95% of my incoming calls are now spam. Most of them are some strange pre-recorded Chinese voice with music playing in the background but I occasionally get a free hotel stay as well.

So far Google has rolled out Call Screen. This means I can waste my time watching Google Assistant talk to the spammer. It's way faster not to bother, hang up all calls and delete the voicemails later.

It seems like instead of Call Screen there could be a better way to deal with this.

Firstly, send any call not from someone in my contacts directly to voice mail. This would actually solve a lot of the problem.

Next, for extra credit, run spam detection on the voice mail before sending it to me. If it's two seconds long and blank then just bin it. If it's Chinese with music bin it. Only if it passes the smell test should it appear in my actual voice mail. Google is very good at this for Gmail.

Please!

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(Published to the Fediverse as: Please fix phone spam Google! #etc #google #spam #phone Why can't Google manage to fix phone spam when Gmail does such a good job? )

In TechCrunch today Josh Constine gets friend portability for Facebook almost right:

"In other words, the government should pass regulations forcing Facebook to let you export your friend list to other social networks in a privacy-safe way. This would allow you to connect with or follow those people elsewhere so you could leave Facebook without losing touch with your friends. The increased threat of people ditching Facebook for competitors would create a much stronger incentive to protect users and society."

The problem is having a list of friends does me no good at all when none of them are on Google Plus, Diaspora or whatever.

What we need is legislation that forces interoperability. I can share with my friends via an open protocol, and Facebook is forced to both send and receive posts from other networks. This would actually create an opportunity for plausible competition in a way that a friend export could never do. Social networking should work like email, not CompuServe.

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(Published to the Fediverse as: Facebook Interoperability #etc #software #facebook Social networking should work like email, not CompuServe. We need legislation to mandate interoperability between platforms. )

Material Design brought bland consistency to the Android ecosystem. Every app had some sort of bold header and a floating action button. There is some value in consistency and at least some personality was retained. It's red, it's probably Gmail. Yellow, I must be in Keep. Boring but tolerable.

Material Design 2 solves mainly for the problem of knowing which app you're looking at. Colors have gone. Every Google app is now an oppressive black list with some oppressive black icons. To add to the misery the icons have a shade of stock-library amateurism and are just a little too heavy. Unless I look really closely or the what-icon-did-I-just-click region of my brain is on top form there is no longer any way to tell the difference between Google apps.

I'm pretty sure Material Design 3 is just going to be a command prompt. What Android customers really want is telnet or wget and some raw JSON.

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(Published to the Fediverse as: Material Design 3 #etc #google #design The slow death of personality via bland consistency that is Material Design. )

I have a 58mm ND5 filter that I bought to photograph the 2017 solar eclipse. It worked pretty well for that with my Sony RX100 V, but now I want to use it with an RX10 IV (which has the advantage of a 600mm equivalent zoom). The RX10 accepts 72mm filters and I want to try and photograph an ISS transit which is happening sooner than I can get hold of an adapter.

I figured someone must have done this before, but I can't find a file anywhere. It's a reasonably straightforward part - as the filter is smaller than the thread on the camera I just need a small cylinder which has a 72mm thread on the outside and 58mm on the inside. A step up adapter would be slightly more complicated to accommodate the larger filter size.

To build this I used OpenSCAD and this thread module. Open the thread module file in OpenSCAD and then you just need to subtract the inner thread from the outer thread like this:

This makes a simple 10mm tall adapter and you would just need to change the thread sizes to make it work for pretty much any combination of camera and filter (most filter sizes use a 0.75mm pitch as shown above). The vignetting is pretty extreme with the smaller filter and the size of the adapter. For this application I don't care, I'm only using the center of the image. If it's a problem for your application then it might be worth reducing the height of the adapter, at the expense of making it harder to detach from the camera.

Here is the adapter STL file on thingiverse.

After all that, I missed the transit by a couple of seconds. I thought the clock on my phone would be accurate enough but turns out it's 5 seconds off. So memo to self for next time - shoot over a longer window, or just take a video.

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(Published to the Fediverse as: 3D Printing a 72-58mm step down Camera Filter Adapter #etc #3dprint #solar #filter #thingiverse #iss How to 3D print a step down camera filter adapter with OpenSCAD code and the STL file for a specific 72mm to 58mm project (adapting a solar filter for a Sony RX10 IV camera). )

If the atmosphere was the United States here's how it would break down:

Thor, Iowa is Hydrogen. Thor is the birthplace of John K. Hanson, founder of Winnebago. 179 people.

Florence, South Dakota is Krypton. 371 people.

Butterfield, Minnesota (home of the Butterfield Steam and Gas Engine Show) is Methane, 586 people.

Lewisport, Kentucky is Helium. Abraham Lincoln was unsuccessfully tried for operating a ferry without a license here in 1827. 1,706 people.

Maquoketa, Iowa is Neon. As of the time of writing Maquoketa Caves State Park is closed for bat hibernation. 5,921 people.

Gainesville, Florida is Carbon Dioxide. It's ranked by the National Coalition for the Homeless as the 5th meanest city. 132,567 people.

Chicago, Corpus Christi and Kimball, West Virginia make up Argon. 3,042,217 people total.

All that adds up to around 1% of the atmosphere, mostly Argon.

Oxygen is about 20%, that's California, New York, Oregon, Louisiana, Lake Station, Indiana and Cedar, Kansas. 68,225,139 people.

If you're not listed then you are Nitrogen. Close to 80% at 254,334,562 people.

(Population figures from the US Census 2017 estimates. Atmosphere composition from Wikipedia. Water vapor not included.)

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(Published to the Fediverse as: Comparing the Atmosphere to the Population of the United States #etc #atmosphere Which cities an states correspond to each gas in the atmosphere if the population of the United States is broken down in the same proportion. )