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Quorten Blog 1

First blog for all Quorten's blog-like writings

Develop camera RAWs from the command line

quorten

2020-01-28

Categories: pentax-k-1-camera  
Tags: pentax-k-1-camera  

Okay, there are plenty of good tools for developing camera RAWs via a graphical user interface, but what if you need to go really fast in developing a large number of photos with identical settings? Like if you are digitizing books? No problem, there are command-line interfaces for both RawTherapee and darktable. RawTherapee’s looks to have an edge over darktable’s command-line interface, so that’s why it’s good to install both tools for your workflow.

20200128/DuckDuckGo command line camera raw processing
20200128/http://rawpedia.rawtherapee.com/Command-Line_Options
20200128/DuckDuckGo darktable command line
20200128/https://www.darktable.org/usermanual/en/overview_chapter.html

Improving graphics performance in oVirt and QEMU

quorten

2020-01-28

Categories: random-software  
Tags: random-software  

QXL is a long-established and old way to get reasonably good graphics performance in QEMU, but what if that is not good enough? How do you get better performance? In newer versions of QEMU, 2.6+, virtio-gpu is a higher performance option available. Functionality is excellent on Linux; however, Windows support is still sparsely documented and in an unknown state. Nevertheless, even if you select virtio video on a Windows VM and start it up, you’ll notice you get better 2D graphics performance with the Windows generic drivers, at the expense of screen tearing.

20200127/DuckDuckGo virtio 3d acceleration not supported
20200127/DuckDuckGo virt-viewer screen tearing
20200127/DuckDuckGo virtio display driver
20200127/DuckDuckGo kvm qxl versus virtio video
20200127/DuckDuckGo qxl or virtio video
20200127/https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/QEMU/Guest_graphics_acceleration

Very interesting hack to unlock Arwins in Ocarina of Time N64 cartridge

quorten

2020-01-27

Categories: twitter   misc  
Tags: twitter   misc  

This is an interesting article on unlocking an Arwing code portion built into the Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time Nintendo 64 cartridge. The cleverness of the original programming code reuse and the methods to unlock this hack without a GameShark? Wow.

20200126/https://arstechnica.com/gaming/2020/01/how-to-get-star-fox-64-ships-into-ocarina-of-time-no-hacking-required/

N.B. The Ocarina of Time Nintendo 64 game was in-development for a pretty long time, so it was last when many Nintendo 64 games and technologies were already developed and in their prime.

Turntable or turn-scanner?

quorten

2020-01-26

Categories: 3d-scanning   3d-scanner  
Tags: 3d-scanning   3d-scanner  

So, previously, I’ve mentioned the possibility of setting up a 3D scanner so rather than having the object rotated on a turntable, the scanner itself rotates around the object. This has the advantage of not needing to worry about soft objects shifting in their shape as the turntable is rotated? Are there disadvantages? Yes, there are. What are the principle disadvantages? The principle disadvantage is that such scanner designs require more space to setup: all of the clearance between the camera and light source to the object must be replicated 360 degrees around the object platform. On the other hand, a turntable scanner only needs such clearance instantiated once. Therefore, all of the area otherwise consumed for the turn-scanner is freed up for other uses. This is particularly useful for scanning large objects as otherwise the available room space can get quite tight with a turn-scanner design. That is, when you don’t own the entire room for the sake of the scanner itself, but are bringing the scanner into a room not intended for that primary purpose.

Another false study trying to link genetics and income, but a great counter-goal at the end of the article

quorten

2020-01-25

Categories: random  
Tags: random  

Here we go again, circling around to this subject that typically leads nowhere. Trying to use genetics to predict differences in income, it can explain no more than 2% of income differences. Suffice it to say, in general the differences are negligible compared to larger scale environmental factors.

20200125/https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/jgepv8/a-study-tried-to-use-genetics-to-explain-why-people-are-poor

Now the paper at the end concludes with something meaningful:

If you want to address poor people getting sick and dying while the wealthy aim towards living forever, increase access to health care, and improve working and living conditions. Ignore the 2 percent effect and focus on taxing the top 1 percent of people who own more wealth than the bottom 90 percent combined. That will actually help.

Well… the goal mentioned is audacious, but the means to the end? Well, that deserves further discussion.

But, I have to agree. For most people, if the goal mentioned was their goal in life, our world would be a very different place.

Prometheus blackbox exporter

quorten

2020-01-24

Categories: misc  
Tags: misc  

How do you monitor the status return results of an arbitrary URL in Prometheus with ease? Use the blackbox exporter.

20200124/DuckDuckGo prometheus blackbox
20200124/https://github.com/prometheus/blackbox_exporter

Puppet JSON handling, strings, and "shell backticks"

quorten

2020-01-24

Categories: misc  
Tags: misc  

How do you parse JSON in Puppet? Well, now that is a bit of a more complicated question to answer. First of all, Puppet doesn’t handle standard JSON; rather, it uses a variant called “PSON.” PSON’s main difference is that it is specified in 8-bit ASCII rather than UTF-8, and some ASCII control characters must be escaped via an escape sequence. Furthermore, if you have a string parsed into Puppet with Unicode characters, you cannot use that string as-is, else you will get “invalid UTF-16le literal” errors. You must first decode the UTF-16 into UTF-8, then encode and escape and ASCII control sequences.

20200124/DuckDuckGo puppet parse json string from command
20200124/https://stackoverflow.com/questions/43729915/parse-a-json-string-in-puppet
20200124/https://ask.puppet.com/questions/28878/how-to-handle-json-data-in-puppet/
20200124/https://puppet.com/docs/puppet/latest/http_api/pson.html
20200124/https://tickets.puppetlabs.com/browse/MODULES-9195

In particular, if you are reading the output of a “shell backticks” command, Unicode characters will be translated and represented in the Puppet native form. Which is what? UTF-8… strings are just sequences of bytes, but in the future, all strings may be required to be valid UTF-8.

20200124/DuckDuckGo puppet string literal syntax
20200124/https://puppet.com/docs/puppet/latest/lang_data_strings.html

Read on →

LCD screens, the touch of death and the healing touch of life

quorten

2020-01-24

Categories: raspberry-pi  
Tags: raspberry-pi  

Over the course of the past two weeks, I’ve had a very interesting experience with the LCD screen in an old flip phone cellphone. On one moment, I made a bad touch to it and very nearly lost it all. Literally. And, in the following moment, I literally came back with a healing touch and completely restored its original, fully functional state. Overall, this was a very great learning experience with lessons to teach for working with LCD screens modern electronics, especially DIY hobby projects where you are likely to handle the bare LCD screen components before all protections are installed.

So, what happened? What did I do that started my bad touch to the screen? I wanted to check my phone quickly while I was laying in bed, but I had to turn on my phone first because it was powered off. To do this, I was first ruffling around frantically in my bed on a winter day when the air was dry, then I quickly reached over to my phone on the nearby table. I had to open the flip phone to power it on, and while I did, I made a few accidental touches to its internal LCD screen. Herein lies the problem. All that ruffling around in my bed on a dry air winter day built up a considerable static electric charge, and reaching over quickly to touch my phone didn’t help either, as that meant that the static charge didn’t have time to slowly dissipate. And, being that my phone was on my table, my table was made of a more conductive material, so that meant touching things on my table would lead static electricity to discharge through those things more readily to my more neutralized table, and the two ends especially had differing electric potentials at this moment.

Read on →

Interesting copyright articles from EFF

quorten

2020-01-24

Categories: legal   license  
Tags: legal   license  

I’ve found these interesting copyright articles from the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF). The first one, new legislation, The Music Modernization Act, limits the term length of old music copyrights so that many very old recorded music is now entering the public domain. Yes, it has its flaws, but it is indeed a step in the right direction. One particularly interesting point about it is its provisions for orphan works to cede into the public domain. This will serve as an important test ground for legal precedent for solving the orphan works problem in other areas of copyrighted works.

20200123/https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2018/09/new-music-modernization-act-has-major-fix-older-recordings-will-belong-public

This second article, this is a really nice reflection on the economic value of copyrighted works versus public domain works. Many of our most important information works, data, facts, laws, etc., have never existed within the purview of copyright and have always been considered by their creators to be in the public domain. Only recently are “third parties” to the original creators trying to claim copyright on their products and disputing the claim that it cannot be covered under copyright. Arguably, the economic value of public domain works has always been much greater than that of copyrighted works, and copyrighted works should be viewed as an exception, not the norm.

20200123/https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2020/01/public-domain-rule-copyright-exception

Multiple filesystems in the same partition

quorten

2020-01-23

Categories: twitter   unix  
Tags: twitter   unix  

For a long time, I’ve been wishing to be able to have a partition with just one filesystem that can be shared by multiple operating systems. It would make data access on multiboot systems so much easier. Alas, for quite a long time, I had to side with a minimum of a dual-machine setup: one machine is the multiboot machine, the other machine is an always-on Unix file server.

But, we can in fact do better than that.

But, as it turns out, in spite of the lack of agreement in operating system developers on a single filesystem where the operating system itself can be installed, there is another alternative that has truly come to reality. What if you could share the data blocks of files but have two copies of the filesystem metadata in the desired formats of the separate operating systems? Although that still would not be ideal, it would at least allow for a read-only volume accessible from both operating systems without consuming double the disk space.

Write two or more filesystems in one? Yes, but read-only except from Unix.

But wait… don’t get over-excited, I was exaggerating a bit. Aww, yes, wishful thinking. But, nevertheless, here is something to at least spark the imagination: cursedfs. a script to create a partition with both a FAT32 and ext2 filesystem within it. The two filesystems don’t share file data blocks, unfortunately.

20200123/https://github.com/NieDzejkob/cursedfs