Google has been sending me increasingly threatening emails about upgrading my Android apps and so August has been all about that. Helpfully Microsoft has also deprecated Xamarin (a tool I used to write software for Android) and so I also had to do a crash course in MAUI. Thank goodness for ChatGPT and GitHub Copilot. I also took this opportunity to figure out adaptive icons and generally update the look and feel of the apps.
Catfood Earth for Android has a new volcanoes layer and support for showing where you are on the satellite image.
I have wanted a decentralized social network for alongtime. Maybe this Fediverse thing is starting to get legs. Bluesky and Mastodon can now talk to each other via Bridgy Fed. Threads can post to Mastodon. ITHCWY has been on ActivityPub for a year now and it's become a significant source of traffic and comments. If you are on Mastodon or a federated service you can follow me at @[email protected]. I plan to get even more federated over the next year.
I waded foolishly into the debate around turning the Great Highway in San Francisco into a park, and found that the data doesn't support the fear of carnage in the Sunset when this road is closed. I also made a custom GPT to discuss the San Francisco budget with, and had to spend some time writing the missing manual to even know what to ask. Too late now, but here's a guide to the March ballot measures (watch this space for November) On a national level I got to update my NPVIC page now that Maine has joined.
Nope: "To unlock the device with a passcode, hold out your hand to project a green laser onto your palm. Pulling your hand outward increases the number while pulling it inward decreases it, and you select each digit by pinching two fingers on the same hand." #ml#humane
“The system is currently working just fine, but we know that with each increasing year, risk of data degradation on the floppy disks increases and that at some point there will be a catastrophic failure,” - maybe save $400M with a floppy emulator and a USB stick? #sfmta#muni#sanfrancisco
"In messages during the pandemic, he referred to ministers as “useless fuckpigs,” “morons,” and “cunts.” The inquiry’s lawyer asked Cummings if he thought his language had been too strong. “I would say, if anything, it understated the position,” he replied."
This is a depressing but definitive read as we wait for the UK election to be announced. #politics#uk
January has been nearly all timelapse at ITHCWY. First up I have my annual New Year's Eve production, this time a portrait of the Embarcadero in San Francisco. Apparently the Port Authority and US Army Corps of Engineers have a plan to lift this stretch of shoreline by 7 feet to protect it from climate change. I also got a chance to visit Miami, and produced a timelapse of the skyline and the world's latest largest cruise ship, the Icon of the Seas. It's so big it can spell it's own name out using windows as pixels. This is the ship causing the climate change that necessitates lifting the Embarcadero. Finally some present day construction, two months of light rail track replacement on my street.
Catfood Earth 4.40 includes the latest time zone database and also some fixes for the locations, volcanoes and weather radar layers. If you use any of that please update.
I'm slowly replacing myself with an LLM. Currently I'm on Rob 2.1 which features a fine tuned version of GPT 3.5, retrieval augmented generation (RAG) and some prompt tuning. You can chat with it in the comments. Don't worry, it's not blogging yet, the aim is to start sending it to some meetings.
I got the Aura Carver Mat for Christmas. It's a nice 10 inch digital photo frame with great Google Photos integration - hook it up to an album, invite people to the album, add photos. You can also use the Aura app for sharing but a Google Photos album is way easier. I got this to replace an Echo show because I had started spending too much time switching off all the ads. Even after you've toggled off every bit of marketing fluff the thing still shows you ads. It's one thing if it was sold as ad supported but quite another to continually sneak them in via software updates. I like Alexa and so I replaced it with the Echo Studio (so much sound) and this frame which so far just works.
One minor detail is that this frame is designed to sit on a desk or shelf and does not contemplate living on a wall. I designed this discrete shelf for wall mounting. It's pretty small which is good, I'd recommend some double sided tape or similar to stop the frame from sliding sideways in case you're as bad at using a spirit level as me (or live in an earthquake zone, also like me).
OpenSCAD code below, or grab the STL from Thingiverse.
(Published to the Fediverse as:
3D Printing a discreet wall mount shelf for the Aura Carver Mat #etc#3dprint#openscad#thingiverse#alexa#amazon STL and OpenSCAD for a wall mounting bracket for the Aura Carver Mat 10 inch Digital Photo Frame)
Vice has a horrifying article on nanoplastics. I'll have to worry about them later though because Mirjam Guesgen trots out this amazing comparison:
"Microplastics are on the scale of micrometers, while nanoplastics are mere nanometers. To get a sense of just how small that is, imagine the difference between the size of a WNBA basketball (which is slightly smaller than the NBA equivalent) and a grain of rice."
If we're getting a rough sense of the difference from rice and basketballs what on earth could be the motivation to make it a WNBA basketball? How slightly smaller is it? Stack says:
"A standard NBA basketball has a diameter between 9.43 and 9.51 inches. In the WNBA, the basketball has a diameter of between 9.07 and 9.23 inches. Basketballs used in the NCAA are between 9.39 and 9.55 inches for men and 9.07 and 9.23 inches for women."
Around 5% smaller by diameter at most.
Also, is the WNBA / NBA distinction meaningful when we're not defining the type of rice? Basmati is 6-8 mm, so way more variability than basketballs. I don't even need to bust out the short grained varieties. This is so crazy I had to check out the plastics as well.
Guesgen says microplastics are on the scale of micrometers which is kind of what I had assumed too. But then I'm not a science journalist. Some light googling reveals that microplastics are fragments under 5mm. Some rice would be a microplastic, if it was plastic rice. I guess everything can be measured in micrometers but 5mm is 5000 micrometers. So what are nanoplastics? Maybe 5 micrometers and smaller?
"For particles smaller than 1 μm, they are defined as nanoplastics"
And:
"The term “nano” in nanoplastics tends to be contentious as many researchers follow the convention for nanoparticles that are defined as particles having a size approximately between 1 and 100nm."
So at the extremes that's five million times smaller, or to get a sense of just how much smaller imagine the difference between a grain of rice and around 1,300 blue whales, nose to tail. For the largest plausible nanoparticles, still about a whale. I'm not going to get into the gender.
(Published to the Fediverse as:
Nanoplastics, Microplastics, Basketballs, Rice and Whales #etc#nanoplastic#microplastic#rice#whales#basketballs How much smaller is a nanoplastic than a microplastic? A lot more than I expected, and a lot more than claimed in a recent Vice article.)
