David Gessel
A digest of tweets for 2009-04-18
- Off to run before the sun goes. http://is.gd/t2HF #
- Taqueria La Nueva. Yum! http://is.gd/t5c2 #
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Twitter Tools is pretty cool
If you have a wordpress blog and the thought of bidirectional integration with twitter is interesting, twittertools is pretty cool. For a long time, used KBB RSS widgets to display the RSS feed of my facebook status on my personal, unedited, why would anyone else possibly care web site (aka “blog”) and never really noticed how slow it was to retrieve the RSS feed (and maybe the facebook fave icon) but it seriously hung the page load times. Plus FaceBook is so last month. I mean seriously, who uses it any more?
Twitter is only so last week and while it may already be uncool, the cool phase is so short that even with rapid software development tools it is hard to build an ecosystem around the hot new technology in the two weeks between when it has enough traction to be “hot” and when it is so mainstream as to be “burned out.”
Sometime in that brief arc, twitter tools appeared and it does a couple of simple things really well:
- You can display a selectable number of your most recent tweets in your sidebar,
- You can make tweets into blog posts (why? 140 characters is a short post!),
- You can “digest” a day’s worth or a week’s worth of tweets into a post,
- You can tweet your blog entries (like this) in some format we are about to discover,
- It prefixes your tweeted blog entries with a fixed text to prevent a masturbatory circle tweet.
I messed around with twitterfeed, and that too seems cool, doing a similar thing, but it requires a third party site and I generally prefer to have my code local.
Kimrick’s Dad’s 80th
Happy 80! Kimrick’s steam engine running on propane.
Splish Splash, an SRL prop takes a swim
An SRL prop takes a swim…
This was recorded on my Blackberry way back in the ancient era and I ffmpeged it back to life. Fun times in the gold olde days when SF still had a thriving art scene. The post is backdated to the contemporary era, but these comments are 2023.
If the video doesn’t play, dump your iPhone for a non-walled garden device.
Encode parameters
ffmpeg -i splishsplash.MOV -vf vidstabdetect -f null -; ffmpeg -i splishsplash.MOV -vf vidstabtransform=zoom=1:smoothing=5:optzoom=2:interpol=bicubic:input="transforms.trf" -c:v libsvtav1 -pix_fmt yuv420p10le -preset 2 -svtav1-params tune=0 -b:v 0 -crf 41 -pass 1 -an -f null /dev/null && \ ffmpeg -i splishsplash.MOV -vf scale=-2:960:flags=lanczos,vidstabtransform=zoom=1:smoothing=5:optzoom=2:interpol=bicubic:input="transforms.trf" -c:v libsvtav1 -pix_fmt yuv420p10le -preset 2 -svtav1-params tune=0 -b:v 0 -crf 41 -pass 2 -c:a libopus -b:a 24000 splishsplash.webm
Rental Hummer H3
Odd vehicle awaited me at Hertz when I got in: H3. It isn’t that big, drives like a normal SUV. The faux-armor windows are a bit odd from the inside and it has, therefore, less visibility than a normal SUV, but otherwise seems like any suburban 4WD luxury minivan-ish truck conversion. Maybe there are some challenging roads around Guelph…
New coffee machine at BOS RCC does not suck
The new espresso machine at the Boston Red Carpet Club does not actually suck. It wouldn’t win any contests against a decent cafe, but it is as good as the starbucks with the espresso automats that seem to have taken over the airports.
Google Sync For Mobile Works, “Sync” Fails
I used to be very happy with Google Sync. It worked great and got my outlook calendar to my google calendar reliably and easily. And with google’s gears-based offline calendar, my calendar life seemed complete.
Until… it just didn’t sync. Not at all. I was always disappointed it would only sync to my default calendar, but not syncing at all, well that just sucks.
So I tried Sync for my blackberry. It worked perfectly (so far) and lets me choose which calendar to send my data to, which is perfect for keeping work and personal calendars separate and allows me do bidirectional sync without populating my work calendar with embarrassing personal events.
The only problem is that I tried to sync my contacts from Google Contacts. That was bad, mmmkay, because Google contacts SAID it would parse VCAL files, so I exported a vcal directory from Mulberry mail (and you know Cyrus got the format perfect to the letter) and google read every VCAL field as an entry, so I had 1200 people named BEGIN: VCAL, and 1200 people named END… etc.
Now Google, in their unfathomable wisdom, only lets you delete 500 entries at a time. Which means individually ticking the entries one at a time until there are less than 500 identical entries (like BEGIN: VCAL) which can then be bulk deleted. That was not happening. I tried, thus, to sync 8,000 plus entries to my blackberry and that did not work… that’s why there is the “fail” notice.
But somebody pointed out that you can switch to the “Older Version” and from that you can delete more than 500 entries a time and this bug was fixed in the newer version to prevent such deletions. From the older version you can search and delete larger groups (at least 1324 at a time).
You may need to log out of google and log back in to propagate the deletions to the New Version.
Coffee Science Update
Magnetically stirred coffee seems to be a success, but still tuning the parameters. I have a surplus temperature control module connected to a thermocouple probe to monitor the temperature.
My first attempt was confounded by not programming the controller to read a K-type thermocouple, it came set for a J-type and so the water never got over 88C even boiling… which it did for a while and that’s not good. Not good at all.
Today I let the water temp get up to 80C and the coffee was very good, smooth and not bitter at all. Perhaps a bit too smooth, a bit like the cold-brew taste but warm and much faster thanks to the stirring action. I will try 90C tomorrow and if success continues, modify the hotplate to add a direct thermal element bypass to the outside so the temp controller can control the heater directly (now I just watch and turn off the heater at the target temp.)
The theory is that by continuously stirring the coffee, a lot of flavor is extracted without relying on heat, and that the stirring also ensures uniform heating through the entire volume and thus the temperature can be set fairly precisely (to about a degree C, +/- 1 degree or so) to optimize differential extraction of the organics in the grounds.
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