steely_glint

sundogplanets, 3 months ago to random

Watch this satellite obliterate the Kuiper Belt object moving through this set of images.

The dumb satellite is so bright that our auto-detect software threw out the whole stack, because it destroyed the average brightness.

It pisses me off to no end that my taxpayer-funded telescope time is now less and less effective because of one for-profit private company.

(P.S. software dudes: please don't try to mansplain workarounds, believe me, a LOT of astronomers are working hard on this)

A gif of a Kuiper Belt object slowly moving across a set of images. It just looks like a fuzzy dot. Toward the end of the sequence, there's a super bright diagonal line that covers up the moving dot - that was a satellite.

steely_glint, 30 days ago to random

Thanks to @saghul for the perfect illustration of the problems with chatGPT:

steely_glint, 5 months ago to random

'The reason Tesla hasn't "worked all the bugs out yet" is that the company is run by people who hold established best practice in ideological contempt'

https://defector.com/youre-supposed-to-be-glad-your-tesla-is-a-brittle-heap-of-junk

steely_glint, 1 year ago to random

My Chrome has just updated and is now offering me some "Ads Privacy" options.

What they tell me is how f-ing invasive the Ad web is.

Why would I want one site to tell another what I'm interested in ? No Gossiping behind my back !

And no Google I don't want to help measure the effectiveness of ads since effectiveness is a synonym of making me do something I didn't intend to.

The Googlers obviously think this s**t is normal - am I alone in thinking they have lost their minds?

steely_glint, 8 months ago to random

Bad news for the Raspberry Spy Cop.

Their new SBC doesn't do hardware video encoding - so his hidden cameras will need big batteries and a noisy fan. How sad...

steely_glint, 2 months ago to random

You know that feeling that the threat modelling you are doing is paranoid - I mean no big co would ever offer a VPN for the purpose of intercepting their competitors.

Oh, right, they would, Meta did.

https://storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.uscourts.cand.369872/gov.uscourts.cand.369872.735.0.pdf

This makes #webRTC 's DTLS-SRTP requirement seem positively prescient.

steely_glint, 10 months ago to random

I didn’t know this existed, @neilhimself reading the first chapter of “the 13 clocks” by Thurber with animation by Juan Declan https://vimeopro.com/juandelcan/animation-juan-delcan/video/31299484 - warning, it is a teaser to get you to read the book, which you really should!

steely_glint, 9 months ago (edited 9 months ago) to random

If, hypothetically, you were trying to build a small run IoT device and wanted it to be as independent as possible of the cloud - how would you handle 5 years of firmware updates?

steely_glint, 5 months ago (edited 5 months ago) to random

I'm pleased to see this Stolpersteine carefully put back after the cycle lane was improved.

It marks the last place Lucie Konzack voluntarily lived before she was murdered.

I gave it a polish this morning - as a tiny gesture against fascism.

steely_glint, 1 year ago to random

A long time ago, when webrtc was young, we had a small standards war over which codec should be the video codec. After a long battle, we selected 2 and made them both mandatory.

Fast forward to this week. I got a new camera board (VIM4) which supports one of them(h264) in hardware. So with a couple of tweaks my app worked.
The Vim4 also supports h265 - which is 'better' so I thought I would give it a go.

steely_glint, 11 months ago (edited 11 months ago) to random

I know this is the wrong time to ask, but can anyone recommend a fediverse instance for a long-running local (Manchester UK) sci-fi virtual book club? (a few posts a month I'd expect)

https://mcrscifi.wordpress.com/
Thanks...

Boosts welcome.
(edited to clarify the fediverse aspect)

steely_glint, 11 months ago to random

For my #webrtc followers - here are the slides/video for a talk I did about getting low latency video from racing cars and robots.

https://pi.pe/Moving-WebRTC-part1-kworld/

• and an extra video:
  https://pi.pe/video/trainingrace.mov

steely_glint, 7 months ago to random

About 12 years ago I gave a 5 minute talk (at Bletchley Park! ) about protecting (video) calls from impersonation attacks in a user friendly way.

I see that Apple have now launched an addition to iMessage which does exactly that.

Ostensibly it protects the user from fraud - but I wonder if it can detect state sponsored snooping.

steely_glint, 1 month ago to random

"it takes the pencil experience to a whole new level" - Do these folks listen to themselves ?

steely_glint, 6 months ago to random

Another surprise from @thecontinent “The resolution, passed by consensus, would see authority for global tax rules pass from the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) to the UN.” Was news to me and I read the FT.

steely_glint, 6 months ago to random

Sunak is copying Thatcher's trick of appointing the weakest candidate in order to strengthen his own position.

On that basis, expect to see Liz Truss as Chancellor by Christmas.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FjE080TGEEk

steely_glint, 7 months ago to random

A lesson we need to keep learning...

"one of the tragedies of WeWork was that venture capital made it a much worse business rather than a better one"

from :

https://www.theinformation.com/articles/softbank-and-the-real-tragedy-of-wework

steely_glint, 7 months ago to random

Reminding myself that sometimes the most powerful thing to do is nothing - i.e. not retreating or going half way to meet the (unreasonable) opposition.

This only works if you are on relatively firm ground and time is somewhat on your side.

Or like Breq in the Ancillary series, you are angry and right and that's enough for you.

steely_glint, 6 months ago to random

@craignewmark you might want to look at sponsoring @thecontinent - it is a real impressive news sheet delivered via WhatsApp covering African news from an African point of view. I am -not- the target audience, but I think it is excellent.

steely_glint, 8 months ago to random

I spent most of yesterday trying to track down a nasty repetitive crackle on an audio feed from our prototype 5g camera.

I changed a lot of code and captured a lot of samples and couldn't find the cause.

This morning I listened to it again and recognised the 'beat' - of a GSM registration. I had the 5g antenna about 10cm from the mic and it was getting radio interference.

I switched to a longer shielded mic cable and the problem is gone.

Sigh.

steely_glint, 3 months ago to random

I'm delighted to find another 'usefully wrong' person.

I have a small cadre of people I follow whose opinions are always wrong.

Any issue I'm not sure about I wait for one of these 4 or 5 folks to chime in on it and that helps me clarify my thinking on a tricky topic.

Find yours, they are an absolute godsend in these busy times.

steely_glint, 8 months ago to random

I wonder if it is too late to create a fediverse thing like Latin has where you can indicate the expected answer to your question. (Admittedly only yes or no indications are possible in Latin but the concept feels like it could save a lot of fuss)

steely_glint, 1 month ago to random

Yesterday's trip back from Krakow via Warsaw was painless - I got some work done, read some more of my book, bought/listened to a new album (Tyla as reviewed in @thecontinent ).

The ride did make me appreciate the sheer comfort of the German ICE trains though. The Polish #CrossBorderRail rollingstock is a bit antique - no wifi and not the best seats, clean and punctual though, so I can't really complain.

steely_glint, 7 months ago to Matrix

I think I'm (almost) alone in believing that a bit of extra distance between the #matrix foundation and @element is probably a good thing.

Separating protocols from implementations is important - as we are slowly realising in the the #webrtc world.

I also wonder if the timing is in any way related to the UK's passing of the Online Safety Bill. (matrix.org is a UK Community Interest Company).

steely_glint, 4 months ago (edited 4 months ago) to random

For those of you who base your (negative) view on #java 6 (or perhaps 8) I submit that there is modern #java21 you haven't seen and might like.

https://github.com/steely-glint/fxess/blob/4d7a212cec99b7326509f13c65232a615ca7aa8b/src/main/java/uk/co/westhawk/fxess/NextSun.java#L130

Those 20 lines grab a weather forecast, update the expires, parse the resulting json into a cache list of 'sunny hours' - then map-reduce the cache into a prediction of when it will next be sunny and for how long.

(used as info for car charging decisions)

All of this was much uglier in Java6