Dave. @ dgriffith @aussie.zone

I'm a technical kinda guy, doing technical kinda stuff.

---

Read more

Posts

0

Comments

452

Joined

2 yr. ago

Your rods and cones in your eye and the nerves that transmit the information to your brain have signalling limits, they can only fire so fast and they have a time to reset. It depends on lighting and what you're focused on as well.

Which is why film can get away with 24 frames per second because in a dark theatre and a bright screen 24 fps is enough to blur that signalling so that it looks like decent motion. Only thing cinematographers had to watch out for is large panning shots as our peripheral vision is tuned for more rapid response and we can see the juddering out of the corner of our eyes.

I could see the 60Hz flicker of crt monitors back in the day if I had a larger monitor or was working next to someone with 60Hz. Not when I was directly looking at it, but when it was in my peripheral vision. The relatively tiny jump to 72Hz made things so much nicer for me.

Yeah basically you can only signal "on-off" so many times a second in a vga cable before the ons and offs get blurry and unusable. So you can trade lower resolution for a higher frame rate as long as you keep the total number of on-offs below the limits.

Maybe mention the fact that this recent alarming jump is very likely due to us doing accidental geo-engineering for the last 80 years and we've only just stopped it.

We finally banned sulfur-laden bunker fuel globally for shipping last year. Dirtiest fuel in the world basically, all the left over crud from refineries straight into your cargo ship's engine. Sounds like a good environmental move but, oh shit, guess what? Those sulfur aerosols the ships were pumping into the atmosphere worldwide were actually keeping surface temperatures down.

Climate scientists were shitting themselves over the temperature jump until someone made the connection. They're still shitting themselves over it now, but at least it's an explainable jump now.

It's proof that fairly "trivial" changes by humans can have measurable effects on climate.

This was a binary configuration file of some sort though?

Something along the lines of:

        IF (config.parameter.read == garbage) {
         Dont_panic;
    }


  

Would have helped greatly here.

Edit: oh it's more like an unsigned binary blob that gets downloaded and directly executed. What could possibly go wrong with that approach?

To be honest, I was surprised it had any idea about FFMPEG. The biggest problem is that it sounds so authoritative.

If it said, "hey I don't know a huge amount about X" then you could work with that. But it will blithely say "no problem" and spit out 6 pages of non working code that you then have to debug further, and if you don't know the terms in the area you're working in you end up blundering around trying to find the right trigger word to get what you want.

You're never going to live in a world where you're allowed to fly without photo id amigo

Move to a different country.

Eg in Australia I can book a domestic ticket and have two interactions after that:

• x-ray/security where they scan my carry on
• boarding at the gate where they scan my pass.

No photo ID - or any ID really - needed. Now there's enough dribs and drabs of information when I book the ticket and etc etc that they can identify me, but there's nothing stopping someone from booking a ticket for someone else under their name.

Windows: "All your files are exactly where you left them."

I end up having to play twenty questions with chatgpt. For example, I've been asking it for code examples for ffmpeg mpeg4 encoding with C++.

It will happily spit out completely non-working code, where the core part - feeding image frames to the encoder - works, but it doesn't initialise or tidy up the encoding afterwards.

Until I say, "hey this code doesn't seem to work and creates corrupted files", and then it's like, "oh yeah you also need to do a bunch of other stuff, just like this". Repeat as it slowly adds more and more pieces until finally you end up with something that actually works.

Or it will happily dream up function names or mix python and C functions, or will refer to older APIs even when I've specifically said "use API version x.y" and so on and so forth.

If I didn't know enough about the subject already, I'd never be able to tease out the answer. So in a sense it's a mostly useful reference, but it can't be relied on to actually and consistently provide a result because it's all statistics and fuzzy text generation behind the scenes, not actual knowledge.

Seriously, give me any supported argument why it would be beneficial to send humans to the moon (and Mars) instead of just robots.

Robots, in particular mining equipment robots that everyone seems to be jazzed up about, they need maintenance. Earth bound mining equipment has minor service intervals of 250 hours of operation, major intervals every thousand hours, machine-stopping breakdowns occur on a bathtub curve but there would be a dozen or so before the first 4000 hours of operation.

For reference, 4000 hours of operation is less than half a year of 24/7 work.

Even with the addition of a few hundred million per machine in hardening and robustness, the environment they will work in is much, much worse than earth. Seals will need frequent replacement, the parts that do the digging need replacement, hoses will burst or leak, etc etc.

On the moon you could (probably) laboriously tele-operate repair robots with the 2.5 second lag you'd have to Earth.

Mars? Not possible.

So I look at all these plans, where they'll send ice mining equipment to mars to run for two years unattended to make fuel and what-not, and with my 30 years of experience in the mining industry on earth, I just say, "that must be some good crack they're smoking".

Someone is going to have to go, just to repair and maintain all the machines.

Big stainless steel hook , when anyone asks tell them it's for your sex swing. The actual sex swing is optional but recommended.

Otherwise look at fancy lights. You've got other lights in the room but maybe look for one that throws light horizontally, not downwards , at least it will still have some utility.

Or a light with an elaborate shade, there's those types with a pull string that give you endless patterns as they shift between two shapes.

Throw a smart light bulb in there so you can muck around with colours and brightness.

It was a client that let you browse Reddit on your phone, in a much nicer and more organised way than anything provided by Reddit itself.

All was fine until Reddit decided to monetise their API that Apollo - and many other apps - used. Now it would cost the app developer tens of thousands a month to maintain the connection, which is not something that they could sustain.

So for me, the day that Boost for Reddit stopped working, I stopped using Reddit.

It was one of LinuxBabe's guides - this one:

https://www.linuxbabe.com/mail-server/setup-basic-postfix-mail-sever-ubuntu

There is a more recent one that uses a shell script to install all the bits and pieces but I prefer to do it myself so I've got at least some idea of how all the pieces work.

Mmm I'd probably be a bit irritated about inadvertent activation of whatever function it's set to do while the tag is getting bounced around doing its main job.

I've had Tile tags before where the "find my phone" function would be triggered just from eg sitting in the car with keys+tag in your pocket, or cramming just one more receipt into my wallet with the credit card sized tag they sold.

So, for me, 90 percent of the time this function would be firmly set to "off".

My most recent ISP does CGNAT. They don't hide it, it's mentioned in their support pages. A quick email is all it takes to switch you over to an open address though.

Anyway I've got a $5/mo server with akami that looks after my email and it's associated domain.

It took about three hours of following a guide to set up DMARC and etc etc and it works unobtrusively, and is about ten times faster than my old ISP IMAP account that I had for about twenty years.

The actual quantities are pretty small, and if you've got burning refrigerant there are much bigger problems going on seeing as the refrigerant circuit is hermetically sealed. That kind of thing would also provoke a product safety recall. Most modern domestic fridges stick with a plain hydrocarbon refrigerant anyway (akin to butane) these days.

But there's plenty of other things that can burn in a modern fridge. Circuit board components, circulation fan motors, etc can all put out ridiculously bad/noxious odours when they burn out.

I have a Samsung A71. It permanently lives in its protective case which gives it good bumpers around the easily-breakable edge-to-edge screen. It's now 4 years old and has survived numerous tumbles and drops over the years.

Occasionally I have to swap the SD card in it and I am always astonished at how thin and light and fragile it is when not in the case.

I would quite happily have an actual similar size phone to what "I have now" if the battery size was bumped up another 50 percent.

McAfee wrote a program that used the Sqlite library for database storage.

When going about its data storage business for McAfee's program, the Sqlite library was storing files in C:\temp with prefixes like sqlite_3726371.

Users see that and get angry, and bug the Sqlite developers.

Now probably when initialising the Sqlite library McAfee could have given it the location of a directory to keep it's temp files. Then they could have been tucked away somewhere along with the rest of the McAfee code base and be more easily recognised as belonging to them, but they didn't.

So because of a bit of careless programming on McAfee's part, Sqlite developers were getting the heat because the files were easily recognisable as belonging to them.

Because the Sqlite developers don't have control of what McAfee was doing, the most expedient way to solve the problem was to obfuscate the name a bit.

There's geological, and then there's ecological. Mars has geology but has no ecosystem discovered thus far.

So the question, "should we replace one ecosystem with another on Mars for our own benefit?" doesn't really make much sense. There isn't anything to replace, as far as we can tell right now.

Perhaps consider instead that creating an ecosystem where there wasn't one before is of an overall net benefit to life in the universe, of which all current evidence points to being present on only one planet.

It did have a pretty catchy chorus.

Turns out it's about an actual school shooting and not just disliking Mondays.

Back when a school shooting was actually something to write a song about.

Especially after all the spam on Facebook like:

"RANDOM_FRIEND wants to get in touch with you on Threads™!"

"RANDOM_FRIEND just posted something on Threads™! Check it out!"

Etc etc

And then the interleaving of Threads™ teaser posts amongst Facebook posts with half a sentence and then "..." and any interaction with it prompts you to join threads so you can read the rest of that sentence that hooked you in...

Or the "easy and fun™" way that every Instagram account has a Threads™ account just waiting to be activated by you.

I wonder how much of a user base they would have without all the jamming it down user's throats.