During the past year many have been able to give each other a good amount of grace and empathy and not judge them by their race, inability to wear a mask, or whether they go to the grocery store once a week or once a month to reduce their risk. Business owners have shown concern by giving special hours for the at risk or unvaccinated to come and shop early hours. And many have been using tools like microcovid.org to gauge the risk their household should budget. However not all has been as it should be.
Continue reading “Common Sense (and basic arithmetic) are not so common anymore”Chrome 93 brings a different way of thinking
If you are using Chrome 93, you may have noticed recently the “Your connection is always secure unless Chrome tells you otherwise” in the location bar. This raises an interesting question – should the system be telling you that any site that you visit is secure? Should we be trusting Chrome in this regard?
Continue reading “Chrome 93 brings a different way of thinking”Zipf’s law, Kleiber’s law, and finding interesting patterns in browsing history
In the chapter The Long Tail of the Law, in Alex Bellos’ book The Grapes of Math, he shows some different statistical patterns that share the same properties:
Continue reading “Zipf’s law, Kleiber’s law, and finding interesting patterns in browsing history”Sum/product of consecutive numbers and other math shortcuts
If you have studied some of the old SAT questions at some point you may have gone through questions like –
4 consecutive numbers sum to 166. What is the product of the numbers? or…
3 consecutive even numbers sum to X. What is their product?
The way the tutors and the online tutorials show seems to always be to algebraically solve this – for example 4 consecutive numbers would solve x+x+1+x+2+x+3 = 166, collect terms and solve…
However there is another way that works for this and works for other similar problems.
Continue reading “Sum/product of consecutive numbers and other math shortcuts”Pat 0.11 Review and setup… the long awaited update!
If you have used Ham radio and are on Linux, you most likely have used the Winlink program Pat, an open source interface to use Winlink over internet (and some radios if you have that set up). The long awaited new release now includes the forms feature! and other improvements! If you haven’t set it up here is a quick review:
Continue reading “Pat 0.11 Review and setup… the long awaited update!”The Gene: an Intimate History Book Review
With a lot of misinformation about genes and the spreading of all manner of made up things on the internet it is interesting to read this pre-pandemic published book and some interesting history of viruses and gene technology.
Continue reading “The Gene: an Intimate History Book Review”Purism price increase scheduled for end of June
If you have been thinking of buying the new Librem phone now may be the best time to do so! The price will be increasing $100 according to a recent posting on their blog. And what better way to celebrate independence day than a device independent of many of the major tech giants’ updates? You can even buy a Librem phone that is built in USA… at over double the cost, however.
Continue reading “Purism price increase scheduled for end of June”PyImageSearch Review
If you have been doing OpenCV or Python machine learning, you have most likely come across PyImageSearch. If you come across a sale for this service I would recommend trying it out if you are learning some machine learning. This past week they have run a free promo 7 day trial, which gave me an opportunity to browse these.
Continue reading “PyImageSearch Review”Keeping a process running with a 3 line Bash script
While you are running a long running process, you may want to run it again if it stops or is watching some process that should be running all the time. At first look at this might seem best to…
- Create some cron running a script that checks output of “ps aux | grep myprogram”, run it if it is not running.
- Wrap some other Python script calling it and at the end wait and try running again.
- Check in on the process and see what might be wrong. (Not great, if it is a process you want to be checking errors in you should be using Sentry anyway)
Government publication shows practical ways you can prep for an EMP
Chances are you have seen a movie or book recently covering the topic of an EMP – an Electro-magnetic pulse from a faraway nuke that could cause outages and damage. While most of what you hear will either be dismissive of the possibility, or a horror story of years of electronic wasteland, the reality could be more in the middle and is something folks can prepare for, according to a US government publication linked in the documents section of the SHARES site.
The SHARES system is a HF long range ham radio service but there are several recommendations in the document that just about any civilian should be considering, not just radio maintainers and organizations:
Continue reading “Government publication shows practical ways you can prep for an EMP”