I am surely hoping to be able to make it to the parade. And for that the preparation as a good foreigner includes making myself aware of the regulations that apply during the event.
The important information on this can be found here.
Boomtime 5 Aftermath: The Apostle Malaclypse the Elder’s Holyday. A wandering Wiseman of Ancient Mediterrania (“Med-Terra” or middle earth), who followed a 5-pointed Star through the alleys of Rome, Damascus, Baghdad, Jerusalem, Mecca and Cairo, bearing a sign that seemed to read “DOOM”. (This is a misunderstanding. The sign actually read “DUMB”.)
While recording a podcast episode we briefly touched on the topic of bulletin board systems and how we both had operated our own FidoNet BBS in the 90s.
To create a bigger reflux of thoughts:
Synchronet Bulletin Board System Software is a free software package that can turn your personal computer into your own custom online service supporting multiple simultaneous users with hierarchical message and file areas, multi-user chat, and the ever-popular BBS door games.
Everything there to set-up a BBS. Maybe I really need to get out a backup of my old BBS and bring it back online?!
Today I learned that the Apple iPhone re-purposes the IMAP protocol to implement the voice mail feature.
By sniffing the network traffic it was possible to examine the IMAP protocol revealing username and the corresponding hashed password (which allows to repeat a successful login) and of course all voicemail files. We want to highlight, that all the voicemail files have been transferred unencrypted.
Assessment of Visual Voicemail from 2012
Well, it’s about time to do something about MyFitnessPal. In our family we’re using their service by the daily. But just for logging. No reports, no further features used.
But still, we were using it for quite a time now:
The service has started to roll out ads for some time now in their apps. There are only iOS / Android apps available. And a mediocre website.
Just recently they started to announce that their free service will restrict how many years back are going to be stored. From those 5 years we will loose 3.
In addition the whole integration has never gotten to a point where I would have decided to upgrade to the paid premium version. No functionality ever got added. No interfacing with scales, no optimizations for UI/UX, …
But they now reduce the functionalities and service and want me to cough up a bit of money:
I am not generally against subscriptions. But I am not getting 9,99 Euro of value out of the service. A shared google sheet would almost achieve parity. And the price itself is just not value based. For 2 Euro I probably would not feel the urge to move on. For 9,99 (times 2 for 2 accounts) make me move.
So I’ve sat down with my wife and we scribbled up some things we want to have in a replacement. The content and feature-set is agreed. Now I’ll throw up a prototype app.
It’ll be integrated with the MQTT scales. And with the flow we came up with we hopefully will reduce the interactions dramatically over MyFitnessPal. And it’ll never stop saving history. And I’ll learn something new.
The 73rd and Last Day of the Season of Bureaucracy. Eye Day is celebrated by playing Discordian Games.
I gave Rifftrax a swing in 2006 when they started their project. Now it’s time for a revisit.
Rifftrax was created by the same people that created and made the series “Mystery Science Theater 3000” so successfull.
Think of this: You go to the movies. Bad movies mostly. And there are 3 of your friends next to you and constantly commenting the movie – in a funny way.
Since MST3k had ended a long long time ago the people behind it have started to do the same with current movies. And this they called “Rifftrax”:
Mike Nelson, Bill Corbett and Kevin Murphy, the former stars of Mystery Science Theater 3000, create commentaries for B-movie oddities and Hollywood blockbusters. It’s like watching a movie with your funniest friends!
Their catalog has grown from 0 in 2006 to over 222 full length feature movies and much much more shorts.
If you have never experienced their art: Give them a try. You’ll probably laugh a lot!
There’s the DJI drones that seemingly own the market at this point. Mostly used to take aerial images and movies. Your average YouTuber will probably have two or more of them.
Turns out that, if you add modern camera technology to these small flying objects and a lot of processing power you can do crazy things like indoor realtime 3D mapping…
Skydio is a vendor to look at when it somes to such interesting mapping applications.
The first sound card I got as an upgrade to a PC without sound back in 90s was the glorious Sound Blaster 16:
There were several different sound card options back in the days and all sounded a bit different.
A sound card (also known as an audio card) is an internal expansion card that provides input and output of audio signals to and from a computer under control of computer programs. The term sound card is also applied to external audio interfaces used for professional audio applications.
Wikipedia
With the synthesizers and audio processing each series and make produced a distinctive sound. Some of us want to bring these sounds back. But keeping the (old) hardware running is an increasingly difficult task.
For example: The interface used by the above mentioned Sound Blaster 16 card is the ISA bus interface. This interface was introduced in 1981 and replaced in 1993. If you want to hear how such a sound card sounds today you would have to run hardware from this time period.
But some people are working towards getting at least some authentic sound back.
In this talk, Alan Hightower takes a look at the complexities, challenges, and even current progress at integrating all of the above cores into one FPGA based ISA sound card.
This is what the concept would bring if done:
Oh that would be soooooo nice to have all these vintage sound interfaces available and to be able to actually use them for audio output.
Setting Orange 66 Bureaucracy: A Discordian Holy Day of Fondle and Gropage, when all Discordians should grab their Legislative Representatives by the goolies and cry out “Where’s my Bill of Rights, you bastard?!”
On this day in 3025 YOLD (12 October 1859 AD), His Imperial Majesty, Emperor Norton I, Emperor of the United States and Protector of Mexico, ordered the Congress of the United States to dissolve.
“Fraud and corruption prevent a fair and proper expression of the public voice; that open violation of the laws are constantly occurring, caused by mobs, parties, factions and undue influence of political sects; that the citizen has not that protection of person and property which he is entitled.”
Habeas Corpus Day
I like location based stuff. I like QR codes. There is something that combines both.
Meet Munzee:
Munzee is the next generation in global scavenger hunt games.
Track down QR Codes hidden in the real world and capture them for points. Whether you are a casual player, an avid explorer, or a hardcore competition enthusiast, Munzee helps you rediscover the world around you.
A month ago I wrote about a very black paint. This month brings me a papepr about an even blacker substance.
The synergistically incorporated CNT–metal hierarchical architectures offer record-high broadband optical absorption with excellent electrical and structural properties as well as industrial-scale producibility.
Paper: Breakdown of Native Oxide Enables Multifunctional, Free-Form Carbon Nanotube–Metal Hierarchical Architectures
We all know this. You typed a loooong line of commands in your shell and you made one typo.
That’s the worst.
Now. There’s a command that aims to help:
It is rather simple. But extremely effective.
The Fuck attempts to match the previous command with a rule. If a match is found, a new command is created using the matched rule and executed.
Grab it on github. Install it right away. It went into my toolbelt in an instant.
If you’re old enough to have used MS-DOS you know the benefits a read cache introduced back at the time for floppy disks. Without such a cache everything data intensive was magnitudes slower.
Now after all these years more and more stories emerge about how certain thresholds and timeings where set back in the days.
This is such a story:
Mark Zbikowski led the MS-DOS 2.0 project, and he sat down with a stopwatch while Aaron Reynolds and Chris Peters tried to swap floppy disks on an IBM PC as fast as they could.
They couldn’t do it under two seconds.
So the MS-DOS cache validity was set to two seconds. If two disk accesses occurred within two seconds of each other, the second one would assume that the cached values were still good.
Raymond Chen blog
There are more links in the original article – so go there and down that rabbit hole!
I do not drive motor cycles. I never found a reason to.
Given that non-experience: I can only assume that something like this helmet would really make a difference for bikers.
With the integrated camera system it will have a rear-view mirror screen in sight all the time and be able to overlay all sorts of information into the field-of-view of the driver. In addition it seems to be capable to augment the audio getting to the driver in various ways.
If you are as interested as I am, despite not having a motorcycle: take a look at the Indiegogo campaign.
To remind you of the recently celebrated 42nd mission anniversary of the still active and data transmitting Voyager 2 space craft.
NASA’s Voyager 2 is the second spacecraft to enter interstellar space. On Dec. 10, 2018, the spacecraft joined its twin—Voyager 1—as the only human-made objects to enter the space between the stars
Voyager 2 Homepage
And what reminded me of this astonishing achievement.
Think of this: You are flying at >34k miles per hour. You are >18.5 billion miles away from earth. (It’ll take >16 hours at light speed one-way trip from earth to you). And on top, you are still able to send data back to earth at 159 bytes per second.
Mind. Blowing.
Microsoft recently is releasing a lot of tools and assets for developers and terminal monkeys.
This is good. Very nice of them.
The recent release of a font specifically for terminal and code editing use seems worth a mention here:
Cascadia Code was announced this past May at Microsoft’s Build event. It is the latest monospaced font shipped from Microsoft and provides a fresh experience for command line experiences and code editors. Cascadia Code was developed hand-in-hand with the new Windows Terminal application. This font is most recommended to be used with terminal applications and text editors such as Visual Studio and Visual Studio Code.
Cascadia Code announcement
What’s most interesting about this: It’s got code ligatures. Just recently a lot of development focussed fonts showed up and they started to incorporate special characters for development specific character combinations:
Cascadia Code supports programming ligatures! Programming ligatures are most useful when writing code, as they create new glyphs by combining characters. This helps make code more readable and user-friendly for some people.
Cascadia
If you, like me, are looking into new emerging tools and technologies you might also look at Wireguard.
WireGuard® is an extremely simple yet fast and modern VPN that utilizes state-of-the-art cryptography. It aims to be faster, simpler, leaner, and more useful than IPsec, while avoiding the massive headache. It intends to be considerably more performant than OpenVPN. WireGuard is designed as a general purpose VPN for running on embedded interfaces and super computers alike, fit for many different circumstances. Initially released for the Linux kernel, it is now cross-platform (Windows, macOS, BSD, iOS, Android) and widely deployable. It is currently under heavy development, but already it might be regarded as the most secure, easiest to use, and simplest VPN solution in the industry.
bold wireguard website statement
To apply and get started with WireGuard on Linux and iOS I’ve used the very nice tutorial of Graham Stevens: WireGuard Setup Guide for iOS.
This guide will walk you through how to setup WireGuard in a way that all your client outgoing traffic will be routed via another machine (server). This is ideal for situations where you don’t trust the local network (public or coffee shop wifi) and wish to encrypt all your traffic to a server you trust, before routing it to the Internet.
WireGuard Setup Guide for iOS.
The 50th Day of the Season of Bureaucracy. The Fluxday marking the approach of the Season of The Aftermath.
Aftermath (season)
I’ve written on this topic before here. And as developers venture more into these generative algorithms it’s all that more fun to see even the intermediate results.
Oskar Stålberg writes about his little experiments and bigger libraries on Twitter. The above short demonstration was created by him.
Especially worth a look is the library he made available on GitHub: mxgmn/WaveFunctionCollapse.
Some more context, of questionable helpfulness:
In quantum mechanics, wave function collapse occurs when a wave function—initially in a superposition of several eigenstates—reduces to a single eigenstate due to interaction with the external world. This interaction is called an “observation”. It is the essence of a measurement in quantum mechanics which connects the wave function with classical observables like position and momentum. Collapse is one of two processes by which quantum systems evolve in time; the other is the continuous evolution via the Schrödinger equation. Collapse is a black box for a thermodynamically irreversible interaction with a classical environment. Calculations of quantum decoherence predict apparent wave function collapse when a superposition forms between the quantum system’s states and the environment’s states. Significantly, the combined wave function of the system and environment continue to obey the Schrödinger equation.
Wikipedia: WFC
Right. Well. Told you. Here are some nice graphics of this applied to calm you:
Still working on these…
Still lots of errors and challenges to positioning and casing. It works electrically and in software. Does not yet fit into a case.
It’s supposed to get you these sensors accomodated:
And a RGB LED as output. All powered by USB and an ESP32.
Episode 006: “Monitoring Release Pipeline” ist fertig und steht bald zum Download und zeit-sourveränem anhören bereit.
Auf der Homepage, im Feed und auf YouTube:
Diesmal unterhält Andreas sich mit mir über:
Do you always slack off on your computer and worry about getting busted?Not anymore because Daytripper is here to save the day!
daytripper
Booting a computer does not happen extremely often in most use-cases, yet it’s a field that has not seen as much optimization and development as others had.
Find a very interesting presentation on the topic: How to make Linux boot faster here. The presentation was held at the Linux Plumbers Conference 2019.
You might have asked yourself how it is that some phones charge up faster than others. Maybe the same phone charges at different speed when you’re using a different cable or power supply. It even might not charge at all.
There is some very complicated trickery in place to make those cables and power supplies do things in combination with the active devices like phones. Many of this is implemented by standards like “Quick Charge”:
Quick Charge is a technology found in QualcommSoCs, used in devices such as mobile phones, for managing power delivered over USB. It offers more power and thus charges batteries in devices faster than standard USB rates allow. Quick Charge 2 onwards technology is primarily used for wall adaptors, but it is also implemented in car chargers and powerbanks (For both input and output power delivery).
Wikipedia: Quick Charge
So in a nutshell: If you are able to speak the quick charge protocol, and with the right cable and power supply, you are able to get anything between 3.6 and 20V out of such a combination by just telling the power supply to do so.
This is great for maker projects in need of more power. There’s lots of things to consider and be cautious about.
“Speaking” the protocol just got easier though. You can take this open source library and “power up your project”:
The above mentioned usage-code will give you 12V output from the power supply. Of course you can also do…:
Be aware that your project needs to be aware of the (higher) voltage. It’s really not something you should just try. But you knew that.
More on Quick Charge also here.
We’ve got several quite big fish tanks in our house. Mainly used by freshwater turtles.
These turtles need to be fed every once in a while. And while this is not an issue normally it’s an issue if you leave the house for travel for an extended period of time.
Of course there are humans checking on everything in the house regularly but as much as can be automated should and will be automated in our household. So the requirement wa to have the turtle feeding automated.
To achieve this is would be necessary to have a fixed amount of turtle food be dispensed into the tanks on a plan and with some checks in the background (like water quality and such).
It’s been quite a hassle to come up with a plan how the hardware should look like and work. And ultimately i’ve settled on retrofitting an off-the-shelf fish pond feeder to become controllable through MQTT.
The pond feeder I’ve found and used is this one:
It’s not really worth linking to a specific product detail page as this sort of feeder is available under hundreds of different names. It always looks the same and is priced right around the same.
If you want to build this yourself, you want one that looks like the above. I’ve bought 3 of them and they all seem to come out of the same factory somewhere in China.
Anyway. If you got one you can easily open it up and start modifying it.
The functional principle of the feeder is rather simple:
Simple. Since the switch-status is not known on power loss / reboot a calibration run is necessary (even with the factory electronics) every time it boots up.
After opening the feeder I’ve cut the two cables going to the motor as well as the micro-switch cables. I’ve added a 4-Pin JST-XH connector to both ends. So I can reconnect it to original state if desired.
These are all the parts needed:
I am using a Wemos D1 Mini and a couple of additional components apart from the prototype board:
A PN2222 NPN transistor, a rectifier diode 1N4007 and a 220 Ohm resistor.
I’ve connected everything according to this schematic I’ve drawn with Fritzing:
I’ve then prototyped away and put everything on the PCB. Of course with very limited solderig skill:
As you can see the JST-XH connector on Motor+Switch can now be connected easily to the PCB with all the parts.
Make sure you check polarity and that you did correctly hook up the motor and switch.
When done correctly the PCB (I’ve used 40mm x 60mm prototype pcb) and all cables will fit into the case. There’s plenty of room and I’ve put it to the side of it. I’ve also directly connected an USB cable to the USB port of the Wemos D1 Mini. As long as you put at least 1A into it it will all work.
Since the Wemos D1 Mini sports an ESP8266 and is well supported by Arduino it was clear to me to use Arduino IDE for the software portion of this project.
Of course everything, from schematics to the sourcecode is available as open source.
To get everything running you need to modify the .ino file in the src folder like so:
What you need to configure:
Commands that can be sent through mqtt to the /feed topic.
There are overall two MQTT topics:
So if you want to make it start feeding 3 times:
mosquitto_pub -t house/stappenbach/feeder/feeder-00F3B839/feed -m 3
And if you want to see the state of the feeder:
mosquitto_sub -v -t house/stappenbach/feeder/feeder-00F3B839/state
All in all there are 3 of these going to be running in our household and the feeding is going to be controlled either by Alexa voice commands or through Node-Red automation.
I am still working on it – but it is coming together nicely. During the next vacation our fish tanks are going to be well fed.
More soon.
