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Quorten Blog 1

First blog for all Quorten's blog-like writings

Searching for the Internet Archive community, a disappointment

quorten

2020-07-04

Categories: vintage-computing   inven-sys  
Tags: vintage-computing   inven-sys  

So, after really getting into the lowdown of archiving, I’m thinking. I need to find a really good community that is focused on that more general subject, archiving. 68kMLA, they’re a pretty good community but they’re focused on Macintoshes in general, and the historic world is bigger than just the Macintosh, we know. So, I’ve felt that the Internet Archive got pretty good momentum behind it in building such an digital archival community of the future that I’ve been looking for, and they have some sort of connection with the broader community when it comes to the process for uploading digitized books. So, surely, they have a plenty good forum around there for me to go looking.

Okay, so I’ve found something. Alas, my feeling, upon entering… this is a forum inundated by “noobs”! This is all about basic customer support questions, I can’t get this book to work, why do I see this issue when visiting this URL, there’s a bug here and there. Yeah, sure, we absolutely need a good discussion place for that kind of interaction. But, again, this goes back to teamwork versus group-work, this is clearly an area that hyper-manifests the individualized mode of working together, ultimately the primary reason why most people come is to solve some kind of personal problem.

20200704/DuckDuckGo internet archive community forum
20200704/https://archive.org/iathreads/forums.php
20200704/https://archive.org/post/1108514/welcome-to-us-petabox
20200704/https://web.archive.org/web/20130813145128/http://searchfun.in/

Read on →

Other things you can do with a Windows XP VM, and connecting physical USB devices to Windows XP

quorten

2020-07-03

Categories: windows  
Tags: windows  

So, since gaming on a Windows XP virtual machine is pretty much doomed due to the difficulty of getting proper the video modes and 3D acceleration, what useful things can you do with a Windows XP virtual machine? I’ll list a few clearly obvious ones from my experience.

  • Put together some Microsoft office documents, like a slide show, a spreadsheet, or a short letter/article/essay. Write them to virtual USB memory sticks, or burn them to a virtual CD so that you can put them in your virtual pocket to take with you to present at school, in the office, etc. Maybe you even end up printing a hard copy of some of your papers. Nostalgia about the 2000s era of office productivity software.

  • Browse through a photo collection on Windows XP, nostalgia about the old world of many people’s first experience with digital photography and digital cameras.

  • Listen to music from a music collection on Windows XP, use Windows XP to organize a music collection, within the limits that fit on the computer. Burn virtual music CDs from your own collection.

  • Watch DVDs through Windows XP (via disk images, of course), nostalgia about the old world where for many people, their new computer was their first DVD player in their home. Doesn’t work with copy-protected works, of course.

Read on →

Actual setup of a Windows XP virtual machine

quorten

2020-07-03

Categories: windows  
Tags: windows  

In my previous blog article, I outlined some overall procedures to get a Windows XP virtual machine setup. But, that was it, I never actually successfully got one setup myself. So, here I actually go.

So, first of all, how do I apply those much-needed registry changes so that Windows XP will not fail to boot due to disk driver device ID mismatches? Rather than needing to go through the whole chicken-and-egg problem of modifying by booting a disk image that I captured from pristine unmodified hardware, I can achieve the same effect by editing the registry off-line, from GNU/Linux. So, here’s the low-down on the actual procedure I use.

First, you need to mount your virtual machine disk image to your host machine. If guestfish is not available to use the oVirt approach I mentioned previously, you can use nbd instead.

Read on →

Coronavirus underreporting factors may grow in the United States, and economic slowdown continues

quorten

2020-07-02

Categories: covid19  
Tags: covid19  

Coronavirus underreporting factor of 20:1 or 50:1? Be forewarned, this may grow as the pandemic continues to grow across the United States.

20200701/https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2020/06/us-coronavirus-testing-could-fail-again/613675/

Also, now this is really good news. My fear that Americans didn’t have enough sense in them to social distance to limit the spread of the quarantine? Thankfully, recent data shows otherwise. As governments lift restrictions, business activity picked up, but as reports of infection spikes came out, consumers decided not to engage in as much commercial activity on their own. Yep, no need for the government to impose the lockdown. And that is very good that the public at large is not as intent at protesting lockdown measures as a few extremists may have made it seem.

20200701/https://www.nytimes.com/2020/07/01/business/economic-recovery-virus-surge.html

Teamwork versus problem solving

quorten

2020-06-30

Categories: tour-de-force  
Tags: tour-de-force  

Teamwork versus problem solving? Now that’s an interesting phrase to start with. Don’t you mean teamwork and problem solving? No, actually I don’t. This is a rather interesting hypothesis to have here, so I will detail my observations behind this.

Suppose you have a math problem you need to solve. It’s not a hard problem, it just involves some general purpose logical reasoning and basic high school algebra knowledge. In other words, problem solving knowledge legally mandated, by law, in most jurisdictions, by virtue of the fact that this is an education requirement for receiving a high school diploma. Surprisingly, though this sounds like a “tongue-in-cheek” metaphorical joke statement to say, it’s not. So, me thinking this is an easy problem that anyone should be able to solve, I consider the idea of asking friends and family to simply review my workflow to solving the problem. But… I think this through, and given how little motivation they have toward mathematical engagement, I decicde it wouldn’t be a good idea. Nope, I have to look around elsewhere to find people who are truly motivated.

Read on →

Lithium-ion battery safety on ships at sea

quorten

2020-06-30

Categories: raspberry-pi   mat-sci  
Tags: raspberry-pi   mat-sci  

Larger ships at sea using lithium-ion batteries? Currently, it is not very widespread due to different motivational emphasis between legislation between big ships and small boats. Small boats are legislated more based off of environmental impact and noise generation, so in Europe they have gone pretty much all electric. But big ships, those are regulated based off of safety and reliability, of which is not well proven with lithium-ion batteries, especially for very large battery packs. This is a great article on lithium-ion battery safety in that application and one system design that optimizes such.

20200629/https://www.governmenteuropa.eu/lithium-ion-battery-fire-vessel/88384/

So, keep in mind some numbers on the thermal runaway of lithium-ion batteries. 180 to 220 degrees Celsius for Li-NMC, 270 degrees Celsius for LiFePO4.

Designing a SIMD processor of my own, reflection on many-core communication architectures

quorten

2020-06-28

Categories: unlipic   media-prog  
Tags: unlipic   media-prog  

Okay… it’s official. I’m now getting ready to design my own GPGPU. The first step, mastering the design of a SIMD processor. A simple GPGPU is simply a collection of SIMD cores, an optimized parallel memory architecture, and memory stores private to a single SIMD processor (i.e. “local memory” in OpenCL terminology). Parallel memory architecture can be implemented real simply: just use multiple different RAM banks, this allows for parallel and strided memory access, and put in front another multiplexer of a sort for shifting the logical offset of strided memory accesses, and tada! You’ve got a pretty efficient parallel RAM.

So, now for the repertoire of parallel load and store instructions.

  • Load index vector: Load an integer vector where the contents of each element are the element’s index itself. For example, { 0, 1, 2, 3 }. This might be phrased up as a variant of the “zero register” load, for example. Optional, this can be computed via a parallel unfold.

  • Load vector: load a contiguous vector of the designated length into the designated vector register.

  • Store vector: Reverse of load vector.

  • Load strided vector: load a vector of the designated length where each element is spaced by the given offset. That is, the address of an element at index i is determined by mem[stride*i].

Read on →

Very interesting discussion on Autodesk Maya, etc.

quorten

2020-06-27

Categories: media-prog  
Tags: media-prog  

This is a really great discussion about Autodesk’s attitude toward Maya and the like in 3D art. Really strong on engineering, sure, but 3D art they seem weak. The idea of unification across products, heck that never played out in all these years, just that they bought and killed off SoftImage XSI, and many 3D art folks are still missing it. Yeah, I miss it too, I only visited their website once and read about them from the periphery, but yeah you can see in its heyday it was used in some important movies and the like.

20200626/https://blenderartists.org/t/is-autodesk-trying-to-commit-suicide/1166568/278

Oh, wait, but here’s the real explanation behind what was happening with XSI.

As for Xsi, yes, it was a big loss when Adesk purchased it, but honestly it was on the way out, regardless. When they purchased it, Xsi had dwindling seat numbers and never really took off. Its development was unsustainable and Avid knew the writing was on the wall, and when they sold Xsi the company shut down and Adesk were simply there to mop it up and pick the bones for tech(with ICE finally being utilised as Adesk currently push heavy development of Bifrost for Max/Maya)

Wow, now that’s a really interesting back-story.

Interesting discussion on photorealism and 3D artists

quorten

2020-06-27

Categories: media-prog  
Tags: media-prog  

This is an interesting discussion about artist’s approach to photorealism. Often times, they don’t strongly target and follow it because… it is tedious and boring. Commercial advertisements and Hollywood special effects industry are the main proponents that have put in an extreme pursuit of photorealism.

20200626/https://blenderartists.org/t/do-artists-have-the-tendency-to-avoid-photorealism-cause-its-too-difficult/1235998/11

Marketing tactics galore, own a consumer's habits

quorten

2020-06-27

Categories: random  
Tags: random  

Well, well, I’d be. Here it is, a marketing strategy recommendation that’s almost asking for the worst. Want to sell more of your product? Well then see if there’s some kind of habit of a consumer you can capture and own for yourself.

20200626/https://getpocket.com/explore/item/how-two-companies-hooked-customers-on-products-they-rarely-use

Why the heck did I read and write down that link? Well, Firefox is trying really hard to force this marketing and promotion upon us through its “pocket” automatically generated constantly changing article lists that show up. And yes, if you set a homepage for yourself, they will show you their own homepage every single time you create a new blank tab. Absolute highjacking for command and control.