Sunday, April 8, 2018

TWID April 08, 2018

This is a post detailing some stuff I did, learned, posted and tweeted this week, I call this TWID (This week in Denis). I am doing this mostly for myself... a kind of an online journal so that I can look back on this later on. Will use the label TWID for these


I skipped a couple of weeks but decided to get back to post these again


Went to Washington DC with the family during spring break. I always wanted to see the cherry blossoms in DC but so far every time I visited Washington DC it was in the middle of the summer. This year I got lucky because it was colder than normal for March so the cherry trees didn't bloom until the first week of April.

Here is a pic I took of the Jefferson Memorial with the cherry blossoms in the foreground.

Jefferson Memorial through Cherry Blossoms

The plan was to visit NPR studios, see the Air and Space museum in Virginia and then to hit a museum or two.

The drive from Princeton to the Air and Space museum was not bad, it took a little under 4 hours. There were a couple of things I wanted to see in the museum, these were

The Space Shuttle
The Enola Gay plane
The Concord
World War II fighter planes


Here is the space shuttle

Space Shuttle

For some reason I thought the space shuttle was bigger, I guess I was comparing the shuttle to a Boeing 747

We took a tour and the tour guide was quite good, he had some interesting stories and facts that he gave us

Enola Gay Plane

In the pic above you see the Enola Gay plane, this is the plane that was used to drop the atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The tour guy told us that when they were training in the US with this plane, there was only one person that knew what the real mission would be. It was interesting to see how shiny this plane was. I wonder who has to keep these plane polished and how long it takes
Here is also a close up of the cockpit
  Enola Gay Cockpit

The plane below is a Hawker Hurricane IIC

Hawker Hurricane IIC
The Hawker Hurricane IIC plane was the first British monoplane fighter and the first  British  fighter to exceed 483 kilometers (300 miles). Hurricane fighters fought the Luftwaffe and helped win the battle of Britain in the summer of 1940


The plane below is a Heinkel He 219 A Uhu

Heinkel He 219 A Uhu

A Heinkel He 219 A Uhu was armed with up to 8 cannons and guided to its target by radar. The Heinkel He 219 A Uhu (Eagle Owl) was one of the Luftwaffe most formidable night fighters. On the aircraft's first mission, a single Heinkel He 219 A Uhu shot down at least five British bombers

Here are some Luftwaffe planes with swastikas on them Luftwaffe Nazi Planes

Finally here you can see the 'real' Air Jaws :-)

  The real Air Jaws

The Air and Space museum in Virginia is really cool, it is bigger than the one in Washington DC and the entrance is free as well


NPR

NPR building with Capitol in the distance

We took a tour of the NPR facility in Washington DC. The tour was really good, it took an hour and they took us to several floors as well as the roof. Unfortunately, we were not allowed to take pictures on ever floor so I can just share a handful of pics.


Studio
I was surprised that NPR had a bunch of windows machines... I expected them all to be Macs or even Linux but nope... all Windows machines. Below is a pic of the backup studio, the microphones come from Germany and are quite expensive

Backup Studio at NPR

Sound Diffuser
What you see in the picture below is a sound diffuser.

Sound Diffuser at NPR

Here is how wikipedia explains what a sound diffuser is

Diffusors (or diffusers) are used to treat sound aberrations, such as echoes, in rooms. They are an excellent alternative or complement to sound absorption because they do not remove sound energy, but can be used to effectively reduce distinct echoes and reflections while still leaving a live sounding space. Compared to a reflective surface, which will cause most of the energy to be reflected off at an angle equal to the angle of incidence, a diffusor will cause the sound energy to be radiated in many directions, hence leading to a more diffusive acoustic space. It is also important that a diffusor spreads reflections in time as well as spatially. Diffusors can aid sound diffusion, but this is not why they are used in many cases; they are more often used to remove coloration and echoes.

Diffusors come in many shapes and materials. The birth of modern diffusors was marked by Manfred R. Schroeders' invention of number-theoretic diffusors in the 1970s.

More here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diffusion_(acoustics)



In the pic below you can see my daughter Catherine holding the Emmy Awards that one of the Tiny Desk hosts won

Catherine holding the NPR Tiny Desk Emmy

Tiny Desk, yes you read that right... tiny not tidy  :-) Most of the stuff you see in this picture is the stuff that performers left after performing. Adele left her water bottle, I believe they KISS guys also left a water bottle.  Pretty cool to see all this stuff

NPR Tiny Desk



In the pic below is the camera David Gilkey was carrying when he was killed in Afghanistan on June 5th 2016. David Gilkey was a staff photographer and video editor for NPR, covering both national and international news

David Gilkey's Camera

This Week I Learned

Learned a bunch of stuff about PostgreSQL by taking a Pluralsight course


This Week I tweeted

Nikon versus Canon: A Story Of Technology Change

Pretty cool post showing you how Canon gained ground on Nikon

The high-stakes battle for the Pentagon’s winner-take-all cloud contract

There is a battle afoot, one you might not have heard about yet, but it involves a high-stakes winner-take-all contract for the Department of Defense’s cloud contract. It could involve billions of dollars and when a humongous sum of money meets a set of powerful tech companies, intrigue can’t be far behind.

The story even has a Star Wars reference with the Pentagon dubbing the project the Joint Enterprise Defense Infrastructure (or JEDI for short). Who says the Pentagon is staid?

The tech names involved include the likes of Amazon,  Google, Microsoft, Oracle and Rean Cloud, LLC.

Based on Trump's tweets last week... I doubt it will go to AWS

Some cool stuff you might enjoy


It's time to head back to RSS? 

THE MODERN WEB contains no shortage of horrors, from ubiquitous ad trackers to all-consuming platforms to YouTube comments, generally. Unfortunately, there's no panacea for what ails this internet we've built. But anyone weary of black-box algorithms controlling what you see online at least has a respite, one that's been there all along but has often gone ignored. Tired of Twitter? Facebook fatigued? It's time to head back to RSS.

Well I never left RSS, after Google Reader was shut down I switched to Feedly and have been using it ever since

Some pics I took

You can see all my Washington DC pics I posted on flickr here: https://www.flickr.com/photos/denisgobo/albums/72157689618100060

Saturday, April 7, 2018

Cool idea: old wine bottles repurposed as candle holders

NPR building with Capitol in the distance



While visiting the NPR building in Washington DC this week, I saw these cool wine bottle candle holders in the gift shop


Wine bottles recycled as candle holders

I thought that this was a pretty neat idea. why not repurpose the bottles instead of throwing them out.

What else could you repurpose a wine bottle for? I guess maybe something like a bird feeder. You could maybe make some sort of tiki torch as well. What about a penny piggy bank... not sure if pennies will fit.. but dimes might and you can always just put dollar bills in the bottle... but in order to get the bills out, you might have to break the bottle


Here are also some wine bottles with labels based on NPR podcast titles, that was pretty cool as wellNPR Wine

I am not familiar with these podcast shows, the only NPR podcast I listen to on a regular basis is Planet Money

Thursday, March 22, 2018

Panini WC 2018 codes for free sticker packs



As a kid I used to have the figurine panini sticker albums for the soccer world cup. I remember having the 1982 one and I had lots of fun filling in the empty spots and trading the duplicate stickers with other friends. The Maradona, Zico and Kempes stickers were my favorite ones

Now they have the album in digital format, there are mobile apps as well as a website You can reach the website app here: https://paninistickeralbum.fifa.com/game/flash

Here is what the France page in my album looks like after I added the 3 stickers I had for France





For some reason you can only open a certain packs per day.

Right now I have 9 packs but I have to wait 10 hours till I can open another 5



There are codes that will give you free packs, you can use these codes below, each one will give you a pack of 5 stickers


HAVE-NICE-WC18
COKE-BEST-GOAL
2018-COOL-GAME
FIFA-COCA-COLA
COKE-FAIR-PLAY
FOOT-BALL-LOVE
2018-COKE-GAME
FIFA-FOOT-BALL
GIFT-CODE-2018
ZPID-S1DM-13WL
W1PZ-V1UR-D197

FREE-FIFA-PACK
FIFA-FAIR-PLAY
OPEN-FIFA-PACK

OPEN-YOUR-PACK
FRA1998
OPEN-YOUR-GIFT

KEEPFREE2018
ARG1978
BRA1958
CRO1912
ENG1966
GER1954
JAP2002
KOR2002
URU1930
AUS1963
COL1936
COS1927
DEN1904
EGY1923
ICE1947
IRA1948
MOR1955
NIG1933
PAN1970
PAN1938
PER1924
POL1923
POR1914
RUS2018
SAU1956
SEN2010
SER1919
TUN1960
ESP2010
MEX1970
SWI1904
BEL1904
SWE1958

2742Q-QR
2ABXX-QR
2EJCA-QR
2FSE7-QR
2G74R-QR
2HZVF-QR
2MXS5-QR
2NTUE-QR
2NZPB-QR
2PA3Z-QR
2PF35-QR
2Q7PV-QR
2QKP7-QR
2RN3E-QR
2SMS2-QR
2TGPB-QR
2TKEH-QR
2V96K-QR
2XGW3-QR
2ZW78-QR

26VU5-QR
2GFB2-QR
2D73X-QR
256JM-QR
2J8VB-QR
24Q3G-QR
2MW7J-QR
2P8UC-QR
2HZVF-QR
2UAVQ-QR

These 7 panini ones don't work at the moment

panini1 (this will give you 1 pack)
panini2 (this will give you 2 packs)
panini3 (this will give you 3 packs)
panini4 (this will give you 4 packs)
panini5 (this will give you 5 packs)
panini6 (this will give you 5 packs)
panini7 (this will give you 5 packs)

The total of the 7 panini codes above is 25 packs !



TROPHY-TOUR
READYFOR
CASANOVA
COCACOLABR
2SR2C-QR
2018-FIFA-CLUB
COCACOLA

CASANOVA
COCACOLABR
2SR2C-QR
2018-FIFA-CLUB
COCACOLA
TUDOPRONTO
TUDOPRONTOBRASIL
PANINICOCACOLA
2018KICKOFF1
LISTOSPARA
COCACOLABRASIL

After entering all those codes I have now 35 packs waiting to be opened... that is a whole week since you can only open 5 packs per day

As of now my album is 33% completed


So far I have not found any of the top 10 players like Messi, Ronaldo, Modric, Rakitic, Neymar, Kroos, Lewandowski, Hazard or Kane

As of 3/27/2018 5 AM I have not completed a whole page yet.

Edit 3/27.. Swapped Modric and Rakitic and I have finished my first team page, it is Croatia





Edit 3/29 at 41% completion, 25 stickers in swap area

Edit 3/30 at 50% completion, 19 stickers in swap area, have 36 packs that have yet to be opened
Finished the 2nd team page, it is Korea



Edit 3/31 at 60% completion, 13 stickers in swap area, have 33 packs that have yet to be opened
Finished the 3rd team page, it is Iceland


Edit 4/7 at 99% completion... need only one player... it's Neymar from Brazil/Paris Saint Germain



There are some prizes you can win, here is the info from the website

Edit 4/8  completed the album



When you click on the Album Complete Get Reward button, you can download a PDF. Right now the PDF is just 1 page, you can see what it looks like in the image below. I guess we have to wait a couple of more weeks before they have that album finalized



GRAND PRIZES
The first 50 names drawn at random from those participants who successfully complete the Panini Digital Sticker Album on or before 31 August 2018 will receive a grand prize.

Each of the 50 lucky winners will receive a luxury, hardbound book version of 2018 FIFA World Cup™ Russia Panini Official Sticker Album.

Each winner will also receive one MyPanini code allowing them order 10 printed copies of a single MyPanini sticker for free on www.mypanini.com (shipping is free for prize winners).


RUNNERS-UP
The second 50 names drawn at random from those participants who successfully complete the Panini Digital Sticker Album on or before 31 August 2018 will receive runner-up prizes

Each runner-up will receive a free MyPanini code for use on www.mypanini.com. Each code is valid for 10 copies of a single MyPanini sticker (shipping is free for prize winners).

MyPanini™ stickers allow you to customise your very own unique Panini stickers and stick yourself into football history. MyPanini™ stickers will ensure you have something extra-special to stick, swap or gift your friends and family.

Tuesday, March 20, 2018

Tesla Model 3 or Tesla Model S..

Walked around near the train station today and saw a Tesla car. Initially I did not notice that this was a model 3, it looked like a model S to me

Here is what the car looked like

Tesla Model 3 vs Tesla Model S

The blue car is the model 3, the grey car is a model S.  The model S doesn't look that much bigger to me. I wonder if it makes sense for anyone to buy the model S at this point. Is there such a big difference between these two Tesla cars to warrant the price difference.  At the Princeton Junction parking lot there are about 8 or so Tesla cars I see regularly. Now with a ~33K price tag for a model 3, I wonder how long before we see more than 30 or even 50 of these cars?

According to Bloomberg, Tesla is producing 832 cars a week and have produced 10,299 model 3 cars so far.




You can see these number for yourself at the Bloomberg Tracker site here: https://www.bloomberg.com/graphics/2018-tesla-tracker/


How about you, have you seen any Tesla Model 3 cars yet?



Sunday, January 14, 2018

TWID Jan 15, 2018

This is a post detailing some stuff I did, learned, posted and tweeted this week, I call this TWID (This week in Denis). I am doing this mostly for myself... a kind of an online journal so that I can look back on this later on. Will use the label TWID for these


Finished the blockchain pluralsight course this week and started on the Github course


Should be done with the Github course by tomorrow

Watched Hell or High Water,  the movie was really good and I especially like the music. The music is by Nick Cave and Warren Ellis and it's I guess Western music?


Started to listen to the King of Kings podcast from hardcore history, I think this is the third time I am listening to it. Such great stuff!!


This Week I Learned

Merkle tree
While watching the Pluralsight course Blockchain Fundamentals I learned about a Merkle tree

In cryptography and computer science, a hash tree or Merkle tree is a tree in which every leaf node is labelled with the hash of a data block and every non-leaf node is labelled with the cryptographic hash of the labels of its child nodes. Hash trees allow efficient and secure verification of the contents of large data structures. Hash trees are a generalization of hash lists and hash chains.

The concept of hash trees is named after Ralph Merkle who patented it in 1979

More about Merke Tree here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Merkle_tree


White Plague
Heard about this on the Lore podcast episode 77. White plague is also known as consumption or tuberculosis, never heard it called white plague before. Tuberculosis I know very well, my grandfather died from it, he was 23 years old and when he died my father was only a month old. It was a rough time for my grandmother having to raise 3 kids on her own in the 1950s past war time frame.


Iron
Heard about the different kind of iron on the How it began podcast episode: Mastering Metals: From Sticks & Stones to Cars & Computers
Wrought iron... this is produced by putting the rock on a fire and then manipulating the iron by banging on it
Cast iron...  this is produced by using ovens and melting the iron.. it is however brittle
Steel... this is produced by removing carbon and it is not brittle like cast iron

This Week I Tweeted

A Vast, 430-Year-Old World Map, Full of Places and Creatures, Real and Imagined

The map shows a lush, highly personalized take on the world, with a surprisingly large collection of real and fantasy beasts carousing and cavorting on land and sea. Rumsey’s scan and digital assembly of the cartographic puzzle represents the first time that Monte’s work has been seen in its full glory: It is the single largest world map of the 16th century, and one largely forgotten or overlooked by cartographers and scholars.

Some interesting stuff, would be nice to have this hanging on the wall


Royal Mail’s Game of Thrones Stamp Collection available to order
These stamps look great.


Twitter, Snapchat tie up with Fox to provide coverage of FIFA World Cup

Twitter Inc is partnering with Twenty First Century Fox Inc’s Fox Sports to stream a live show on the FIFA World Cup soccer tournament set to be hosted in Russia later this year.  

Who is going to watch this on crappy telephone screens?

Some cool stuff you might enjoy

Good block chain material from ycombinator: http://blog.ycombinator.com/building-for-the-blockchain/

Small sample

In addition, the developer communities are remarkably receptive and helpful. Check out:


Some pics I took


Mountain of snow Eight feet of snow.... will take a while to melt.

Monday, January 8, 2018

Use Purse.io to shop on Amazon and pay with bitcoin

A couple of years ago I mined some bitcoin with ASIC Antminers. This bitcoin amount was still sitting in my bitcoin wallet until now. I needed some stuff from Amazon and decided to see how I could use some of this bitcoin I had to pay for these items. Amazon doesn't take bitcoin as a payment but there is a 3rd party site you can use. This site is Purse.io

The way it works, you create a wishlist or add the items. Then you can add a discount, I tried 11% for the 4 items and someone accepted


Sweet, 11% on top of the low Amazon price is not bad at all. The way it works is that the people who buy the items for you will get the bitcoin.  Once the order accepted, the amount is put into escrow and when it is delivered and acknowledged by you, the amount goes out of escrow into the buyer's wallet

Not sure if this is the right way to do it, it worked for me and maybe it can work for you as well. Let me know if you tried Purse.io and if it worked out for you as it did for me


Sunday, January 7, 2018

TWID Jan 07, 2018

This is a post detailing some stuff I did, learned, posted and tweeted this week, I call this TWID (This week in Denis). I am doing this mostly for myself... a kind of an online journal so that I can look back on this later on. Will use the label TWID for these


Skipped last week, so here is a bunch of stuff from two weeks combined


Made a whole bunch of chicken broth from the leftover bones I saved up over the last couple of weeks

Made a whole bunch of chicken bone broth

I use this as a base for lentil soups, vegetable soups, risottos or I just have it as is to warm me up.


Finished: The Russian Revolution: A New History by Sean McMeekin
This was pretty good, if you like history I recommend this book


Since a lot of podcasts took a hiatus or had a best of episode, I had some spare time. I decided to listen again to the fantastic World War I podcast episodes Blueprint for Armageddon by Dan Carlin. I think this is the 3rd of 4th time I have listened to it.


Cold spell is still going strong in the Northeast. Worked from home Thursday and Friday. For some reason there was a Comcast cable above ground. The first snow cleaning truck that passed by clipped that cable right into pieces. There went cable and internet. Used the hotspot on my phone to continue working. Comcast had the cable repaired within 2 hours so that was not too bad

Went to pick up some eggs and cheese at the farm and saw these cows drinking water.
The water was frozen in the container on the right side so these cows were pushing each other to get to the water in the container on the left side. The cows seemed contend, not sure how because it was bitter cold. Maybe now if you mil them, you get ice cream instead of milk  LOL




I finally watched Downfall
The movie is well known as the inspiration for "Downfall parodies". One scene in the film, in which Hitler launches into a furious tirade upon finally realizing that the war is lost, has become a staple of internet videos. In these videos, the original German audio is retained, but new subtitles are added so that Hitler and his subordinates seem to be reacting instead to some setback in present-day politics, sports, entertainment, popular culture, or everyday life

I highly recommend this movie, although you know the outcome, if was interesting to see Hitler as a broken man suffering from Parkinson's Disease and still thinking that the war could be won. The human treatment of Hitler raised some concerns by critics

This Week I Learned

kebeb case
Snake Case

In Snake Case, all words are lower-cased, then all spaces between words are replaced by underscores.
So you would get

then_all_spaces_between_words_are_replaced


Kebab Case is similar except that the first letter of each word is capitalized, and hyphens are used instead of underscores:
So you would get

Then-All-Spaces-Between-Words-Are-Replaced

More here: http://blog.greglow.com/2017/12/29/sdu-tools-converting-t-sql-strings-snake-case-kebab-case/

bombogenesis
Bombogenesis, a popular term used by meteorologists, occurs when a midlatitude cyclone rapidly intensifies, dropping at least 24 millibars over 24 hours. A millibar measures atmospheric pressure. This can happen when a cold air mass collides with a warm air mass, such as air over warm ocean waters  https://oceanservice.noaa.gov/facts/bombogenesis.html


Who comes up with these words?


This Week I tweeted

As drone demand soars, New Jersey poised to bar drunken droning

U.S. drone sales in 2017 topped $1 billion for the first time ever, but don’t raise a glass too quickly if you are in New Jersey, where lawmakers are poised to outlaw drunken droning next week.

Drunk droning is the new drunk driving...


Christopher Nolan on the power of the people and why '2001' should be required preschool viewing

I understand you showed “2001” to your children when they were very young, like 3 or 4?
I did. I think they’re able to absorb it on the most important level at a young age. That’s what happened to me. I saw it when I was 7 years old, and that’s the level I think it works the best — pure cinematic spectacle. I was extremely baffled by it, but excited by it.

When people talk about the age of people watching a film, part of what they’re asking is, “How does a 7-year-old parse the content?” And if you look at “2001” and you think about it, you can’t parse it anyway as an adult. The experience is the thing.

Interesting... most people I know say this is the best movie ever or a very boring movie

Some cool stuff you might enjoy

Listen to live Bitcoin transactions: http://btclisten.com/ 

Listen to live Wikipedia updates: http://listen.hatnote.com/


 Smells Like Teen Spirit’ music video auto-tuned to major chord

Nirvirna - Teen Sprite from Sleep Good on Vimeo.

Wow this really is uncanny valley territory

Some pics I took



Snowy trail, good for running

Trail near my home, looks cold but it is actually very nice to run on snow.


Cows drinking in freezing cold weather Went to pick up some eggs and cheese at the farm and saw these cows drinking