Notices by jaseg (jaseg@chaos.social), page 2

TIL that you can just watch cosmic rays hit the Superkamiokande experiment's giant (30m diameter) water tank 1000m below the Japanese alps in real time online:

https://www-sk.icrr.u-tokyo.ac.jp/realtimemonitor/

#science #physics

@0xabad1dea Tge only reason I could imagine for this waste of engineering effort was that they have a massive engineering headcount, and those teams full of people were basically making up stuff to do so they don't get fired.

@0xabad1dea This is actually one of the reasons I switched away from Spotify. Out of nowhere, they would twiddle with the UI of their (android) app every few weeks. They would constantly change little things, continuously re-inventing what winamp did good enough in like 2007. They would never improve things by a lot, but sometimes-very annoyingly-make things slightly worse.

@slothrop @quixoticgeek While they are rare in the west, some state of the art rice cookers for the asian market are pressure cookers (sometimes even with induction heating!). They usually have a bunch of non-rice cooking programs. At least in the western country where I live, I think you tend to not see these mostly because they're too upmarket for most people to stomach the cost.

@nflux IIRC the reason that fans usually have an odd number of blades is that you want the number of blades and the number of struts fixing the fan hub to the casing to be coprime to each other, because that spreads out the acoustic emergy of the fan blades passing the struts the widest and avoids concentrating it into a single noisy tone.

For a freestanding wind turbine that should not matter.

"Optical side-channel attacks on bus stop signs" was certainly not on my academic bingo card today 🤣

Link to the paper:
https://dl.acm.org/doi/pdf/10.1145/3411764.3445054

On that #firefox feature that a lot of people are getting very upset about at the moment. Without even getting into the whole differentially private aggregation thing,

this is only going to affect someone in the first place if they (1) don't have adblock on and (2) click on the ad? like, in the case when their privacy is fucked already and AFAICT all #mozilla does is to make it slightly less fucked?

This weekend, I built a little portable soldering kit out of my old soldering station, powered from a Makita tool battery. I made this thing to help with maintenance of our bicycles' electrical systems, so I can solder right on our bicycles without running cables.

You can download STLs and OpenSCAD models on Printables, link below.

https://www.printables.com/model/943997-portable-soldering-station-powered-by-makita-tool

#electronics #soldering

@gunstick @rberger @ja2ke Yes, there are some techniques. Most of them involve mechanically moving or vibrating some optical component such as a diffuser. To me, they seem too complex compared to buying a couple low-pressure sodium bulbs.

@rberger @ja2ke That might work. The reason you want a narrow spectral peak in the first place is that you want the background to be about the same brightness as the foreground so it doesn't swamp out the color image, but you want to concentrate as much of that yellow light energy as possible inside of the matte image filter's passband while keeping that filter as narrow as possible because making the filter wider will mess up the color image.

@rberger @ja2ke LEDs have a substantially larger bandwidth than a sodium vapor lamp, but if they are too broadband depends on how narrowband their filters in the video are. You're right in that you definitely want a straight yellow/red/whatever LED instead of a phosphor-converted one, as the PC ones have much broader bandwidth, and usually have a peak of the original blue or purple showing through as well.

@rberger @ja2ke btw, if you want a "single frequency LEDs" with much narrower bandwidth, a diode laser is essentially that. You pay with both cost and efficiency though. Also, a laser puts out light that is both narrowband and coherent, and if you don't care about the coherence, it can be a nuisance since it causes speckles from interference when you illuminate an area with laser light.

TIL that sudo, the unix command line utility, has a logo. And that logo is cursed.

https://commons.m.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Sudo_logo.png

Wow this is bad. Some Italian researchers decided there wasn't enough anti-right-to-repair hardware #DRM in the world already, and developed a way to physically profile and recognize individual battery cells that can be combined with classic DRM technologies to prevent non-OEM battery cells from working inside a device, even if the classic DRM portion is circumvented. Whyyyyyy?!

https://dl.acm.org/doi/pdf/10.1145/3576915.3623179

#science #security

In case you were wondering, this is what a tray of cookies looks like on a thermal camera, fresh out of the oven (first pic) and during cooling (the other pics). The second pic shows traditional German cinnamon waffles, the others show shortcrust cookies.

The applications of thermal cameras in the kitchen are totally underrated. You can easily tell which ones are cold enough to be stacked and put into boxes.

Temperatures shown in the pictures are in Celsius.

#thermalcamera #science

@marcan The funniest part about this is that the HN crowd usually is all about freeze peach. I guess that only applies until the speach is about them 😂

@scy If you're about to buy yet another single-board computer, consider that right now, for around 150€ you can get a used Thinkpad X270 laptop. That price includes charger, SSD, keyboard, mouse and display, all of which you have to buy separately with an SBC. Additionally, by recycling a used device, you save lots of resources that would be consumed to make a new device.

@argv_minus_one @scy As someone working in security research, I am confident saying that as long as you install your own OS on the device, the chance of catching any sort of malware persisting through that OS install is zero. Getting scammed on ebay or the device being lost in shipping are more serious risks by many orders of magnitude.

Since it seems #Google has decided to uni-laterally force through their new anti-#adblock #DRM euphemistically named "Web environment integrity", I decided to add a little bit of code to my website that blanks out the page and displays a protest message with a link to the firefox download page when you visit it from a browser with this DRM feature. Here's the source inside one toot, feel free to copy and put it at the end of your website's <body> before the closing tag:

<script>if(navigator.getEnvironmentIntegrity!==undefined)document.querySelector('body').innerHTML='<h1>Your browser contains Google DRM</h1>"Web Environment Integrity" is a Google euphemism for a DRM that is designed to prevent ad-blocking. In support of an open web, this website does not function with this DRM. Please install a browser such as <a href="https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/new/">Firefox</a> that respects your freedom and supports ad blockers.';</script>