Notices by Eric Phelps (ericphelps@mastodon.social)

@sj I'm noticing a lot of big cities, and then down there near the bottom is little Lake Havasu. With way less than 1% of the population compared to New York City, it's getting almost a quarter of New York's traffic?

Am I reading that right? I think if you adjust for population size, these rankings would look very different.

@drwho @sj Ooh, that's clean. I like it! I generally just need to know the overall weather to plan a day hike.
And you reminded me I'd been planning on reading the docs on wttr.in.

@sj I bet they had 2 fives and 2 fours and 1 three. That would be close to those percentages (and give a 4.2 average), but… could this actually be an attempt at statistical corrections for low sample size? Because my only other theory is they just add noise to the numbers to make them look more precise.

@sj Looks like the watermelon scene in "Buckaroo Banzai".

Sooo, there's this fence along the lake here. Lots of scary signs and a barbed wire fence. But… I can go to the public park at the lake and walk to the lake side of this fence. And I can walk in the bike path on the other side of the fence. But I can't switch.

Until today! I saw a biker turn off the bike path and disappear. It took me 30 seconds to realize what that meant. I ran over and traced his path and found a hidden hole in the fence. Completely hidden from both sides.

@sj I always held out hope that PGP text blobs would be sent over otherwise unencrypted channels. I had it all set up, but nobody else cared. We depend on the transmission channel to handle the encryption. That makes a single target for authoritarian regimes.

How desperate do we have to be before we decouple encryption from transmission?

@sj Very funny. It took me a while though. I couldn't figure out what the angry man had to do with a starter pack 🤦.

But yah, if you just want to get at the content, well, I know a way to get just the content ✨.

@chris Oops! Subsonic planes shouldn't do that. Unless it's cheap glass and they're right on the waterfront. In which case you'll probably see those same windows broken out come the regular winter storms.

@chris Makes my heart race seeing that.
I remember the old times watching that sort of thing from the deck of an aircraft carrier where the pilots didn't worry about kissing the sound barrier. You'd know you were in for it when you couldn't hear a thing as you saw them coming right at you. And then you'd see the Mach cone start to form. Uh-oh 😬. B-Bang!

Software go brrrrrr. No, this isn't the inside of a bombed out Minecraft warehouse, it's remote access software I was using to access a system on the other side of the planet. The network glitched, this happened, and I grabbed a screenshot before it all recovered about 5 seconds later.

It's pretty. I like the contrasting colors and that anomalous blue streak. But what do I know? Most things look pretty to me.

@sj At the bottom of their archived page, there's a begging link to exploit.im… Which doesn't look like a particularly reputable place. Figured I'd look at virustotal. Nope, not a good reputation.

@Infoseepage Well, heck. At least I have nothing planned for the next week. Come to think of it the next 3 weeks. Thanks for the advice.

Yay, I finally tested negative for COVID! Two weeks of no fun. I still have a residual cough, but I had that darned cough weeks before I caught COVID. Pretty sure it's a mold allergy because I seem to get it every year when we get warm weather rain.
Maybe if I quit hiking it wouldn't affect me as much? Naaah, that's crazy talk.

#covid

@sj Systemd? How's that?

I'd just set cron to start it hourly and have the script check the UTC time on each run. If it's the wrong time, it shuts down. That way you can keep it as a simple cron job for future maintenance.

But knowing another way might be useful one day.

Remember that iPhone update that cut down on the phone battery life? Well it looks like Android is doing the same thing. Probably restricting the crazy fast charging and enforcing max and min battery levels to extend battery life and prevent battery "mishaps".

The difference is Google learned from Apple's fumble and is offering free battery replacements, $50, or a $100 credit against a new phone.

Well, if you have a Pixel. No idea what other phones get.

@Infoseepage No, mine is an ordinary (well, extraordinary) conventional filter. It won't filter out sea salt, metal salts, or dissolved poisons. As long as I stay away from hazardous waste dumps and the ocean, I should be good.

https://www.amazon.com/dp/B019ERWU66

The long walk. Mile 19.5. Well, my wife finished what she was doing and insisted on picking me up on her way home. So the last 2 miles didn't happen. That's okay, I was in my home territory, so I didn't miss anything new. And I wasn't thrilled about walking the last hour in the dark 😉.

I did the whole trip on 3 liters. Can't do that in the summer! I did stop to refill when I got down to one liter remaining – playing safe because I knew the final stretch was away from water.

#hiking

@jake I've been wondering about it as a bookmarking tool, but haven't really done any research. Can you share a screenshot and your overall strategy?

@smurthys I remember reading a study about how people act in a store. For example, they're most likely to turn right when they get off an escalator.

But now you have me wondering if maybe all that might be affected by which side of the road people drive on. And temples! Wow. I never considered how social/religious factors might influence how we do the things we don't even think about.

Out for a pre-dawn walk around the neighborhood lake. Funny, I walked up to the lake and turned right (as humans are prone to doing), resulting in me going counter-clockwise around the lake. Just like 99.9% of everyone there. Lots of walkers, a few joggers, and many people "exercising" by themselves or in groups. Most of the exercise was just arm-flapping. I think mostly people just wanted an excuse to get out of the house and move around some.