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Quorten Blog 1

First blog for all Quorten's blog-like writings

Remove heatshrink tubing from wiring

quorten

2019-04-29

Categories: raspberry-pi  
Tags: raspberry-pi  

So, I’ve bought a serial cable that I knew was wired up wrong, with the intent that I’ll need to rewire it for it to work correctly. I open up the box on the RS-232 connector and I see that there is heatshrink tubing over the soldered connections. So, how do I remove this? Easy, just use a razor blade to cut away at the tubing, it is designed to be very soft and pliable to the razor blade, then pull it away with a pliers, tweezers, or whatever other simple tool works best for you.

20190429/DuckDuckGo how to remove heatshrink tubing
20190429/https://www.hunker.com/13414418/how-to-remove-heat-shrink

Reflection on non-computerized technology

quorten

2019-04-27

Categories: tour-de-force   computer-history  
Tags: tour-de-force   computer-history  

1960s, 1970s? Computers? Heck, most practical applications did not use an actual digital computer to do these. What are these applications, that, nowadays, are almost exclusively done with computers?

20190427/https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Retrocomputing
20190427/https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_computer_hardware

Zero electronics, purely mechanical and chemical:

  • Motor engines

  • Engine fuel

  • Combustion lighting: Gas lamps

  • Heating: furnace, cook tops, stoves, ovens

  • Thermostat

  • Clock, watch, alarm clock

  • Maps

  • Cash register

Read on →

Disadvantages of an open floor plan office

quorten

2019-04-25

Categories: random  
Tags: random  

Here are some interesting articles and quotes on the disadvantages of an open floor plan office.

It turned out that companies had no interest in creating autonomous environments for their “human performers.” Instead, they wanted to stuff as many people in as small a space for as cheaply as possible as quickly as possible.

20190424/https://www.wired.com/2014/04/how-offices-accidentally-became-hellish-cubicle-farms/

Clear scientific evidence that open office plans really do not buy anything. Less collaboration, less productivity, and overall higher operating expenses.

20190424/https://www.inc.com/geoffrey-james/its-official-open-plan-offices-are-now-dumbest-management-fad-of-all-time.html 20190424/https://business.linkedin.com/talent-solutions/blog/hr/2016/open-office-plans-are-a-lot-less-cost-effective-than-you-may-think

Random, 2 page and 6 page documents for meetings.

20190424/https://medium.com/@inowland/using-6-page-and-2-page-documents-to-make-organizational-decisions-3216badde909

Now this is interesting. A gesture controller marketing oriented value added night light.

20190424/https://blog.bolt.io/casper-glow-e4f8819376d7

Is real estate really a good investment?

quorten

2019-04-21

Categories: personal-finance  
Tags: personal-finance  

Many personal finance pundits write about how real estate can be a very good investment, but is that really so? Let’s delve a little bit deeper into the claims of real estate as an investment vehicle and understand it from a scientific analysis.

So, the first thing to understand about real estate. The whole idea of the real estate market revolves around one single type of event: sales. If some piece of real estate never gets sold, none of the other “derivatives” of real estate finance are applicable. And as it turns out, there is nothing that guarantees a real estate to always end up being sold. One obvious event that would cause real estate to never get sold, for example, is mass flight and emigration out of a particular geographic area. If a specific geographic area becomes unpopular and gets depopulated, chances are that most of the real estate in that area may never get sold before it looses too much of its value due to lack of maintenance and becomes unhabitable.

So, rule number one. Since nothing is guaranteed in the real estate market, all valuations must be treated in a probabilistic manner. So, with that being said, what are the probabilistic variables that increase or decrease the likelihood of an payout after a reasonable amount of time?

Read on →

Lawson software, so old it is hard to find information about

quorten

2019-04-20

Categories: computer-history  
Tags: computer-history  

So, I happened to catch mention of Lawson software as some very old mainframe accounting software. What does Wikipedia have to say about that? Nothing, it’s too old to be heard of by the youngsters who redact older, “non-notable” information from Wikipedia that does not have “reliable sources” to cite. But. if you go searching abroad on the Internet, you will find a blog and some articles written by such an old-timer who has had first-hand experience with the times in which that software was relevant, Naomi Bloom. Wow, things sure were different back then in the mainframe days, and what a journey we’ve went on to get into the modern era!

Infor bought Lawson Software. Interestingly, Infor is known to be the “ERP graveyard” among some circles, this company that buys out software to scoop up some of the revenue from the existing market, but eventually kills off the old software.

20190420/https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lawson_Software
20190420/DuckDuckGo lawson software
20190420/https://www.tlnt.com/lawson-software-a-very-sad-ending-and-an-important-lesson-for-hr/
20190420/http://infullbloom.us/477/where-are-the-snowdens-of-yesterday-a-cautionary-tale/
20190420/http://infullbloom.us/1460/snowdons-of-yesteryear-history-is-repeating-itself/
20190420/http://infullbloom.us/in-full-bloom/
20190420/http://infullbloom.us/about-naomi-bloom/

Vitamin B12 and very interesting history of breakfast cereals

quorten

2019-04-20

Categories: random  
Tags: random  

Vitamin B12, what does Wikipedia have to say about this? Indeed, this is a relatively scarce vitamin in vegetable food sources, but common in dairy, meat, eggs, and fish. Some breakfast cereals are fortified with vitamin B12.

20190419/https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vitamin_B12

The breakfast cereals of justice! What does Wikipedia have to say about breakfast cereals? Indeed, there is a very interesting history here about how breakfast cereals came about, and how they quickly became competitive with each other. The story of food scientists, and fortification with vitamins and minerals, that came about later.

20190419/https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Breakfast_cereals

Freeze drying? Basically, this works by lowering the temperature to freeze the water to ice, then reducing hte pressure so that the ice evaporates via sublimation. Yeah, very interesting indeed.

20190420/https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Freeze-dried

Random discussion on advice improving mental focus from Twitter

quorten

2019-04-19

Categories: twitter  
Tags: twitter  

What kind of health advice is good for improving focus on a mentally intensive task when there are too many distractions that cannot be eliminated?

Eat less? This can be good if you are eating too much and the fullness makes it hard to concentrate.

But not too little, because then you run out of energy for your brain.

If you do moderate exercise, rather than intensive exercise, this is probably ideal because (1) because you don’t consume a lot of energy during the exercise.

You can get a few inches more of concentration.

Pull out eat more or eat less as a factor.

Rather than take naps in the middle of the day, you may want to instead make sure all your breaks are moderate exercise like going on a short walk. Then make sure your nighttime sleeps are a regular amount, not too much and not too little. Take a short break every hour, and a few longer breaks during the day. Then figure out how much you need to eat and how frequently to satisfy this regime. Keep your electrolytes balanced.

Read on →

Miscellaneous notes on culture, software abstractions, and EOMA 68

quorten

2019-04-19

Categories: raspberry-pi   random   twitter  
Tags: raspberry-pi   random   twitter  

Interesting article here, women who support women is an excellent way for them to become more successful.

20190418/https://www.forbes.com/sites/shelleyzalis/2019/03/06/power-of-the-pack-women-who-support-women-are-more-successful/#55de4de81771

This is interesting. Joel on Software created the blog article “the law of leaky abstractions” a long time ago, and it is being felt still today with problems in modern software. “Failure does not respect abstraction.” If a failure happens, it happens in spite of the designed programmer abstractions.

20190418/https://architectelevator.com/architecture/failure-doesnt-respect-abstraction/
20190418/https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2002/11/11/the-law-of-leaky-abstractions/

Oh wow, this is great news! The EOMA 68 is making it further along to being manufactured for real! Unfortunately, since I was not a pre-order customer, I will not be able to have one, there are only enough being made for the pre-order customers.

20190418/https://www.crowdsupply.com/eoma68/micro-desktop/updates/500-micro-desktop-pcb-assemblies

How polluted air affects behavior in many ways

quorten

2019-04-18

Categories: random  
Tags: random  

Very interesting articles on how polluted air affects intelligence, high-stakes academic test performance, crime rates, and purportedly how it can cause people to get fat.

20190418/http://www.bbc.com/future/story/20190415-how-air-pollution-is-doing-more-than-killing-us?utm_source=pocket-newtab
20190418/http://www.bbc.com/future/story/20151207-the-air-that-makes-you-fat

Loop mount a partition from a full disk image

quorten

2019-04-18

Categories: unix  
Tags: unix  

There were a few times when I previously only archived the partition of a disk because I immediately knew how to do loop mounts from just a partition image. But, with the added boot sector info, I was at lost as to how to mount that. Alas, it is fairly easy to loop mount one partition of a disk image, here’s how. (For sure this works with MBR partitioning, additional methods might be needed for GPT partitioning.)

fdisk -lu sda.img
sudo losetup -ro `echo $SIZE \* 512 | bc` /dev/loop0 sda.img
sudo mount -o ro /dev/loop0 /mnt/view/

20190417/loop mount partition from full disk image
20190417/https://askubuntu.com/questions/69363/mount-single-partition-from-image-of-entire-disk-device
20190417/https://askubuntu.com/questions/22743/how-do-i-install-guest-additions-in-a-virtualbox-vm