do this. Their streaming data is like JPEG but without the tables since it would take up too much bandwidth.

Superglue has a shelf life of about a year before it stops working as well. It will still harden, but doesn’t have the same strength.

I figure it’s six months old when I buy so in practice that almost always means “buy a new tube” if you need a full strength joint unless you use it regularly.

I see that after 50 years, C has finally gained an official null pointer value and type! "nullptr" and "nullptr_t".

That wouldn't be so interesting, but it highlights the complexity of specifying a language and implementing a specification. For what sounds at first hearing a lot like "#define nullptr 0" the Clang release notes identify 7 syntactic cases where the C standard and the C++ standard disagree about whether "nullptr" should be acceptable in a location. Clang takes each side about equally and it sounds like they are waiting for the standards groups to fix the standards.

I drove a Rabbit Diesel back in the early '80s. It was not a luxury driving experience, but 48MPG highway! I didn't have much money and squeezing in a 700 mile round trip would let me visit my girlfriend over a weekend. Lots of miles in that car (mostly in the dark hours of the night, middle of nowhere, with Tangerine Dream blasting).

I doubt it would come close to passing modern safety standards, and I guess we saw how likely it would be for VW to make it clean enough for modern emissions… but it was an economical car to buy and operate. Here we are 40 engineering years later and all of the "New Small Cars With the Best Gas Mileage for 2022" have worse highway mileage than that 1980 Rabbit.

There was a pretty good time interval between dot matrix printers becoming a thing and any kind of dot addressable graphics. For many years you just sent them regular old ascii codes and got text.

I think communication interfaces had to come up in speed for it to make sense, and memory on the computer to hold an entire page of pixels. I mean, at 72dpi that's 50KB just for the data! You were mostly into the IBM PC era before that was a thing.

I went through part of this while working on some liveness analysis. The lecturer and the notes do a good job of conveying ideas.

Well worth using as a resource.

I suppose things might have changed in ~half a century, the FDA used to care about everything.

Back in the late '80s the VAX-11/750 that was part of the Siemens MRI scanners was shipped in the old blue trim color long after DEC had switched to the very chic "brown on tan" color scheme. The FDA approval for the scanner would not let them change the color of the paint because of some bleedover of medication regulation language into the equipment approval regulations.

I'm beyond my expertise, but silicon crystal's compressive strength is 3GPa, so maybe? Plus I assume one would surround everything with a "fluid" (or at least flows at that pressure) to distribute the forces. Silicon chip fluid suspended inside carbide anvil with a steel clamping structure and tightening bolts should work. Interconnects are left as an exercise for the reader.

I have enough faith that this would work out that I'd put it in a sci-fi story, and not enough that I would invest in a startup.

The study, https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/sciadv.ade4687 suggests in figure 1 that the device is 0.5mg of molybdenum and dissolves over an 18 day period, ~30µg/day. This is less than your recommended dietary allowance of 45µg/day and about two orders of magnitude under the tolerable upper intake level.

You will also find in the study analysis of what compounds the molybdenum forms as it dissolves.

Also, who knew they were supposed to be getting molybdenum every day? Somehow I feel a bit more cyborgy now, like maybe there is a tiny gear in me somewhere that needs to be greased.

A woodworking clamp with a handle in line with the screw will generate about 400lbs of force. That’s a reasonable model for how much axial force you will be able to exert with a screwdriver handle and beefy threaded screws. To get 150000 psi you have to squeeze something .0027 square inches, or 1.7mm^2, leave some room for edges and let’s work with 1mm^2.

I’m not sure what interesting things can be done with this superconductor in 1mm^2, but squeezing the anvil isn’t outrageous.

For perspective, TSMC will put 150 million transistors in that area. I kind of suspect that integrated circuits might flow at this pressure, so that might not be the application, but a superconducting ground plane and power plane would be interesting.

Edit: Wait, maybe that’s just a giant capacitive load on all the signals. Do something smarter.

There are tax credits to the builder to offset some of the increased up front cost, $2000 + $500 for some systems, and 22% on PV systems. It looks like the homeowner can get a $5000 tax credit for 10 years.

The goal is to transition to housing which can be powered by renewables. To that end there are requirements for the thermal integrity of the envelope and windows, there must be electric run for HVAC heat pumps, hot water heat pumps, and at least one EV parking space. Lighting must be modern high efficiency stuff. Ductwork must be inside the thermal envelope. There are indoor air quality standards to meet.

Yes, for those unfamiliar, the city used to contract to have waste oil sprayed on the unpaved streets to keep the dust down. (Hush Children of Summer, it was the 1960s and 70s, it seemed like a good idea at the time.) In 1972 their contractor sprayed dioxin contaminated oil, possibly unbeknownst to him and the people who paid him to take the waste oil, but he wasn't being all that careful. Again its the 1970s, the EPA was two years old, the Crying Indian ad had just come out, trying to get people to carry a litter bag in their 8mpg car instead of chucking their beer cans and bottles out the window was the big thing. You wouldn't walk barefoot in a park because of all the pull tabs discarded on the ground. Dioxin is not known to cause problems in humans at this point, though animal studies suggest it could be a thing. No one has studied it.

Meanwhile, 10 years pass, the EPA has connected the oil hauler to contamination problems in a number of sites. They take samples at Times Beach and the next day a 500 year flood covers the town. Dioxin is now listed as a human carcinogen, and the towns streets contain 50% of the dioxin contamination in the entire state. The EPA uses the newly passed federal Superfund to buy out all the residents. The town is sealed off from humans, but apparently that river can flood and carry things downstream.

10 more years pass… The EPA decides on incineration, build an incinerated, purify everything with fire. Problems solved. It's now 1997. 25 years from contamination to cleanup.

Bonus Context for Diligent Readers:

Low level dioxin exposure has since been concluded to not be a health hazard. No one in Times Beach showed signs of dioxin poisoning. The decision maker for destroying the town now says with current knowledge he would not have ordered that. There was actually no disaster.

More anecdotes! I use the AirPod Pros many hours a day and have mild tinnitus. I find the noise canceling makes me more aware of the singing in my ears. I don't live in a place where silence happens, but the cancelling will kill the outside noise enough for me to remember that the ears are always singing to themselves.

For people experiencing loud noises, be aware that if the microphones can come loose, then they can get weird transients from vibration, shock, or even the sound being driven through the AirPods. The original AirPods were subject to that, I had mine replaced once and when they came loose again stopped using them. (Gross note: the original ones made me more subject to disgusting things happening best left unmentioned when used many hours a day. That was most of the reason for not getting them replaced again. The new ones definitely breathe better and don't cause me trouble.)