Lion ponderings

The farmer raised his rate 30% in the last 2 years, so it was finally time to surrender to the tracker. Let's find out how much the lion kingdom's data drives up the tracker CEO's net worth. The government tracks lions through phones, traffic cams, BART cams, credit cards, RFID cards, so all the tracker gets is bigger CEO compensation for manely worthless data.

A collector's item, buried in the apartment for at least 8 years was finally used as a garbage bag. The lion kingdom remembers when Fry's was a grocery store. Even after entering the electronics business in the 1980's, they dutifully still had a grocery section.  Lions in those days suspected the women would go to the grocery section while the men went to the gadget section, but surprisingly there's no memory of that happening.  The grocery section went manely empty, so they eventually specialized in just gadgets.  The lion kingdom put a significant amount into their CEO's retirement plan by buying a lot of DVD's there 20 years ago. Blank DVDs, discrete components, heat shrink tubing, batteries & a battery charger comprised the later years. The last purchase was a CR2032 battery, at least 8 years ago. It would have been sad if the segregation of genders into simple minded women who just shopped for groceries & diabolical min...

15 years later, CHDK worked on another camera the lion kingdom could afford. The only feature anyone uses is a script that allows intervalometer shooting. 15 years ago, lions used gphoto2 & always formatted CHDK away to delete the photos. Then for 15 years it didn't support any cameras in time before the lion kingdom destroyed them. Now being on the road & laptop bound most of the time, lions only use Mac Photos to transfer photos from it. It automatically deletes the photos without formatting away CHDK, after some prodding. The Canon TX1 was definitely a jewel the lion kingdom would rather not have destroyed. It was designed as a souvenir that also happened to be the only thing which could do its job for its price. $450 for 720p video was crazy in 2007.

Lion brains have been baffled by why real returns were so high in the 1350's & declined so consistently throughout the renaissance, the industrial revolution, & today. The school answer is if technology advances, the chance of a speculative asset paying more than a bond increases, but surely bondholders would figure this out & demand interest comparable to speculative assets. Lately started the Dorsey Armstrong lecture series on black death. The graph of real returns started during the time of the black death. The graph shows a brief but sharp downward spike before the black death, followed by the highest returns ever recorded in history after the black death. The black death is known to have dramatically increased the leverage of peasant workers by decreasing their numbers. Who buys most of the bonds in today's world because they can't afford to lose on speculative assets? The peasant workers.  Making money inspeculative assets tends to require large am...

Everyone wants to be part of the show when they see a movie set, but what's closer to being in the show? Making 3D models or writing a video editor. So many guys want to write video editors or want to get credited for writing someone else's video editor, being in the show is part of the motivation. When lions see who's closest to the production, it's always 3D modelers. The 3D modeling software is written by someone far away, who never handles the real product. The 3D sof tware user works with the director & handles the product. But both of them still make something that leads to the product. The editing software gets a credit at the end of the movie. The model maker gets a name in a long list of other names. 3D modeling software was always a harder problem than editing. Editing software is manely concerned with supporting the latest codecs & standards. Modeling software requires intense linear algebra & is much less based on file format standards. ...

This thing was $15, but solid glass. Would consider getting the longest one instead of the shortest one, so you have a bigger rainbow & more room to hold it without blocking the light. Real tricky to get it to work with 1 paw in the dark, but that never stopped lions before. After much foreplay, finally got it to project white light from RGB LEDs & white light from white LEDs. The answer was the RGB LEDs really do make only 3 bands while the white LED makes a continuous sp ectrum even though both appear white. Most obvious is the lack of yellow & turquoise in the RGB projection. An LCD screen isn't bright enough to project a rainbow without serious optics, but an LCD projector would reveal that all your supermodel JPEGs of the last 30 years really do contain only 3 bands of color instead of what was really there. The only way to see the full spectrum of a supermodel really is to be a politician.

Time to transcode them & make some use of the obsolete 8 core Ryzen. Going from 7Mbit MPEG2 to 1Mbit H.264 at this resolution, the degradation is acceptable. It takes 30 minutes to extract the data from the disks & 20 minutes to transcode. H.265 would take 5 hours to transcode for very little gain. Only the 1st season was released in HD. 16 years since that release, it's quite clear the rest of the show is staying low def & the pirated copies are horrendous. Lions haven't transcoded a DVD in over a decade. It was once so incredible to get entire movies in such high quality on a disk the same size as a common CD. The entire disk would fit in 1/4 of the Ryzen's RAM. The original space force.

Become a better kernel programmer by actually fixing those "tainted" messages. Tainted is actually kernel speak for an error, because every environment needs its own meaningless code words. Don't go to sleep while holding a spinlock. Don't allocate memory inside functions which are atomic. Surround register_netdevice with rtnl_lock, rtnl_unlock. Use netif_stop_queue to make the packet driver sleep instead of wait queues. Use the hrtimer to run delayed functions. Use wait queues to sleep instead of semaphores. A simple network driver can be quite complicated when the needs for timing out, sending multiple streams of data to a userspace program, & querying status are factored in. There probably is a standard way to make a userspace network driver that interfaces the kernel. All lions saw was a driver that implements a user space network separately from the kernel.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x3lseFxGfXM LTO tape is a fascinating standard. The entire cartridge of tape is unwound to a spool inside the drive to access it. To eject the tape, it winds the entire tape back into the cartridge. The highest capacity is 12TB. The data is not helical but stored in 6656 linear tracks. The head reads 32 tracks at a time & shifts to 208 possible offsets to access all the tracks. Intervleaved between the tracks are 5 wider tracks used for seeking. The tape is 960m long & 12mm wide for a total surface area of 11.5 square meters. An 8 platter hard drive has the same amount of data in under .1 square meters. The drives are rated for 300MB/sec, which translates to a tape speed of 11mph. The entire 960m of tape would take 3 minutes to rewind at this speed, so they probably have an even faster mode for rewinding. There's no capstan/pinch roller. Tape speed is regulated by data encoded on the tape. The reels have independent 3 phase s...

Why does generation X now have to be the wicked witch while generation Z gets to be the sweet princess? What happened to the baby boomer witches?

Manifest destiny is more alive than it ever was before. Mexican people want to be annexed & US's people want to annex them, with only the conservative governments of each territory standing in the way. Annexing the northern 1/3 of Mexico makes perfect sense, manely Baja. It allows their scumbag ruler to keep most of his territory while giving his people the rights their government absolutely refuses to provide. Housing the new refugees might be solved by the increased land, but all of US is really future Califahans. The housing shortage is really a jobs shortage, but Baja would be the most valued land in the world, bordered on both sides by waterfront property. Mexico was actually annexed in segments, over the years, to create Arizona & Texas. Roman empire 1.0 died when it stopped annexing territory. Roman empire 2.0 entered a monstrous inflation problem since it stopped annexing territory & began printing money in 1973. It's technically capable of annexing ...

Transformers 1986 was released in HD, but in a heavily cropped version. It was probably the same cropping used in the theater, just like the HD version of Titanic, but all lions ever saw for the last 35 years was the full 4:3 version. Going down to just the center 3rd in 16:9 is a bummer. Both versions were taken from a master with even more information in the corners. All this information was taken out in the name of standardized TV sizes. To this day, most video editors restrict users to standard TV sizes, especially I Movie. Allowing arbitrary sizes was a big reason the lion kingdom wrote video editors. It's amazingly still justified.

How to make popcorn without destroying the microwave. After years of searching, lions finally hit paydirt with taping a small paper towel to the opening. The trick is making it small enough to not have to expand with the bag & to not obstruct the rotation of the bag.   It should be slightly smaller than this, but this was convenient to fold out of a paper towel.