Trust or drop the pilot ?

When you click through on a webshop's request for a general review, you land on a trustpilot.com page. Would you carry on with your review after this warning?

Thanks for the warning, Tor!

A bit more on HTML5 canvas finger-printing from wikipedia:

Canvas fingerprinting works by exploiting the HTML5 canvas element. When a user visits a website with canvas fingerprinting, their browser is instructed to "draw" a hidden line of text or 3D graphic that is then converted to a digital token. Variations in which GPU is installed or the graphics driver cause the variations in the rendered digital token

Utah Arches

Another oldie (spring 2008).

Vivofit activity tracker, day #1

It hurt being forced to bootup my laptop in Windows mode to configure my newly acquired Vivofit device. Before that it had hurt finding out my Galaxy SII phone would not connect to the vivofit, because of an older Android version that doesn't use all features of the phone's bluetooth (hey, the phone is only 4 years old, it should give me at least another 6 years)!

Before going down the CyanogenMod way with the phone, let's see what linux can do, to sync vivofit data to Garmin Connect.

First dabbled a bit with python-ant-downloader. Positive side-effect: it forced me to install the latest version of pyusb

Then stumbled on antfs-cli, and that tool does a perfect job copying the .fit files onto my linux box!

$ antfs-cli 

Driver available: [<class ant.base.driver.SerialDriver at 0xb701295c>, 
                   <class ant.base.driver.USB2Driver at 0xb7012d4c>, 
                   <class ant.base.driver.USB3Driver at 0xb7012e0c>]
 - Using: ant.base.driver.USB3Driver
Request basic information...
  Capabilities:  array('B', [8, 8, 0, 186, 54, 0, 223])
Starting system...
Key done...
Searching...
Authenticating with vívofit (3893983957)
 - Pairing: OK
 - Set time: OK
Downloading 11 file(s)
Downloading 2015-10-06_07-32-12_1_0.fit: [..............................] ETA: 0:00:00
Downloading 2015-10-05_19-57-21_32_4.fit: [..............................] ETA: 0:00:00
Downloading 2015-10-05_21-19-34_32_5.fit: [..............................] ETA: 0:00:00
Downloading 2015-10-05_22-23-14_32_6.fit: [..............................] ETA: 0:00:00
Downloading 2015-10-05_22-24-50_32_7.fit: [..............................] ETA: 0:00:00
Downloading 2015-10-05_22-27-10_32_8.fit: [..............................] ETA: 0:00:00
Downloading 2015-10-05_22-28-39_32_9.fit: [..............................] ETA: 0:00:00
Downloading 2015-10-05_22-30-18_32_10.fit: [..............................] ETA: 0:00:00
Downloading 2015-10-06_01-00-00_32_11.fit: [..............................] ETA: 0:00:00
Downloading 2015-10-06_06-09-32_32_12.fit: [..............................] ETA: 0:00:00
Downloading 2015-10-06_06-43-51_32_13.fit: [..............................] ETA: 0:00:00

Upload these .fit files onto the garmin connect web site:

Don't really like the manual upload, but then this is day one and step one with the vivofit, surely we can further automate it!

River restaurants serving seafish

In the Taman Negara rainforest

You'd expect these floating restaurants in Kuala Tahan, smack dab in the middle of the Malaysian rainforest, to serve fish that jumped straight from the river into the pan! Alas when you order fish you get served seafish that was trucked in from a place at least 4 or 5 hours driving away! You CAN order river-fish, but that will bump up the price by a factor 5! Strange..

Location on Google Maps

Sidenote

On this tropical trip through Malaysia I really appreciated airconditioning, and could not agree more with Lee Kuan Yew, Singapore's founding father who said:

Air conditioning was a most important invention for us, perhaps one of the signal inventions of history. It changed the nature of civilization by making development possible in the tropics.
Without air conditioning you can work only in the cool early-morning hours or at dusk. The first thing I did upon becoming prime minister was to install air conditioners in buildings where the civil service worked. This was key to public efficiency.

(see www.vox.com/2015/3/23/8278085/singapore-lee-kuan-yew-air-conditioning )

Sneeze !

An oldie: springtime in Andalucia. (April 2010)

Bar-raiser

We like it that Mr. White-eye has chosen our garden as his territory. He's a bar-raiser on the scruffy-ness front!

The summer is hot

But it could be worse: hot with flies!

Horse near Polleur

Summertime in England

Capel

And time for a new pair of runners ..

.. again?

It's so hot ...

.. the squash/pumpkin leaves are drooping ..

A new tool for your toolbox : grob

Ever wanted to grep an OSM protobuffer file for a waypoint ? Grob will do that for you!

It is also possible to grep within a certain radius of a waypoint...

Example

Use case: you want to eat a pizza close to Checkpoint Charlie in Berlin.

Step 1: Locate checkpoint charlie in the Berlin osm protobuffer file:

grob berlin-latest.osm.pbf "checkpoint charlie"

..
52.507546, 13.390361,  name:Checkpoint Charlie name:ko:체크포인트 찰리 ..
..

Step 2: Check within a radius of 0.5 km of waypoint 52.507546 13.390361 for pizza

grob berlin-latest.osm.pbf -d 0.5 52.507546 13.390361 pizza

52.505250, 13.393108,  name:Charlotte 1 amenity:restaurant cuisine:italian..
52.506928, 13.392213,  name:Pizza amenity:fast_food #,0.14
52.506916, 13.395269,  addr:housenumber:9 name:Pepe Pizza amenity:fast_foo..

Change-over time again

Had the impression that my blue Mizuno's wore down rather quickly, but it turns out they clocked more than 1700 km.

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Skin in the game

Cowhair.

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This quote from the movie Whiplash will be a classic:

There are no two words in the English language more harmful than "good job."

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Nothing succeeds in reproducing itself better than a false sense of entitlement

Above is a quote from a long article by Yanis Varoufakis, here's the context:

My personal nadir came at an airport. Some moneyed outfit had invited me to give a keynote speech on the European crisis and had forked out the ludicrous sum necessary to buy me a first-class ticket. On my way back home, tired and with several flights under my belt, I was making my way past the long queue of economy passengers, to get to my gate. Suddenly I noticed, with horror, how easy it was for my mind to be infected with the sense that I was entitled to bypass the hoi polloi. I realised how readily I could forget that which my leftwing mind had always known: that nothing succeeds in reproducing itself better than a false sense of entitlement. Forging alliances with reactionary forces, as I think we should do to stabilise Europe today, brings us up against the risk of becoming co-opted, of shedding our radicalism through the warm glow of having “arrived” in the corridors of power.

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UPDATE 20151029 : .. a report originally carried by Greek newspaper Proto Thema, claiming that Varoufakis is being advertised as a speaker by an agency advertising fees running up to $60,000 (£39,228) for appearances in the United States. While there's nothing wrong with that, it's a little against the grain for a prominent critic of laissez-faire greed. .. ( deny, ask for retraction, claim transparency etc ) ..

But the blog post does concede that he's been paid €24,000 (£17,387, $26,584) after tax with first class travel expenses for participating in an Italian TV programme. He's getting another €28,800 (£20,285, $31,016) after tax with business class travel expenses for a presentation at conference in Singapore.

How's about that for a false sense of entitlement...? (more detail on: uk.businessinsider.com/anti-austerity-advocate-and-ex-greek-finance-minister-yanis-varoufakis-fees-for-speeches-2015-10 )

Timeline:

• 25 january 2015: Varoufakis gets into the spotlights when being appointed as finance minister
• 28 June: capital controls imposed and banks close
• 5 July: the Greek people vote 'no' to austerity
• 6 July: suprise resignation of Varoufakis
• 9 July: Geece capitulates to the demands from its creditors
• 20 July: Banks reopen in Greece
• 14 August: Greece secures 3rd bailout

Plain white rice diet

When putting your smartphone on a plain white rice diet...

.. would risotto be ok?

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The beauty of python

Who needs Haskell or any other fp language when you have set comprehension in Python ?

n=48
{ (x,y) for x in range(1,1+int(math.sqrt(n))) for y in range(1,1+n) if (x*y)==n }


{(1, 48), (2, 24), (3, 16), (4, 12), (6, 8)}

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Everything good in life is an acquired taste

Quote from Marisha Pessl's book "Special Topics in Calamity Physics" :

Like most people they hate change, but everything good in life is an acquired taste.

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For old time's sake

Saw this one flying by on the twitter-wind, seems RadioShack is in problems. Oh, the memories.

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