Progress

Lots of work. Little else. It's a good thing. I work on a Mac again, so now all my keyboard and shortcut muscle memory is going down the drain again.

PlantEd

I've decided to switch to a Pi zero. Less work, overall, and more possibilities. I wonder how to do timelapses, for example. Should I just use an old smartphone? Or is there a goodi.e. cheap camera that can be controlled by the Pi, or even work with the Pi?

Lots of questions, about which one can think to procrastinate the actual doing.

NTS

We thought long and hard, then we played around with indices a bit and then it actually worked. I'm as surprised as you are, but more delighted.

Articles

I went through my open tabs backlog, so there are a lot more than usual this week, and not all are very fresh.

• Cause of Cambrian Explosion - Terrestrial or Cosmic? - ScienceDirect: We review the salient evidence consistent with or predicted by the Hoyle-Wickramasinghe (H-W) thesis of Cometary (Cosmic) Biology. Much of this physical and biological evidence is multifactorial. One particular focus are the recent studies which date the emergence of the complex retroviruses of vertebrate lines at or just before the Cambrian Explosion of ∼500 Ma. Such viruses are known to be plausibly associated with major evolutionary genomic processes. We believe this coincidence is not fortuitous but is consistent with a key prediction of H-W theory whereby major extinction-diversification evolutionary boundaries coincide with virus-bearing cometary-bolide bombardment events. A second focus is the remarkable evolution of intelligent complexity (Cephalopods) culminating in the emergence of the Octopus. A third focus concerns the micro-organism fossil evidence contained within meteorites as well as the detection in the upper atmosphere of apparent incoming life-bearing particles from space. In our view the totality of the multifactorial data and critical analyses assembled by Fred Hoyle, Chandra Wickramasinghe and their many colleagues since the 1960s leads to a very plausible conclusion – life may have been seeded here on Earth by life-bearing comets as soon as conditions on Earth allowed it to flourish (about or just before 4.1 Billion years ago); and living organisms such as space-resistant and space-hardy bacteria, viruses, more complex eukaryotic cells, fertilised ova and seeds have been continuously delivered ever since to Earth so being one important driver of further terrestrial evolution which has resulted in considerable genetic diversity and which has led to the emergence of mankind.
• Historical Reconstruction of the 1915 Ford Model T Assembly Line
• Model T Ford Assembly Line - Buy Royalty Free 3D model by Myles Zhang (@mdzhang) [182208c]
• Open Zone Map Beta: A map showing all known free-trade zones.
• Amazon.de: BOOX
• Repurposing Large Electronic Price Tags -- Hackaday
• Can you get 32 level grayscale out of an E-ink display? -- Details -- Hackaday.io
• plant_generation_time_and_climate/generation_times.csv at master · AldoCompagnoni/plant_generation_time_and_climate · GitHub: Part of PlantED, but didn't go anywhere because I can't read it.
• "But How Do I Actually Start?" Making Games on Your Own as an Engineer -- Eyas's Blog
• Iceberger Remixed - Iceberg Simulator - Engaging Data
• How to Make the Computer a Medium of Artistic Expression -- Interactive Storytelling Tools for Writers -- Chris Crawford
• In praise of property-based testing – Increment: Testing
• A new way to make maps with OpenStreetMap -- Protomaps
• The Lifecycle of a Plot — Matplotlib 3.5.1 documentation
• electricityMap -- Live CO₂ emissions of electricity consumption
• Surprising shared word etymologies - Daniel de Haas
• Practical SQL for Data Analysis -- Haki Benita
• I ****ing hate Science • Buttondown: "I’m a big advocate of Empirical Software Engineering. I wrote a talk on it. I wrote a 6000-word post covering one controversy. I spend a lot of time reading papers and talking to software researchers. ESE matters a lot to me. I’m also a big advocate of formal methods (FM). I wrote a book on it, I’m helping run a conference on it, I professionally teach it for a living. There’s almost no empirical evidence that FM helps us deliver software cheaper, because it’s such a niche field and nobody’s really studied it. But we can study a simpler claim: does catching software defects earlier in the project life cycle reduce the cost of fixing bugs? Someone asked me just that. Which meant I’d have to actually dive into the research."
• Hillel on Twitter: "One of my most controversial software opinions is that your sleep quality and stress level matter far, far more than the languages you use or the practices you follow. Nothing else comes close: not type systems, not TDD, not formal met
• Planning & estimating large-scale software projects
• Archive.org Serendipity: Search and Stream Selections from the 78rpm Collection: play random expired-copyright recordings, transferred from old 78rpm vinyls
• How NFTs Will Save Video Games By Making No One Want to Play Them Anymore
• Sensor Network Technology in Vinge’s A Deepness in the Sky – Embedded in Academia
• [1811.04994] How to Increase Global Wealth Inequality for Fun and Profit: "We point out a simple equities trading strategy that allows a sufficiently large, market-neutral, quantitative hedge fund to achieve outsized returns while simultaneously contributing significantly to increasing global wealth inequality. Overnight and intraday return distributions in major equity indices in the United States, Canada, France, Germany, and Japan suggest a few such firms have been implementing this strategy successfully for more than twenty-five years."
• [2201.00223] They Still Haven't Told You: "The world's stock markets display a decades-long pattern of overnight and intraday returns seemingly consistent with only one explanation: one or more large, long-lived quant firms tending to expand its portfolio early in the day (when its trading moves prices more) and contract its portfolio later in the day (when its trading moves prices less), losing money on its daily round-trip trades to create mark-to-market gains on its large existing book. In the fourteen years since this extraordinary pattern of overnight and intraday returns was first noted in the literature, no plausible alternative explanation has been advanced. The main question remaining is therefore which of the few firms capable of profitably trading in this manner are guilty of having done so. If any of this is news to you, it is because the people you trust to alert you to such problems still haven't told you."
• 2017: Universal Paperclips - by Aaron A. Reed
• Creating Beautiful River Maps with Python -- by Adam Symington -- Jan, 2022 -- Towards Data Science
• Words Known Better by Males Than Females, and Vice Versa / Yuri Vishnevsky / Observable

Libraries, programming, etc

• GitHub - aztek/awesome-self-reference: A curated list of examples of self-reference in art, science, and technology
• Code. Simply. Clearly. Calmly.
• GitHub - chrislusf/seaweedfs: SeaweedFS is a fast distributed storage system for blobs, objects, files, and data lake, for billions of files! Blob store has O(1) disk seek, cloud tiering. Filer supports Cloud Drive, cross-DC active-active replication, Kub
• GENUARY PROMPTS –: GENUARY is an artificially generated month of time where we build code that makes beautiful things.
• GitHub - DIYgod/RSSHub: 🍰 Everything is RSSible
• GitHub - Witiko/markdown: A package for converting and rendering markdown documents in TeX
• Open Source Home Theater Software -- Kodi
• GitHub - mendel5/alternative-front-ends: Overview of alternative open source front-ends for popular internet platforms (e.g. YouTube, Twitter, etc.)
• KT403A-MP3/kt403A.py at master · jczic/KT403A-MP3 · GitHub: A small library for interacting with a KT403A MP3-decoder chip, in micropython.
• Webhook.site - Test, process and transform emails and HTTP requests
• GitHub - joe-crawford/Static-Site-Search: Generate a "static" website search engine
• GoJS: A Web Framework for Rapidly Building Interactive Diagrams
• ShadyURL - Don't just shorten your URL, make it suspicious and frightening.
• A(x56) - URL Lengthener
• Introducing Dataflow, a self-hosted Observable Notebook Editor / Alex Garcia / Observable
• Network protocols, sans I/O — Sans I/O 1.0.0 documentation
• Zanzibar: Google’s Consistent, Global Authorization System – Google Research: "Determining whether online users are authorized to access digital objects is central to preserving privacy. This paper presents the design, implementation, and deployment of Zanzibar, a global system for storing and evaluating access control lists. Zanzibar provides a uniform data model and configuration language for expressing a wide range of access control policies from hundreds of client services at Google, including Calendar, Cloud, Drive, Maps, Photos, and YouTube. Its authorization decisions respect causal ordering of user actions and thus provide external consistency amid changes to access control lists and object contents. Zanzibar scales to trillions of access control lists and millions of authorization requests per second to support services used by billions of people. It has maintained 95th-percentile latency of less than 10 milliseconds and availability of greater than 99.999% over 3 years of production use."
• Moving forward with ORY Keto · Issue #47 · ory/keto · GitHub
• GitHub - ory/keto: Open Source (Go) implementation of "Zanzibar: Google's Consistent, Global Authorization System". Ships gRPC, REST APIs, newSQL, and an easy and granular permission language. Supports ACL, RBAC, and other access models.
• GitHub - artperrin/image2csv: Convert tables stored as images to an usable .csv file
• Camelot: PDF Table Extraction for Humans — Camelot 0.10.1 documentation
• Engauge Digitizer
• WebPlotDigitizer - Extract data from plots, images, and maps
• Critter.Camera
• Everyday Data Science
• Graphiti
• GitHub - ArchiveBox/ArchiveBox: 🗃 Open source self-hosted web archiving. Takes URLs/browser history/bookmarks/Pocket/Pinboard/etc., saves HTML, JS, PDFs, media, and more...
• GitHub - shaarli/Shaarli: The personal, minimalist, super-fast, database free, bookmarking service - community repo
• GitHub - gildas-lormeau/SingleFileZ: Web Extension for Firefox/MS Edge and CLI tool to save a faithful copy of an entire web page in a self-extracting HTML/ZIP polyglot file
• GitHub - gildas-lormeau/SingleFile: Web Extension for Firefox/Chrome/MS Edge and CLI tool to save a faithful copy of an entire web page in a single HTML file
• Deine freie und dezentrale Audio-Plattform - Funkwhale
• Soundsync - Music in sync on all the speakers in your home
• Gyroflow v1.0.0-rc1 has appeared! -- Gyroflow
• How does UTF-8 turn “😂” into “F09F9882”?
• ~toykeeper/flashlight-firmware/anduril2 : contents of ToyKeeper/spaghetti-monster/anduril/anduril-manual.txt at revision 642
• Catherine on Twitter: "- there is an open source version of flashlight firmware https://t.co/e26DIcNVJm - the open source flashlight firmware has a configuration flowchart - it stores the configuration in EEPROM https://t.co/ZStPNgONAQ L213 - the EEPROM w
• Full Anduril V1 Guide (Everything Explained) - YouTube: An open source flashlight firmware. Because of course there is!
• jpmens/jo: JSON output from a shell: turn command line arguments into json
• ohsayan/jotsy: Jotsy is a self-hosted, free and open-source note taking app with a goal of simplicity in mind
• FreeCAD: Your own 3D parametric modeler
• Python Pandas for your Grandpa
• Typer: Building a command-line interface from functions with type hint. How new!I am surprised myself that my little library is now almost ten years old. I'll have to do something for its birthday...
• Rich: very, very nice terminal output with colors and progress bars and all the other stuff anyone could want
• jless: a command-line JSON viewer

Books

• Bluebird by Ciel Pierlot: Space Opera par excellence. But a modern one, where everyone is lesbian. The only bad thing about this, so far, is the repeated stupidity of the main character, which will be able to talk about nanotech at length, but does not notice so many obvious things. Also, silly emotional problems.

Games

• Spiritfarer: This looks like a quite little game at first, even though the furry-deer is a bit weird. I haven't played past the tutorial, but I think this game turns into quite a hard management sim after a while, where you have to keep your customers happy by making everything. And all I wanted to do was to ferry some spirits through the afterlife...

Backlog

• Windbound (free from EGS
• Foundation (from Dominik)

Recipes

• One-Pot-Spätzle mit Räuchertofu
• Crème Brûlée
• Triple Layer Chocolate Cake: This one didn't work very well at all. The kladdkaka was too kladdig, the chocolate mousse wasn't enough and the white mousse just deflated. It tasted excellent, but I'll have to refine the recipe before I'm happy. So, as usual, more research is needed.

Other media

• LED灯丝灯制作工艺流程: How an LED light bulb is made
• Why are TV Cameras still HUGE and expensive ? - YouTube
• Jan Willem Nijman - Vlambeer - "The art of screenshake" at INDIGO Classes 2013 - YouTube
• Juice it or lose it - a talk by Martin Jonasson & Petri Purho - YouTube