bofh23

Channel 72 on Spectrum Cable in NYC cycles through the NYC DOT traffic cameras with realtime update speed albeit in standard definition.

I tune in and leave it on in the background and it’s like having a window with an interesting view. It’s great ambient TV as noted in this article:

[2012-09-18] The Inadvertent Cinema: City Drive Live | The New Yorker https://www.newyorker.com/culture/richard-brody/the-inadvert...

The cameras are old, some are black & white, and often they’re over or underexposed with all the interesting video artifacts that entails.

Unlike the webcam access at https://webcams.nyctmc.org/ the cameras update at realtime rates (30 fps) though some are slower.

Sadly, they don’t make the realtime camera cycling available to live stream that I’m aware of. I wish they would for homesick NYers. They don’t even show channel 72 in the Live TV tab of the Spectrum app (perhaps it works when using Spectrum Internet access).

I like multi-function displays (MFD) which were probably a necessity in aviation before touchscreen technology and also could be operated by a pilot with gloves on.

Multi-function display - Wikipedia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multi-function_display « a small-screen (CRT or LCD) surrounded by multiple soft keys (configurable buttons) that can be used to display information to the user in numerous configurable ways. »

I’d like a Thrustmaster Cougar MFD with USB interface on a flat panel screen, perhaps with both illuminated soft buttons and knobs with labels on screen. I wonder why they don’t sell one with a built in screen? There’s lots of DIY builds that add them.

Wow, thanks for making this! I’m having lots of fun playing with it.

A quibble: Choosing between Draw|Erase|Toggle is awkward on mobile (Safari on iPhone). The old toggle between Draw|Erase was quick but the new pulldown list widget is in the upper left while the choices always pop open at the bottom of the screen.

Perhaps move the pulldown list to the bottom on mobile or make it two toggle buttons (Mode: Draw|Erase, Line type: Bounce|Toggle)?

Some enhancement ideas:

Add a mark where the dots drop from and perhaps a faint line to show the drop path.

Add an edit mode so existing lines could be selected then either erased, moved, lengthened, shortened, or have their type changed between Bounce|Toggle. Going further allow a point to be selected and move it or rotate a line around it.

Amazing work. Thanks for sharing xwax with the world!

Are you aware of Rasteri’s SC1000? It uses a magnetic rotary sensor with a modified version of xwax instead of time-coded vinyl. I wonder if xwax has support for other DIY jog wheel controllers? I didn’t see anything in the docs.

GitHub - rasteri/SC1000: An open-source digital portable turntablist instrument https://github.com/rasteri/SC1000/ « the scratch wheel is handled by an Austria Microsystems AS5601 magnetic rotary sensor »

James Mickens’s Monitorama 2014 presentation had me laughing to the point of tears. “Look a word cloud!”

Title: "Computers are a Sadness, I am the Cure" https://vimeo.com/95066828

Critical article from Apr 2009:

on url shorteners -- joshua schachter's blog http://joshua.schachter.org/2009/04/on-url-shorteners

Print publishers might have a case for URL shorteners but they should own and maintain their own instead of a 3rd party service they can’t control or prevent from disappearing.

Plenty of articles in the Communications of the ACM magazine use 3rd party shortened URLs and it’s unacceptable. They should know better and should host their own link shortener via their digital library system.

To mitigate link rot I always include a title along with the URL. This is especially important for URLs with opaque ids like on YouTube instead of slugs. If you visit a pulled YouTube video link you’re left not knowing the title to search for it elsewhere.

This doesn’t always work because many websites neglect page titles. I’ve always wanted to ask a wide range of web developers why they neglect titles. Why?

It’s a wonderful resource but they neglect the pagetitle element which is set to “McMaster-Carr” on every page. Links opened in tabs/windows all get the same title and bookmark titles need to be manually edited to be useful.

Why do developers of otherwise great websites neglect page titles?

There’s a similar device used to transmit the first recovered victim’s fingerprints from the funeral parlor to FBI field offices in Silence of the Lambs.

Web publishing aside:

Why do sites like this totally neglect the page title and meta attributes for sharing in social media such as Open Graph?

At bare minimum, why not include <title>Blackmagic Design Announces DaVinci Resolve for iPad</title> in the <head> element?

I checked the page with Facebook’s Sharing Debugger and found:

og:title: Media | Blackmagic Design og:description: All items on this website are copyright […]

> and things shift around on you for another 20 seconds after that, so when you go to tap a link you accidentally tap an ad that finally loaded under your finger.

Why don’t browsers mask out events during render of page regions or note their time and bounding boxes so click events reach the correct element?

Steps to reproduce this annoyance:

- visit Twitter mobile site: mobile.twitter.com in Safari on a slow iPhone (eg iPhone 6 stuck on iOS 12.X). - scroll and view tweets for a while soaking up memory. - visit a tweet - press tweet share icon - popup menu takes forever to render fully to include the Cancel button. - clicking Bookmark tweet menu item will trigger item after that, Copy Link to Tweet, when it finally loads and moves that menu item under your finger.

Why did Apple remove the cursor keys that would appear in landscape aspect? There’s still plenty of unused space for them. Thankfully there’s the long press on spacebar gesture but I only recently learned about that.

The PlainText app would show cursor keys in its customer keyboard but that’s long gone from the app store so I’ll lose it at my overdue upgrade.

P.S. Restore the 3.5mm TRRS headset jack.

I’m pretty sure Thunderbolt only has the equivalent of 4 lanes of PCIe 3.0 while GPU cards tend to be 16 lane.

I think it was 3 to 6 VME-sized boards. There was 1 Display Generator board, 1 Geometry Engine board (12 x Intel i860 processors in the RealityEngine2), and 1, 2, or 4 Raster Manager boards (for framebuffer and texture memory). I’m not sure if the maximum configuration of 6 boards could fit in the deskside chassis. That might have required the full rack chassis which had space for several sets of cards for multi-pipe systems. As for cooling, I know the full rack chassis had a huge blower. I’m not sure if the deskside models had blowers or more traditional axial fans.

Aside:

Why don’t folks give their web pages titles? There’s a title in the body but I mean actual page titles that show up in browser windows, tabs, and bookmarks.

  <head>
    <meta>
      <title>Page Title</title>
    </meta>
  </head>

This “Smart Window Fan” is a window-mounted economizer. If it’s cooler and dryer outside, like at night, it opens its louvers and pulls in cool air and exhausts warm air. It also has a HEPA filter. I assume it has humidity sensors too to avoid running when it’s humid outside.

I am wary of a product sold by only one vendor. Economizers tend to be added to large central ducted commercial HVAC systems and this is the only window unit I’m aware of.

EcoBreeze 2.2 - Nature's Cooling Solutions® https://naturescoolingsolutions.com/ecobreeeze-2/

Enjoy this awesome cinemagraph from that opening scene (not my work):

“Los Angeles, November 2019” Blade Runner (1982) IWDRM https://iwdrm.tumblr.com/post/2927811283

I have a Samsung TV with “smart” features but only connect it to the Internet when using a streaming app. I still use cable for TV so I don’t use builtin apps often.

Most of the time the TV is set to unconfigured WiFi so it can’t reach the Internet. I temporarily switch it to Ethernet when I need Internet connectivity.

Alternatively, you can use less(1) in tail mode to search growing logs.

  less +F -p pattern /path/to/log

(Ctrl-C to break out of tail mode. /pattern to interactively set search pattern.)

The webcam should’ve been an external option. If I have two or three monitors, only one needs a webcam.

Perhaps include a soft shoe or 1/4”-20 accessory mount on top for a ball or pan-tilt head along with a nearby USB-C port for an elegant webcam mounting option?

Why does a webcam even need an A13 (the guts of an iPhone 11)? I’d expect plenty of idle CPU and GPU cores in the Mac Studio computer driving the display that could be used instead for Center Stage, spatial audio, and Siri wake word.

All monitors should ship with VESA mounts. The various stands should fasten to the VESA mount. If Apple makes a great VESA stand maybe folks would buy it to use with other monitors?

$400 is a ridiculous premium just to add height adjustability.

I’d also like to see additional standard monitor inputs like HDMI, DisplayPort, and even DVI-I (dual-link and analog) and VGA, with side-by-side and PiP/PoP viewing of inputs.

Also, add a couple of USB-A ports on the hub to power and connect devices with that ubiquitous connector without an adapter.

Over the years, I’ve enjoyed reading many ghacks articles about browsers. However, I find it ironic that every link in the OP article reporting on user tracking practices is wrapped in opaque googleadservices links. By opaque, I mean the destination link is hidden.

Good luck finding any consumer products that ever supported HDMI Ethernet Channel (HEC). In contrast, HEC capable HDMI cables with pins 14 and 19 in a twisted pair were widely available to the confusion of many.

Audio Return Channel (ARC) uses the same pins as HEC. Enhanced ARC (eARC), available on some newer TVs and AV Receivers/preamps/soundbars, takes advantage of the twisted pair to support greater audio bandwidth and surround channels (ARC was limited to 5.1), so it’s a happy ending for folks who bought HEC compatible HDMI cables.

“I need my sleep. I need about eight hours a day, and about ten at night.” — Bill Hicks

This desktop dashboard with three analog panel meters is gorgeous:

Ambient Executive Dashboard | Uncrate https://uncrate.com/ambient-executive-dashboard/

A new version that uses WiFi instead of a defunct paging network would be nice.

Plans to mod original ones so the meters could be driven by a micro-controller or Raspberry Pi would be cool.

No need to give up a PCIe slot. The Raspberry Pi Zero and the RPi 4 have USB On-The-Go support so they can appear to be a serial port, Ethernet port, or other types of devices using the Linux USB Gadget API. It’s even possible to appear as multiple device types at once.

Overview | Turning your Raspberry Pi Zero into a USB Gadget | Adafruit Learning System https://learn.adafruit.com/turning-your-raspberry-pi-zero-in...

> This ensures that the media file that a NFT represents, will always be available, since it is hosted by many people on the network.

I’m pretty sure this is incorrect. IPFS is not permanent storage unless you host the content yourself or pay a pining service to host it. It may be cached on many computers but those caches are finite and get cleared.

Persistence | IPFS Docs https://docs.ipfs.io/concepts/persistence/#long-term-storage

« Long-term storage

Storing data using a personal IPFS node is easy, but it can be inconvenient since you have to manage your own hardware.

[…]

[…] paying a pinning service to store data is a convenient workaround, it still requires someone to bear the cost of storing that data.

[…]

While IPFS guarantees that any content on the network is discoverable, it doesn't guarantee that any content is persistently available. »

Avoiding “useless cat” on the command line is premature optimization. Sure, don’t do it in a script that is invoked a lot but it shouldn’t be a concern when prototyping a filter pipeline.

  $ cat foo | head -4
  b
  a
  c
  b
  
  $ cat foo | head -4 | sort
  a
  b
  b
  c
  
  $ cat foo | head -4 | sort | uniq -c
  1 a
  2 b
  1 c
  
  $ cat foo | head -4 | sort | uniq -c | sort -k1nr | head -1
  2 b

> 5. What about scrolling?

The less(1) command has horizontal scrolling, just invoke it with the -S or --chop-long-lines options or toggle that feature while paging a file.

I agree it would be nicer if less(1) had a user configurable header with a format option to set it to the contents of the first line in a file or stdin or perhaps the most recent line matching a regex to allow for multiple tables and an option to make it scroll horizontally in -S or --chop-long-lines mode.

There’s a nice photo of an open back PCIe x1 connector here:

File:PCIe J1900 SoC ITX Mainboard IMG 1820.JPG - Wikipedia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:PCIe_J1900_SoC_ITX_Mainbo...

I’m hoping peer pressure from Google will push Apple to find the “courage” to undo its mistake[1] and restore the headphone jack on new models.

[1]: Removing the headphone jack was a mistake because:

1) Every smartphone has built in speakers and a microphone so the components have always been there to support a headphone jack. Restoring it is a wiring change.

2) Removing the jack required another set of components (DAC, ADC, amplifiers) to use wired or wireless headphones.

3) Wired headphones usable with a jackless phone require those components to be embedded in the cable, rendering those headphones useless for other audio devices.

4) Supporting traditional headphones requires an easily misplaced adapter dongle to host those components.

5) Embedding such components in the cable seems like a bad idea because cables tend to wear out before the devices they connect.

4) If the Lightning, micro USB, or USB-C port is used for headphones, it can’t be used to charge or sync at the same time without yet another adapter (or inductive charging, yay more complexity).

5) The headphone jack is the simplest audio connector. Removing it didn’t solve any problems, it just created new ones.