By Robert Ellison. Updated on Wednesday, November 16, 2022.
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.
(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.)
The site I had been using for global cloud cover images in Catfood Earth abruptly shut down recently so I've had to scramble to build a replacement service. This is live now and updates are available to download for Windows and Android.
More details about putting together the best possible clouds image for Catfood Earth here.
Catfood Earth 3.44 is available to download. This version updates the timezone database to 2018i, moves to a new source for timezone mapping an fixes a bug in the volcanoes layer.
Thomas Friedman in the New York Times today: "Could we have our first four-party election in 2020 — with candidates from the Donald Trump far right, the old G.O.P. center right, the Joe Biden center left and the Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez far left all squaring off, as the deepening divides within our two big parties simply can’t be papered over any longer?". Here's my daisyworld analogy from 2010, and a write-up of an Intelligence Squared debate on the same topic from 2011.
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.
By Robert Ellison. Updated on Sunday, September 25, 2022.
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.
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.
(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).)
(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.)
It turns out I'm not great at getting a monthly newsletter out. Starting with the January 2019 newsletter I've put in place a new system - I'm storing summaries of new articles when I write them and also collecting a few links that might be of interest to ITHCWY readers. These should be sent out automatically on the first of the month so I should only skip the newsletter if nothing happened. Apologies in advance if there are any teething issues with the new format.
I've been itching to replace my kitchen clock. I stupidly bought a self-setting atomic clock and the instructions said (this was a few years ago so I'm paraphrasing) 'Install as high up as possible on a southern facing exterior wall - ignoring these instructions may interfere with reception of the time signal.' Of course when used in my kitchen it has no idea what the time is. Due to the fancy mechanism it's extremely painful to set the time manually - you push a tiny button and try to stay awake while the hands move round and ultimately overshoot. Repeat.
It really should be illegal to sell things that tell you the time without some self-setting mechanism that works. Would it be hard to encode this in the electricity mains supply for instance? Or acquire via wifi or bluetooth? Every time I get in my car it connects to my phone but the car clock is clearly some cheap crystal that drifts daily and has no idea about daylight savings.
So the Echo Wall Clock is appealing because it should keep the right time without effort in addition to it's main role - visualizing Alexa timers. It's a stripped down implementation of the smart Glance clock but $170 cheaper at $30. It looks like most of those savings went to finding the cheapest possible plastic body. The Echo Clock also skips a face plate, which is a risk as if you touch the hands it will die.
Pairing is easy (via bluetooth) and it does manage to keep the right time. It's a decent if unattractive clock.
The timer function has taken the easy way out. If you set a five minute timer it lights up the minute marks from 12 up and then counts down. On a clock that knows what the current time is. This means that if you want to figure out when something is ready you're going to have to think. You need to look at the lit segments to see how long is left on the timer, and then add this on to the current position of the minute hand. I don't think anyone is buying a $30 timer visualizer to do minute-math. It would be a much better device if it just added the timer onto the current location of the minute hand, which is so obvious that this is what I expected to happen the first time I used it.
Overall it's cheap, cheap looking and flawed. But still a huge improvement on my kitchen's atomic age.
(Published to the Fediverse as:
Amazon Alexa Echo Wall Clock Review #etc#amazon#alexa#clock It's cheap and cheap looking. It has one job, and it's not that great at it. Still a huge improvement on my old kitchen clock. Read the full review...)
