Daily (tech related) news diet

[NicoD]

Yeah. The bycicle is still the most efficient vehicle mankind ever evented. But it uses our own our own energy for it. But a lot more efficient than running. Not for lazy people.
It's very dangerous since not much good bikeroads in the world.
Ain't nothing perfect. You've just got to make out what you can pack in your bag of guilt Some don't care and ride big pick ups with a chimney for exhaust.
Some want to feel better and buy and electric vehicle. But then plug them into mains. When producing your own energy then it's a lot better.
Energy is everywhere, but we just need to learn how to get it at the places where it's needed. Enough place in the sahara for solar plants, but no people there who ned it. A lot of energy in oceans. Again not where people live(yet).

All the pieces ar available to make great improvements. But whose going to put them together? I don't think Elon Musk. He's just a salesman.

For now I'll keep cycling. Next trip, NicoD's Leaving Europe. (UK)

[TonyMac32]

Via hackaday

Sent from my Pixel using Tapatalk

[chwe]

On 4/23/2019 at 3:04 AM, TonyMac32 said:

There is potential in electric vehicles, and I like the technology, but as an engineer with experience in energy storage and power distribution, it isn't mature enough to push yet, it very clearly causes as many problems as it solves, even in the most optimistic vision.

 

 and it will never go ready as long as there's no 'starter'.. VW needed dieselgate to take a 'serious' engagement towards e-cars.. And I'm not a 100% sure if you're right here:

you don't here any characteristic two-stroke engine sound anymore here... So it somehow works.. not in europe not in the US.. but somewhere else.

______________________________________________________________________________________________________

 

https://www.vpnmentor.com/blog/report-millions-homes-exposed/

 

 

I guess we'll see this more and more..

[TonyMac32]

Takes about the same amount of water to put out a burning Tesla as it does a burning oil rig...

For sure electric scooters "work", but no one is going to drive 20 miles a day in rain/snow (short commute in US) on a scooter, so...

The "starter" will be either personal interest by consumers (there is a little of that now finally) or maturation of the base technologies that are not dependant on the success of cars (battery, generation, motors without rare Earth's, etc) making them commercially viable. Without a mature technology these cars are like 18th century steam engines:. Cool, impractical, and likely to catch on fire.

To be honest the grid can't handle these anyway, so massive point of delivery energy shortages are also in the way of broad deployment.

Sent from my Pixel using Tapatalk

[Tido]

1 hour ago, chwe said:

I guess we'll see this more and more..

aha, clean electric power... https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Schaufelradbagger#/media/File:Größenvergleich_Schaufelradbagger_Mobilbagger.JPG

[TonyMac32]

2 hours ago, Tido said:

aha, clean electric power...

Shhh, Germany is a leader in clean energy implementation...     They also are addicted to Lignite, or what is known as "brown coal", quite literally the worst kind.

 

To be clear, if there were a cost model anywhere that made sense, I would have an electric car for my drive to and from work, and probably some solar panels to help generate the needed power (assuming those were truly cost effective either).  The problem is, I will never make my money back on it as opposed to running a fuel-efficient gasoline car that can also take me the 775 km to my family's home in the mountains, or survive -30 degrees C without losing too much range to be useful, etc.  In short:  The technology is not mature enough to fit the needs of the average consumer.  It is an enthusiast toy, and very little real breakthrough development has happened in 10 years (No, there is absolutely nothing special about a Tesla except their apparent disregard for regulations and safety, and willingness to spend other people's money.)

[chwe]

hmm okay this one got a bit more political than I thought.. Take it with a grain of salt

Spoiler

 

5 hours ago, TonyMac32 said:

Shhh, Germany is a leader in clean energy implementation...     They also are addicted to Lignite, or what is known as "brown coal", quite literally the worst kind.

https://www.spiegel.de/wissenschaft/mensch/klimawandel-wir-schuetzen-die-profiteure-der-katastrophe-a-1264618.html

 

Quote

RWE verdient nach eigenen Angaben bei der Braunkohleverstromung drei Cent pro Kilowattstunde. Die Gesundheits- und Umweltschäden durch die gleiche Menge Braunkohlestrom schätzt das Umweltbundesamt auf 19 Cent pro Kilowattstunde.

 

They get 3 cents per kilowatt with 'brown coal' but the estimated health and environmental costs are ~19 cents/kwh..

 

9 hours ago, TonyMac32 said:

For sure electric scooters "work", but no one is going to drive 20 miles a day in rain/snow (short commute in US) on a scooter, so...

softy...

 

9 hours ago, TonyMac32 said:

To be honest the grid can't handle these anyway, so massive point of delivery energy shortages are also in the way of broad deployment.

well infrastructure wise.. we could make some really bad jokes about the US.. and your grid is probably a perfect example..

 

5 hours ago, TonyMac32 said:

gasoline car that can also take me the 775 km to my family's home in the mountains, or survive -30 degrees C without losing too much range to be useful, etc. 

how often do you do the 775km trip a year? Maybe, just maybe renting a gasoline once a year would actually make sense. similar for the -30°C.. is this really an average need.. or just a regional..

Don't get me wrong.. I don't think E-Cars are fully mature and can replace every or even half of the use-cases.  But we can't burn endlessly oil for personal transportation.. The drawbacks are just to high (in case of 'pacification' of oil rich regions worldwide and dependencies to such, the fact that oil isn't endless and we mess up the environment to get the last drops out of it combined with our atmosphere which isn't supposed to get as much CO2 thrown to it... - don't want to start a global warming discussion here, it always ends that alex jones calls you a Gayfrog ). Either we accept that we mess up earth for the next (or nextnext) generation due to being irresponsible with the resources we have and therefore being honest here - so that the young generation can decide if they still want to vote for such people, or we take a bit of responsibility and try to have an open discussion how it can be reduced. It doesn't have to be based on the climate change we assume we can observe yet, but on the fact that even if we wouldn't see any effect of CO2, the thing we burn is still not endless and later generations may can use it for more worthy stuff than:

(https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Work_(thermodynamics))

 

 

 

 

 

 

8 hours ago, Tido said:

aha, clean electric power...

well it was more in the context of the link below:

https://www.vpnmentor.com/blog/report-millions-homes-exposed/

10 hours ago, chwe said:

 

always reminds me about Clive:

 

we don't even master oil derricks.. So probably humans are the wrong species to handle the amount of this 'new oil' as we currently do..

[Tido]

1 hour ago, chwe said:

well it was more in the context of the link below

the line between the two topics was not obviously enough and I didn't open the link, you provided pictures and that says more than thousand words

 

[NicoD]

15 hours ago, TonyMac32 said:

The "starter" will be either personal interest by consumers (there is a little of that now finally) or maturation of the base technologies that are not dependant on the success of cars (battery, generation, motors without rare Earth's, etc) making them commercially viable. Without a mature technology these cars are like 18th century steam engines:. Cool, impractical, and likely to catch on fire.

To be honest the grid can't handle these anyway, so massive point of delivery energy shortages are also in the way of broad deployment.

Electric cars exist longer than gas driven cars. More than half of all vehicles in the early 1900's were electric vehicles. It worked then. Now what happened that it doesn't work now anymore?

[NicoD]

3 hours ago, chwe said:

we don't even master oil derricks.. So probably humans are the wrong species to handle the amount of this 'new oil' as we currently do..

At least dataleaks don't polute the environment
Edit : And I'm not American so I've got nothing to worry about

[Tido]

3 hours ago, NicoD said:

More than half of all vehicles in the early 1900's were electric vehicles.

half of nothing  ==  nothing 

 

[NicoD]

3 hours ago, qblueRed42 said:

Year of the linux desktop?

https://devblogs.microsoft.com/commandline/shipping-a-linux-kernel-with-windows/

This is exactly what I had predicted.
If you can't beat them, join them, and kill them from within.
First they tried fighting it. Then they started to buy themself into Linux, and slowly they are taking control of many important aspects.
I don't know if what they are planning is good for the open source community. They can easily add things and then copyright it so Linux goes backwards, or even gets to be unuseable.

I hope they really mean it that "Microsoft loves Linux". But I'm having troubles believing this. It isn't in the companies culture.

It does look promising, and might be an improvement. But I'm always paranoid when it comes to Microsoft.
I once worked for a major tech company(1999-2003), Lernhout & Hauspie. They made speech technology in the late 90's and early 2000's. They started working together with Microsoft. Until everything was almost finished and then Microsoft pulled themselfs out the project. Everything did end up in Windows XP (Microsoft SAM). And they even left markers to L&H in it, not caring about removing it.
L&H went bust(other reasons). Now the technology is used for Siri, and a lot more speech to text and text to speech systems, and even google translate has it's origions with L&H.

Microsoft is still the same company, but they try to show another face. No difference with Apple.

[Tido]

I heard the podcast, sounds interesting

 

Your Data, Yours Only.

Secure, end-to-end encrypted, and privacy respecting sync for your contacts, calendars and tasks.

 

EteSync integrates seamlessly with your existing apps. All you need to do is run your own instance, install the app, and enter your password.

After that, you will be able to save your contacts, calendar events and tasks to EteSync using your existing apps, and EteSync will transparently encrypt your data and update the change journal in the background. More security, same work-flow.

https://www.etesync.com/

 

 

[NicoD]

https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/arm/
Windows is going ARM. 
Could be good for the ARM world. But will it really come to SBC's too? What I hear is they want always on laptops on arm64.
I'm watching some previews.
There's building guides for drivers.
https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/windows-hardware/drivers/develop/building-arm64-drivers

What will this mean for Armbian?
I don't know what to think of it. I'm enjoying SBC's so much because it's not the x86/amd64 Windows environment. I've got to learn everything from the start what is an adventure. I think Windows would make SBC's boring for me.
But it also would make things easy.
What do you all think?

[martinayotte]

6 minutes ago, NicoD said:

I think Windows would make SBC's boring for me.

I use VM to run Windows. I don't use any native Windows since more than 12 years, I think my first VM was Windows 2000, I have a backup of that VM somewhere ...

[TonyMac32]

https://www.raspberrypi.org/blog/driverless-cars-run-by-raspberry-pi/

 

  

[lanefu]

1 hour ago, TonyMac32 said:

https://www.raspberrypi.org/blog/driverless-cars-run-by-raspberry-pi/

 

  

That is NOT how I want to die.

[chwe]

just look at the small gif video.. they mostly use the white grey difference for navigation.. and the distance between two white stripes where the one car changes the track is a big longer..

 

In science you call this 'slightly optimized conditions'... (normally an indication that the told story didn't happen the way you try people to believe it was - some suuuper secret stuff here, the story is quit often different to the one you tell )

 

On 6/12/2019 at 12:18 AM, lanefu said:

That is NOT how I want to die.

btw.

 

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/06/15/us/politics/trump-cyber-russia-grid.html

Quote

John R. Bolton, said the United States was now taking a broader view of potential digital targets as part of an effort “to say to Russia, or anybody else that’s engaged in cyberoperations against us, ‘You will pay a price.’”

 

I would probably not start a "who has the longer one" when it comes to power grid with russia.. Not sure who pays the higher price here...

 

Quote

The commander of United States Cyber Command, Gen. Paul M. Nakasone, has been outspoken about the need to “defend forward” deep in an adversary’s networks to demonstrate that the United States will respond to the barrage of online attacks aimed at it.

reminds me to the statement of the former german minister of defense:

Quote

Unsere Sicherheit wird nicht nur, aber auch am Hindukusch verteidigt,“

 

 

 

[Igor]

Didn't know where to put this. Perhaps here  

[Tido]

Back in the day I was wondering, why the bloody TV wouldn't show the pictures in logical order..  now I heard about this:

 

FATSort Utility

 

FATSort is a C utility that sorts FAT12, FAT16 and FAT32 partitions. It even can handle long file name entries. It was developed because I wanted to sort my MP3 files on my MP3 hardware player. Unfortunately, there was no utility out there so far, so I had to write it myself. FATSort reads the boot sector and sorts the directory structure recursively.

 

https://fatsort.sourceforge.io/ 

 

If I only new a couple years ago about that.

[Pytheas]

2 hours ago, Tido said:

Back in the day I was wondering, why the bloody TV wouldn't show the pictures in logical order..  now I heard about this:

 

FATSort Utility

 

FATSort is a C utility that sorts FAT12, FAT16 and FAT32 partitions. It even can handle long file name entries. It was developed because I wanted to sort my MP3 files on my MP3 hardware player. Unfortunately, there was no utility out there so far, so I had to write it myself. FATSort reads the boot sector and sorts the directory structure recursively.

 

https://fatsort.sourceforge.io/ 

 

If I only new a couple years ago about that.

 

The - R option made me laugh out loud ...

Sort in random order !!!

 

[martinayotte]

2 hours ago, Pytheas said:

The - R option made me laugh out loud ...

[Tido]

is this news ? 

 

Orange Pi Zero LTS   is an update to Orange Pi Zero Allwinner H2+ board   https://www.cnx-software.com/2019/07/31/buy-orange-pi-zero-lts-sbc/

 

[chwe]

https://github.com/buildo/react-components/pull/1367

 

Conclusion: we definitively need a nemobot as well here...

[Tido]

Banana Pi

 

In order to better promote the development of open source hardware and support the development activities of the open source community, Banana Pi has been carrying out board sending activities for developers for a long time.

Board delivery object: ....   http://forum.banana-pi.org/t/banana-pi-open-source-boards-giveaway-for-developer/9945

 

[Tido]

faster boot process, BZIP2, LZMA and XZ are slow to decompress - is this true for ARM as well?

A nice blogpost about Boot speed improvements  https://smackerelofopinion.blogspot.com/2019/09/boot-speed-improvements-for-ubuntu-1910.html

 

[vlad59]

Last time I checked LZ4 kernel algo was not properly optimized for ARM (with NEON) so I don't think you can directly apply this blog results to ARM. The same "problem" happen with zram which is slower than in x86 world.

[Igor]

Yet another version of IRC. This time for 8.5 MIO $ 
https://venturebeat.com/2019/10/10/new-vector-raises-8-5-million-to-develop-an-open-source-slack-and-whatsapp/

[Tido]

On 10/8/2019 at 11:25 AM, vlad59 said:

The same "problem" happen with zram which is slower than in x86 world.

IIRC, @tkaiser did some tests and it may be the best or the best-compromise to use this for ZRAM.

 

11 hours ago, Igor said:

another version of IRC

it says slack&whatspp...  isn't https://wire.com  already doing that?   They want to close the gap between rivaling provider or so AND get some money to do so.. fair enough.

 

[Tido]

We are all tentative to that topic, writing on SDcard or eMMC. Tesla was not

in german:  https://www.heise.de/autos/artikel/Teslas-Flash-Fehlkonstruktion-4563357.html

 

Google Translate: https://translate.google.com/translate?sl=de&tl=en&u=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.heise.de%2Fautos%2Fartikel%2FTeslas-Flash-Fehlkonstruktion-4563357.html