Cyanbane

The curious invasion of my network from Peloton's Ruby

2018-11-13T00:00:00+00:00

I picked up a physical copy of a CD earlier today and with Amazon’s MP3 AutoRip service was able to download the MP3s right away. I snagged the MP3s and was going to store them on my Plex server and opened up Network and was kind of awestruck as there were 2 devices on my network that I didn’t know: “ruby” by Peloton International (I don’t own a Peloton - although I think they are pretty cool) and a network connected Bravia TV (I also don’t own one of these and/or if I did would never let it broadcast out). I immediately logged onto my router and checked the MAC addresses and didn’t see anything connected at all for these two devices. Bewildered, I went back to the Network tab and tried to figure out how I saw these. My main box is only networked via cable and doesn’t have wifi so that this box couldn’t be accepting connections for these two devices, yet here they were. The only thing I could tell about them was their mac addresses so I started to google and saw what I could find. Eventually, I got to the docs for an API that Windows 7-10 uses called Windows Connect Now. From the docs:

“Windows Connect Now (WCN) provides a simple and secure mechanism for network access points and devices (like printers, camera, and PCs) to connect and exchange settings. This API is the Microsoft implementation of the Wi-Fi Protected Setup (WPS)/Wi-Fi Simple > Configuration (WSC) protocol, which was created by the Wi-Fi Alliance as a solution for home networking and small businesses. This technology is not intended for enterprise scenarios.”

So the key here is that it is looking over WPS/WSC protocol and it is walking to your lead router when it does this. My router won’t list these devices because they are not authenticated on the network. However, they CAN be authenticated as this protocol is just asking “who is out there that can connect” vs “who is connected.” So I think that Windows 10 is going to the router, grabbing a list of potential devices and then displaying that in network settings. The way it gets this is via WPS on the router. I recently installed a new router, so I went to the settings and low and behold I didn’t cut off WPS on the router. I switched off WPS. Seems to have cleared these guys up. It is good to know though that I have a neighbor somewhere that I can ask about their Peloton though.

Fallout 76 and Griefing

2018-08-23T00:00:00+00:00

I have been following Fallout 76 a lot lately. The subsystems and graphics look amazing, but it also sounds like an exciting hybrid for Bethesda. While Elder Scrolls Online (ESO) does have some PvP elements, we have never seen a Fallout game with “MMO-esque” PvP. It feels like with the advertising for 76 that Bethesda is putting a lot into the PvP aspects and they are more than happy to talk about it. This isn’t “bolt on” PvP, this is legitimate, “built into the game” PvP.

As with any PvP system, the key in 76 is going to be able to balance the griefers with the people who want to partake in legitimate PvP, that’s why when I saw this quote from Todd Howard stuck out:

“[our PvP] turns assholes into interesting content.”

The plan is this:

1.) Johnny farms for hours and gets to be Mr. Badass when it comes to equipment.

2.) Johnny gets bored of regular PvP and wants to pwn some noobs, so he goes out into the game (note: weapons are on a normalized level curve, which makes it a little harder) and starts killing level 5 guys who just got flagged for PvP.

Here is where the magic happens:

3.) After killing the low-level players, Johnny now has a bounty on his head. When he is eventually put down, the player who puts him down will receive the (hefty?) bounty from Johnny’s caps (in-game currency).

4.) When he is marked for bounty, he is marked on all other players’ maps. Maybe marked is not the best word to use here, he is featured as a bountied player to all other players; however, he cannot see the other players on his map, and his bounty added silently to his character from his perspective.

I like the plan, and I think it ads an extra layer to anti-griefing. My thoughts are:

The silent bounty is key to this system.
This potentially could add an additional trophy for bounty players. For example, look at me - Not only am I powerful enough to kill noobs, but I also challenge anyone to ‘come at me.’ If this person is successful at holding people off, then Bethesda has just created an unofficial ladder for people to brag about on forums.
They need to make it hurt for the bountied player. Not only should they have to have caps removed, but they need destroy all armor, force repairs, do something to make it hard for them to bulk back up.

My favorite PvP system of all time was the original EQ on the original PvP servers. It came down to: you died, and the person could loot your entire body. If I recall right, SOE ended up making this just one item lootable eventually.

There were tons of griefers in that system, but also some cool unofficial community groups that would form when people banded together to take down people and loot all their stuff and split it between the group with the player’s eventual death. I am excited about this new system, but also just as excited to see how what game system organically comes from this.

Full interview about PvP at Quakecon can be seen here:

Original Marvel Star Wars Lando Comic Miniseries

2018-08-17T00:00:00+00:00

I am an avid Star Wars comics and book reader. I have had a few people ask me about starting to read SW comics and I have to give them this crazy rundown that usually sounds something like this:

“So Marvel started making comics back in the 70s when the movies came out, then a company named Dark Horse took over. Disney ended up buying the franchise and starting with a blank slate, tabula rasa. So, while they are some good stories, anything during that Dark Horse (DH) period isn’t canon. And actually, even though Marvel printed the original series, a lot of that isn’t canon either because they have what is called the “new continuity”. So just to be safe (and stay in canon) You want any Marvel comics after 2015 except for a few series like Son of Dathromir which is canon and is DH. “

Usually, their faces have folded in on themselves at this point and they just ask:

“Well, what should I start with?”

and my answer is ALWAYS:

Lando.

The original Lando miniseries was brilliant. This was one of the early stories that one of my favorite new writers handled (Charles Soule) and he knocked it out of the park. The art by Alex Maleev is absolutely on point also. Probably some of my favorite comic art in all of SW. There are 5 issues in the series and it chronicles Lando and Lobot as the get out of one debt and fall into another.

One of the neater things about the series is not only the two alien creatures they accompany (the clones Aleksin and Pavol) but also that some of the things they find. Now, years later you can see how some of those things now tie into other parts of the canon especially in regards to the Sith and the lengths that they will go through to retain power. Also if you watch there are definitely some things on board the ship that you will see not only in other SW comics but also the movies.

It looks like the series is available digitally for Kindle/Comixology and also there is a really good Hardcover where you can get the full initial Lando, Leia and Chewy series all in one book. I can’t recommend this series enough and I love talking to people after they have read it and seeing if they thought it was as awesome as I did.

Ken Carter, Kenny Powers, and the St. Lawrence River Jump

2018-08-16T00:00:00+00:00

So the other day I came across this tweet and immediately had to know more about it:

Trying to jump 1 mile over a river in a rocket-powered Lincoln pic.twitter.com/uMoTDqHpQA
— Catastrophic failure (@SafetyFlrst) August 5, 2018

I watch a lot of sportscar enduro, F1 and pretty much anything under the sun that goes fast and let me tell you unless that video is sped up a bit - that car is going faster than 99% of the cars I have seen in my life.

After doing a little research here is what I discovered:

This was a stunt designed by a guy named Ken Carter that wanted to jump the St. Lawrence River in Canada. This jump was going to be over one mile and was going to shatter any previous record by a long shot.
The car was a rocket-powered Lincoln Continental.
The ramp was a 1400 ft monstrosity.
ABC paid $250k for the rights to show it along with the National Film Board of Canada.

I used the word “designed by” above because up until the day of the stunt Ken Carter was supposed to do the stunt but had to cancel the first attempt at the stunt because of mechanical reasons. It looks like he was kinda nervous about a second attempt, and it sounds like the people that had put backing into the feat didn’t want to lose any money if Carter backed out, so it seems they secretly hired another stunt driver Kenny Powers (no, not that Kenny Powers) to do the stunt while they lured Carter to another city.

Powers was in the car when the above tweet’s movie took place. There were bumps on the ramp, the car shook and pretty much melted away at the pinnacle of the slope, however the parachutes did deploy and Powers came down with only 8 broken vertebrae and 3 broken ribs. The car was supposed to get up to 270, however, bumps on the ramp caused Powers to lose acceleration. He was getting thrown around in the car so much he couldn’t keep his foot on the gas and only launched at a mere 180 mph.

The entire five years of making the jump were chronicled by the above mentioned National Film Board of Canada in The Devil at Your Heels. If you fast forward to about 1:32:00 you can see Powers getting pumped up and honestly looking at the body language of everyone it seems like he is really trying (and failing?) to pump himself up while everyone around him has a look about them of “this shit ain’t going to work”.

Honestly, I am glad the guy didn’t die.

Assorted Links

2018-08-14T00:00:00+00:00

Zildjian, the 400+ year old American company.
In search of a universal distance algo to support a generic model for Nearest Neighbor Problems (of which there are tons in Computer Sci/Data Modeling).
note: after reading this, it doesn’t sound like anything was specifically found?
Universal Method to Sort Complex Information Found.
No Benefit from Fish Oil.
(I still supplement them because who doesn’t want those awesome 10:30 am fish burps?)
90s R&B Writers find new life in Korea and K-Pop:.

“K-pop’s willingness to acknowledge its debts to R&B leads to an odd phenomenon for the genre’s ace writers – a feeling more familiar to American jazz musicians, who have long been valorized overseas and overlooked in their homeland. “It’s almost like you get more honor outside of your own country for what you do sometimes,” Kelly admits.”

How American R&B Songwriters Found a New Home in K-Pop

Twitter ↓, RSS ↑

2018-08-10T00:00:00+00:00

My style of news consumption has changed a bit as of late. Twitter has been a bit ‘off’ for me for the past year or so. I have a few rules with Twitter:

1.) Never go off the timeline. Don’t willingly wade into the mire.

2.) Be liberal with unfollowing/blocking/muting.

3.) Use the ‘muted words’ option - it is your weapon against ‘what are we mad at today?’ type stuff.

Even using these rules over the past year, Twitter is sometimes reaching upwards of 15-20% garbage for me. Part of it is Twitter showing the likes of people I follow. Not a single person I have ever conversed with about Twitter enjoys that feature. Just get rid of it. I think in a few years that “feature” may be the looked upon as the start of the downfall.

That being said, Twitter is still handy as a channel for finding interesting things. So I have come up with a solution that cuts away most of that 20%, and it involves just good old RSS.

Here is the summary of how I am doing most of my news consumption over coffee in the mornings. Most of this is kludged together via a Feedbin account:

Ignore collective/non-breathing Twitter accounts. Anytime I want to follow a website, first look for an RSS feed. If they don’t have an RSS feed, then fuck’em.
Feedbin has a neat option to allow for just showing tweets that contain a link on your news list. To subscribe to people using this method via Feedbin, turn on ‘link only’ (Subscription Options → Twitter options → Media Only) for those that post interesting links.
Move all mail list subs to Feedbin via their account email proxy. This is an excellent and underlooked feature of Feedbin. Look under ‘Settings → Newsletter Address’ and resub to all your mailing lists and have each email come in as a feed element.
Monitor the sparklines on your subs and don’t be afraid to drop people. Blogs get stale (hey look at this one!). If someone starts reposting in the future, you will eventually come across it again.

DOTA 2

2018-08-09T00:00:00+00:00

My history with MOBA’s is tenuous at best. I remember when Defense of the Ancients was all the rage from Warcraft III and I just never got into it. I remember thinking that I didn’t understand wtf they were creating a “clone” called League of Legends (LOL). I didn’t really think it was going to be anything other than a niche game.

I was fucking wrong

There was a time when I got into Smite a good bit. I had a former coworker go to work for Hi-Rez studios a good number of years ago when Smite was in its infancy and had been following them a good bit because the studio is based in the same suburb here in Atlanta. I think Smite appealed to me because it was “almost” a first-person shooter vs. the top down usual MOBA fare. I started playing it on PC and then slowly migrated to the Xbox version when the game was released hoping I could capitalize on the fact I could migrate accounts. I still got my ass whipped; however it was fun. The game slowly faded for me on Xbox although sometimes I will pop up a stream of the big yearly Smite tourney here in Atlanta to see the progression of the game and if it is growing at the insane numbers that LOL did.

I read a lot about AI/ML and keep tabs on significant accomplishments just for my knowledge and have had a lot of fun keeping up with Musk and Altman’s brainchild OpenAI which has its hands in a lot of cookie jars at the moment. One of the cookie jars I am most interested in is the OpenAI Five (OAI5) which is a team of neural networks (5!) that learn via self-play how to beat humans at Defence of the Ancients 2 (DOTA 2). Having played some MOBA’s in the past, I felt I needed to learn the intricacies of the game to appreciate the results that they are getting. I picked up the game a few nights ago and have played 4 or 5 matches. My goal is to get into the game enough to where I can watch a game (OAI5 vs. humans) and know what is going on and objectively judge how well the AI is doing/progressing.

Here is a quick list of observations on playing the game so far. More incoming in the next few weeks:

The sheer number of heroes is staggering. The combinations for playstyles (and action combinations) is almost unfathomable to me. This makes sense that OAI5 went extremely focused at first and had slowly added heroes/playstyles. Compound that with a single neural net interacting with its other four personas is mind-blowing.
I like that all Heroes are free at all times in the game. If I remember correctly unless you purchase Smite’s God pack you only had a random assortment of heroes to choose from in game.
I am still getting used to the top down the 3rd party isometric view. I have seen a bunch of other views when watching a broadcast so there must be some specific third party views when broadcasting/streaming?
I feel like the gold cap (and its advantage creations) at the beginning of the match is a MUCH more significant variable in DOTA 2 than Smite. So far (only after 4 -5 games mind you) it seems like on the surface it pays to bait and farm. This I think is due to the “last hit” mechanic which I feel like an A.I. can keep track of much better than a human.
There seems like an extra layer of fortifications around the Ancient in DOTA 2 that I don’t remember Smite having. So not only do you take out towers in the lanes but also some buffer buildings for each lane before you can get to the Ancient for the game win.
Again, how the hell does anyone remember, let alone, play all these heroes?

Solo and Last Shot

2018-05-29T00:00:00+00:00

Spoiler filled

So I wrapped up Daniel Jose Older’s Last Shot this weekend just in time to go see Solo in the theaters this past Sunday.

My thoughts…

Once I heard that Rogue One was officially announced I was very giddy about the Star Wars “one-shots” that Disney was planning on developing. I think it was a great move to put a one-shot in between each of movies in the final trilogy of the Skywalker Saga. Rogue One had me off the bat after seeing the first trailer. I thought that the story was going to be compelling and I didn’t remember anything from Legends that touched on it very deeply.

I remember exiting the theater after seeing Rogue One and honestly was torn about it. I felt that the story was strong and I loved the visual mood of the movie. My only pet peeves were Tarken, who I thought looked awful (note: my wife didn’t even realize it was CGI) and I didn’t feel like Jyn’s background matched where she was in the present situation. What I did enjoy were the side characters. New characters like Baze and Chirrut where exactly what I wanted to see in a new SW movie that was not directly* related to a Skywalker.

After watching Rogue One a few more times, it grew on me and pretty much became my favorite Star Wars movie since the Original Trilogy. I enjoyed both TFA and TLJ, but I think that because I read a lot of SW books/comics the continuation of the Skywalker story has had its time and I am just along for the ride for that narrative arc. However, with these one-shots (and the subsequent Benioff/Weiss and the Favreau series) I feel like I am going to REALLY enjoy some of the stories we are going to see not directly related to that arc.

So about Last Shot and Solo…

** I mean it, really really spoiler filled from here on out***

As for Last Shot…

Last Shot was decent. I enjoyed the story. It made sense and introduced a few new contexts in the universe that have been hinted at before but had not been brought into canon. I also liked seeing what I consider a darker (horror?) story coming out of the new Solo context material.

Some brief thoughts on the book:

The dual cover of the hardback is very very cool.
I liked L3 a lot in the book.
Loved the back and forth of Lando & Han and how neither will tell each other the full story but as the reader, you get to see it unfold as they unfold and become closer.
Baby Ben’s inclusion was meh. If only that coffee bot…
Ewok slicer sounded very interesting on the outset. The fact Peekpa couldn’t communicate with half the crew seemed odd seeing that her focus was information gathering. (yes, I know we see it with Chewie all the time).
I liked Lando questioning settling down and his place in the world.
The She/He/Them with Taka felt added to let people think Disney is forging a new path in literature and breaking barriers but I kept trying to figure out if I read something wrong in thinking he was human or if he was some dual being entity and I just missed them talking about it.

As for Solo the movie…

I loved Solo. I unabashedly loved this movie. It was everything I wanted in a Disney Star Wars movie - amazingly fun, action-packed and some new storylines introduced and some added to. That being said I look at it as a completely different type of movie than Rogue One.

Rogue One was a background story that we were filling in, but Solo felt a lot less restrained, and the main concept of the movie (how did Han get to be Han?) had a lot fewer rails than Rogue One which I think worked in its favor considering its faster story pace.

More brief thoughts:

I didn’t like L3 in the movie. I loved the idea of a self-built droid who had scruples and in Last Shot, an overall mission. The L3 in Last Shot had a purpose and not only aided Lando (similar to Vuffi Raa) but also wanted to progress what she felt were causes important to her. That fell short in the movie. She felt over contrived and almost a liability in most scenes she was in. The belief in those causes was there, however, how they played out seemed comedic and almost annoying sometimes.
Again I loved the back and forth between Lando and Han. The conversation right after they land at Savareen might be my favorite conversation between the two in any SW story.
Three big action sequences - the movie felt like a summer blockbuster and just kept moving forward. Near constant action and I think that was exactly what Han’s one-off needed.

but…I felt like that was at the expense of character development we got a few shallow side characters. I was bummed when Val only had 10 min of screen time total. In that 10 min, she was amazing; I would have loved to hear more about her and Rio and how they ended up with Beckett. Instead, they were both gone in what seemed like a flash.
I loved the “hey guess what, Maul’s still here for all you people that don’t watch our TV shows.” I did not expect Maul in any way to be in this movie until the mention of Teras Kasi. At that point, I started putting two and two together about what would be going on with the Shadow Collective at about this time. Once Qi’ra picked up the ring I was on the edge of my seat to see if Disney would have the guts to put Maul in there after 90% of the people that go to this movie believe him to be killed by Obi-Wan. Some are going to call it fan service, I am going to call it excellent and glad Disney took some chances with it.
The last scene with the Falcon coming over to Han seemed… rushed? I don’t know; it just didn’t seem to flow very well. It had to be done, so I don’t think it’s inclusion was wrong it just that the scene felt “tacked on.”
Finally I loved the Cloud Riders being the Rebellion in infancy, it gave the film some weight that it was missing and made it feel like part of the bigger story and not just about Han. I don’t know how I feel about seeing Han flip to their side so quickly. They lined that scene up with Qi’ra talking about Han being a “good man”, so that lends itself to him flipping to Enfys band so quickly - but I think the quickness with which he did it in the movie was odd.
Finally, Enfys Nest (and crew) were very cool characters. Neat seeing TPM’s Warwick show up in the Rebellion and one of Saul’s two Twotubes characters (not sure which it was) also being part of her group in infancy.

At first I thought Enfys’ helmet removal scene felt like it was supposed to wow the audience into knowing who she was but sitting in the theater I couldn’t think of anyone (maybe Sana?) that she could be, later on I realized that the “wow” of it was for the audience to recognize that she was young and that the rebellion was young and these people had a fighting spirit and that youth could attract youth to grow the rebellion. Raise your fist but also raise your children.

In conclusion and other stories…

I picked up pretty much all the books around Solo. Pablo’s Official Guides are pretty much always must-reads for me, and I love going through the “Art of” books for each new release. Both are excellent, and I highly recommend.

Overall I am quite happy with this year’s movie/books, and movie novels release around Solo. I picked up Most Wanted and will probably read it after I get done with these three Lando Legends books. So I may talk about Most Wanted at some point also. My SW queue looks like this at the moment:

with the Beckett one shot also in the queue when it hits.

If you are still reading this and haven’t seen Solo (I hope you didn’t spoil it, I gave ample warning) do go see it. Totally worth it to see on the big screen.

Channels I support on Patreon

2017-07-30T00:00:00+00:00

A few months ago we decided to join the 764,000 other people who finally cut the cable cord in Q1 of 2017. We dropped our $160 a month DirectTV bill and decided to go with the following combo:

SlingTV w/ Sports Add On
Basic Comcast cable (comes with our internet package)
Netflix
Amazon Prime

I honestly don’t watch TV much other than sports. My wife watches a lot of TV dramas that she records on DVR, and my kids usually have Disney or Nick turned on while they do something else in our playroom.

So far it has gone pretty well and other than adapting to the hardware needed now (Apple TV/Roku/Xbox One) we have moved on past cable companies for the most part. We also have moved past “time window viewing” (that’s just what I am calling it) so that 90% of the time the show we are watching has been time shifted with few exceptions (looking at you Jon Snow).

As I mentioned above, I don’t watch much TV to begin with, but over the last few months, I have found myself usually coding, researching, or general futzing around on the internet until about an hour before I go to bed. At that point, I usually make me an ‘Uncle Pappy’s Cough Syrup’ and head to the couch to chill and watch an episode of something on Netflix. Currently, my loves are Castlevania and all the seasons of Archer I have missed the last few years. After I watch an episode of something on Netflix, I have found myself turning to YouTube and watching videos for about a half hour. I have always used YouTube before we cut the cable to watch videos, but it was usually in a way to reference methods for something I needed to do. What I mean by that is that I would have some question about how to do something (for example install base cabinets) and I would watch a video or two on how to do it. I never really used YouTube for entertainment per se.

Now I find myself browsing and watching about 10-12 channels nightly. The amazing thing is that this is almost 50%+ of my “tv” viewing now. Most of these creators are making high quality stuff and putting a lot of time into the finished work. Since this is about half of my lazy sitting on the couch entertainment, I felt like I should contribute financially to these creators. Subscribing is good and creates more popularity for the channel, but I felt that donating to these shows monthly (and in some cases per video) was a better option to help the host more directly.

Here is my current list of who I give to via Patreon. I highly recommend all these shows.

1.) The Nerdwriter

Even before we cut the cable, I was donating to the Nerdwriter (aka Evan Puschak). Well researched essays + great editing of each video makes this a channel that I love seeing pop up on my feed. Usually, there are 2-3 videos a month that discuss mostly cinema but also other types of pop art including music, politics, etc.

2.) SciShow

Always entertaining and always not too long. The hosts get to the meat of a subject pretty quickly and each show usually initiates with a question to draw the viewer into the show. All the hosts seem very knowledgeable about the show’s subject regardless of host and the info provided is usually sourced well.

3.) Star Wars Explained

I have been a new canon geek since Disney made the purchase and love getting my monthly comic delivery in. I read most of the new canon books and try to keep up with all the different aspects of the Star Wars Disney juggernaut. This series is very well written/edited and comes out almost daily. Never too long and dragging, it gets right to the point. It is a bonus that they are from here locally in Atlanta. Great show.

4.) Binging with Babish

Oliver Babish has been a watch for a few months now. Always on the cusp of pop culture knowledge and then mixing with a fantastic recipe. I watch cooking episodes a lot on YouTube, and this guy is an amazing chef in his own right. Adding in the show/movie references just makes it even better. I also enjoy how sometimes he branches/splits the recipes and gives a full version and a shortcut version. My only complaint may be that if I were following along at home, there would be a ton of pauses because sometimes the show moves very quickly in what I think is stuff that is very easy for him but hard for us laymen cooks. +1 for being a beer guy also though.

5.) Kurzgesagt – In a Nutshell

Kurzgesagt is a very original style of YouTube channel. I started watching after someone sent me a link to the CRISPR show. There are a few imitators out there (doesn’t mean they don’t produce good info videos) but these guys seem like the original. I love not only the stylistic decisions made in the videos but also the info they present is excellent and seems well researched. I also have a small drinking game for when the presenter says “there you have it”.

Things I read while I drank coffee this morning (7.8)

2017-07-08T00:00:00+00:00

I tried and failed to find newspapers and wire services who would purchase my photos. But the soldiers had fed me and given me a seat in their Humvees, and the refugees had tolerated my presence on some of the worst days of their lives. They very rightly expected that I would tell their story.

Amazing photoset and read by Kainoa Little

No One Would Buy My Photos, So Here They Are For Free: Mosul 2017

This album has been on my ‘to take to a desert island’ lists since it came out. (Holy shit 20 years ago). Palo Alto will always be my image of the valley.

On ‘OK Computer,’ Radiohead Saw the Future: Ours

The human race, West says, has been saved by innovation and innovation thrives in cities. Unlike countries, companies and humans, cities seem to be immortal. In the last century cities have been de-industrialised, starved and some have even been attacked with nuclear bombs. And yet they always seem to survive. Ten years ago humanity passed the point by which those who lived in cities outnumbered those who didn’t. Every day a million more people move into cities, and this shouldn’t worry us.

The cities will save us all. Good read on the pace of change and why groups of people slammed together are needed for minds to create and build upon each other.

Are our cities immortal?

Things I read while I drank coffee this morning (7.7)

2017-07-07T00:00:00+00:00

Use of Wolfram Alpha is difficult to trace, and in the hands of ambitious students, its perfect solutions are having unexpected consequences. It works by breaking down the pieces of a question, whether a mathematical problem or something like “What is the center of the United States?”, and then cross-referencing those pieces against an enormous library of datasets that is constantly being expanded. These datasets include information on geodesic schemes, chemical compounds, human genes, historical weather measurements, and thousands of other topics that, when brought together, can be used to provide answers.

I bought Stephen Wolfram’s A New Kind of Science about 10 years ago and it still sits on my shelf. Huge tome. Never read. Neat to see his ideas starting to come together with enough data.

A.I. is making it extremely easy for students to cheat

If you want to talk about the history of immigration in America, or urbanization or the expansion of transportation networks, really any subject that you want to explore, you can talk about it through beer

How The Story Of Beer Is The Story Of America

A Japanese approach to watchmaking, executed by hand.

Simply amazing and beautiful work on the watches and the photography set on this.

Portrait: Masahiro Kikuno, Japanese Independent Watchmaker

Things I read while I drank coffee this morning (3.15)

2017-03-15T00:00:00+00:00

If I had to pick the critical technology for the 20th century, the bit of social lubricant without which the wheels would’ve come off the whole enterprise, I’d say it was the sitcom. Starting with the Second World War a whole series of things happened–rising GDP per capita, rising educational attainment, rising life expectancy and, critically, a rising number of people who were working five-day work weeks. For the first time, society forced onto an enormous number of its citizens the requirement to manage something they had never had to manage before–free time.

And what did we do with that free time? Well, mostly we spent it watching TV.

Interesting take on how the industrial revolution produced, frankly, a ton of alcoholics. We, as a society, had to come up with more formalized entertainment structures to keep people from binging, and over time we moved into spending a lot of our cognitive surplus by watching sitcoms.

Gin, Television, and Social Surplus

More than a century after their discovery, we still don’t really know what blood types are for.

Why do we have blood types?

The accelerators all brag about the total valuation of all their bets. Hey, companies we gracefully allowed to sign our deal are now worth $100 billion!! Rarely do they brag about the distribution of outcomes, and never do they dwell on whether the individuals who went through the sausage factory liked the smell.

Good read from @DHH

Don’t accelerate your startup

“What we are finding it’s much easier to use social engineering to trick people into installing malware than to exploit a vulnerability,” said Proofpoint’s Wheeler. “What attackers have done is replaced the automated exploit with (socially engineered) ploys to get people to click.”

Good read on the changing landscape of exploit delivery.

WHERE HAVE ALL THE EXPLOIT KITS GONE?

Things I read/saw while I drank coffee this morning (3.13)

2017-03-13T00:00:00+00:00

The government-prepared return would estimate your taxes using information your employer and bank already send it. Advocates say tens of millions of taxpayers could use such a system each year, saving them a collective $2 billion and 225 million hours in prep costs and time, according to one estimate.

The original part of this article is an NPR report from 2013; it was updated yesterday for 2016.

How the Maker of TurboTax Fought Free, Simple Tax Filing

A must hear if you are into the advances (and mistakes) as humanity (via scientists) advance at an amazing and scary pace with CRISPR. The Radiolab recording is 3 I think in one, where the first two are reviews, and the last portion is the new update.

For this reason, I will do my best to share inspired drinks in all four parks beyond the standard sugar-water-with-a-shot. Think of me as your intoxicant informant.

A VERY COMPREHENSIVE GUIDE TO GETTING DRUNK AT DISNEY WORLD

I have an on and off again relationship with the Instant Pot. Sometimes we get into a mode where we make 2+ meals a week with it, other times it sits on our shelf for weeks at a time. I see the advantages of it for sure; I guess I just need to find some more recipes. Interesting read on it’s creation and cult that seems to have formed around it.

How the Instant Pot cooker developed a cult following

Things I read/saw while I drank coffee this morning (2.13)

2017-02-09T00:00:00+00:00

I am very excited for the live action version of Ghost In The Shell. Based on this latest trailer it might not be a 1:1 of the original movie but also integrate some parts of the Standalone Complex.

The primates that ventured down out of the trees got access to a brand-new food source. “If you can smell the alcohol and get to the fruit faster, you have an advantage,” Dudley says. “You defeat the competition and get more calories.” The ones that stuffed themselves were the most likely to succeed at reproduction—and to experience (while eating) a gentle rush of pleasure in the brain. That buzz reinforced the appeal of the new lifestyle.

Great long form read in this month’s National Geographic on Alchohol and how we are genetically primed for it and also how damn old it is.

Our 9,000-Year Love Affair With Booze

” From tweaking algorithms to stepping up notifications to endlessly scrolling feeds, technology has turned human distraction into its metric of profit.”

Good read on how some old media brands ($DIS) are navigating the new attention economy.

The battle for consumers’ attention

Two interesting maps from @AEI

fs—

Things I read while I drank coffee this morning (2.8)

2017-02-08T00:00:00+00:00

Excellent interview with @MCuban

Great read on Desktop usage drops.

Desktop dies on weekends

Bartle’s research showed that, in general, people were consistent in these preferred ways of being in online video game worlds. Regardless of the game, he found that “Socialisers,” for example, spend the majority of their time forming relationships with other players. “Achievers” meanwhile focus fully on the accumulation of status tokens (experience points, currency or, in Grand Theft Auto’s case, gleaming cars and gold-plated M16s).

How Video Games Satisfy Basic Human Needs

Things I read while I drank coffee this morning (2.7)

2017-02-07T00:00:00+00:00

To gauge the real-world e↵ectiveness of this approach, we recruited nearly 400 people to donate their web browsing histories, and we were able to correctly identify more than 70% of them.*

Bit.ly (and other shorteners) have a new target market that should try to appeal to. The rise of the “link cleaner”.

De-anonymizing Web Browsing fsData with Social Networks

For the most part, I pretty much quit using Facebook a few years ago pretty much for how shady they seem, but some of this I wasn’t aware of. Cursor tracking, shadow profiles for kids, keystroke logging? Geez.

What should you think about when using Facebook?

We are a few years off from autonomous services doing a lot of this (Uber, Lyft). This “middle time” should be interesting still using Humans as the work horses.

People are getting sick of working in the “sharing” economy

All the same, Sentient, which currently trades only its own money, is being closely watched by the finance and AI communities. The venture capital firm owned by Hong Kong’s richest man, Li Ka-shing, and India’s biggest conglomerate, Tata Group, are among backers who have given the company $143 million. (Beyond trading, Sentient’s AI system is being applied to a separate e-commerce product.)fs*

Silicon Valley Hedge Fund Takes On Wall Street With AI Traderfs

5 Albums People Should Hear From 2016

2016-12-05T00:00:00+00:00

I’ve been doing some form of variation of a top X albums each year since 2004. I used to do 25, then it slowly got down to 10. This year I am being uber lazy and I really only have 5 albums that I have really fallen in love with this year. They are not in any particular order, one not better than the other. All are great and worth a listen.

Anderson .Paak - Malibu

I don’t know how many times I have listened to this album so far this year. Goes all over the place musically, head bobbing the entire time. Been my go to coding music since release.

The Midnight - Endless Summer

Had this album on constant rotation at the beach all summer. So good. When Days of Thunder came out last year (or year before?) it got me into a synthpop groove, then I just fell in love with this album once it hit. This album is under apprecated even though I have seen it on a few lists. I hope it breaks out of the synthpop subculture and gets some serious mainstream playtime.

Halloween - Ruston Kelly

Album kinda came out of no where for me because it got suggested to me over Spotify. I rarely even listen to the suggestions, but the name of the album caught me. So glad I did. Parts dark, parts poetry, parts upbeat Coldroses era Adams. Very well made record and I am surprised I have not seen it mentioned more.

Goldroom - West of the West

Definte pop goodness. Seems to be a complication of a lot of their singles work, but it still makes a really solid album over all. Got tons of plays in singles forms and whole album listens at our house.

Westworld: Season 1 - Selections from the HBO Series

Djawadi did such a great job with Thrones soundtrack and I was really happy to hear he was going to be handling the Westworld sound context. Once that first piano started up in the opening sequence I thought oh man this is going to be good. Then interspersed all over I start to hear this jangly western versions of No Surprises, the Stones and Black Hole Sun on the first episode.

Things I read while I drank coffee this morning (11.30)

2016-11-30T00:00:00+00:00

It has become cliché to observe that Americans spend more and more time watching cooking shows and less and less actually cooking.

The link in this to Pépin’s shows on GPS is great. I plan to start watching one now and then at lunch.

This Man Will Teach You How to Cook

Mr Trump, who is said not to use a personal computer

esh.

Donald Trump’s tech troubles

Economists believe in full employment. Americans think that work builds character. But what if jobs aren’t working anymore?

Interesting take. I just started Ford’s Rise of The Robots which somewhat expresses a similar sentiment from what I can tell.

Fuck work - What If Jobs Are Not The Solution But The Problem

Saturn’s largest moon might be the only place beyond Earth where humans could live

Let’s Colonize Titan

Things I read while I drank coffee this morning (10.24)

2016-10-24T00:00:00+00:00

A quarter of outstanding global corporate debt, or as much as $3.4 trillion, is linked to the utility- and auto-industry bonds that rely on fossil fuel activities, the ratings agency wrote in a report published Tuesday.

It would be welcomed.

Batteries May Trip ‘Death Spiral’ in $3.4 Trillion Credit Market

Good read on staving off Alzheimer’s before its Alzheimers.

A New Tack to Stave Off Alzheimer’s Years before the First Symptom

In September one of SpaceX’s rockets exploded. So the key is to control perceptions of the distant future, in order to influence financial forecasts from banks and investors. Here Mr Musk is dazzlingly skilful. He publishes plausible “master plans” and uses shifting targets to anchor expectations.

My fascination with Musk continues. Good read on his intracompany dealings.

Elon Musk’s empire - Countdown

I remembered back in 2007 this was a big deal and I felt like Page & Brin were on the right side of the fence on this one. The market has passed them by, and users have not even blinked, so I suppose this was inevitable.

Google Has Quietly Dropped Ban on Personally Identifiable Web Tracking

Things I read while I drank coffee this morning (10.14)

2016-10-14T00:00:00+00:00

“We based the packaging on government-issued military supply from the 1950s”

A group of work friends and I were discussing this packaging the other day. Great read on Alvin Diec.

The Brand Man: Meet Atlanta restaurateurs’ best-kept secret

“Even when you include poor and middle-income countries, low back and neck pain went from ranking 12th as a cause of DALYs globally in 1990 to ranking fourth in 2015, the most recent year.”

How Back Pain Took Over the World

Barack Obama, Neural Nets, Self-Driving Cars, and the Future of the World

I am going to be bummed seeing President Obama exit the Whitehouse when it comes to tech matters. He has a lot of the underpinnings of complicated technical problems understood. Way more understanding than the current two ‘private email/I’m the best at cyber’ candidates. I hope some of his retired time is spent helping these problems as a liaison for the government.

Return to the Teenage Brain

Fascinating read on increasing neuroplasticity in the brain with valproic acid.

Creating a Pastry Chef From Scratch

I think being a pastry chef is a very entrepreneurial job which stifles wages and that isn’t touched on in this article, but good read none the less. Also bonus point for that pun in the last sentence.

My iPhone Home Screen - 2016 Edition

2016-10-12T00:00:00+00:00

I enjoyed TJ’s “My iPhone Home Screen - 2016 Edition” post, so I am going to unabashedly copy it. I think it’s an excellent way to see new apps and to also see that TJ is so insanely behind on things (3 digit bubble on Wunderlist?!?) that I pre-forgive him if he can’t find the time for lunch/ping pong when I travel downtown sometime in the next few weeks to pick up my awesome switchyards hat.

My screen:

Messages / Camera / Settings - Pretty Standard.

Calendar - Note that I don’t use this app, I only have it on here because it is easy to look at the date on the app’s icon as a shortcut. I wish other calendar apps would do this. I feel like it is such a basic thing that my guess is that “live tiles”ish ability isn’t able to be done because Apple doesn’t want to allow it for other calendar apps and it is a design decision that they don’t want updates to come via a live updating app icon.

Utils Group - Pretty much anything from Apple that I could potentially use - but don’t day to day. There is a QR Reader suck in there also.

Mail Group - I like to keep alerts on my personal Gmail and work email (uses Google mail also) separate, so I use both Google Mail apps (Gmail/Inbox) separate with each account. I use the iOS mail app as a junk mail filter account I have. Pushover is also in there, but I haven’t used it in awhile. I had delusions of grandeur in using it in a home automation scheme that just never came to reality. Pushover allows for iOS events to be pushed to your phone with an easy API.

Twitter - Still my social network of choice, although I will admit Instagram is gaining ground.

ESPN - Personal and Professional for keeping up with the news.

OneNote - I converted from Evernote a few years ago to OneNote and will never look back. I love OneNote and the freeform note style it gives.

LastPass - PW Manager, everyone should use one. No questions.

Wunderground - Best Weather App hands down. I do also use Storm by WUnder also, but it doesn’t get front page real estate.

Spotify - Rdio used to have this spot (and a large part of my heart) but those days are gone. Spotify is the new best in the breed.

Auth Group - I two-factor everything I can, this group is my secondary key.

Xbox - As of the last two years MS has worked hard to create a community around Xbox Live and although I think it is slow going, they are doing a decent job at it. I usually only get 2-3 messages a week on this app about gaming, and it’s not a bad little social network if you play Xbox a lot and have bought into the Microsoft gaming spectrum.

Google Photos - Photoware of choice. Mainly used as an off-site backup, but works well with Chromecast.

Health - A huge group for me as I love to test out anything and everything new related to Health. I use iOS’s Health app now (this is as recently as last week) as my aggregator for all health information. That app is fed running data from Under Armor’s (UA) Endomondo (with basic activity data coming from watch). It is also fed workout data from another workout app - Strong Lifts 5x5 that I use a few days a week. For nutritional data I still use UA’s MyFitnessPal (for when I can remember to log things). This app now also feeds nutritional data into iOS Health. This group also contains Sync Solver which is a handy tool to convert Apple Watch activity into Fitbit steps.

Safari - Pretty standard, I know a lot of people probably expected Chrome here but I like to spread my browsing URLs out so that one company doesn’t have uber control of my profile and searches.

Home Group - This is the beginning of my attempt at home automation. It includes Kasa (Smart Plugs) Hue (Lightbulbs) Harmony (Entertainment Center stuff) Canary (Security), and the newest addition to the group of iOS Home. It does an EXCELLENT job of tying a lot of that stuff together. At a minimum, it is the best phone interface that I have used thus far. That being said, 90% of the input to that entire system goes in vocally via Alexa.

Slack - God’s gift to small companies. Allows me to keep my email apps in an email app group and not on front page.

Discord - Slack for gaming groups with an IRC spirit. I still have a lot of friends I have met over the years in gaming that I want to keep in contact with from various games over the years. I love discord and the ability to granularly specify what gets to me via my phone (true alert) or just gamer talk. I love gamer talk and shooting the shit while playing video games, but I don’t need to be alerted to it. Discord (and their servers) and a great happy medium. Always there if you want to look, but you are not red bubbled’ to hell with alerts.

Magic The Gathering: Planeswalkers - I usually keep one iOS close to my heart at a time for when I am waiting on something outside my home and have 5-10 min to kill. It’s Puzzle Quest with the lore of M:TG. Great game. Haven’t invested a penny in it either.

Kidslox - My kids both have iPads (older ones, nothing shiny) they love them, they love iOS games, they love Kid’s YouTube. So much that I have to limit them to a total of 45 mins a day of device time. Kidslox allows me to do that. Great app. I think it is paid, but it’s minimal. Highly recommend.

Alexa - I am all in with our Alexa at home. I love it. This app gives me quick access to my active shopping list. It also lets you fine tune vocal commands and such, but I honestly have not used it that much in that capacity.

Google Cast - We have chromescasts on all TVs so we can sling stuff around to them. We also use Google Photos so this controls backgrounds etc. Also, I watch a lot of Sports car racing from around the world. The rest of the world likes to stream their sports car events - so nice just to toss it out to a TV. So close to cutting the cord at this point - I just have to find a solid app for my college football fix.

Bottom 4 -

Phone - Given.

Wunderlist - My todo list of choice. I happily pay for a sub.

Fusionetics - Have you taken your R&R test today? Done your customized program to improve Range of Motion and Movement Efficiency? This is the company I work for and believe in, and this is one of the apps I work on. If you are interested in hearing more about it, let me know.

Fantastical - I am a sucker for calendaring and email apps. I change them all the time. My current dandelion in the wind is Fantastical. It’s…. ok. I used Sunrise up until their demise (thanks Microsoft), and it was the perfect calendaring app for me. I don’t use the calendars built into iOS/Apple. I base everything on 3 Google Calendars that are for my family. Fantastical seems to do a great job at consuming those gCals and alerting, but it keeps wanting to add new entries to Apple’s set of calendars which does me no good. If there was an app space that could change on my home page in the next month, this is probably the best bet in Vegas.

Things I read while I drank coffee this morning (8.24)

2016-09-01T00:00:00+00:00

What is Africa’s “Great Green Wall”?

Whoops, It’s 2016 and I Just Got Obsessed With Magic: The Gathering

Awesome Dustin pic.

Alas, the Sunrise App’s Dead—But Try These 7 Other Calendars I was a huge Sunrise fan, stinks no longer available. I have been trying Fantastical (iOS version - mentioned in article) lately and I like it so far.

Communicating Animation

“The Brit was Tom Parker Bowles, the son of Camilla, (now) duchess of Cornwall. Parker Bowles, a prominent food writer, was on a research trip for his book, The Year of Eating Dangerously: A Global Adventure in Search of Culinary Extremes. He got what he wanted, and he loved his first bite. Then it started to hurt. Then came the tears. Bowles would dedicate two pages in his book to describing the misery the Prince’s extra-hot chicken put him through. “The only thing willing me on is pure, pig-headed pride,” Bowles wrote. “Each mouthful becomes more and more painful and numbing until I’m uncertain as to whether I’m swallowing my saliva or just dribbling it out of my mouth.””

The Burning Desire for Hot Chicken

And as always, Bourdain on point (at least in my experience):

I’m not complaining or anything but #Nashville Hot Chicken can be a three day commitment. #FuelAirExplosive
— Anthony Bourdain (@Bourdain) March 13, 2016

Hard to believe Band of Brothers is 15 years old. Such an amazing series, and the best thing HBO has ever put out (and that says a lot). I try to watch once a year sometime around Memorial Day. Amazing men.

Things I read while I drank coffee this morning (8.24)

2016-09-01T00:00:00+00:00

What is Africa’s “Great Green Wall”?

Whoops, It’s 2016 and I Just Got Obsessed With Magic: The Gathering

Awesome Dustin pic.

Communicating Animation

The Burning Desire for Hot Chicken

And as always, Bourdain on point (at least in my experience):

I’m not complaining or anything but #Nashville Hot Chicken can be a three day commitment. #FuelAirExplosive
— Anthony Bourdain (@Bourdain) March 13, 2016

Things I read while I drank coffee this morning (8.24)

2016-08-24T00:00:00+00:00

S/M/L clothing sizes actually came out of the Civil War. Great podcast.

99% Invisible: On Average

How the NSA willfully exposes Americans to danger

China unveils 2020 Mars mission probe and rover

“So it may come as no surprise that within the past few months sports equipment giants Nike and Adidas have announced that they are looking to exit their golf club businesses. “ Why Nike and Adidas are hanging up their golf clubs

What’s Inside Microsoft’s HoloLens And How It Works

Things I read while I drank coffee this morning (8.23)

2016-08-23T00:00:00+00:00

Discussion with Treeline Cheese & Beyond Meat

Material World: The Future of Vegan Food Is Here, and It’s Not Gross

“These lenses could be used for seeing and viewing previously ‘invisible’ structures, including engineered nano-structures and biological micro-structures as well as, potentially, native germs and viruses,” he said.”

Spider silk helps creates microscope superlens

“User research finds that tightly integrated services with a wide-ranging set of convenient features, accessed through a simple and unified design, are the reason Chinese users use WeChat so much. They do so mainly through traditional GUI interactions, not a “conversational user interface,” despite the hype.”

WeChat’s integration with the browser is what seems to keep it King in Chinese Chat apps.

WeChat: China’s Integrated Internet User Experience

Convention of the States is starting to gain some real traction. Would be amazing to see the states attempt to take back power from DC. If they could get the 3/4ths vote on some issues it would be something pretty much unheard of. -E

Inside the Conservative Push for States to Amend the Constitution

Things I read while I drank coffee this morning (8.22)

2016-08-22T00:00:00+00:00

Audi A4, Kia Sorento, Lexus RX 350, Subaru Legacy, Toyota Highlander, Volvo XC90, Honda Odyssey, Toyota Sequoia and Mercedes-Benz GL scored an overall death rate of zero for the years examined by the study.

Safer cars: 9 models had zero deaths in study

A closer look at an Olympic-quality bow

“But a study by health economists at Harvard, M.I.T., Columbia and the University of Chicago showed that heart attack survival gains from patients selecting better hospitals were half as large as those from breakthrough technologies.”

http://www.nytimes.com/2016/08/23/upshot/the-life-changing-magic-of-choosing-the-right-hospital.html

Penny Auctions - How to sell a $180 tablet for $7,264

Heraldry of German States

How Pittsburgh Birthed the Age of the Self-Driving Car

The Books That Shaped America

2016-06-29T00:00:00+00:00

I am venturing into a new project, and I am going to use this space to keep up with it. I found a great list of books - some of which I have read, others I have not - that “helped shape America.” I think this list appealed to me because of the breadth of types of books on it. At first glance, I saw everything from poetry (Leaves of Grass - Whitman) to classic Sci-Fi (Dune- Herbert) and tons of classics stuck in the middle that I have wanted to read for awhile.

So I have decided to take this list and cram it into my “To Read” list on Wunderlist and roll a random 1-65 dice (via Random.org) to see what book I get from the list and then read it in its entirety and report back here when I am done with each read. I don’t know if I will write full reviews on the books or just my interpretation of and why it probably did or did not shape the America of today in any way. We shall see what I come up with.

So onto book one:

which has determined (no Whammys, no Whammys) my first read to be:

“The Sun Also Rises” by Ernest Hemmingway it is.

Stay Tuned.