Picture yourself in this situation. You connect to a network and nothing works. Except for this:
It is quite common to have DNS working in networks while everything else is not. Sometimes the network requires a log-in to give you access to a small portion of the internet.
Now, with the help of a tool called iodine, you can get access to the full internet with only DNS working in your current network:
iodine lets you tunnel IPv4 data through a DNS server. This can be usable in different situations where internet access is firewalled, but DNS queries are allowed.
It runs on Linux, Mac OS X, FreeBSD, NetBSD, OpenBSD and Windows and needs a TUN/TAP device. The bandwidth is asymmetrical with limited upstream and up to 1 Mbit/s downstream.
Setting it up is a bit of work but given that you are anyway having access to a well connected server on the free portion of the internet it can be easily done.
Imagine you’ve got this ancient piece of technology in front of you. You clearly understand how the hardware works and you are even able to emulate the hardware on your modern-world computer.
Unfortunately hardware is only one half of the story. Software is the other half. And software at this time of the past was burned into chips which do not easily give their secret software away.
But let’s start with the hardware:
The IBM 5100 Portable Computer is a portable computer (one of the first) introduced in September 1975, six years before the IBM Personal Computer. It was the evolution of a prototype called the SCAMP (Special Computer APL Machine Portable) that was developed at the IBM Palo Alto Scientific Center in 1973. In January 1978, IBM announced the IBM 5110, its larger cousin, and in February 1980 IBM announced the IBM 5120. The 5100 was withdrawn in March 1982.
When the IBM PC was introduced in 1981, it was originally designated as the IBM 5150, putting it in the “5100” series, though its architecture was not directly descended from the IBM 5100.
The IBM 5100 portable computer came with some of its built-in programs stored in a read-only memory called the “non-executable ROS”. (ROS = “read-only storage”.) In contrast with the “executable ROS”, which supplies instructions to the 5100’s processor directly, the non-executable ROS is accessed using sequential I/O operations, a bit like a tape.
Most notably, the non-executable ROS holds the interactive interpreters for the APL and BASIC programming languages. These are not “native” 5100 programs but were expressed instead in System/370 mainframe and System/3 minicomputer machine code respectively. The 5100 runs emulator programs for those computers in order to host the interpreters, so perhaps it’s just as well that the non-executable ROS is non-executable.
So this write-up is all about how the bits where pushed to the screen and recorded as pictures of the said screen. The characters in these pictures then where analyzed and with the help of machine learning the data could be successfully extracted. It is mind-boggling. And it is all on Github.
With a picture spot freed at one of the walls in our house we decided to print the day and night pictures on canvas and have them side-by-side. And it looks great, I think.
I might want to take the night picture again with the slightly different perspective
The middle day of the year. Use only middle names, stay to the middle of the road, pat or rub your or someone else’s middle (this is a great day to apply to join The Order of the Holy Chao Belly Rubbers). Point to things with your middle finger. Visit a middle school and talk about the good old days of the Middle Ages. (If you want to get technical, on Leap Year this day would run from noon of July 2 to noon of July 3, but you don’t have to get that anal unless you really want to).
Seemingly short-message services are becoming the standard mode of communication for the powerful and rich. It seems that especially Twitter is capable of bringing the worst in those among us to the outside.
Of course the most controversial statements are being washed away by the sheer throughput. The next one always comes up quicker than you expect.
Helping the masses to keep track is a main task of journalism. That being said traditional journalism (as in newspapers, television) sees great difficulties to keep track as well. Too much, too quick.
So new forms of journalism develop. Often more tendentious then helpful for the cause so they require the cautious mind of the reader to add some more perspective.
This is the example of such a newly developing “tracking journalism” site around the dazzling public character that is Elon Musk. It is called “elonmusk.today“.
Editor’s note: others have done great work exposing Musk’s shameless charlatan carnival barking. If you enjoy this sort of thing, I highly recommend Niya White’s excellent article Musk Misses: The Stories You Don’t Hear About Tesla Anymore …
And of course there’s this list of craft beer breweries missing:
A microbrewery or craft brewery is a brewery that produces small amounts of beer, typically much smaller than large-scale corporate breweries, and is independently owned. Such breweries are generally characterized by their emphasis on quality, flavor and brewing technique.
If there is any discussion or argument about electric mobility these days the topic of range and battery-aging is coming up rather quick.
Every once in a while you also hear these awesome stories about electric cars achieving total-driven-distances outrageously huge compared to combustion engine cars…
But what is it then, how does a battery in an electric car age over time and mileage? Given that car manufacturers seem to settle on a ca. 150.000km total-driven-miles baseline for giving a battery-capacity percentage guarantee. Something like…
The future owners of ID. models won’t need to worry about the durability of their batteries either, as Volkswagen will guarantee that the batteries will retain at least 70 per cent of their usable capacity even after eight years or 160,000 kilometres.
Model S and Model X – 8 years (with the exception of the original 60 kWh battery manufactured before 2015, which is covered for a period of 8 years or 125,000 miles, whichever comes first).
Model 3 – 8 years or 100,000 miles, whichever comes first, with minimum 70% retention of Battery capacity over the warranty period.
Model 3 with Long-Range Battery – 8 years or 120,000 miles, whichever comes first, with minimum 70% retention of Battery capacity over the warranty period.
So. Guarantees are one thing. Reality another. There’s an interesting user-driven survey set-up where Tesla owners can hand in their cars data thus participate in the survey.
And it yields results (getting updated as you read…):
In a nutshell: It seems there is a good chance that your Tesla car might have an above 90% original-specified-battery-capacity after the guaranteed 100.000 miles and even after 150.000 miles (241.000km)…
Good news that is! Given that the average household will do about or less than 20.000 km/year it would mean over 12 years of use and the car still would hold 90% of battery charge. The battery being the most expensive single component on an electric car this is extremely good news as it’s unlikely that the battery will be the reason for the car to be scraped after this mileage.
“We show that tilting one’s head downward systematically changes the way the face is perceived, such that a neutral face—a face with no muscle movement or facial expression—appears to be more dominant when the head is tilted down,” explain researchers Zachary Witkower and Jessica Tracy of the University of British Columbia.
A very nice use of 3D printing technology: Print your own set of “Settlers of Catan” board game!
ThingiVerse
This is my new low-poly settlers of catan-style boardgame. Especially made for multicolor printers like the prusa mk2 multimaterial upgrade ore the palette from mosaic.
Recognize and credit your imaginary friend, whom you blame for everything on all the other days of the year. Or help someone anonymously, but in a way they’d never expect. (“Captain Tuttle” was the made-up buddy of Benjamin Franklin “Hawkeye” Pierce and “Trapper John” McIntire on the TV show M*A*S*H. They used the mythical captain’s identity to get supplies and funds from the U. S. Military which were then sent to help an orphanage).
TOKYO — Japan’s government will allow NTT Docomo and its three major mobile rivals to set up 5G base stations on traffic signals, hoping to reduce the cost and time it takes to roll out the ultrafast networks by taking advantage of the nation’s high density of traffic lights.
Interesting. It seems that there is another way of doing things when you want to see success. Japan always seems very determined when the decision has been made to adopt something. In the curious case of the mobile communication standard 5G they have chosen a different way over countries like Germany.
Last year when I had asked for a new mobile plan here in Germany and I expressed my surprise about the enormous prices for just data quota I was told “That’s because we had to bid on the frequencies and that was soooo expensive that now we cannot offer the service cheaper”.
drop in replacement for tail -F that asks you if you are still watching
Just like Laura I am also was having a moment when I stumbled across tailflix.
For those not understanding the reference: At the end of an episode you’ve watched on Netflix you will be shown another one, and so on, and so on. Until if you have not touched the remote at all for several episodes Netflix will ask you “Are you still watching?”.
The Jupyter Notebook is an open-source web application that allows you to create and share documents that contain live code, equations, visualizations and narrative text. Uses include: data cleaning and transformation, numerical simulation, statistical modeling, data visualization, machine learning, and much more.
voilá
Voila serves live Jupyter notebook including Jupyter interactive widgets.
Unlike the usual HTML-converted notebooks, each user connecting to the Voila tornado application gets a dedicated Jupyter kernel which can execute the callbacks to changes in Jupyter interactive widgets.
I am a happy user of the Apple Watch and iPhones in general. It’s working out great for me so far.
There are a couple of features that I would wish where there. And simple things like an hour-chime or hour/half-hour tap are frequently included into the WatchOS updates.
But some of the more specific features just won’t materialize on Apple Watch.
Think of this: You are doing your thing, you know, being a productive member of the society. And apart from the information “What’s next” the information of “When’s next and how long until then” is equally important.
I already had all information – like upcoming events – in my calendar. Why not have the watch display directly on the watch face how long I’ve got until then?!
You’re downloading it on your iPhone and when opened up first it will show you a list of your calendars.
You can turn on/off any of them in this app and by doing so you are selecting which of the calendars will be included in the calculation “how long until the next meeting”.
I’ve only selected one calendar which holds those appointments that I need to know how long until then. So it’s not the next work meeting. It’s important things.
On the watch, however many calendars you’ve selected, it will show you something like this:
I’ve circled the complications added by “Time Till”
So in this case it’ll show the hours until I have to wake-up. Whatever I put into this calendar will show up there. If I want with the name of the event, but most commonly I am using the bottom right version: just the hours/minutes until.
Unfortunately Rachel is quite busy and so there’s no update for the app to also support the new Modular Infograph complications of WatchOS 5 and up.
If you don’t know how those look like, here is a picture I’ve put together from Apples developer documentation:
So I am thinking to rewrite the app and include the new complications. In fact: I’ve implemented my “Discordian Calendar Apple Watch Complication” app as a test and exercise to learn how I would be able to rewrite “Time Till”.
Now the only thing I need is to be kissed by the muse that fuels the urge to just get it done :-).
Addresses in Japan are fascinating. There’s a system to it, with lots of exceptions and special cases. And just recently there was an announcement about the city I am technically considering home-base when in Japan: Kawasaki (川崎).
As you see in the title of this post there’s a kanji character missing:
川崎 means “Kawasaki” – just the name itself, like used on signs and such.
川崎市 means “Kawasaki-shi” – the name got extended by -shi which in itself will signal that the name before is a city.
And then there is this other kanji in the title: 区. It is spoken as “ku” and basically means “ward”. It’s a bigger city broken down into separate wards.
Not all cities in Japan are required to differentiate into wards – just the ones considered big enough. Kawasaki was considered big enough by 1972 to name out it’s wards.
And so its the Nakahara-ward (中原区) I am usually staying to be more specific on the Kawasaki-home-base-statement at the beginning of this post.
And the designated cities are somehow ranked according to their population. The news here is that apparently given the 2019 population numbers Kawasaki has improved it’s position among all big designated cities by one rank:
Some more details then to the japanese addressing system:
Japanese addresses begin with the largest division of the country, the prefecture. Most of these are called ken (県), but there are also three other special prefecture designations: to (都) for Tokyo, dō (道) for Hokkaidō and fu (府) for the two urban prefectures of Osaka and Kyoto.
Following the prefecture is the municipality. For a large municipality this is the city (shi, 市). Cities with a large enough population, called designated cities, can be further broken down into wards (ku, 区). (In the prefecture of Tokyo, the designation special ward or tokubetsu-ku, 特別区, is also used for municipalities within the former city of Tokyo.) For smaller municipalities, the address includes the district (gun, 郡) followed by the town (chō or machi, 町) or village(mura or son, 村). In Japan, a city is separate from districts, which contain towns and villages.
So let’s make an example, since it’s always great fun for me to figure out the address again when I try to order the SIM card to the hotel address. A good example would be a randomly selected and nice hotel in Nakahara-ku:
Richmond Premier Hotel address as written on it’s website.
The typical english-language online order form / address entry form for shipping SIM cards to hotels gives you this interface:
Ha! Now that’s a challenge, right? At first glance its not obvious but if you take a look at the structure of the address it opens up:
Our deep learning engineers at Dessa built a model to replicate Joe Rogan’s voice to showcase current AI techniques. To understand how we developed the technology and to discuss the ethical implications of this work, read our announcement article.
Hate reaching for the mouse? multi-cursor-plus allows you to create multiple cursors anywhere in the buffer, using only your keyboard. Supports multiple selections and removing previous cursors at any time. Easy to use. Amazing!
We are using computers every day and we are doing this in many different environments. Some of us give their desk space and work environment some more thoughts.
If you want some inspiration regarding your desk and work space, take a look at this great Twitter Hashtag: #絵描きさんの作業環境が見たい
It means “I want to see artists’ work environments” and is used for some years now for japanese artists to post pictures of their work environments…
It always seems to me so much easier to meet a Hackers in Japan than anywhere else. Maybe social-gravity works different there. Or there are more of them.
Whatever the reason, I keep crossing paths with people that more or less deep-dive into topics and understand systems in ways and in details that you would normally not expect.
And todays example is a detail you would normally not think about:
The footbridge that was newly built in Shibuya was painted in N8.5. This is commonly known as “Tokyu White”…
Multrin is a cross-platform app built on top of Electron, React, styled-components and TypeScript, that lets you to organize apps in tabs, by just dropping them onto Multrin. It aims to greatly improve your productivity and organization.
There are new micro-projectors coming and they are looking good. After the first availability of really small and low-power but enough-light LED projectors (see here) manufacturers have apparently added a laser to the equation.
It is said that…
Unlike traditional projectors that constantly need to be focussed, the Nebra AnyBeam picture is always perfect. You can project onto curved or irregular surfaces with ease – perfect if you want to use it on the fly, or if you want to try your hand at a bit of projection mapping!
This thing will be available, according to the Kickstarter, as a all-in-one package with power and HDMI inputs. It’s got 720p inputs. Well. Well really?
And it will be available to the maker market as a RaspberryPi Hat…
I can never wrap my head around how people really only use audio to communicate within teams, across cultures and timezones.
I’ve experienced first hand what a difference it makes to use good video conferencing that actually works. And it makes such a difference on productivity and team collaboration.
Video conferencing never replaces real-life face-2-face meetings. It just does not start relationships.
If you already had your work and personal relationship started video conferencing will make all the difference to your work.
Anyhow: I am also a big believer in augmented-reality glasses. I have to wear glasses anyhow all the time – why not improving them with the ability to display stuff.
Now, think of this. You’ve got one of those AR glasses on and you start the video conference call. And this happens:
Catching up to some YouTube things during dinner made us see a Japanese TV commercial sporting the German DLG quality seal. Funny to see that these kind of quality seals carry over even to Japan…
The German Agricultural Society (Deutsche Landwirtschafts-Gesellschaft), commonly known as DLG, is an international non-profit organisation for agricultural industry in Germany. DLG was founded in 1885 by Max Eyth, has over 23,000 members as of 2011 and is headquartered in Frankfurt am Main. Its main purpose is to promote technical progress and scientific advances in the food and agricultural industry, including setting standards.
