Recent content on negativesign
Having watched an absurd amount of Home Office Youtube, I was thinking about how I could improve my office. I wanted a desk shelf, but they seemed really expensive for what they were. And because I want to do fascinating, fun, and weird things, I thought it might be fun to build one with my Dad. In true Leeroy Jenkins fashion, I decided I was going to build a model and make drawings of a desk…
A delicious cocktail inspired by a turkey parade in the fall. Invented by Shorty. Ingredients one slice candied ginger one orange dash of Angostura bitters 1 tsp vanilla extract 1⁄2 tbsp agave syrup 1 oz Benedictine & Brandy (B&B) 3 oz bourbon (wild turkey?) cinnamon stick ice Preparation In a cocktail shaker, muddle candied ginger and two 1⁄2 inch strips of orange peel. Squeeze 2 tbsp…
I came back to ye olde static site generator after three years and I think everything is still working. Not only that, the contraption I set up to post from my iPad still works too. It’s a miracle. At least until I have to update go.mod or whatever. Or I realize that my VPC got backdoored and has secretly been mining crypto without my knowledge. Anyway, Hugo is fine I guess.
I’ve been trying to take and publish at least one photo for every day since 2010. Ten years, roughly, as of December 2019. I’ve published this diary on my website, and I’ve written about the project at least once before. From my first selfie with (taken with a Canon T2i) to the last photo of 2019 (taken with a Leica M10!), I published 8,564 photos for this project—an average of…
Another year, another year-end-review, I always say. Thankful to have an opportunity to reflect on another trip around the sun. You may think it’s odd to write a review of 2019 in December of 2020, but if y’all have 2020ed at all, you understand how remembering 2019 could be therapeutic. If you asked me, my friends, my family, or anyone adjacent to my life, you’d know that the…
I don’t usually talk about the work I do (in my free time, 😅) but If you wanna nerd out for a bit, here are some of MY OWN THOUGHTS about some PUBLICLY-AVAILABLE RESEARCH that…just happens to have my name on it. The specific topic area is speech quality measurement. What does that mean? Well, you’re probably familiar with the following statements: “[voice service provider] sux0rz/always sounds…
I’ve been lucky to be able to work from home during this…crisis…and I’ve been using 15” MacBook Pro and a Dell 4K monitor for a second screen. It’s a nice setup—again, I’m really lucky and thankful—all the extra screen real estate is so nice for writing code and viewing images in QGIS all at the same time. One thing that was less than optimal was changing the…
I’ve been rewriting my multiple exposure software (again—the code was totally unmaintainable and totally horrible). I decided to switch from exiv2 to the excellent exiftool and pyexiftool for reading and writing image metadata. exiv2 is good! But exiftool is compatible with raw images from more camera systems. I didn’t have any tests so I failed to maintain the functionality of my old…
Yesterday I was working from home and needed to boot my Ubuntu-based office computer into Windows. I really didn’t want to brave the bomb cyclone (again) so I did some quick searching to see if I could do this remotely—without manually interacting with the EFI boot screen. Surely you should be able to tell GRUB which OS to start on next boot, right? Right. Here’s how. First, use this one-liner to…
Last year I wrote a small summary of the things I accomplished throughout 2017. I am glad I did that last year and I wanted to do it again. So. Here is another bulleted list to summarize the most recent arbitrary unit of time that I managed to traverse. I didn’t switch careers, there were no weddings, and I maybe worked more than I should have. But I did make a concerted effort to push my…
In my previous post I talked about how to build some Docker containers to run a deep learning-focused1 JupyterHub instance. It’s nice for several reasons if the JupyterHub server brings itself up when the system starts. Here’s how to do that—an adaptation of this Stack Overflow post. Create a file at /etc/systemd/system/docker-jupyterhub.service and put the following text into the…
If you’ve gone down the road of building your own machine for “deep learning”,1 you may also have some sort of Jupyter Notebook server running on it. You may also be able to access that server when you’re not on your local network. The Jupyter Foundation have done a good job of documenting how to do this in a fairly secure way. But standalone Jupyter Notebook servers…
Just finished moving ye old blog from Octopress to Hugo under the premise that I’d write and publish a little more if I could use a tool that is is a little more modern.1 You know, more modern than a vintage 2012 Ruby. I took a look at other options before I took the leap—Nikola and a couple other Python-based systems looked promising. I started hacking around with Nikola before deciding it…
A few weeks back I went to a meetup where people, uh, meet, to talk about artistic projects they’re working on and critique each other’s work. I took some prints of my AVG DAY project from last year and got some really good feedback. Here is the question that stood out most to me: what do multiple exposures look like as images are added to the exposure? I heard that same question in…
Nothing like a bulleted list to make you feel good about your year. But seriously—I wanted to get one more item on the blog before the calendar turns and reviewing my year seems like a good way to close out 2017. In the past I was required to write out a list of accomplishments twice a year for performance evaluations. Every time I did that I ended up writing thousands of words and I was surprised…
Ming Thein, prolific writer and photographer (with cameras that are like, way too nice, I guess): …there are increasingly times when I do things and go places that are not 100% dedicated to the creation of images; at these times there may be some opportunities for photography and you’d like to not compromise too much… …so where are the proper enthusiast compacts? In other words: either the…
Photorealism in video games has improved by leaps and bounds in the last several years. Alan Butler has taken advantage of this by creating beautiful compositions in the virtual world that exists in Grand Theft Auto V. Down and Out in Los Santos is series of photographs that are created by exploiting a smartphone camera feature within the video game Grand Theft Auto V. Players of GTAV can put away…
I don’t always agree with ol’ Brooks Jensen but I do enjoy listening to his podcast. This specific…release? episode?…struck a chord with me though. He reads from the introduction of James T. Farrell’s Studs Lonigan: There is the self-imposed loneliness. There is the endless struggle to perceive freshly and clearly—to realize and recreate a sense of life on paper. […] the writer…
You’ve probably seen many other people pointing to this New York Times article this week, but I couldn’t help myself. Though as a whole the article was bittersweet I love to learn about cool efficiency tweaks like this one: Turning the heaters off for a while is the safest way to get enough power to run the instruments, but the lower the overall wattage drops, the faster parts will…
In order to make simulated multiple exposures I wrote some Python code to average several images. Here’s a little more about how I made the images. Concept I thought about how to build the program so that it most accurately simulated a multiple exposure created in a film camera. When making a double exposure, a photographer adjusts all available camera settings so that two exposures will…
I recently finished processing the last of the photos for the 2016 version of my ongoing “dailies” project. Earlier this year I messed around with the idea of simulating multiple exposures by averaging JPEG files in the pixel domain. I know you can do this in photo processing programs, but what if you wanted to make like, a 40 or 50 image exposure? It’s definitely not impossible…
Pete Souza, the White House photographer for the past 8 years, published a personal selection of photos from this past year. The collection contains many wonderful and touching photographs. He’s a talented photographer and story teller. Pete’s technical prowess lends his photos a sense of precision you don’t often see. His eye for composition engages the viewer while making them…
Comes responsibility. Walt Mossberg: My fourth wish is for some sort of optical zoom that doesn’t require a heavy telescoping lens. The rumored dual-lens camera might provide this. Previous efforts at unobtrusive optical zooming by other phone makers haven’t been good, so Apple has a real opportunity here. Apple has an opportunity here? Unless there’s some breakthrough in physics I…
It’s that time of year again—I’m pointing to the tumblr I use to post photos of my every day life. Dailies, I call them. I take a picture of what I see most days and then put it somewhere. So yeah, you can find them at the following confrontational complete sentence dot net: faceit.thisisreal.net. All of my dailies ever should be there unless I made a mistake (of course I did).
Well kind of. There’s this infrastructure but it’s not immediately helpful. It’s more like an empty template. The arrangement of the infrastructure appears to be random; seemingly placed without thought. Of course, that’s really not the case. This piece is here because the available HVAC capacity is most efficiently utilized when distributed in this spot and that piece must…
You dapper rascal you. Here’s to the new narrative: getting better. Cheers!
This scarcity mindset can also be debilitating. It shortens a person’s horizons and narrows his perspective, creating a dangerous tunnel vision. Anxiety also saps brainpower and willpower, reducing mental “bandwidth”, as the authors call it. Relevant. (Clearing out the linkblog backlog shamalama bing bang.)
The FCC has recently changed its position on net neutrality and frankly it’s a bad deal. It’s time to contact your representatives and senators. I did. Despite the fact that the current FCC chairman was formerly a lobbyist for the industry he is now supposed to regulate, the arguments concerning this topic are largely based on court decisions resulting from lawsuits filed against cable…
Joshua Ho writes for AnandTech about when an increase in mobile device pixel density provides no further benefits for its user. Considering some of the tradeoffs inherent in a system comprised of the human visual system and a mobile device, he concludes that screens with a resolution of around 90-100 pixels per degree are a good compromise for typical, RGB-pattern LCD screens. Ho arrives at his…
Jason E. Harrington wrote about his experience as a TSA employee at Chicago’s O’Hare airport (go read the whole thing!). This quote from the essay refers to a letter that he wrote to (and was published by) the New York Times: “The problem we have here is that you identified yourself as a TSA employee,” she said. His letter to the Times demonstrated an attempt to take pride in his job…
We all know modern publications use any or all tools at their disposal in order to drive traffic to their websites. I don’t know what it’s like to write for Quartz, but this gaffe is nothing short of embarrassing for Quartz writer Christopher Mims. Let me elaborate. The linked article, entitled “Intel’s voice recognition will blow Siri out of the water—because it doesn’t use the…
Time published photos Christopher Morris took early in his career. These photos are a delightful example of a sentiment I highlighted in an earlier post. Christopher’s photos highlight the value of the ability to remove oneself from the present in order to become a detached observer and document a moment in its unique context. Though a portrait of “the world as it is” (or…
Useful for those who have “cut the cord”, canistream.it is a service that will tell you if a movie or television show is available for streaming, purchase or rental. Pretty convenient. The site is easy to use and its utility is obvious. However, this service shouldn’t need to exist in its current form. The content producers, the people who make the television shows and movies,…
Writer’s block is a phony, made up, BS excuse for not doing your work. Okay.
Kind of. My intention was to write a concession to a claim I made in an earlier post which stated that the Leica M9 is the smallest interchangeable-lens camera with a 35mm sensor. The Sony A7 and—more interesting to me—the A7R have been released and I had assumed that these bodies were smaller than the M9. After doing a little research, I found that the M9 will fit into a smaller circumscribed box…
The Great Discontent interviewed Helena Price on the specifics of her photography career. She says: Don’t worry about creating things that you think will be popular for a certain group of people—just take time to explore and document for yourself. Eventually you’ll find patterns in your work and your viewpoint will emerge on its own. This is a refreshing, hopeful and liberating approach to getting…
Joseph Menn on the NSA paying RSA $10 million to intentionally cripple their own security products (by utilizing the problematic pseudo-random number generator mentioned previously): >RSA adopted the algorithm even before NIST approved it. The NSA then cited the early use of Dual Elliptic Curve inside the government to argue successfully for NIST approval, according to an official familiar with…
This one hits close to home. I can’t imagine how the NIST staff involved in creating SP 800 (and more specifically, the SP 800-90A Dual Elliptic Curve Deterministic Random Bit Generation…bit) must feel. First of all, given the definition of a deterministic system, the title itself gives me pause. Maybe there’s some next-level random number theory described in the standard, but…
Really cool article by Greg Koenig explaining the Apple video that shows off the manufacturing process for the new Mac Pro. Mr. Koenig works with Luma Labs, makers of the camera strap I use to carry my camera everywhere so people can ask why I have a camera with me.
CryptoSeal announces that they’ll no longer be providing their consumer-focused virtual private network (VPN) service: With immediate effect as of this notice, CryptoSeal Privacy, our consumer VPN service, is terminated. All cryptographic keys used in the operation of the service have been zerofilled, and while no logs were produced (by design) during operation of the service, all records…
I work for the federal government. Specifically, I work for the Institute for Telecommunication Sciences which is a research arm of the National Telecommunication and Information Administration, itself part of the Department of Commerce. My title is “Electronics Engineer,” and I do research to facilitate the efficient use of bandwidth in the context of telecommunication systems.1 The…
Ladar Levison: I’m taking a break from e-mail. If you knew what I know about e-mail, you might not use it either. All this news about the NSA lately is pretty upsetting, but shutting down communication systems that were designed to be private is terrifying. Silent Circle, another private email provider, went as far as to destroy their server in order to prevent the government from accessing its…
Lukas Mathis on ego depletion: >Ego depletion is the idea that you only have a limited amount of self-control that you can “spend” each day. Every decision you make uses part of that limited resource and makes it harder for you to make good decisions; breaks “refill” your ability to make thoughtful (or any) decisions. … Applications that force users to make decisions…
I run a GitLab server that I use to collaborate with coworkers.1 It’s a custom-built machine with a RAID, lots of memory, redundant power supplies, and is running Ubuntu. Every day, a simple cron script to makes a backup copy of the data on the server to another machine. The script looks something like this: #!/bin/sh cd /home/gitlab/gitlab sudo -u gitlab -H bundle exec rake…
Chris Pruett wrote that his wife was well into an RPG when her savegame went bad. He spent three works trying to fix the file in secret, and finally figured it out. Miraculously, it worked. The continue menu showed stats from the other save, but once loaded her game was completely restored. Between ordering the DexDrive and patching the save, the whole process had taken me about three weeks. That…
Sometimes when you have to look through other people’s work all you can do is shake your head. Sometimes people will use your thing in a way that is completely nonsensical and get mad when it doesn’t work or when it backfires. Sometimes the only thing you can do is write all of it down for your sanity and my amusement. Brent Simmons posted Brian Reischl’s Stupid [RSS] Feed Tricks…
On June 8, 2013, Jonathan Larroquette and Seth Romatelli of Uhh Yeah Dude came to the Oriental Theater in Denver’s Highlands to perform their podcast LIVE. I started listening to them a few years ago because Erik Price (from Frank and Erik Internet Famous) listed it as one of his favorite podcasts. Since then I’ve spent many happy hours listening to their show—one that lends a unique…
The “Get Plain Text” app is selling for $3 on the App Store. Is not having to remember the built-in system keyboard shortcut cmd+opt+shift+v worth $3? Further, how did this fly past the app reviewers? Nice payday, dudes. Is it mean to buy the program so I can leave the keyboard shortcut in the review?
CBS and FOX have threatened to stop broadcasting over the air (and distribute via cable only) if the courts side with Aereo in a lawsuit against CBS. Aereo’s suit is meant to prevent CBS from suing Aereo in every market where Aereo wishes to operate. Okay then. Quit broadcasting. Let us use that spectrum for mobile data. It is crazy to me that CBS and FOX are threatening to stop broadcasting when…
Thousands of well-written words written by a guy who gave up on his M9 because its technical performance fell behind other full-frame cameras on the market. In short, he likes the improvements present in the new M (Typ 240), but may not devote space to it in his camera bag. But. But but but. Those M lenses that I have kept, my cherished babies, have such a lovely look—better on the M240 than on…