May 31 2018, 12:35

Yesterday, we finished watching all the previous episodes of Handmaid’s Tale, ‘The Handmaid’s Tale’.

A very unusual series. You will like it if you are into the dystopian genre, themes of “man versus system,” and the post-apocalyptic world in general. This makes it somewhat fantastic, but at the same time, there are practically no elements of fantasy in it. It’s a reflection on the what-if scenario, something like “The Experiment” or “Lord of the Flies”. Humanity is challenged by nature (women become infertile across the globe), and it survives as best it can (organizing the remaining women into slavery and using them as living incubators). The series is very stylish, somewhat slow, sentimental in a certain way, and with beautiful music.

https://www.kinopoisk.ru/film/rasskaz-sluzhanki-2017-1007426/

May 30 2018, 10:40

I have already written that I assembled a Google assistant on a raspberry pi ($30) and Google voice kit ($5). It works quite nicely. The microphone is very sensitive, and the speech recognition is simply a notch better than even on an iPhone with Siri. Apparently, due to the “special hardware” – the VoiceHat boards from the $5 kit.

Convenient features include: timer, traffic, weather, shopping list. Inconvenient features include: calendar, mail, messages, and broadcast are not supported. It’s also good to have an Android phone rather than iOS alongside this device.

May 29 2018, 00:09

New blog post about Hybris. I present my concept of expanding the ImpEx data import-export language, heavily used for absolutely all projects, but not very tailored in the “out-of-the-box” version for multi-site or support of large catalogs aiming for growth. In the “out-of-the-box” version, programmers have to create lots of duplicated structures there, which need to be corrected synchronously. In my language extension, you only need to make corrections in one place, and duplications are minimized (if not eliminated entirely).

P.S. Those not familiar with Hybris might find it hard to understand 😦 The post is meant for those who are not

https://hybrismart.com/2018/05/27/hybris-impex-preprocessor-impex/

May 28 2018, 23:56

Today, I bought an additional Google Voice Kit for my raspberry pi. It cost five bucks, which is more expensive than the microphone and speaker I needed for my experiments. So, I assembled it, and it works 😉 by the way, they tricked me: the button is blue, not green. Should I return it… 😉 Raspberry pi has become surprisingly cheap. 35 bucks for a computer with a good set of interfaces – that’s awesome

May 27 2018, 17:50

About half a million bikers today converged from across the country in Washington to honor the memory of those who died or went missing in action during war. Tomorrow is Memorial Day, but today there was a parade of these motorcyclists: they rode through the central streets. Many alongside the U.S. flag carried the black POW/MIA (prisoners of war / missing in action) flag. Many of the participants are veterans. The first image shows a Polaris Slingshot.

I can’t even imagine how to organize an event for half a million people.

What was the largest event in Russia? I only know about “Monsters of Rock” in Moscow in 1991 (Metallica, AC/DC and others), which also had around half a million people. And then there were the rallies in 1991 with a similar number of people gathered together. Could there really have been nothing bigger?