Audible’s tale of an engineering hero: The Man Who Knew the Way to the Moon

by philg

It is rare for engineering to be the subject of literature and entertainment and even rarer for an engineer to be the subject. Audible’s The Man Who Knew the Way to the Moon is a welcome outlier. Although I was once a proud Fortran programmer at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center (the Pioneer Venus project), I hadn’t realized that the original idea for the moon landing was to fly a huge vehicle and enough fuel for the return trip straight to the lunar surface. Audible’s work is about John Houbolt, who fought the conventional thinking and endured all of the bureaucratic infighting to promote the idea of a small vehicle that would land on the moon, thus requiring only a tiny fraction of the fuel to get back to Earth. After escaping the moon’s gravity, the small vehicle would rendezvous with a bigger spacecraft in lunar orbit (“lunar orbit rendezvous” or “LOR”) and then the astronauts could all go home.

Trigger warning: the book implies that members of the 2SLGBTQQIA+ community, engineers of color, and engineers who identify as “women” played no role in getting astronauts to the moon.

Related:

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Audio Pro, the Swedish alternative to Sonos for whole-house music

by philg

Whole-house music is great. Buying things from our Swedish brothers, sisters, and binary-resisters is great as a way of showing support for their courageous decision not to order lockdowns, masks, etc. These principles intersect in Audio Pro, a well-established Swedish company that transitioned from powered speakers to multi-room music in 2017.

At $129, the Audio Pro no-amp no-speaker Link 1 node is much cheaper than the Sonos Port ($449). Audio Pro seems not to make any direct competitor to the $699 Sonos Amp (the Wi-Fi node plus a 125W/channel stereo power amp to drive speakers; back-ordered until mid-August!). So you couldn’t have quite as clean an installation with Audio Pro because you’d have to add a small Class D amp to get comparable capability. I guess this makes sense because Audio Pro is all about powered speakers. Why would they want to make a box for fools who still own passive speakers?

Has anyone tried Audio Pro? The British magazine What HiFi? top-rates Audio Pro among Sonos competitors.

Sonos is winding down support for previous generation gear like what we own and we don’t have quite enough nodes for the current house so we need to eBay all of our Sonos stuff soon. Do we buy the latest Sonos products, showing our support for the Science-followers of Santa Barbara (they also have offices in Science-following Boston, Seattle, and San Francisco)? Or do we buy Audio Pro, saving some $$ and giving money to unmasked Fauci-deniers?

The reviews on Amazon suggest that Audio Pro’s multi-room system got off to a rocky start, but now works for most people. The reviews for Sonos are nearly all five stars.

One thing that is strange about Audio Pro is that the no-amp Link 1 device doesn’t have any inputs. Some of their speakers have RCA and 3.5mm inputs, but if you were trying to pull sound out of a legacy stereo system, there would already be speakers in that room. The Sonos Port is 3X the price, but it does have the line input that you’d expect.

Another area where the Sonos Amp and Port lead: buttons on the device to play/pause and adjust volume. Some of the Audio Pro speakers have a big array of buttons (including presets for radio stations), but the Link 1 lacks the basics that Sonos always includes. I don’t know why Audio Pro can’t just copy Sonos and make a clone of the Sonos Amp. The company knows how to make the streaming hardware and they know how to make power amps (or how to ask people in China to make them!).

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What have we learned about Salvador Ramos, the Uvalde, Texas murderer?

by philg

The shooting in Uvalde, Texas is dominating my Facebook and Twitter feeds. Here’s an example:

(Joe Biden has been in the Senate or the White House since 1973. He didn’t do anything about gun laws, common sense or otherwise, during those 49 years, but “we have to do more” today.)

From an older guy in Maskachusetts on Facebook:

Does anyone really need these kinds of guns. I think if you want to shoot these kind of weapons you can only shoot them and keep them at gun ranges. Other than that, no one, other than law enforcement should have these weapons. I am sorry. There is ZERO need for them out in society.

What has been learned about Salvador Ramos and his motivation for killing elementary school kids?

From skimming the news, it sounds as though Mr. Ramos confirms the findings in The Son Also Rises. His grandfather was unsuccessful (“[grandfather] Rolando Reyes also said he has a criminal background and cannot have a weapon in the home.” (ABC)) and Mr. Ramos was on track to be unsuccessful (“The Robb Elementary School shooter went on the deadly rampage after apparently fighting with his grandmother about his failure to graduate from his Texas high school, according to a report.” (New York Post)).

“Salvador Ramos Was Bullied for Stutter, Wearing Black Eyeliner: Friend” (Newsweek):

“He would get bullied hard, like bullied by a lot of people,” Garcia told the Washington Post. “Over social media, over gaming, over everything.”

Could this be the motivation? Plenty of teenagers in the 1970s had access to guns. Bullying in the 1970s was far worse than today and physical violence was common, as it was outside of school as well during the high-crime 1970s. In the junior high school that I attended, kids could get bullied for wearing Sears Toughskins rather than Levi’s blue jeans. I don’t think coming out as transgender or gay would have gone over well. On the other hand, 1970s bullies couldn’t follow the weak members of the herd into their own homes via social media.

What about pills? Kids weren’t medicated back in the 1970s. Psychiatrists today poke at random into a complex system that they don’t understand (the brain). Some of the most commonly prescribed medications may push pill-takers toward violence. See “Precursors to suicidality and violence on antidepressants: systematic review of trials in adult healthy volunteers” (2016): “Antidepressants double the occurrence of events in adult healthy volunteers that can lead to suicide and violence.” But there is no evidence that Salvador Ramos was taking any pills.

What has been learned that could explain this terrible crime? (other than, in a country of 330+ million, there are going to be terrible crimes periodically)

Separately… gun nut readers: How are you going to sweep this episode of gun violence under the rug? If Americans were willing to shut down schools for more than a year and be locked down at home in hopes of slightly reducing the COVID-19-tagged death rate, why aren’t these same folks willing to repeal the 2nd Amendment? (China is the dream society, I think, for about half of Americans. China has zero COVID and no private gun ownership.)

Related:

  • the worst trauma is suffered by those who cower on the edge of a battle: “Amid criticism of the police response to the gunman’s hourlong rampage, including outrage among frantic parents who said that heavily armed officers stood outside the school restraining them rather than storming the building themselves, Texas officials on Thursday sought to express the difficulty facing community members and law enforcement responders alike. “It is so hard,” said Victor Escalon, regional director for the Texas Department of Public Safety. “We’re hurting inside. We’re hurting inside for the community members. We’re hurting inside for our local partners.” (NYT)
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The Brave New World of text message spam

by philg

This year will be the 30th anniversary of the modern text message (SMS). It seems to also be the year of text message spam. I don’t remember receiving even a single spam or phishing text message prior to 2021 and in 2022 it is a near-daily occurrence. Here’s an example:

How is it supposed to work from here? I’m supposed to reply “My name isn’t Logan and here is my Visa card number…”?

Also, is it trivial for senders to spoof the from number? What if I call (304) 607-3405? Will that number belong to Logan, Selina, or Lucy? Or some person entirely unaware that his/her/zir/their phone number has been appropriated?

Why didn’t we get these before coronapanic?

Update from this evening… my uncles are looking out for me beyond the grave:

(In addition to being blind, Lisa will also be suffering from heatstroke if she wears that outfit on a date here in south Florida!)

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How to use a television as a digital picture frame? (2022 edition)

by philg

From 2012, Best LCD television for use as a digital photo display?:

  • must be programmable so that it comes on in “photo display” mode so that there is no need to monkey with a remote control after a power failure (or maybe default to photo display mode if a USB stick is plugged in); I have found the deep menus of modern HDTVs to be truly painful
  • must be programmable to shut itself off at midnight, for example, and back on at 8 am (to save power)
  • must be daylight-viewable (means LCD is better than plasma?)
  • must have low power consumption (implies LED-lit)?
  • [2022 addition] keep each image up for at least a few minutes

From 2010, Why don’t people use a small TV as a digital picture frame?

From 2014, Can Google Chromecast do a simple slide show?

What’s the answer to these questions today? I talked to some A/V installers who charge over $100,000 for a typical home setup and they couldn’t think of any way to have a TV turn itself on at the same time every day and start showing images of the consumer’s choice. Their only idea was the LG Gallery TV, but I think that is designed to show art and images from LG’s servers, not your own USB stick or local NAS share. Also, supposedly it is impossible to change the settings for transitioning from image to image, including both effects and timing.

I looked at the manual for the latest and great “Evo” LG OLED TV. It seems to have the same limitations as when I looked at Samsung and LG 10 years ago. The TV can turn itself on at the same time every day and tune to a particular channel or display a particular HDMI input.

(i.e., if you had a dongle that continuously went through the contents of a USB stick and turned it into 4K video, the TV could be programmed to show it)

How about the $4,300 Samsung “The Frame” TV? It doesn’t have an “on timer”, only an “off timer.” (But in theory it can turn itself on automatically via a motion detector?) It sounds as though displaying your own pictures can be done, but via a tedious importation process of one image at a time.

How about a $7,000 Sony 8K Mini LED TV that isn’t even available yet? The web-based manual suggests that it offers the same features as LG, i.e., to turn on and tune to a channel or input.

Since the TVs won’t do this for the $thousands that have been handled over by consumers, what about the dongle feeding an HDMI input idea? A December 2020 article on the subject says the dongles are called “media players” and describes the “Micca” product line, but these are limited to a feeble 1080p. The Amazon Fire TV stick might be able to do it with a cheap app that pulls images from Flickr. It will generate a 4K signal. China comes to the rescue with Rikomagic’s mini PCs and Android devices, sometimes with various apps, e.g., that can pull from Dropbox. All of Rikomagic’s products seem to have 4K HDMI output. I can already feel the pain of more devices to maintain, though, and also see this getting stuck and having to be rebooted. Not to mention lots of extra wires and periodic removal of the TV from the wall to get to the dongle, etc.

At this point, you’re thinking “Of course, the TVs can’t do this because who besides a handful of digital SLR nerds would ever want this?” In fact, however, a huge number of TVs are purchased for this exact role… in-store advertising, a.k.a., “digital signage.” Because, apparently, you can’t plug in a USB stick and have the TV do the rest, there are a lot of vendors happy to sell you the few lines of software that Samsung, LG, and Sony left out. Rise Vision is an example and it seems to be priced at about $120 per year per TV (i.e., over the life of a mid-priced mid-sized TV, more will be paid to Rise Vision than to the TV manufacturer).

Related:

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Special PIN to delete some applications and data when the police or school demand an unlock?

by philg

Some friends and I were discussing a kid who was kicked out of a school in Maskachusetts:

kids were caught vaping at school. Their phones were searched. The Man saw they bought it from [the kid who was kicked out]. Also an administrator suspended another kid for 1 day because the kid has called him a name in a text to the other kid.

This kicked off a discussion:

  • Me: The state that says marijuana is essential complains about vaping?
  • Friend 1: Private school. [A kid] was taken from school in handcuffs.
  • Friend 2: How’d they get into his phone?
  • Friend 1: They told the kids if they don’t let them search their phone they will be kicked out.
  • Ukrainian friend: so they searched and kicked them out! they are like the Russians
  • Friend 2: Use third party app. Delete that app when compromised.
  • Ukrainian: ambush PIN. if compromised, give out a special PIN to law enforcement, then pre-set up set of apps are erased in the background.

The “ambush PIN” idea seems to have been implemented to some extent on Android. See “Privacy Lock adds disk wiping unlock code to your Android device” (2015). But it leaves the phone in a suspiciously empty state. If the vape enthusiasts had agreed to use Signal or Telegram, for example, and these apps got deleted with their “ambush PIN”, the school authorities would find a typical teenager’s phone full of photos and innocent text messages.

Related:

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Monkeypox motivates Science to find something essential other than alcohol and marijuana

by philg

The Science-following states, e.g., Maskachusetts, California, and New York, closed public schools for 12-18 months while keeping alcohol and, at least in MA and CA, marijuana stores open as “essential.”

Let’s look at a recent tweet from one of America’s top scientists, an epidemiologist at the Yale School of Medicine (smart enough to stop SARS-CoV-2 but not smart enough to notice an administrator stealing $40 million):

I think we can infer from the above that the bathhouse joins the marijuana and the liquor store in the “essential” category, as determined by Science.

Maybe Professor Gonsalves was always anti-lockdown? It is possible to search by date range within Twitter, e.g., “from:gregggonsalves school since:2020-08-15 until:2020-09-01”

In August 2020, Science wanted schools kept closed:

(the idea of “all schools open”, pushed by Donald Trump, was a mark of “surrender”)

And in July 2020:

Danger is everywhere, and especially in open schools:

So I think it is safe to say that, like in-person marijuana and alcohol retail, the bathhouse has been found by scientists to be more important than K-12 education.

Related:

  • “Monkeypox outbreaks across Europe linked to gay sauna and fetish festival” (PinkNews): Twenty-three new cases were confirmed in Spain on Friday (May 20), with regional health chief Enrique Ruiz Escudero telling reporters that most of the cases had been traced from a single adult sauna, used by queer men for sex, according to Reuters. Authorities have also confirmed the first cases of monkeypox in Belgium, which have been linked to visitors of the Darklands fetish festival which took place from 4-9 May.
  • Darklands: Life is great, but it is even better in your favorite fetish gear. Darklands Belgium encourages visitors to explore their sexuality and develop a safe and sane interest for the many fetishes in our community. The event is a collaboration of different groups, organizations, clubs and over 150 volunteers. The various tribes in the gay fetish community (Leather, rubber, army, skinhead, puppies, …) come together to create a unique spectacle of fetish brotherhood. [i.e., it was “safe” except for the monkeypox]
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Xfinity xFi Pods mesh network review

by philg

One of the worst things about having moved from an apartment to a single-family house is that we were kicked out of the AT&T fiber 1 Gbps symmetric paradise and plunged into the dark pit of Xfinity cable Internet service (more money, 1/30th the upload speed). The good news is that the xFi Gateway (modem/router/WiFi base station) seems to provide reasonably good service through three walls, at least when one is not experiencing a complete service outage from Comcast. Beyond three walls it gets dicey and our old-school laser printer requires a Cat 5 connection.

Enter the xFi Pods. This is an official ISP-sold and -supported tri-band mesh network. Even more exciting, the pods include RJ45 jacks for dinosaurs who have laser printers requiring Cat 5 connections. At two for $200, the price is lower than shutting down the Xfinity WiFi network and building a new network with Eero or Netgear or similar. Carriers need to make everything idiot-proof so I imagined that setup would take mere minutes.

In case it helps others, this post is to report that the Xfinity system is

  • about one hour to set up (multiple attempts at configuration and repeating the same process about 6 times finally resulted in the Pods both affiliating with the Gateway)
  • not great at connecting clients to the closest wireless access point to the point that a phone will drop off WiFi altogether because it was trying to connect to the far-away Gateway and never discovered the alternative of a nearby Pod
  • prone to complete failures where both Pods will be offline and the only way to fix is to unplug everything, including the Gateway, and apply power sequentially

This is on top of the overall fragility of Xfinity, which fails at unpredictable times and fails hard after brief power outages (power cycling the gateway is insufficient; one needs to call Comcast and have them send a reset signal).

On the plus side, the Xfinity app is easy to use and it is easy to see which devices are connected to which access point (Pod or Gateway). Also, the Xfinity app gives you alerts when someone new connects.

With or without Pods, a deficiency of the whole Xfinity system is that, unlike with AT&T and Verizon fiber standard gear, there is no way to set up a guest network. Every service person who comes to the house will need to be supplied with your private network password (since Verizon doesn’t see fit to cover Jupiter, Florida, except on its fictional coverage map).

Here’s a question for network nerd readers: does the heavily promoted WiFi 6 standard have better protocols for ensuring that a client, e.g., smartphone, is always connected to the best wireless access point in a multi-point (but same SSID) system?

Related:

  • UniFi versus Araknis versus Ruckus (updated to reflect the fact that a lot of this stuff is certified to work only up to 40 degrees C and therefore shouldn’t live in an unairconditioned garage)
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Will masks for the general public work as well against monkeypox as they did against SARS-CoV-2?

by philg

“New Yorkers told to mask up again after local patient tests POSITIVE for same genus virus as monkeypox” (Daily Mail):

An NYC patient has tested positive for the same genus virus as monkeypox sparking calls from the health department for residents to wear masks indoors – just as New Yorkers were finally returning to mask-free normalcy after COVID-19.

The health department is encouraging New Yorkers to wear face masks to protect against the new virus outbreak, as well as COVID-19 and the flu. Monkeypox primarily spreads through physical contact but can also be transmitted through respiratory droplets in the air.

Why isn’t the best advice “Leave New York City, which is one of the world’s most crowded places”? The Science is strong with the NYC health department, but ordinarily a scientific conclusion is supported by evidence. What is the evidence that a monkeypox outbreak can be stopped by ordinary residents of a city wearing masks?

In a world obsessed with avoiding viral infection, I can’t figure out why cities like New York make sense (or why boosting population density in already-crowded cities via low-skill immigration makes sense). I have a lot more confidence that someone living in the suburbs can avoid monkeypox compared to someone living in a Manhattan studio apartment and going out to the stuff that used to make Manhattan attractive.

Combining these topics, a photo from June 2021:

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Coat the garage floor with polyaspartic or epoxy? Put in an air conditioner?

by philg

For the first time in my life, I live in a house with a reasonably nice garage. The floor is a concrete slab poured in 2003. For a lot of neighbors, however, this is apparently not sufficient. Because there are no basements in Florida, the garage is a critical storage facility and also sometimes the home of N-1 or N-2 cars (where N is the theoretical capacity of the garage in cars).

Does it make sense to put in a plastic floor? The cost is about $2,700 for a polyaspartic floor, which dries quickly and therefore enables the contractor to show up from 9 am to 2 pm and the homeowner to put everything back into the garage by 3 or 4 pm. The old religion was epoxy, which I think resulted in two days of downtime for the garage and two visits by the contractor, but Science now says that polyaspartic is better?

Readers who’ve done this: Why? And what material?

Also, I’m thinking that items stored in the garage will be in better shape if the temperature and humidity are limited to some extent. It will also help with my dream Internet system since the CAT5 wires all come back to a panel in the garage and typical modems and routers are rated to operate at temperatures no higher than 40C (104 degrees in the units that God prefers). Does it make sense to try to keep the garage to a maximum of 85 or 90 degrees with a split system?

Finally, if polyaspartic is the right choice, what color? The exterior has a lot of beige and the garage door is brown, so I was thinking of “Saddle Tan”. On the other hand, most of the ones that I’ve seen are gray (e.g., “Midnight” or “Smoke” below). “California Gray” can be ruled out since we don’t want to have to wear masks and show our vaccine papers in the garage. There is no “Blue Steel” or “Magnum”, sadly.

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