Post originally published March 22 of 2021, date above represents most recent edit
The Nebraska Union at UNL, photo by ensign_beedrill, CC BY-SA 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons
At the time of writing, I am currently a student at the University of Nebraska - Lincoln, where I study Computer and Electrical Engineering as a dual major. I have a serious passion for both of these subjects, which is why I am so incredibly frustrated at how negative my experience at UNL has been, especially in the classes that directly relate to my major. This frustration is a large part of why I started OpGuides, so I thought I’d share it with the world.
Quantization is the process of constraining an input from a continuous or otherwise large set of values (such as the real numbers) to a discrete set (such as the integers).
I’m less than two months from graduating with degrees in both Electrical Engineering and Computer Engineering. One subject that comes up a lot in both fields is Quantization. Reading audio in to a micocontroller from a DAC? That continuous signal, represented physically by infinite values, now may only have 12 bits of resolution. Turning a knob on MIDI controller? There you get 7 bits. 128 possible values.
One of the bigger points of the metaverse is the idea of owning a slice of digital property. This is a weird mix of the scarcity and value from real life property and the domain name (like myfancyname.com) market. It also makes no god damn sense in this context, and is really just artificially putting limitations into a system for the sake of making yet another crypto currency.
From time to time, I get asked about my religion. Sometimes, “asked” is putting it lightly, like when my SO’s father asked if I believe in a God, but made it very clear there was only one right answer if I wanted to date my SO. Sometimes I’m asked with honest curiosity, as when people find out I grew up in a mixture of Wicca and Christianity, people wonder how that works, and what I came out believing in. Sometimes I’ll mention my less-than-ideal experiences with Christians, such as the career campus preachers, my interactions with those extremely anti-LGBT, and my honestly extremist grandparents (that’s a whole different story) - but I can think for myself, and I’d like to think none of those things have really influenced my own view of religion.
I bitch about consumerism a lot, yet, I like things. So that’s what this post is about. Things. Things I’ve bought over the last few years and what things fall into “OhMyGod This is Life Changing”, “A Bit of a Mixed Bag” and “How Did You Fuck This Up?”. Because I know not everyone cares about all these products, I’m going to skip right to the juicy bit- the thinking about what lessons come from this thinking:
So, you’ve got a website that you want to make use less bandwidth. Maybe you’re paying by the byte for content delivery, maybe you’re worried about the environment, either way, let’s assume you want to make your images as small as possible. The obvious place to start is just shrinking your images. Here, this is a 4032x2268 .jpg shrunk down to a 1008x567 .jpg - 25% of the original quality. This brings the file down from 3.2Mb to 260.4Kb, so about a 12x reduction in size. We can do better though:
The term digital native describes a young person who has grown up in the digital age, in close contact with computers, the Internet, and video game consoles, and later mobile phones, social media, and tablets. The term is often used to refer to millennials, Generation Z, and Generation Alpha; the latter two are sometimes described as distinct “neo-digital natives”, “true” digital natives, or “digital integrators”.
NOW, THEREFORE, BE IT RESOLVED BY THE MEMBERS OF THE ONE HUNDRED SEVENTH LEGISLATURE OF NEBRASKA, FIRST SESSION:
That we hereby reaffirm our solemn oaths of office by expressing a firm resolution to maintain and defend the Constitution of the United States and the Constitution of Nebraska against every act of aggression whether foreign or domestic, including every act of unconstitutional abuse of power arising from the state or federal government.
That sounds fantastic, unfortunately, it seems that you also use this document to then break those oaths, so it may have been advisable to put this at the end of the document. Regardless, this point exists solely as a ‘war cry’ of sorts to simultaneously stir up feelings of national pride in readers as well as stoke the flames of the exact crowd that believed there was an abuse of power so strongly that they choose to break into the U.S. Capitol or supported those that did.
If you would like to read the refrenced papers, I recommend using Sci-Hub with a VPN on, as the academic publishers putting up paywalls as barriers to science can go fuck themselves.
Most of these things probably exist. For many, it’s just that they don’t exist at a practical price point.
Without further ado, In no particular order
A not garbage, not phone based, IR camera that doesn’t cost a bajillion dollars
Yes. I know the FLIR and SEEK Thermal cameras are a thing, but both have their share of software problems or hardware incompatibilities. Most of all, I don’t want to have to hope that their app keeps working with my phone at risk of a $250 paper weight.
