🇨🇦 tunetardis

This one’s Japanese (which has a lot of onomatopoeia btw), but ki-ki-ki is the sound of a violin being played badly. I put my poor family through a lot of that when I was taking lessons as a kid. I could hear my aunts in the background saying “mata ki-ki-ki yatteru.” That’s basically Japanese for “there he goes sawing away again”.

A little follow-up on this. Tonight I had a look at what it generated. It produced 2 files: a .wav and a .ass. The latter apparently contains subtitles that sync to the audio. But how do you play them together?

After searching around online, the general consensus seemed that you need to make a video file that throws it all together. For the background image I used a still of the book cover art. Then I ran an ffmpeg command that looked something like this:

ffmpeg -loop 1 -i cover.jpg -i abogen_file.wav -vf subtitles=abogen_file.ass -shortest audio_book.mov

It sounds pretty awesome and looks like this while it’s playing!

I installed it yesterday and started having it chug through the Murderbot series I got in epub format. It seemed to be taking forever, but then I checked a system monitor and discovered it was using the GPU to do most of the work. So whenever my GPU-heavy screen saver kicked in, it slowed to a crawl.

At any rate, it was done this morning but then I forgot to bring the files to work, so I can’t say at this point how good a job it did? It was a bit of a pain to install because it needed Python 12 and wouldn’t accept Python 14 for some reason, and pyenv on my Mac is a bit of pain because it hates tkinter. Go figure. But I got it working in the end.

Yes, Steam Machine is optimized for gaming, but it’s still your PC. Install your own apps, or even another operating system. Who are we to tell you how to use your computer?

I wonder if this means it’s less locked down the Deck? Like is it kind of an iPad vs Mac situation? When I got the Deck and it was my only CPU travelling around at one point, I tried installing some general tools so I could get some actual work done on the road. Things were fairly heavily sandboxed, though nothing was a total deal-breaker I guess?

Your coworker is reaching out to you in his own way, and you are making his life more bearable than you may know. What seems a little bump in the road may be a mountain to him. But life’s a marathon, and he might come around yet.

I was just trying to make sure that this is ok and won’t tangle up my code later on.

I guess the main issue there is Python doesn’t like circular dependencies? Like if you try to import dep2 from dep1 and dep1 from dep2, you’re going to have a problem. You’d essentially have to refactor your code to have a dep3 that both can import to use the common functionality I guess.

As others have mentioned, I would add a src/__init__.py file to turn src into a package.

Then, inside dep1.py, you can do a relative import with:

from . import dep2  

I’m not sure why you’re using as to make the module name longer? Usually, if I use it at all, I use it make things shorter. Anyway, once you’ve imported dep2, you can call dep2.some_fn(). You could also go:

from .dep2 import some_fn  
some_fn()  

I wish they had put snake on there for comparison purposes. They seem to have a certain economy of motion compared to legged animals, though friction could be an issue?

Heck, I’d have bet a Greenland Shark, or a Whale Shark to beat salmon.

They’re only considering “land” travellers. Though they include birds and fish that are not directly propelling themselves using the land, so take from that what you will.

I read somewhere that when they were envisioning the storyline for The Matrix, the original idea was supposed to be that human grey matter powered it in a computational sense. This kind of tracks, given the brain can perform outstanding feats running at a measly 20 watts or whatever it is, but somehow the story got distorted into its eventual form in which the human body is acting as a grossly inefficient battery.

So ground based observatories have long benefited from the development of adaptive optics. That’s basically where you have a small mirror that is synced to the movements of the upper atmosphere and essentially cancels out the shimmer that makes stars twinkle to the naked eye, bringing them into a sharp focus more like what you would get from a space telescope. But the tech can only achieve this feat over narrow patches sky, meaning wide field observatories were left out. I think that’s what they’re talking about here? You can’t get much more wide field than Vera Rubin.

After someone here linked a number of these, I’ve become something of a junkie following sites like this which show power generation around clock.

My armchair assessment in terms of utility carbon footprints these past few months has been that places with substantial hydro and/or nuclear capacity have fared best, though this past season has been rough on the former at least here in North America with drought-like conditions prevailing. Wind has also been disappointing. No wind during these heat dome events. Solar has done better, but even in a state like California that is fairly heavily invested in battery backup, the dream of a 24-hour solar grid still seems aspirational at this point?

Among the requirements of the DMA is that Apple ensures that headphones made by other brands will work with iPhones. It said this has been a block on it releasing its live translation service in the EU as it allows rival companies to access data from conversations, creating a privacy problem.

I’m not really understanding this. Where is the privacy problem? What is different with airpods that solves this? At the end of the day, are they not just bluetooth headphones? Do they add some extra security layer beyond what bluetooth itself offers?

The carbon tax was revenue neutral. It came back to you in the form of rebates. If you were an average Joe and did absolutely nothing in response to it, you’d still break even.

But if you did do something to lower your personal carbon footprint, you’d get ahead. You’d be getting back more than you were paying. And the higher the tax went, the bigger the payout would become. That was the point of it. It was an incentive to lower your taxes and emissions at the same time.

But all people with half a brain could hear was TAX TAX TAX. And so here we are…

How is the center of mass is lower on a scooter? It is the same or higher.

I guess I was thinking in terms of the contraption itself. The battery and the bulk of the weight would be down near ground level. But that’s a good point about the rider’s position.

The tiny scooter wheels will react enormously to tiny disadvantages in the road surface and the consequences of it. Hitting an tiny rock on the asfalt with a e-scooter will result in way nastier accidents than hitting a similar rock on the asfalt with a bicycle.

Yeah, this was main concern. There are potholes around here that are so bad your teeth may clunk together if you don’t have any sort of suspension, and I can’t help but think it would be difficult to steer your way out of those if you hit one on a scooter?

My main reason for considering a scooter was for hybrid trips where you drive to another place and then ride around. But if anything, the by-laws are even more vague around e-scooters than e-bikes in a lot of cities, so that makes me a little reluctant to take one on the road. Folding e-bikes are getting much smaller now though, so that might be the better option?

I am curious about e-scooters but have never ridden one. They have a lower centre of mass which, in theory, would offer some advantage over bicycles in terms of the severity of collisions.

Otoh would you not tend to have more control issues over uneven terrain? I think about my inline skates from the 90s. The streets suck here, and I had one too many an instance of a pothole or a bump sending me flying to keep that up.

Scooters have bigger wheels than skates, of course, but much smaller than bikes and they seem to have very low ground clearance. This makes me a little edgy.

My coworker who switched to one after riding an e-bike to work said the brakes were weaker with the e-scooter. That could just be a workmanship issue. I’d have to think about whether physics would play a role there?

Yeah, I guess it keeps you far enough away from the light/heat source to avoid burns. But in this day and age of LEDs, it’s rather vestigial. Maybe you can make a game out of flicking rubber bands through the hoop?

Our transportation network isn’t ready for a full return-to-office either.

Nice dig at OCTranspo there…

I was thinking more Hugh Laurie?

I hate articles that don’t give real units. 5 million households. Ugh. According to another article, we’re talking 7 GW.