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ekingr

93 karma · joined February 5, 2013

Strategy consultant. Hacker during leisure time.
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ekingr··on How I learned electronics [video]
I bought a cheap usb-powered hand-held oscilloscope DIY kit off Aliexpress. It was a fun soldering project and now I have a (very minimalistic) oscilloscope for when I need one (which is very seldom).
ekingr··on DIY Acoustic Camera
If so, it’d definitely be worth coupling it with lasers to kill mosquitoes!
ekingr··on NASA Space Tourism Posters
The CNES (French national center for space studies) had done similar 'vintage' ones a while ago

https://reves-d-espace.com/affiches-spatiales-pour-decorer-v... (unfortunately not available in the original site anymore)

ekingr··on Apple Music Announces Spatial Audio and Lossless Audio
Still not sure.

Indeed I have Funkwhale on the radar, but tbh I don't have a strong use case for streaming at home. Was thinking about putting it on my rPi -- but in the end it's even easier to just stream from my iPhone through Bluetooth (or a good old jack).

My priority is to build a clean library with beets, transcode it in mp3 and feed it to iTunes, to have it on my iPhone & iPod.

ekingr··on Apple Music Announces Spatial Audio and Lossless Audio
I agree so much! I switched to Apple Music 2 years ago when my hard drive failed. At the beginning it was alright, very convenient to have (almost) everything available on hand, in the same app as before. But now I can't stand it anymore. I have so many albums that randomly split all the time, version of tracks that change or become unavailable altogether. I'm moving away from streaming and am working on building back my music library (that I will be owning for good).
ekingr··on Happy New Year HN
Bonne année HN ! Wishing even more curiosity to you all this year!
ekingr··on Boom supersonic jet readies for rollout
That seems too high. I'd rather say in the order of c.$100bn.

In France the average cost is €15m/km, and that's for extremely high standards / constraints (350km/h or 220mph nominal speed, incl. barriers & bridges for wildlife)

ekingr··on Airbus unveils 'blended wing body' plane design after secret flight tests
It's not that fantasy anymore: Emirates' new first-class suites in the 777 [1] have fake windows that display a live feed from the outside.

[1] https://www.theverge.com/2017/12/1/16723152/emirates-first-c...

ekingr··on I miss Inbox, so I hacked Gmail with a little CSS magic (2019)
I guess beyond UI/UX, a key pain point that webmail solved is synchronisation. Whatever the change you do on whatever device, the state is managed by the server and reflected the same everywhere. Much easier than POP/IMAP/Exchange. The drawback is that you have to be always connected.
ekingr··on I Got Access to My Secret Consumer Score
> Two points: First, the very act of requesting your data is in a way confirming and verifying the accuracy of the data.

Same dilemma as hitting the "unsubscribe" link on spam: when doing so you confirm them you have a valid email address. It's a pure act of faith, you hope that they will comply and not take advantage of you even more.

ekingr··on Finding meteorites with 10cm NEXRAD weather radar
On a similar note, there was this video from the Verge on collecting roof-top micro-meteorites that was quite interesting to follow:

https://www.theverge.com/2019/2/5/18211112/meteorites-space-...

ekingr··on Pricing niche products
The Matt Levine-style "People are worried about custom keyboard market liquidity" made me laugh aloud!

https://www.bloomberg.com/topics/money-stuff

ekingr··on Hinkley Point C nuclear plant to run £2.9bn over budget
Just to put it in perspective, the same model of EPR (European Pressurized Reactor) being build at Flamanville in France is 10 years late (x3 vs 5 years initial estimate) and €8bn over budget (x3.5 vs €3bn initial budget). The Finnish one is also massively struggling.

Fortunately the Chinese ones in Taishan were delivered quite on time & budget this year.

It's sad to see all these issues with execution, doing a bad press for nuclear - while we really need more of it to decarbonize our electricity (at least in the mid-term).

ekingr··on Vinyl set to outsell CDs for first time since 1986
I know it's not really what you are mentioning, but I remember reading a paper of people being able to playback a vinyl from a high-resolution scan of it.

I can't find back the paper in question but I've found this which is in the same spirit: https://www.cse.huji.ac.il/~springer/DigitalNeedle/index.htm...

ekingr··on XLOOKUP for Excel
It’s a breakthrough for the consulting world!

Joke appart, it’s been long overdue to have such a lookup functions - even more so with sensible parameters as default!

ekingr··on YouTube should stop recommending garbage videos to users
I would argue that it is the same story for traditional media - albeit to a less extreme extent. In France, even on public channels, reality shows and dubious scandal-sounding programs now represent a high share of the broadcasts.

For sure it is less extreme than the topics mentioned there, but still the programs are optimized to make you addicted and boost stats. Neutral fact-based or educational content is disappearing quickly.

ekingr··on The coal mine that ate Hambacher forest
Thanks for the link.

What's most crazy is when you compare it to the nearby city of Köln (1+m inhabitants). It's almost the size of the city center!

ekingr··on I was wrong about spreadsheets (2017)
The worst of it is that there are some very specific (and undocumented) edge cases where the translation won't be done properly. It create very 'fun' to debug issues where a spreadsheet would work in a French Excel and not in an English one.

(For instance if you use the "Row-Column" cell reference, in English it is `R1C1` while in French `L1C1` - and it won't translate)

ekingr··on “The books will stop working.”
I understand it as two slightly different meanings for the word 'free'.

In French we have separate words for (a) 'free' as something we don't pay for (gratuit) and (b) 'free' as your have the freedom to use it as you wish (libre).

ekingr··on DIY Amps: A Roadmap for Beginners (2017)
Seconded. Great video, very informative.
ekingr··on CDs Curated by Steve Jobs and the iPod Team (2016)
Too bad I cannot manage to find Crash by Dave Matthews Band in Apple Music.

All the other are available (at least in France).

ekingr··on Twisted graphene has become the big thing in physics
Another major 'environmental' impact that may be very nefarious is the health effect of such nano-materials.

We don't want to re-create all the mess that we have today form asbestos -- which was also a wonder-material at the time.

ekingr··on The Paris Compressed-Air Power Network (2018)
I stumbled upon one of its remaining manhole covers a few weeks ago, which led me to discover about this network.

I have been living in Paris for 10 years but never knew this existed before.

ekingr··on Cross-Platform GUI Toolkit Trainwreck (2016)
He jokingly mentions Qt in the caption of the final picture.

I guess since he excludes GTK2 at the beginning for size concerns, wxWidgets and Qt would fall into the same category.

ekingr··on CNIL imposes a financial penalty of 50M euros against Google
English version: https://www.cnil.fr/en/cnils-restricted-committee-imposes-fi...
ekingr··on Yellow vests knock out 60% of all speed cameras in France
That is why there is also (in France at least) a system of points on the driving license. Everybody has the same count (12) at the beginning and will lose an equal amount in case of an infraction. If you lose all of them your license is suspended.
ekingr··on Yellow vests knock out 60% of all speed cameras in France
They will still loose points on their driving license. Everybody has the same amount (and not much).
ekingr··on Mapping and visualization
It would be interesting to know which tool & dataset the author used to produce those visualisations. Any ideas?

I particularly enjoy the “old-school” 3D maps.

ekingr··on [dead]
https://web.archive.org/web/20181010030152/https://blog.jonl...
ekingr··on Google Titan Security Key now available
Yes. Unfortunately it is still only OTP (vulnerable to fishing).

Let’s hope that one day Apple opens full access to the NFC chip.

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