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H ybrids "sort of" appear to be ahead in lower lifetime CO2. They key thing is that they higher GHG emmisions from the eletric grid, regionally, the less good hybrids look. But considering the trend of how fast wind, solar are lowering in cost, where coal isn't, I think the picture is getting better re: GHG emmisions for hybrids and electric, where gas IC engines are not, at least not as fast.

https://science.howstuffworks.com/science-vs-myth/everyday-m...

Original paper referenced above. https://afdc.energy.gov/files/pdfs/argonne_phev_evaluation_r...

In the conclusion: "The primary conclusion is that electrification of transportation significantly reduces petroleum energy use, but GHG emissions strongly depend on the electricity generation mix for battery recharging. "

A bunch: - Ubiquiti network controller, Pi Hole - Temperature controller to knit an ancient hydronic in floor heater and a new-ish mini split together to act in unison. Pings local national weather stations to get more accurate data than I care to replicate at my home. - Octoprint for my 3d printer - 4x for a hobby project stitching together video from multiple cameras

In a former job where I was in applications engineering, the cost of getting the customer up to speed (from a support point of view) was many times the product price. In a couple hundred sales cycles, there was only one we would have made money on in qty 1.

And value based pricing...

Pretty well written piece for a an intro to this issue. Same issue with cookie acknowledgements. Some important quotes:

“These are documents created by lawyers, for lawyers. They were never created as a consumer tool,” Dr. King said.

"The BBC has an unusually readable privacy policy. It’s written in short, declarative sentences, using plain language. "

The BBC example shows that it is possible to write a readable policy, if a company cares to.

I was wiring in a charge only USB port in my car today and found out that cutting the data lines limits the charge rate to a uselessly low rate. You need to tie the data lines together to put it in usb bc1.2 mode. Or 2.7 v on each line for 2.4 a iPhone charge or other modes. It isn’t simple. Simpler than Bluetooth, but not “hook up ground and 5v” simple.

Computer vision / OpenCV. It’s so fun to get the computer to “understand” what it sees with dedicated GPIO style sensors. I can also apply it to another hobby, which is fun. There is tons of resources out there. I use PyImageSearch for generic tutorials and the udacity computer vision course for more theoretical bckground. Looking forward to doing some embedded deployments and using GPUs.

I have no specific info on this, but I can only imagine a lot of work being done here, none of which will be made public until it is close to release and the marketing benefits of showing it outweigh tipping off their competitors.

The best train conductor knows best how to get a train somewhere at a specific time. If said conductor wanted to save some money on keyboards at the expense of quality because he thought it was in Apple's best interest, I wouldn't be shocked. Just because you understand Ops doesn't mean that you necessarily want to produce the highest quality at the expense of all other things.

Pyimagesearch is great. I'm just a tinkerer / hobbyist in the computer vision space, but this is a site I come to time and again to get up to speed on topics that just seem harder elsewhere.

What a blast from the past. I actually worked in the same office park they did. Hearing an afterburner blast when working late one night was quite a suprise! I must say that it made my day to wonder out investigating only to find a Beetle with a jet engine doing afterburner blasts :)

You are right that Amazon clearly does not feel pressure to satisfy the tiny majority that care about Amazon selling counterfeit goods.

Fixed point often works better, as it has better resolution because it doesn't need the exponent. The flip side is that the range of a fixed point is very limited (because it doesn't have the exponent). Practically, that means you need to do some analysis to make sure don't overflow or saturate, and use the bulk of your fixed point range to get the resolution benefits. If you do that, fixed point is great.

If you don't have time or knowledge to do that, floating point works better because you can be more ham-fisted with your scaling and still not overflow or saturate.

Regarding equal spacing: the sample rate determines a part of the system latency, and therefore performance and stability limitations. Eliminatating the stability of sample rate eliminates the decades of work basic controls analysis relies on. Or said another way, slow your sample rate and pay with your phase margin. Not to say it’s impossible to deal with (small) changes in sample rate, but in a text where he is already wildly simplifying things, this sounds like the wrong place to innovate.

This is value based pricing. It is just the start, it isn't new, and it isn't limited to computer hardware. *aaS (anything as a service) is the newest flavor of this. Expect it to explode as IoT becomes more mature.

I remember Aibo as the product that Sony made that could reverse all the positive feelings I had for their products because of this. It turns out that this was the true Sony.

http://grep.law.harvard.edu/articles/02/05/03/1613203.shtml

It is slow, but most of the time, we don't use the raw data - we use the metadata. It worked great for our app. We got a excited and tried to implement some on the fly data summaries where we would have to touch a bunch of files every time we wrote anything. That just didn't work because of the speed.

Let's be specific on speed. Most of the time, the MB or two needed for a plot is a fraction of a second, which our customers can deal with. That retrieval is a single object from S3, the way we organize things.

Having said that, the talk I linked to has some great advice - use the "folder" structure to write data so you don't search, you just use the naming scheme to do a direct object read. In addition, we can keep most reads to a single object, which is fairly fast.

As is always true, you will need to test to see if it fits your speed needs. But even with just the naming scheme and meta data in the database to eliminate all searches on S3, the speed works for us.

We stopped storing our IoT raw data in databases. We still need to search it, but now we store only metadata in the database (we know what we will search by, so we can make appropriate metadata) and store the raw data in S3. So any searches are in the DB, using the DB for what it is good at. This means that our storage / database cost approaches just the S3 cost, because our metadata is ~0.001 the size of the raw data. It took our product from "we are going to shut this thing down" to making money.

Got the idea from an AWS talk here https://youtu.be/7Px5g6wLW2A. Blew my mind. I coded up all the changes in a day. Took way longer to move the data than to code it.

I got an Amazon IoT button and made some super simple back that will remind me to clean the pet’s water fountain every n days. I just push the button when I clean the fountain. I would horrify how gross it was before when I would remember to clean it. It’s much more humane now.

Also made Arduino boards that are dedicated timers to blink a light: - 2 minutes to empty my coffee when brewing in a Aeropress. - 24 hours to empty the cat's litter box.

Both of the timers are so simple. It doesn't sound like much, but the hyper focus on the task use case makes it actually improve my life in a small way.

It doesn't even account for all airports. I live near a Navy base and it doesn't show a thing, despite fighter jets making loops around the base. The nearby commercial airport is shown prominently, though.

Similar experience with the latest Star Wars. I saw Nightmare Before Christmas years ago and it was all in focus (memory hazy here) and the 3D distance made it look like it was a play, on a stage. I absolutely loved it. I've never seen another 3D movie since that I thought was good for the same depth of field issues discussed.

In addition, every train I have been on is more comfortable than any but the most expensive airline fares.

We've got on here and I was surprised how much time I (not in IT, but sit near the Surface Hub) got wrangled into helping IT support this thing. The problem seems to stem from it being a phone underneath, in the OS (error messages will occasionally mention this). IT has trouble wrapping their head around that it is not a regular Surface, which they have rolled out boat loads of, successfully.

In addition, you can't really install anything on it, so it's tough / impossible to meet automated compliance checking (AV in place, etc.).

I guess this is really an IT group not trying hard to support it, but it was an eye opener to see the round peg / square hole thing going on.

Having said that, it's a nice whiteboard / Skype appliance. Nobody mentions the stand. It's built like a tank and finished really cleanly. Also would be nice if it weighed less. Smaller people really have to lean into it to move it.

The magic part is the thing we have gotten used to with the cloud -- virtual hardware you never see and rent by the minute. Imagine having an FPGA idea and not needing to make board, pay for a dev board, or even find a dev board in your lab... Like your idea and need more? Spin up 100 more right now...

I consider the unpredictable case the several to many years it takes to upgrade all the devices between my wife and me. It probably took 3 years to get rid of all the 30 pin devices in our house. I don't see why it will be any better switching away from 1/8".

This doesn't change your overall argument, but Image Capture on the Mac will let you get your pictures without Photos or Itunes. I'm DONE with Photos and had to figure this out. It's not a great app, but it is simple.

I wish they didn't do 24V PoE. I know they are coming from a WISP background, but a AP seems like something that should support 802.11af. It's not like it's something exotic.

Yes. That cloud setup punches through firewalls and is just turn key. I wish they made routers.

Sometimes I fall into the "what's left to discover" trap. Great to see fundamental understanding of our universe increasing!

Agreed on the uncanny valley comment. It's interesting to me that very uniform "smile and look at the camera" is the desired outcome of pictures for so many. This page seems to work on the unspoken assumption that the perfect smile in front of some other thing is the ideal picture. I definitely prefer pictures of people doing something other than staring at a lens with a rehearsed smile. It seems that this and so much other camera algorithmic work is aimed at idealizing that posed picture style.

I can understand it, if it's not too draconian. It's nice for some central power to have coherent walktnroughs on how to set up an editor to lint, etc. If another dev wants to use a different editor and can make it work, it's fine by me, but I can't see anyone "supporting" every editor out there.