Martin Whitaker @martin@whitakernet.com
- Callsign
- M0NXP
- Town
- Southampton, UK
- Projects in progress
- Many
- Spare time
- None
Admin
Theatre lighting enthusiast, amateur radio geek, electronics nerd and all round tinkerer.
Joined Nov 2022
People around here are far too responsible... It's been around 6 months since I last saw a discarded disposable vape and I'm now running low on Li-ion batteries....
Now this is unusual.... We've currently have a power cut... About 10 minutes ago the power half came back - but only at 70 volts.
I'm guessing one phase is out and the power we're seeing on this phase is as a result of the other two.
Does anyone have a day-by-day gas usage graph of their own they'd be willing to share? I'd love to see how well this matches up across the country....
The graph below shows the daily gas consumption of my house located near Southampton and the gas consumption of my parents house located in East Yorkshire in 2023.
The crazy thing is how closely the two lines track each other given the only real thing they have in common is being located in the UK.
One is a 1906 semi-detached house, one is a 1970s bungalow.
One has the heating set to a constant temperature 24/7, one has the heating set for waking hours only....
This is nuts....
There's a bot 'vncresolver@botsin.space' that connects to any open VNC servers it finds.
Quite a few are just VM guest screens, presenting a login screen. Not ideal, but at least there is something preventing access.
Just as many though are logged in with full access to something. Some of them show clear evidence they've already been abused too (e.g. wetransfer tabs left open).
Just bonkers!
Martin Whitaker
boosted
My house isn’t messy, it’s just sorted by Date Last Modified
@0x47df loving the server URL!
Martin Whitaker
boosted
Dear Microsoft. Here is a list of things I want the Start Menu to do:
* Show my installed programs
* Search my local files
* Provide access to system settings
Here is a list of things I do *not* want the Start Menu to do:
* Show the weather for a randomly-selected town near my network's public IP infrastructure
* Show tabloid headlines
* Show programs I *don't* have installed
* Search the web via Bing
* Show adverts(!)
* Attempt to engage me in conversation with a hallucinating LLM
Thanks.
Martin Whitaker
boosted
For the theatre folk that follow me: Guess the show based upon the props table...
I've just noticed the box claimed it would last 25 years! They were off by a factor of 2.5...
Currently feeling smug....
10 years ago I replaced all the GU10 bulbs in a room with LED ones.
Today the first one failed (which isn't bad for a room used daily). I'm feeling smug because I bought 2 spare ones at the time so all bulbs in the room still match 😃
I've put the Dockerfile on github - whilst not especially complicated I'd have certainly used this if somebody else had written it:
https://github.com/pythag/simple-amazon-textract
Martin Whitaker
boosted
I wrote about my first two months on Mastodon. I was a Mastodon hater because I thought it would be weird, complicated, or dead. It's been none of those things.
I'm ashamed I didn't join earlier and I'm ashamed I haven't been telling people to join it, because it's a version of the internet and social media I've long advocated for with my reporting: decentralized, portable, user controlled, not corporate:
....However when I try the pip install I get warnings about a managed environment, so I can't do anything with Python on my desktop....
...fine - I'll build a docker container.
HOW HAS THIS GOT SO TIME CONSUMING AND MESSY???
How has computing become so difficult????
The goal: OCR a scanned PDF file using AWS Textract into a plain text file.
Installed AWS CLI fine and setup all the AWS bits - not too bad (or time consuming).
Ran Textract - the tool works really well, looking at the JSON file 100% of words accurately read.
The problem: Putting it back into a straight text document... The JSON structure is complicated - you need to reassemble the detected words. It's okay - there's a python utility for that.... 1/2
Martin Whitaker
boosted
Raspberry Pi 5 is coming
With more than twice the speed of Raspberry Pi 4, and featuring our brand new RP1 chip, we’ve refined the Raspberry Pi experience.
It’s the everything computer. Optimised.
Priced at $60 for the 4GB variant, and $80 for its 8GB sibling, units are already available to pre-order from many of our Approved Resellers, and will ship at the end of October.
https://www.raspberrypi.com/news/introducing-raspberry-pi-5/
Martin Whitaker
boosted
Graphically visualizing the erasure of a 16kbit #EPROM with a UV source in 16 seconds!
This time lapse shows all of the bits being flipped from 0 to 1 over about a 24 minute period. The first bit flips at 8 minutes.
What's fascinating to me is the bits "twinkle" as they flip back and forth before settling.
- Callsign
- M0NXP
- Town
- Southampton, UK
- Projects in progress
- Many
- Spare time
- None
Admin
Theatre lighting enthusiast, amateur radio geek, electronics nerd and all round tinkerer.
Joined Nov 2022
