Month: July 2020

Mashka finally finished school with straight A’s (funny details inside)

Standing in line (ten minutes) at Ikea. Everyone is given water and umbrellas. Masha is pleased and is recording a TikTok.

Science news. Well, sort of news. Hello from 2013. Scientists from a Czech university spent two years analyzing 1,893 defecations and 5,582 urinations of 37 dog breeds in an unleashed field to prove that their body positioning correlates with Earth’s magnetic lines. They prefer to align along the north-south axis. It is assumed this is not unique to dogs. But the scientists are probably still knocking on doors for a grant. So, if you ever get lost in the woods…

A good video about the Moscow dialect – with examples and explanations. And the channel itself is pretty decent too.

Interestingly, in 1999 eInk introduced a flexible display based, as their press release states, on Immedia Display technology. The image updates slowly – once a second, but it has a large area, and was intended for use as advertising spaces. I’ve included the display in the pictures from the exhibition, which I found in a video conference. Not a single mention on Google or YouTube. What was that?

Jokes aside, in my childhood we stored games on audio cassettes. But that’s not even surprising. During my college years in Russia, they came up with a cool thing for backups, ArVid. And we actively used it.

ArVid is an adapter to a VCR that connects on one end to a computer and on the other to the VCR, to use the latter as an external storage device. It’s amusing how it operates – encoding and decoding through an analog video input and output. Control of the VCR was essentially done via emulation of the standard IR remote control commands. But they’re different for all models! They created a “learning” mode for determining the IR command codes and the timing characteristics of the VCR rewinding, working with a specific VCR. During the training, the user had to position the standard remote control opposite the IR receiver of the ArVid unit, and at the training program’s request, press the buttons corresponding to each significant operation needed to control the VCR (Play, Stop, Rec, FF, Rev, etc.). A file profile of the specific VCR model is created based on the training results. Additionally, the manufacturer supplied a large number of ready-made profiles for popular VCR models of the time.

When something needed to be recorded onto a videotape, like a game distribution, for example, this gadget would emulate remote control rewinding, then it would start play, and decode the signal from the video output where, aside from the data, all sort of metadata was encoded allowing for further, more accurate rewinding. Each cassette could store up to 2-3 GB of data.

The developer – KSI Software – is still alive and on their website, “greetings from the nineties,” they still advertise ArVid. 🙂

I wonder if there’s a security risk in the possibility that a malicious spy employee could program, from scratch on a computer disconnected from the internet and with locked interfaces, a Javascript application that encodes a file into an image, captures it on video on a mobile phone, and decodes it accurately at home? Theoretically, this is possible, and the investment in typing such a program from scratch from a printout at home would “pay off” by the program then working for an hour and translating megabytes into changing QR codes on the screen.

Google delights with the quality of voice recognition into subtitles

Americans usually opt for practicality. But here, a tunnel in Baltimore stretching two and a half kilometers is meticulously lined with 15×15 tile on both sides, just like in bathrooms. Of course, it’s understandable that since it’s an underwater tunnel, there’s a similarity to a bathroom, but it’s insanely expensive and complicated. Normally in such cases, they would just use plain concrete and not bother. Yet here, they installed eight million tiles, which took two years and 200 workers dealing solely with tiling. It’s claimed that this makes the tunnel brighter, enhancing safety. But we know better!

Decent room

Our bike rides in Pennsylvania and Delaware from this and past weekends (photos).

Today was not the luckiest day: we went on the trail without checking the tires, which turned out to be damaged from the last time, and as a result, two punctures in one day. The last ferry to the island where Fort Delaware is located left shortly before our arrival. We had to go back and pick up Nadya by car from the last five kilometers of the route: after all, walking for an hour under the sun at 35 degrees Celsius is not the most pleasant activity. I quickly drove to the car, but retrieving Nadya from the trail turned out to be quite a problem. For instance, Google Maps indicates that there is a path between the 285 highway and Michael N. Castle Trail at its narrowest part, but in reality, there is a house of some burly guy who started yelling obscenities at me even before I figured out what to do with the private property sign and the maps contradicting it. Naturally, I wouldn’t have gone there, tried to be extremely polite, but the guy decided to be proactive and showed aggression, and I had to quickly retreat. Eventually, I still walked back and forth along someone’s lawn (I hope, along its edge), but it seemed much safer. Otherwise, it would be an hour’s push for Nadya with a punctured tire. So, the takeaway: carry not only a spare inner tube but also a spare tire.

Along the way, saw a lift bridge (Lift Bridge). A very interesting engineering structure. There are similar, albeit smaller ones, in St. Petersburg, and a similar one in Rostov-on-Don.