Rolandt

Bei den persönlichen Freisprecheinrichtungen hat Poly viele Jahre lang das Feld relativ kampflos dem Mitbewerber Jabra überlassen, kontert jetzt aber endlich mit einer sehr gelungenen Reihe neuer Geräte. Das Sync 20 ist das kleinste und ich konnte es ein paar Tage testen, übrigens mit Clubhouse. Ich habe es immer dann benutzt, wenn ich die Scheffin mithören lassen wollte.

Der Sync 20 ist gegen den Jabra Speak 510 positioniert, aber ich vergleiche es hier mir mit dem leistungsfähigeren und teureren Speak 750. Und dabei zeigen sich mir ein paar Vorteile in der Bedienung.

Auf der Vorderseite hat der Sync 20 fünf Tasten. Die erste ist programmierbar und löst bei mir Play/Paus aus. Es folgen Leiser, Stummschalten, Lauter und Auflegen. An der rechten Seite gibt es einen Bluetooth-Button, eine USB-A-Buchse und der Ein/Ausschalter. Links gibt es eine versenkte Öse für eine Trageschlaufe, das gut 70 cm lange USB-Verbindungkabel ist auf der Unterseite sicher verstaut.

Die USB-A-Buchse verwandelt den Sync 20 in eine Powerbank. Hier kann man sein Smartphone unterwegs aus dem 3200 mAh großen Akku nachladen — eine nützliche Zusatzfunktion.

Ich habe die Version ohne BT600-Dongle und Teams-Zertifierung, das USB-Kabel hat einen USB-C-Stecker. Die Version mit einem USB-A Stecker kostet aktuell gerade mal 111 Euro..

Wie bei den Jabra Speak dient das USB-Kabel nicht nur zum Aufladen des Akkus sondern auch als direkte Verbindung zum PC bzw. Mac. Man sollte sich deshalb den am besten passenden Stecker aussuchen. Im Zweifel nimmt man die Version mit Teams-Zertifizierung, das hat keinen Nachteil.

Der Lautsprecher des Sync 20 klingt voller als der des Speak 750, die Stimme wird von drei statt einem Mikrofon aufgenommen. Ich habe einmal zwei Vergleichsaufnahmen in meinem sehr "halligen" Büro gemacht:

Ich finde die Sync-Aufnahme trockener als die Speak-Aufnahme. Man hört weniger Reverb aus dem Raum. An die Qualität eines Headset-Boommikrofon kommen beide nicht heran.

Mich spricht das Design des Sync 20 nicht besonders an, aber es ist sehr funktional. Das LED-Band leuchtet bläulich, wenn eine Verbindung besteht. Eine aktive Gesprächsverbindung wird grün angezeigt, eine stummgeschaltete rot. Das ist sehr intuitiv. Da sich die Taste zum Stummschalten in der Mitte befindet, muss man sie weniger suchen als auf dem runden Speak 750. Die verwendeten Materialien sind freundlicher. Oben ist der Sync 20 mit Stoff bespannt, unten verwendet Poly Recycling-Kunststoff.

Der Sync 20+ hat anders als der Jabra Speaker keine Möglichkeit, einen Bluetooth-Adapter zu verstauen. Poly hat dafür eine kleine Tasche im Transportcase vorgesehen. Auf dem Smartphone wird der Lautsprecher mit PLT Hub verwaltet, für PC und Mac gibt es die neue Poly Lens Software.

Here’s something I do often, which is to go off into the weeds and try to fix something that suddenly broke. Except this time it’s not cloud (it’s on-premises) and it’s not someone else’s (it’s mine, through and through, although most of the dependencies and stack are in widespread use).

It’s also something pretty low-level and borderline inscrutable…

Problem Statement

For quite some time now, I’ve maintained my own Node-RED cross-platform container image, which I use pretty much everywhere.

I started building those images for home automation, and they currently support arm32v6 (Pi Zero), arm32v7 (Pi 2/3+, my ODROID-U2 and most other modern 32-bit ARM chips), aarch64 (Pi 4 and some cloud hosts) and, of course, amd64.

But while upgrading my home automation setup on my ODROID late last Sunday, I had the nasty surprise of finding that my latest container crashed with an Illegal instruction (core dumped) message.

strace was useless as it spewed too much information, and export NODE_DEBUG=module didn’t afford immediate clues since whatever happened was immediately after module loads, so I pulled the same container onto a Raspberry Pi 3B I have on my desk, and it ran fine.

Plus the ZigBee dongle I use mysteriously stopped working on one of the USB ports on Monday morning (always a nice way to start your week), so I started wondering what was wrong with the ODROID itself.

After all, it’s been in service for over eight years now, which is no mean feat, and it has a rather niche Exynos CPU, so I started suspecting it might just be obsolete by now.

To add to this predicament, although I usually keep older container versions around, Murphy’s Law (and excess confidence) had ensured I hadn’t done that this time around¹, so half of my home automation (the bits that relied on Node-RED, like ZigBee bridging to HomeKit) was dead, including part of my office lighting.

So I had to fix this ASAP.

Parenthesis: My Current Build Process

I’ve been doing ARM cross-compilation for a long time, but over the past couple of years the technique I’ve come to favor is to use qemu-user-static on Linux and using “wrap” containers. In short, this relies on registering QEMU on the host as a binfmt_misc handler and injecting the respective qemu-$(ARCH)-static binary into a base container², which is then invoked upon build³.

Since armv6 has been falling out of favor (and I still have a Pi Zero W “running” Node-RED) and there were a number of years when getting an up-to-date, native armv6 or armv7 build of nodejs was almost impossible, I’ve taken to building the full stack (nodejs, Node-RED and all associated binaries), which takes a few hours for all the architectures⁴.

It’s usually a “fire and forget” thing I do on one of my machines, and is usually faster and much less hassle than building on native hardware due to I/O performance alone. Still, it’s slow enough that I usually only have fresh containers four to eight hours later (depending on build).

Side Note About docker buildx

Before someone writes in asking why I don’t use docker buildx which would be a lot neater, allow me to say a few things:

• Yes, I have tried it every few months.
• No, it doesn’t work for me across both 4.5.x and 5.x kernels, on public cloud or on my i5/i7 hosts, because it keeps crashing randomly.
• Yes, I tried it again this week (Docker version 20.10.5, build 55c4c88) and it bombed out on both the arm32v6 and arm32v7 builds.
• When it works, I find it a lot slower than my current process (partially because it tries to do all the builds at once, and partially because it does not, by default, use all CPU cores).

Also, I lost an entire day (in wall clock time, around 2 hours spread throughout the day) trying to sort out the above during the rest of my investigation.

Binary Sleuthing

My initial suspicion (based on both the literal error message and past experience) was that a QEMU upgrade might have broken the final binaries somehow, and that the ODROID‘s Exynos chip might not like the binary’s instruction set – this usually happened in the past with floating point extensions, and the ODROID reports itself as armv7l, with a typical binary stating support for VFP3 but not NEON:

# readelf -A /bin/sh
Attribute Section: aeabi
File Attributes
  Tag_CPU_name: "7-A"
  Tag_CPU_arch: v7
  Tag_CPU_arch_profile: Application
  Tag_ARM_ISA_use: Yes
  Tag_THUMB_ISA_use: Thumb-2
  Tag_FP_arch: VFPv3-D16
  Tag_ABI_PCS_wchar_t: 4
  Tag_ABI_FP_rounding: Needed
  Tag_ABI_FP_denormal: Needed
  Tag_ABI_FP_exceptions: Needed
  Tag_ABI_FP_number_model: IEEE 754
  Tag_ABI_align_needed: 8-byte
  Tag_ABI_align_preserved: 8-byte, except leaf SP
  Tag_ABI_enum_size: int
  Tag_ABI_VFP_args: VFP registers
  Tag_CPU_unaligned_access: v6

…and my custom node builds (which had previously worked) were earmarked as having NEON instructions:

# readelf -A /usr/local/bin/node 
Attribute Section: aeabi
File Attributes
  Tag_CPU_name: "7-A"
  Tag_CPU_arch: v7
  Tag_CPU_arch_profile: Application
  Tag_ARM_ISA_use: Yes
  Tag_THUMB_ISA_use: Thumb-2
  Tag_FP_arch: VFPv3
  Tag_Advanced_SIMD_arch: NEONv1
  Tag_ABI_PCS_wchar_t: 4
  Tag_ABI_FP_rounding: Needed
  Tag_ABI_FP_denormal: Needed
  Tag_ABI_FP_exceptions: Needed
  Tag_ABI_FP_number_model: IEEE 754
  Tag_ABI_align_needed: 8-byte
  Tag_ABI_enum_size: int
  Tag_ABI_VFP_args: VFP registers
  Tag_ABI_optimization_goals: Aggressive Size
  Tag_CPU_unaligned_access: v6

Having dealt with compiler vagaries before, I knew that this might have to do with either compiler defaults or auto-detected QEMU features, so I decided to go back and check exactly where on my build process this had been broken.

But first, I tried installing and running nodejs 14.16.0 in a stock alpine 3.13.4 container on the ODROID:

# readelf -A /usr/bin/node 
Attribute Section: aeabi
File Attributes
  Tag_CPU_name: "7-A"
  Tag_CPU_arch: v7
  Tag_CPU_arch_profile: Application
  Tag_ARM_ISA_use: Yes
  Tag_THUMB_ISA_use: Thumb-2
  Tag_FP_arch: VFPv3
  Tag_ABI_PCS_wchar_t: 4
  Tag_ABI_FP_rounding: Needed
  Tag_ABI_FP_denormal: Needed
  Tag_ABI_FP_exceptions: Needed
  Tag_ABI_FP_number_model: IEEE 754
  Tag_ABI_align_needed: 8-byte
  Tag_ABI_enum_size: int
  Tag_ABI_VFP_args: VFP registers
  Tag_ABI_optimization_goals: Aggressive Size
  Tag_CPU_unaligned_access: v6

And guess what, it crashed immediately upon execution (even without any input):

$ /usr/bin/node 


#
# Fatal error in , line 0
# unreachable code
#
#
#
#FailureMessage Object: 0xbec1220c
Illegal instruction (core dumped)

So the next step was to downgrade to Alpine 3.12 (which ships with nodejs 12.21.0). That worked, but, like my custom builds, crashed when running Node-RED.

Persons of Interest

Assuming my custom builds were somehow magically better than stock alpine packages, there were multiple suspects that I could try in descending order of complexity/overhead:

• The alpine base images themselves, which I had bumped to 3.13 recently, and might have different compiler defaults (I have to use alpine as ubuntu doesn’t support arm32v6).
• The qemu-user-static version, which I had also updated to 5.1.0.
• nodejs itself, which is finicky as heck to build and highly sensitive to compiler options (which was at 14.15.3).
• And maybe, just maybe, Node-RED itself and its modules.

Since alpine 3.13.4 now ships with 14.16.0, I decided to (for science) try using that instead of my own custom builds as well.

The Hours

So I started trying different builds – which took me around 15 minutes every few hours to start and later pull down to the ODROID and a Pi to test.

This added up to a lot of wall time (in fact, this took me the entire week to sort out)⁵.

A great (but perplexing) find was that my customarm32v6containers ran perfectly (even if slower) on the ODROID, which allowed me to get my home automation back up on Monday afternoon.

So I tagged it as node-red/stable on docker-compose and started going through a number of combinations:

And when I wrote “Crashes”, I meant that it crashed while running Node-RED, for I soon realized that my custom nodejs builds would run fine (or at least give me a usable prompt) nearly all the time.

This took me the best of four days, and by that time I was starting to think there had to be some other cause–after all, nodejs is a major pain to build, but I was becoming skeptical of it being the culprit on all cases, as well as either alpine or qemu.

The Weeds

Despite the failure of the alpine stock build, my suspicions turned to the extra modules I build and deploy with Node-RED, many of which (like most of npm, really) are poorly maintained one-offs with weird dependencies.

Any one of these might tip nodejs over during Node-RED startup:

    "dependencies": {
        "@node-red-contrib-themes/midnight-red": "1.4.7",
        "node-red-admin": "0.2.7",
        "node-red-contrib-dir2files": "0.3.0",
        "node-red-contrib-fs-ops": "1.6.0",
        "node-red-contrib-homebridge-automation": "0.0.79",
        "node-red-contrib-httpauth": "1.0.12",
        "node-red-contrib-lgtv": "1.1.0",
        "node-red-contrib-light-scheduler": "0.0.17",
        "node-red-contrib-linux-diskio": "0.2.4",
        "node-red-contrib-linux-memory": "0.8.4",
        "node-red-contrib-linux-network-stats": "0.2.4",
        "node-red-contrib-meobox": "1.0.0",
        "node-red-contrib-moment": "4.0.0",
        "node-red-contrib-msg-speed": "2.0.0",
        "node-red-contrib-os": "0.2.0",
        "node-red-contrib-persist": "1.1.1",
        "node-red-contrib-redis": "1.3.9",
        "node-red-contrib-wemo-emulator": "1.0.1",
        "node-red-dashboard": "2.28.2",
        "node-red-node-base64": "0.3.0",
        "node-red-node-daemon": "0.2.1",
        "node-red-node-msgpack": "1.2.1",
        "node-red-node-prowl": "0.0.10",
        "node-red-node-pushover": "0.0.24",
        "node-red-node-rbe": "0.5.0",
        "node-red-node-smooth": "0.1.2",
        "node-red-node-sqlite": "0.6.0",
        "node-red-node-tail": "0.3.0",
        "node-red-node-ui-list": "0.3.4",
        "node-red-node-ui-table": "0.3.10",
        "node-red-node-ui-vega": "0.1.3",
        "node-red": "1.2.9"
    },

So I pulled up my commit logs and started looking at the changes I had made to the Node-RED bundles my build ships with (many of them prompted by dependabot, which is great to keep track of updates), and ranked them according to criticality, hackiness and complexity of their dependencies:

• sqlite, which is one of the largest single dependencies, takes a long time to build as a module and breaks on musl around once a year anyway.
• cheerio, which brings a lot of baggage with it and that I actually stopped using due to it crashing during my last hack.
• ssdp-discover, which is fairly low level and that I relied on to sniff out Chromecast SSDP traffic (and would tie in nicely with Node-RED crashing during or just after module loads).
• lgtv, which was essential for me to automate my LG TV before it got basic HomeKit support.

These had also been recently updated, so they were the most likely suspects.

I started doing (much shorter, but still slow) builds reverting (or removing) each of them from the bundles.

And guess what, it wasn’t any one of them specifically. Some combinations of modules worked, others didn’t.

I ended up just bisecting package.json and doing a sort of binary search until I had removed a particular set of Linux OS statistics modules that I use to build CPU and I/O charts (node-red-contrib-linux-*).

I was quite thoroughly convinced they were to blame as they crashed the arm32v7 build but yielded a working one when removed, but I then did another test: I tried adding another complex module to the mix (node-red-contrib-chart-image, which has a bunch of cairo-related dependencies), and lo and behold, the resulting arm32v7 container crashes again upon execution (and yes, arm32v6 works fine).

Partial Conclusions

I’m now pretty sure that there is something wrong with nodejs 14 on arm32v7 (at least on the ODROID), as both my custom builds and the builds that ship with alpine 3.13.4 crash on the ODROID at various points.

This might be specific to alpine and the Exynos chip, but I don’t have enough data yet. I’d need to try 3 or 4 more builds to make sure and avoid false positives.

But whatever is happening is definitely triggered by the extension modules I’m loading into Node-RED, as nodejs seems to fail whenever I cross some kind of critical threshold of loaded modules.

Plus I had at least one instance where Node-RED loaded completely and flows ran for a couple more seconds (not sure if that was just slowness in hitting whatever made it crash, as the ODROID has a lot of stuff running on it).

Next Steps

Since I really want to figure out what is going on I’m now looking at things like default stack sizes and other things I can shove into CFLAGS, but since I have to go on with my life (and really wanted to have spent this weeks’ evenings messing with Godot), there will be a few changes:

• Until I sort this out, I’ll be running arm32v6 builds on the ODROID.
• I’ll be thoroughly testing the arm32v6 version of the native nodejs 16.14.0 package from alpine 3.13.4 for Node-RED, homebridge, etc. and skipping my custom builds whenever possible, because they take too long and add extra testing and uncertainty to the mix.
• I’ll also start planning to phase out the ODROID-U2 in favor of something else–probably a Z83ii, of which I have two, and which are quite likely to work with every single amd64 container I ever build.

Using a Raspberry Pi is extremely unlikely, as what is running on the ODROID is there because:

• It had 2GB of RAM eight years ago, and most of my Pis can’t fit the workloads in RAM.
• It has built-in EMMC storage that can handle a significant amount of writes, and I don’t want to have the same containers either pounding on an SD card or forcing me to “invest” on a pi with SSD support.

I might also try debian or ubuntu as a base, but that will mean orphaning the older Pi setups, so I’m not really keen on it.

Lessons Learned

• Being an early adopter will always come back to bite you (even if it’s eight years later).
• Before replacing “production” containers in one-of-a-kind hardware, tag the current version and keep it around until you’re happy the new version works.
• Use tried and tested builds whenever possible (my custom builds made sense when ARM was unfashionable, but I can now get fresh, LTS versions of nodejs, so it’s time to phase them out).
• It’s not always DNS (this is probably the biggest takeaway, for all of those people out there who like to say things like “It’s always DNS”).
• Computers are finicky and temperamental.
• nodejs doubly so, in any form.

Well, maybe not all the above are true.

But this turned out to be a pretty intense week, and I haven’t written up the half of it, so take it with a grain of salt.

For reasons I can’t fathom, the band Stars completely escaped my attention until very recently. Despite the band having been around for 20 years, being Montréal-based, and having a Patreon that states, in part:

We don’t believe if you have more money you should have more access. We are socialists. The meek are getting ready. We love you equally so we have one price to open the passenger door. 

Also, their Are You With Me? melts my insides a little every time I listen to it.

Spring is finally here and everyone wants to get outside. The next wave of the pandemic means that restaurants can no longer serve inside, which of course also shows one of the shortages that existed before the pandemic: there’s no public washrooms.

How do you get around the city, get outside by yourself or in your “people bubble” and spend any amount of time patronizing local businesses if there are no public washrooms?

In Vancouver public washrooms availability has fallen to large stores, coffee shops and restaurants to maintain and take care of as part of their private businesses. Providing  true publicly accessible washrooms in Metro Vancouver’s business areas and along the transit routes are pretty well non existent.

There are two ways that public washrooms are provided in the public realm: they can be publicly accessible and paid for by taxpayers, or they can be privately owned but available to customers. We do the latter, and that impacts families, homeless, disabled, seniors and pretty much everyone that needs to go.

Author  of How Public Toilets Fail Our Private Needs Lezlie Lowe writes that Canadian municipalities have really left the heavy lifting of washroom availability to the private sector. During the pandemic that has been a challenge for many businesses that have had to shutter washrooms due to Covid restrictions, and also shown that while there are public washrooms in many parks, those parks are not located in commercial areas and along transit lines where people also need those services.

There’s a real equity issue with the lack of providing public washrooms, and Globe and Mail journalist Andre Picard sees it as a human rights issue. Everyone should have the access to clean washrooms and to dignity.

We’ve seen during Covid times the hardship for the homeless who no longer had the unfettered availability of public washrooms in parks, community centres or libraries to use in their daily lives.

Demographics also show that the provision of public washrooms is just the right thing to do. In 2017, 22 per cent or one in five Canadians was disabled, and 47 percent of people over 75 years was disabled. In 2014 15 percent of the Canadian population was over 65 years of age. That will rise to 23 percent or 9.5 million people within nine years.

Mobility is a basic piece in individual well-being. For people to use commercial areas and to use transit we simply must incorporate safe, comfortable and convenient washrooms so that everyone can spend time in areas and feel included. It is very much an equity issue.

There is a parity issue as well.

In a study undertaken by the University of British Columbia in 2019, women spend longer in public washroom lineups because women are wearing more clothes and are caregiving children and older adults who they assist in using the facilities. In the study if equal speed in accessing facilities is a factor, then more washroom stalls need to be installed for women, often in a ratio of two female stalls for one male stall.

Toon Dreesen in the Ottawa Business Journal identified an area of Ottawa that has the cities “traditional” commercial streets and markets  and was bounded by The Rideau and Ottawa Rivers. In this busy commercial and tourist hub there were only 16 public washrooms.

In Ottawa every new business must provide washroom facilities for the public and for staff, but the location of them often make them inaccessible for those with mobility challenges. A group called  Ottawa “GottaGo” has started a campaign to have more public washrooms created, citing tourism, an aging population and the need to accommodate people with disabilities.

GottaGo looks at London’s public “loos” as examples, where usage costs about fifty cents, as well as public washrooms in France which can cost a few dollars in the bigger cities. These washrooms are staffed and cleaned to ensure safety. Like Vancouver, Ottawa’s Light Rapid Transit system has few washrooms, and those are at only four stops. None of those stops are downtown.

Why is it that we are locating public washrooms in parks? Why are they not part of essential street furniture, located on plazas that can also offer newspaper stands, coffee bars, and be part of available amenities?

Is it time to rewrite what development cost levies can fund, the money that is negotiated from developers to be put forward for the area’s ongoing  livability and life?

The City of London takes their public washrooms or  “loos” very seriously. Rachel Cole-Wilkin leads a tour of London’s history of public toilets, and you can take a look at the YouTube video below to see some of the highlights. By the way that is a sink not a toilet plunger Ms. Cole-Wilkin is carrying to ensure that people on the tour can track where she is as they walk the streets of London.

This post cites a study that suggests that audio conferencing might be better than video conferencing for learning. "Taking 198 people, in 99 pairs, doing 30 minute sessions and six tasks, (the researchers) found that video dampened or impaired then ability to speak in turns and get the problems solved." Why? Audio "allows us to take an almost intimate role in the conversation," suggests Donald Clark. "It also reduces cognitive load for novices, a major inhibitor in learning." If this is true, I suggested on Twitter, then it should also be true for in-person learning. But probably there's more going on than was captured in this study.

As vaccinations rise, lockdowns lift, and consumers once again feel confident, expect an economic surge in the US in the spring and summer of 2021. But the new economy will not look like what we had before. Three things will drive the economic resurgence. First, at least among Americans with middle incomes and above, savings … Continued

The post Opportunities in the economic restart appeared first on without bullshit.

Most organizations adopt agile today not because it will improve their efficiency or effectiveness but because not doing so is considered irrational or outside of norms.

The real problem being solved (or avoided) is that organizations that are traditionally very conservative must now be seen to “fail fast, take risks, and innovate first” in order to compete for social and political resources.

One lens we can use to see this happening is the US stock market. Take, for instance, the rising valuations of tech companies such as Tesla, Facebook, etc. over the last decade. To compete in this market (often directly tied to executive compensation), organizations must find a way to be seen as innovative, adaptable, and Agile.

By adopting Agile forms (mostly in name only using models such as SAFe or Scrum), the organizations will look from the outside as if they are conforming to external expectations. This will solve the first external legitimacy problem, but at the expense of internal efficiency and effectiveness. Internally these same organizations are made up of structures that reinforce conservative decision-making and risk avoidance.

When Internal legitimacy and external legitimacy no longer match, people are forced to find a way to appease two conflicting masters.

Without providing internal legitimacy for innovative risk (Psychological Safety, safe to fail, etc.), any form of Agile (or Lean, or TQM, etc.) will be adopted in name only. The tools available will be used only superficially and not adapted to their specific environment. Research shows that this consistently causes greater inefficiency and ineffectiveness.

To actually see effectiveness and efficiency gains, you must first solve the underlying conflict of (internal and external) legitimacy.

If you solve this underlying problem, Agile (or Lean, or TQM, etc.) will provide a structure within which an organization can adapt to their context and see real efficiency and effectiveness innovations.

Without solving it, any “transformation” is doomed to failure before it starts.

Behind GitHub’s new authentication token formats

This is a really smart design. GitHub's new tokens use a type prefix of "ghp_" or "gho_" or a few others depending on the type of token, to help support mechanisms that scan for accidental token publication. A further twist is that the last six characters of the tokens are a checksum, which means token scanners can reliably distinguish a real token from a coincidental string without needing to check back with the GitHub database. "One other neat thing about _ is it will reliably select the whole token when you double click on it" - what a useful detail!

Via Hacker News

Three packages of arrived to my door last month and I realized they all have something in common, they’re all visualizations of data and algorithms, so I thought I’d share.

W.E.B. Du Bois’s Data Portraits: Visualizing Black America

At the turn of the twentieth century W.E.B. Du Bois set out to visualize the black population of Georgia after the Civil War. These colorful charts and graphs, presented at the 1900 Paris Exposition, tell the story of the racial divide in America. Their creator, their place in history, and their uniqueness is what elevates them and makes them works of art. I’ve always wanted to have non-digital versions of these handmade data visualizations so when Princeton Architectural Press released a collection, I snapped it up.

Smoke 1 by Monica Dinculescu

My friend Monica opened a store for her generative art. While I was happy to offer a signal-boosting ❤️ of support on Twitter, when I her piece called Smoke 1, I bought it without a second thought. What I love about this piece is that it answers the question “Can math be art?” with a resounding “Yes.” Often times art is taking something existing and knowing what levers (or in this case variables) you can tweak to produce something beautiful.

Plus Equals Vol. 1 zine by Rob Weychert

Building off his previous exploration on Sol LeWitt’s ‘Incomplete Open Cubes’, Rob Weychert is back with a new zine called Plus Equals. What I love about Rob’s work is the depth to which he explores a single form in its entirety and this little zine doesn’t disappoint. It’s all available online, but the zine format is so charming.

I’m glad sanity prevailed, but we also need to take into account that as an indirect outcome of the entire thing Oracle managed to alienate a lot of people from Java as a platform (the only good thing for me was that Google started shifting to Kotlin as a preemptive measure).

Greed doesn’t ensure long-term success.

Update: Serendipitously, Microsoft announced own OpenJDK builds today.

It was windy and snowy yesterday in Zeeland. We watched the waves and leaned into the heavy winds on the sea dike. This photo I took from Vlissingen’s old harbour head, looking out over the Western Scheldt. I like the composition with the ship, and the bright line in the clouds countering the lines from the harbour jetty.

There are millions of bloggers on the internet today who writes on millions of niche as they prefer, but only a few of them are successful.

Every day so many bloggers start blogging to earn money, but they can’t do the same, due to their poor strategy of marketing blogs. As a beginner, you should know the right strategies to be a successful blogger.

Usually, beginners make so many mistakes in their blogs, that’s why I suggest to all new bloggers to read these useful blogging tips & be a successful blogger:

I have come here with 10 useful tips for you that you can use while blogging:

1. Follow your passion & keep patience:

Choose a niche about which you have knowledge & Passionate to write. You can’t make money by writing on any topic/niche about which you don’t know. You won’t be able to earn quick, you will have to wait for it. If you want to make money from blogging then you’ll have to understand the right online marketing strategies apart from blogging.

2.Build social media profiles:

Today social media is the power of driving traffic to your website more than the search engines. It will take some time to drive traffic, you’ll have to connect with peoples on social media regarding your niche, keep sharing the links of your posts regularly & establish a good relationship with your connections.

plan a proper social media marketing strategy for your posts. If you will target social media platforms like Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, Pinterest then you will be able to get a good amount of traffic.

Social media also helps to rank your site on search engines, but don’t forget it won’t happen quickly. For more check out Benefits of social media marketing for bloggers.

3.Build Blog community:

Make your blog a community of visitors. when a new visitor comes on your blog make them feel a part of your blog by your familiar content.

4. Backlinks Building:

Link buildings are useful for search engines. Always try to get more backlinks from your blogs by creating a genuine/proper strategy of link building.

we’ll discuss more backlinks in the next blog.

5. Write exclusive contents:

”Content” is the most important part of a blog. where content can make a blog stand out in the

crowd, However, it can also disable a blog from entering the crowd.

Try to write unique content on your blog but don’t copy it. you can get some content ideas by checking out other blogger’s posts in your niche, but you are not allowed to copy & paste contents.

6. Relations with other bloggers:

Try to be in touch with other bloggers by sharing, commenting on their blogs and through social media. You will come to know the new & important aspects of blogging from experienced bloggers.

You can also select some bloggers having good followers/connections for influencer marketing for your blog. so that, your blog will reach & seen by a large number of audiences.

7. Get the reader’s opinion:

Make your readers feel good by asking their opinions. it will increase comments on your blog and you will also come to know what your readers want. Work hard to satisfy your readers by accepting their opinions. Try to get more engagement on your site as it helps to rank your post. Always ask your readers to share your blogs on their social media platforms.

8. Reply to all comments:

My other tip is, always reply to comments of your readers to be in touch with them. Make your people feel good by replying & hitting likes on their comments so that, they will comment again & again on your post because you give the response to their comments & you’ll also enjoy engagement on your posts.

9. Use SEO friendly Theme:

It’s easy to choose a theme but it’s not easy to find an SEO friendly theme. An SEO friendly theme will help you to get ranked. You can choose WordPress themes as they are SEO friendly & will help you to rank your posts.

WordPress has both premium & free themes. It’s better to spend a little money and go for paid themes. If you are budget concerned than you can use WordPress free themes.

10. Give a unique title:

A good/unique title makes your post attractive & genuine. You need to give a unique & extraordinary title (must be related to your post’s matter) to your post. As we know ”content can rank a post on top, content can rank a post to bottom”. The title should contain important keywords to appear on the search engines, It should be SEO friendly & understandable or reader’s friendly.

Now I hope these tips will be useful for you. Let me know your opinion(if any) in the comment box. , what you want me to write about?

Keep sharing, show some love

A good day is always better with the right soundtrack—especially when you can seamlessly bounce your podcasts and playlists from room to room as you move through your home, go out to the backyard, and eventually make your way to the park with your tunes in tow. Normally, you’d need to juggle a few different audio systems and speakers as you move through your day, swapping your multiroom speaker system for a portable Bluetooth option as you head outdoors. But with the new Sonos Roam speaker, you’ll need only one.

Not really surprising except for it having taken this long.

Node-RED is already wildly popular as such things go and needed more of a product steer to it, so I’m quite curious to see how it goes from here.

For The New York Times, Kashmir Hill describes the implications of facial recognition becoming a thing that everyone just has:

Retail chains that get their hands on technology like this could try to use it to more effectively blacklist shoplifters, a use Rite Aid has already piloted (but abandoned). In recent years, surveillance companies casually rolled out automated license-plate readers that track cars’ locations, which are frequently used to solve crimes; such companies could easily add face reading as a feature. The advertising industry that tracks your every movement online would be able to do so in the real world: That scene from “Minority Report” in which Tom Cruise’s character flees through a shopping mall of targeted pop-up ads — “John Anderton, you could use a Guinness right about now!” — could be our future.

No thank you.

Tags: Clearview, facial recognition, New York Times, privacy

10 years ago today was April 6, 2011.

Windows XP was still everywhere. Smartphones were tiny, and not everyone had one yet. New operating systems were coming out left and right. Android phones had physical buttons, and webOS seemed to have a bright future. There was general agreement that the internet would bring about a better world, if only we could give everyone unrestricted access to it.

This was the world into which GNOME 3.0 was released.

I can’t speak to what it was like inside the project back then, this is all way before my time. I was still in high school, and though I wasn’t personally contributing to any free software projects yet, I remember it being a very exciting moment.

3.0 was a turning point. It was a clear sign that we’d not only caught up to, but confidently overtaken the proprietary desktops. It was the promise that everything old and crufty about computing could be overcome and replaced with something better.

As an aspiring designer and free software activist it was incredibly inspiring to me personally, and I know I’m not alone in that. There’s an entire generation of us who are here because of GNOME 3, and are proud to continue working in that tradition.

Here’s to permanent revolution. Here’s to the hundreds who worked on GNOME 3.

Alastair Creelman points to Lucy Biederman's article Goodbye, Zoom Fatigue in Inside Higher Ed pointing to how online learning classes can work without Zoom, including such techniques as communicating on Google chat, a course taught entirely on Slack, and a course where students maintain individual blogs. It boggles the mind to think that these are being introduced as the new thing we can do instead of Zoom. It's like nobody has a memory that extends beyond March of 2020.

I’m not sure what it is with me and side projects at the moment, but I started another one today called privacy.garden. I’m a big fan of news aggregator websites, and thought it was about time there was one related to online privacy that I would visit regularly.

Unlike extinction.fyi, for which I manually update an XML file hosted via GitHub Pages, privacy.garden is an installation of WordPress hosted via a DigitalOcean droplet. I’m using the extraordinarily simple (and free!) WP RSS Aggregator plugin to import feeds from various privacy-related blogs.

The rather comically-bad combined emoji logo was created in about 30 seconds using this guide. I’ll replace it, hopefully with a custom-designed one from someone who knows what they’re doing. I may also tinker with the layout.

There is, of course, an RSS feed for the feeds that the aggregator pulls in which you can access at: https://privacy.garden/rss-feed

If you’ve got suggestions of blogs and other news sites to aggregate, please let me know!

This post is Day 98 of my #100DaysToOffload challenge. Want to get involved? Find out more at 100daystooffload.com.

Sometimes it’s as if you can almost sense its nearness — that perfect to-do system, built on OmniFocus, Things, Asana, Todoist, or one of the many others. It’ll take just a little more thinking and tweaking. Rationalize your tagging system, change how you think about due dates, maybe write some scripts or create more templates, and you’ll have it.

And it will be so glorious! And you’ll never have to deal with this again. (You swear you’re not one of those people who futz with their to-do thing just because it’s fun.)

But Nope

Here’s what you need to know: it’s a mirage.

I know, I know. How can that be, when it feels so damn near? We’re just talking about lists and a few ways — time and tags, for instance — of slicing them up. I know perfection is right here. Give me another day! I’ve so got this!

But it’s not around the corner. It’s really not. There’s no perfect system for anybody. All of these apps are pretty good, and you may find one fits you better than another, but you’re not ever going to make it the perfect system for you. Even if you started from scratch and wrote your own, you’re not getting the perfect system.

There’s no getting out of this fact: these apps are all going to take more constant input from you than you’d wish for. They don’t take away the need for some amount of self-discipline to use them effectively.

I’m so very, very sorry.

[Reposting from my weekly reddit tip for Surface users]

Need to download Surface firmware and drivers fast? These direct download links will help.

Surface Book series:

• http://aka.ms/SurfaceBook3/18362
• http://aka.ms/SurfaceBook2/18362
• http://aka.ms/SurfaceBook2/17763
• http://aka.ms/SurfaceBook/18362
• http://aka.ms/SurfaceBook/17763

Surface Go series:

• http://aka.ms/SurfaceGo2/18362
• http://aka.ms/SurfaceGo2/17763
• http://aka.ms/SurfaceGoLTE/18362
• http://aka.ms/SurfaceGoLTE/17763
• http://aka.ms/SurfaceGo/18362
• http://aka.ms/SurfaceGo/17763

Surface Laptop series:

• http://aka.ms/SurfaceLaptop4/Intel/19042
• http://aka.ms/SurfaceLaptop4/AMD/19042
• http://aka.ms/SurfaceLaptopGo/18363
• http://aka.ms/SurfaceLaptop3/Intel/18362
• http://aka.ms/SurfaceLaptop3/Intel/17763
• http://aka.ms/SurfaceLaptop3/AMD/18362
• http://aka.ms/SurfaceLaptop2/18362
• http://aka.ms/SurfaceLaptop2/17763
• http://aka.ms/SurfaceLaptop/18362
• http://aka.ms/SurfaceLaptop/17763

Surface Pro series:

• http://aka.ms/SurfacePro7Plus/19041
• http://aka.ms/SurfacePro7Plus/18363
• http://aka.ms/SurfaceProX/18362
• http://aka.ms/SurfacePro7/18362
• http://aka.ms/SurfacePro7/17763
• http://aka.ms/SurfacePro6/18362
• http://aka.ms/SurfacePro6/17763
• http://aka.ms/SurfacePro5/18362
• http://aka.ms/SurfacePro5/17763
• http://aka.ms/SurfacePro4/18362
• http://aka.ms/SurfacePro4/17763
• http://aka.ms/SurfacePro3/18362

Surface Studio/Hub series:

• http://aka.ms/SurfaceStudio2/18362
• http://aka.ms/SurfaceStudio2/17763
• http://aka.ms/SurfaceStudio/18362
• http://aka.ms/SurfaceStudio/17763
• http://aka.ms/SurfceHub2/18363

How it works:

You can change the numbers at the end to any of the following:

• 22000: Windows 11 Update
• 19044: 21H2 Update
• 19043: 21H1 Update
• 19042: 20H2 aka October 2020 Update
• 19041: 2004/20H1 aka May 2020 Update
• 18363: 1909/19H2 aka November 2019 Update
• 18362: 1903/19H1 aka May 2019 Update
• 17763: 1809 aka October 2018 Update

When packages specific to later build numbers are unavailable and/or not needed, URLs will just re-direct to the latest available package. For example, http://aka.ms/SurfaceBook3/19042 as of 2020/04/06 redirects back to the 18362 package. If/when a new package specific to 19042 or later is needed and created, expect the URL to start pointing to the newer package.

Indirect links for all Surface devices:

• https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/surface/download-drivers-and-firmware-for-surface-09bb2e09-2a4b-cb69-0951-078a7739e120

I was in third grade when I got a severe case of chicken pox. This was in the days before there was a vaccine for it. When I returned to school, I found I couldn’t read the blackboard anymore, and I had to get glasses.

My eyesight kept getting worse in the years since, and it’s the worst that I know of among friends and family. With my contacts out, I can’t see my feet. I could trip over anything on the floor because I can’t actually see that far away.

I wear contacts instead of glasses because of the lack of peripheral vision. (These days I wear contacts and reading glasses when I’m at my computer or reading.)

I wish there had been a vaccine! I would have gladly had the better life with only normally impaired vision instead of extremely impaired.

Let me tell you how it was almost worse, though

We lived at the bottom of a quarter-mile-long hill. When it snowed, everyone parked their cars at the top of the hill, next to the highway.

I don’t remember the blizzard of ’78 at all because that’s when I had chicken pox. I had it so bad that it wasn’t just on my outside: it was inside. Eventually I couldn’t keep anything down — even the smallest sip of water would make me throw up.

But could I go to the hospital? My parents would have had to bundle me up, put me on a sled, and pull me up that hill, in the cold wind, with the road covered in deep snow, to get me to the car, to get me to the hospital. Would I have survived the trip? Unknown. I was weak and severely dehydrated. (I’ve never been as sick since. Not nearly.)

Long story short — we didn’t have to attempt the trip once I was able to hold down some cherry Jello. 🐣

But was this all better than getting a vaccine would have been? I could have died, and I’m still living with the effects. In a heartbeat I’d swap that experience for having had the vaccine.

When it’s your turn — it’ll be mine in a couple weeks — get the coronavirus vaccine! Don’t let this thing kill you or fuck you up forever.

Mandy Patinkin goes back to work for the first time in a year.

mkalus shared this story from Price Tags.

Daily Scot took me to the 1400-block Laburnum Street on Kits Point to see if I noticed anything odd.

I did not.  Until he pointed out that there’s a big hump in the street for no apparent reason, and that the hydro poles are curiously spaced on either side.  (Scot loves this kind of thing.)

The reason: Possibly the least known streetcar line in Vancouver – the Kits spur:

You can see on the Dial Map of Vancouver that one streetcar line, the 12, departs from Granville, crosses the False Creek swing-span bridge (removed in the 1985) and cuts right through the Point mid-block.  The right-of way is still evident in the hump where the tracks used to be, and the relatively new housing that was built, presumably when the CPR was able to abandon the line.  (Perhaps the Changing Vancouver lads know.)

Kits Beach (previously known as Greer’s) was kind of a summer resort for the early settlers of the city, and the streetcar provided the access.  There was even camping:

Until by 1908, when it had been renamed ‘Kitsilano,’ an Anglicization of August Jack Khatsahlano, a chief of the Squamish (whose land it originally was), and looked like this:And today like this:

Route Werks is a small company based in Rhode Island that launched an incredibly successful Kickstarter campaign for a handle bar bag. It looked pretty slick and also about the right size for my needs so I was one of many backers of the campaign.

In fact, the campaign was so successful that it was the subject of many scams. I kept seeing images of the bag being offered on Facebook for the low low price of around $35, and every time it came up on my feed, I reported it. Apparently several different companies were involved in these scams.

Delivery was promised for January 2021, and they actually started shipping in March, which in kickstarter terms is spectacularly on time. Mine arrived a few days ago.

I’m no student of logistics, but I found it curious that the bag was shipped form China via Sweden. Not complaining as it arrive without additional duty or taxes.

My order included a small saddlebag and two handlebar stubs.

Should I be disturbed that the instructions don’t indicate the difference between force and torque?

The weight of the bag with mount, but no accessories. This is definitely not an item for weight weenies.

Here is the weight of the bag that it is replacing: a Porcelain Rocket Nigel. I’m throwing in the weight of the Garmin mount to be fair.

Here is the Nigel on the bike.

Here is the same three views of the new bag.

The outside dimensions of the two bags are similar.

However, there is no question that the Nigel can carry much more stuff. We’ll see if all the nice compartments in the new bag are useful enough to justify the smaller capacity and the extra weight.

The mount is very slick and solid. Note that it is only compatible with 31.8 mm diameter bars as supplied.

Here’s all my regular stuff crammed into the new bag with no attempt to organize at the moment. Note that one of the rear pockets is just big enough to fit my iPhone 12 mini while making it possible to still close the lid. I’m assuming that the much larger front internal pocket is meant for phones.

There is a pocket that is suspended from the underside of the lid with shock cords. I’m guessing that they did this in order to prevent rigid objects from rattling against the lid.

Just for reference, that mini pump that just fits into the bag is 22 cm long.

On my first ride with the bag I was pleased to report no rattling, although there is a bit of drumming from the rigid lid when you go over bumps. It doesn’t make any more creaking than my fenders. The clearance for this hand position is nice; something that I didn’t have with the Nigel.

Today I decided to mount the handlebar stubs, and I ran into an issue. The width of the bag with both stubs attached is 30 cm.

I have handlebars with a nominal 40 cm width so the stubs were too close to the drops.

Noe that on their website, the company is careful to show pictures of the bag with much wider bars.

I remounted the bag off to one side, and used only one of the stubs, which I will probably use for a daytime running light. Even so, over some bumps, my knuckles were hitting the bar stub over some bumps when I was on the hoods.

Unfortunately, the saddle bag is nothing to write home about, and it came with very thin webbing. The company has indicated that they will be shipping better straps out to all customers.

Overall, I am very impressed with the quality of the bag. I do appreciate the fact that everything is bolted rather than riveted together, which in principle means that the bag is easier to repair. I’ll be putting some more miles on the bag to see how I like it.

A new leak suggests Apple’s refreshed iMac line could include one model having a larger screen than the existing 27-inch iMac.

Notable leaker ‘l0vetodream’ says the new iMac will feature a display that is Apple’s biggest yet. “The ‌iMac‌’s screen is really big, bigger than the biggest one,” the leaker said in a private tweet.

Apple currently sells a 21.5-inch and 27-inch iMac. The tech giant is expected to replace both of these models this year with updated designs and faster performance. This would mark Apple’s first time redesigning the iMac since 2012.

It’s worth noting that this leak isn’t surprising since a larger display could easily be expected with the newer models.

Earlier this year, Bloombergreported that one of the models will feature a design similar to the look of Apple’s squared-off Pro Display XDR. Apple’s new iMacs will also reportedly feature the next-generation version of its M1 processor.

As with any other leak, it’s important to take this one with a grain of salt as nothing has been confirmed. We’ll likely learn more about Apple’s upcoming iMac line in the coming months.

Source: @l0vetodream, MacRumors 

The post Leaker suggests Apple’s new iMac will feature ‘really big’ display appeared first on MobileSyrup.

It’s not every day you see noted writer Cory Doctorow refer to a column as “the piece I’m most proud of,” and his essay in Locus Magazine on IP doesn’t disappoint, connecting the free software movement and the evolution of the term “author’s monopolies” to “intellectual property.”

The essay on DRM and Apple, available on his WP-powered blog, or Twitter, is also worth reading.