This is James Howard Kunstler talking about the “The tragedy of suburbia”. It’s something I think a lot about and something I hated about living in the US. His talk is a bit about the problems of a car culture but also a bit ranty. The TED talks are always interesting.
Tag: JustMigrated
Should anyone ask, well, it’s about time
I’ve been waiting for the flying cars promised to me as a child. In the year 2000 you will have… Well it’s finally arrived: The flying car goes into production. For the record, I’m happy to wait at home on the arranged day of delivery.
Should anyone ask, I don’t like moving parts
Disks are the most unreliable part of any computer system. They fail reguarly and one did on me today. Thankfully I have a RAID5 system which means that I’m able to run with only 3 of the 4 disks avaliable. Still it’s not a nice situation to be in. I’d been watching the disk scream that it was having problems for the last 6 months. Well today it died. I swung by Bauers and picked up a new one, partitioned it to the same size and it’s currently rebuilding:
Personalities : [raid1] [raid5] [raid4] [linear]
md1 : active raid5 sdc2[4] sdd2[0] sda2[2] sdb2[1]
1142582400 blocks level 5, 128k chunk, algorithm 2 [4/3] [UUU_]
[>....................] recovery = 1.0% (3875840/380860800) finish=130.3min speed=48193K/sec
Moving parts suck.
For the record it should be noted that bunker.imaginator.com was running continuously for the last 210 days.
Should anyone ask, never believe what you see
This is very cool: Context Aware Image Re-Sizing allows resizing of images by selective ‘distortion’ as an alternative to design-time choice of crop or scale.
It’s disconcerting to watch parts of an image disappear as it shrinks and purists may object but it does make sense in this ‘good-enough’ web 2.0 age (rather like lossy compression of audio has an application).
Shoudl anyone ask, that’s a big propellor that was once secret
I’m impressed at how the different mapping services are democratising spying. Now the armchair spy can compare propellor sizes. The latest has maritime buff Dan Twohig catching Navy with their propeller’s pants down. And it’s a big one.The full story is on Ogleearth.com.
Should anyone ask, we have enough entropy to go around
I setup some more monitoring of imaginator.com related servers. If you are interested the graphs of system performance reveal some interesting trends. I know that I’ll sleep better tonight knowing that we have enough entropy being generated. Please don’t use it all up.
Yes, the comment is tongue-in-cheek but entropy is an important component of a unix system. It’s read from /dev/random or /dev/urandom (for slightly more random data) and used in any application that needs a random seed, particularly cryptographic tools or games. Systems lacking enough random data would use a dedicated hardware random number generator, or in the case of the Commodore 64, use the built in random number generator. The C64 really was way ahead of its time.
Next week I’ll be looking at how one resolves excess mutex locks using a /dev/null accelerator.
Should anyone ask, I logged my morning run.
I have a new GPS that attaches to my mobile phone. It’s quite good at logging routes although got a little confused when I had it in my pocket and under dense tree cover. The shown route is almost exactly 10km.
Should anyone ask, everything has years.
For the record, all mp3s now have year tags.
Should anyone ask, everything has artwork
I finished a process that I’d started a couple of months back. Every now and again when I need to procrastinate I open up CoverScout and start finding artwork formy music. Yes, that’s 27 178 tracks and 1 884 albums. Most of the years are now set too. It was a horribly manual process that I could see no way to accurately automate. Indeed many of my Jazz CDs are rare bootleg recordings. Came across one from an artist that doesn’t even show up on Google make here in a Munich club called the Domocile. I can recommend CoverScout as a way to speed up the process. It’s well thought out and worth the registration fee.
When going through my mp3s I found this voicemail. No idea where it’s from but pleased to know that I don’t have internet here.
Should anyone ask, this website is run by a law breaker
I’m a dangerous lawbreaker. From the “would-only-happen-in-Germany” department, I can report that today I was pulled over for cycling too fast. I was doing 8km/h and was only allowed to do 5km/h in the pedestrian area. But she gave me a “Mündlichewarnung” which was very nice. For the sake of accuracy, it should be noted that my policewoman was blonde and cuter than the one in the picture.
Should Anyone Ask 