Good article here about the perils of using zip codes for geospatial analysis. It also provides some good background info on why the practice became so ubiquitous.
https://towardsdatascience.com/stop-using-zip-codes-for-geospatial-analysis-ceacb6e80c38
Wow, Libre RISC-V M-Class is making exciting progress. A number of processor architectural innovations are coming out of the project, and admittably direct working in that area is a little bit above me, with me mostly focusing on rather simple CPU designs for my own projects. But, good news, if you’d like to contribute in some meaningful way but are not able to directly participate in the tech discussion, there is an NLnet funding grant for this project that is open to additional donations. Head on over to the corresponding NLnet site to donate.
20190807/https://www.crowdsupply.com/libre-risc-v/m-class/updates/purism-donation
20190807/DuckDuckGo nlnet
20190807/DuckDuckGo nlnet risc-v
20190807/https://nlnet.nl/project/Libre-RISCV/
So, out of curiosity when researching the Raspberry Pi 4, I decided to take a look at what prices terabyte SSDs are at today. Now they are at about $100 per terabyte? Wow. The technology has come a long way. I remember the days (early 2010s era) when SSDs like that would cost over a thousand dollars. Meanwhile, hard disk drives have been stagnant for too long, awaiting the maturization of technology in research such as HAMR and MAMR. Until then, you’re seeing market list prices around $200 per 6/8 terabytes. That is no longer a compelling differentiator from solid-state drives. Seriously, the capacity-to-price factor is only a difference of a factor of 3, 4, or maybe 5. No longer do hard disk drives have the factor of 12 advantage in storage economy.
You know what that means? As far as the near-term market projections are concerned, hard drives have failed. With the current momentum behind SSDs, everyone is prepared to see SSDs pass up hard drives in storage economy, and when that happens, despite the disadvantage of lower rewrite durability than hard drives, the vast majority of the market is going to quickly switch over to using SSDs exclusively, and suddenly there will be a crash in revenue available for research and development of hard disk drive technology. You can argue that it’s already happened today, that because there is so much more money going into the SSD market, they could fund more research, move faster, and pass up hard disk drives. Soon enough, we may end up viewing hard disk drives just as we view CRT monitors: a bygone legacy of computing times past.
Do modern versions of Microsoft Office work on Windows 10 ARM? Unfortunately, no. If you want the full-featured product, you’re going to have to use that through x86 emulation. However, if you’re okay with using only a restricted subset of Microsoft Office, then there are special reduced versions that run native on ARM.
20190806/DuckDuckGo microsoft office arm
20190806/https://office-watch.com/2017/microsoft-office-work-arm-windows-10/
Raspberry Pi 4, what are people saying about it? Well, let’s do a quick web search to see what updates are out there. Oh wow, Tom’s Hardware has a great review written up on the Raspberry Pi. Does it really live up to its claims? For Gigabit Ethernet, that’s a definite yes, it gets pretty close to the real Gigabit limit. USB 3 likewise lives up to its speed claims, with excellent performance from a USB 3 attached solid state drive. GPIO performance is excellent, significantly faster than would be predicted by clock speed differences alone when comparing against previous models.
Unfortunately, 4K video does not qutie live up to its claims, yet. There is some optimization that still needs to be done in the software stack to support true 4K video playback. Also, regarding the higher power requirements, the Raspberry Pi 4 can get quite hot when under load, so with this comes an additional warning to tinkerers and children handle the Raspberry Pi 4 board by its edges while in operation to avoid burns. That being said, you’ll probably want to use a pretty good passive or active heat sink with the Raspberry Pi 4.
20190806/DuckDuckGo raspberery pi 4
20190806/https://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/raspberry-pi-4-b,6193.html
Worthy of mention in the comments is the Atomic Pi, a single board computer based around the x86-compatible Atom processor. Yeah, it has better performance, but that comes at the price of a huge heat sink.
20190806/DuckDuckGo atomic pi
20190806/https://dlidirect.com/products/atomic-pi
I happened to find this somewhat interesting, though maybe I shouldn’t have. In the 1980s, yeah there was a lot of fiction about the “action” genre where guns, shooting, and criminal cahses were part of the plot. Well, there is this modern author David Baldacci who published a “Robie” book series in the same genre, and one of my coworkers happens to really like the books of that author. So, although the literal lifestyle is getting quite antiquated, the fiction mythos lives on.
20190806/https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Baldacci
This is an interesting article on the Federal Reserve interest rate cut.
20190806/https://stories.wf.com/fed-rate-cut-need-know/
Hazmat suits, what does Wikipedia have to say about that? Not much, you’ll be disappointed compared to what you saw in the movies.
20190805/https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hazmat_suit
Previously, I’ve written a blog article about conductive rubber and included a link to a really good article that included information on a great conductive ink repair chemical. Unfortunately, revisiting that article and reading it through, I’ve come to realize that for my own practical use, it is probably a bit too specialized. Namely, it is marketed as a more durable solution to conductive ink that does not wear off.
But, for those projects where cheap is good enough, conductive ink does the trick. Okay, so let’s go a-seaching for solutions on that. There are two primary chemical formulations:
Carbon-based is probably more preferrable to most projects, especially those involving the repair of conductive rubber buttons, rather than, say, the drawing of long conductive traces on paper. Silver-based is intuitively better for the latter, since it will have a lower resistance.
There are also purportedly a few other formulations that are less common, but may still fit the bill for some projects:
Okay, so here is the preliminary results of our search. You might not want a conductive ink pen because maybe it might not be felt-tipped like you like it.
Gaming, yes. It’s fun, right? Well, if you are following carefully about all the ins and outs about gaming, I think you can point out one thing about virtual gaming and “serious gamers” in particular. For some games, there exists a degree of complexity that essentially eliminates many potential participants. The differences between PC gaming, console gaming, and mobile gaming provide a good analytical point. Console gaming is more difficult to access than mobile gaming, so the demographic of such gamers is correspondingly narrower. Likewise with PC gaming, where you can assume due to the technical complexities of building a high-end PC, can be an even narrower demographic than console gaming.
Amidst the discussion of PC gaming, those games that encompass large and complicated virtual worlds, such as World of Warcraft, can have even narrower demographics. But, in my opinion, a notable example of an online game, technically a virtual “toy”, that is most complicated and limiting of them all? Second Life.
20190803/https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Second_Life