Category: Random

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Computer science Random

Seven Head-Scratching Features from WWDC 2022 – TidBITS

Customize Spatial Audio with TrueDepth Camera

This announcement came and went fairly quickly, but it had us scratching our heads immediately. The idea, it seems, is that spatial audio sounds more realistic if it can take into account aspects of the physicality of the listener that affect their perception of space. Apparently, this is a thing—called Head-Related Transfer Functions—and by capturing data using the iPhone’s TrueDepth camera, Apple could personalize the otherwise average HRTF that combines data from thousands of people.
— Read on tidbits.com/2022/06/13/seven-head-scratching-features-from-wwdc-2022/

I worked with HRTFs in grad school, trying to implement the filters in the wavelet domain (More here) so this is interesting to me. Looks like we’ll be able to use some combination of camera + lidar to capture the pinnae and derive personal HRTFs from that.

I cannot wait. Guess I’ll need to explore the spatial music and maybe movies now.

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Random

Safari on iOS 15 – ‘Hide IP address’ breaks a lot of sites

Since I got this iPad Pro (M1, 10”) a year or so ago, it’s been my primary machine for almost everything. SSH, Remote Desktop, video of course, even video editing and uploads with the GoPro and Quik. It’s a fast, silent, long-battery machine and I love it. Paired with the trackpad/keyboard, I don’t miss my MBP13.

Except. Some websites, typically e-commerce ones, never load. You’ll see a spinner in the upper right corner, next to the cell/Wi-Fi icons, and it never loads. Today I found the fix!!

The problem is the iOS 15 privacy feature ‘Hide IP address’. Disabling it fixes every site I’ve had fail on me. Before finding this fix, I had cleared cookies, erased history, disabled extensions, bypassed the Pi-hole and sometimes used Firefox. Note that Firefox doesn’t have this problem, but I prefer Safari just a bit on iOS.

Go to Settings / Safari and scroll down.

Click on ‘Hide IP address’:

Disable it, go back to Safari and you’ll find that the mystery spinner is banished. Bizarre.

Maybe this’ll be fixed in iOS 16… due to be announced in a couple of days, but I found this so frustrating that I should share the fix.

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Random recommendations

Matt’s Off Road Recovery

When the Olympics come around, I’ll often watch sports I am 100% ignorant of, just to see the best in the world doing their thing. It’s the competence at work, the striving, that I find compelling.

Like the Olympics, where NBC will strive to deliver narratives about athletes and their paths, good video or books can take you into another life/job/existence. It allows us, the reader/viewer, to visualize another existence; you even see it in museum dioramas and I think it’s a deep human trait.

Since discovering the Vinegar extension for Safari, I’ve found it a lot easier to browse YouTube. I uninstalled the YouTube app, and now solely use Safari on both iPad and desktop; this app is so good. Anyway, that’s what led me to today’s topic, Matt’s Off Road Recovery.

MORR, as I’ll call it here, is a YouTube channel started in 2019. It’s a family business in Hurricane, Utah, that does off-road towing, primarily for vehicles that get stuck in Sand Hollow State Park. Sounds boring? It’s not. Let me explain.

First off, the people are outstandingly competent. Owner Matt, son Rudy and Lizzy, are damned good at the work they do. Sand, snow, crazy steep rock, snow, trailers – oh my god they can back a trailer on a mountainside that looks like Everest – clever use of winches, pulleys and rigging, combining vehicle vectors… it’s a visual feast of ad-hoc problem solving to revel in. And that’s before you detour into the build videos and related channels doing advanced vehicle work.

There’s a host of supporting characters to recognize and enjoy, and the creators have done solid, careful work in establishing recurring patterns & motifs as well as investing in cameras, drones and lights to make the contents better. Like the canonical genius Clickspring, MORR is good at both videos and the work they do.

Lastly, they clearly have gone to a lot of trouble to remain apolitical and kind. In the work they do, often towing people who made bad decisions, lacked skills or inadequate vehicles, it would be simple to mock the customers but they never do. In 2022, when our national media is mainly afire with hate and status games, this is a wonderful thing to find.

I have no interest whatsoever in becoming an off-road recovery person. At the same time, I greatly enjoy watching them do so, and maybe you will too. Hit shuffle on his recovery playlist and be taken to another life.

On a purely personal note, my family owned two Corvair convertibles, so it was amazing to me to watch them create a monster off-road towing rig out of a Corvair wagon. Mad props.

And yeah, I am tempted to buy some swag.

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Random

Cat weathervane

Saw this today. Random.

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Radio Random Uncategorized

Hey Verizon, you’ve got a problem in 92122

I’m a long time customer and former employee, with an MSEE and ham radio license. I play with SDR for fun – I’m no pro but I’m familiar with radio and cellular. My bonafides explained, this post explains the problem, what I tried and why you lost me today as a customer.

A few months ago we started to have problems. Calls are fine, but data is super slow and my battery was being murdered. With my iPhone 11 Pro, a bit under two years old and 83% battery health, requires two to three charges per day something is wrong.

It just discharges too fast

Second symptom: it works fine out of the home area, very approximately the 92122 zip code. As you can see from the screenshots on Nextdoor, others have the same problems. As the meme says, “I am not a crank.”

I called service and tried to explain. They sent me a new SIM, we reset networks and nothing helped. I wasn’t able to explain that the issue wasn’t me and that others were affected.

So today we’re all onto “Consumer Cellular”. Good price, stellar service so far, and instead of 12mbps I got

So Verizon, I think you’ve got a problem. Could be too many subscribers for the base station, failed antenna lobe, I can’t tell. Apple and the carriers have blocked key diagnostics like SNR so all I can do is speculate. You could sort it out with a test if your mobile coverage and I hope you do. It’s a pity to see the stellar reputation of Verizon Wireless being lost.

Update 12/1/2021 – I reached out to VerizonSupport on Twitter and they are promising to investigate. I spoke to a couple of different reps, one of whom said there was a known outage in the area.

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Food Random recommendations

Pistachios and cashews are gangster

Imagine yourself a sea captain, sailing from port to port with cargos of food. Which ones are a risk?

So a cargo of pistachios seems harmless, doesn’t it? It’s totally not – they can suffocate you, set themselves on fire in two different ways and might, for bonus hazard points, explode.

Cashews? They’re covered in toxic irritant irushiol, which has to be burned off before they’re safe for consumption. That’s why you’ll never see cashews in-shell.

I learned both of these and more at the latest issue of The Whippet, which I recommend to you. S/he finds interesting stuff.

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essays Random recommendations

Building a Cathedral — The Prepared

Well worth your time! https://theprepared.org/features/2019/4/28/building-a-cathedral

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Random

More hovering and circling

Police helicopter. I always wonder.

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Random

Random ADS-B today

You see odd things on ADS-B sometimes when you view traces.

Googled and it was an acrobatic plane.

Guess they were doing a routine?

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Random recommendations

Grim reading

Three long reads – or at least bookmark:

Takeaways? Install pi-hole at home, use 1Blocker on iOS, uBlock Origin on your desktop, reconsider if you use Android at all, and always have a 6-digit PIN on your phone. It’s probably worse than you thought.