Lair Of The Multimedia Guru

2020-02-16

COVID-19 / Coronavirus / SARS-CoV-2

What i write here is going to be outdated in a few days or weeks likely but anyway, some thoughts about this …
Ive been following the information updates in the last few days, less the mainstream news. And normally i do not pay much attention to either the mainstream news nor any non mainstream stuff. But since about the 13th or so ive the feeling from what iam reading that this might turn into a pandemic. I hope iam wrong, this is not my area of expertise at all.
I hope the dumb extrapolation of numbers one can do is wrong because if this virus is anywhere as deadly as currently predicted and if it spreads widely. A worst case scenario could have many dead. Basically if this infects a significant fraction the world population, and the current fraction of seriously ill patients would apply in that scenario. There would not be enough hospitals, ICUs, … . People could be dieing because of the medical system being overwhelmed by the cases of serious illness.
So, i hope iam wrong. I hope this is successfully contained, people are quarantined everywhere and the virus dies instead of people. And from what iam reading it seems china is successful in containing it, but i have difficulty imagining all countries will.
I hope by isolating the most severe cases the virus will evolve to become more benign. A virus which causes severe disease which causes quick detection and isolation doesnt spread well, one that produces minor or no symptoms spreads much better. This can push the virus to evolve toward being milder. Of course that only works if a milder variant still spreads equally well, evolution is survival of the fittest after all, it has nothing do do with the hosts survival.
I hope a working vaccine is quickly found, tested and becomes widely available.
I hope there will be enough antiviral medications for the people who need them.
I hope that if it does spread, the politicans will direct resources toward preparing the medical system of their country and teaching citizens about Hygiene.
In some countries wearing a mask to protect against spreading diseases is even outlawed currently. (like the one i am in for example)
Also its socially not particularly accepted, people here rather cough each other in the face, or if they are more polite cough in their hand and then touch everything and everyone from food to other people with that hand. Yeah thats why the flu and the cold spreads so well and why this one might too.
And i dont even want to think or be reminded of the general gen-tech-phobia. Without that more laboratories and researchers would exist who could now work on finding a vaccine or other treatments or just testing samples from patients if they have the virus. It is AFAIK very simple to do a PCR and gel electrophoresis or realtime PCR which is AFAIK how this is detected currently. There are YouTube channels where you can see hobbyists doing PCR and electrophoresis in a garage, shed or similar. Sure for the virus one needs a negative pressure glove box and some additional saftey but still it puzzles me a bit when i read that various countries cant test or cant test as many samples as they need.
Enough off topic talk, I hope this virus disappears, and everyone gets well and no more people die from it or any other virus.

Update 2020-03-14: You can donate to WHO to fight COVID-19 via covid19responsefund.org

Filed under: Off Topic — Michael @ 22:20

2020-01-12

Fate boxes 2020-01

FATE strikes back

The Cubox no longer boots, the Panda boards power supply no longer works, it actually literally fell apparent when i unplugged it

The USB stick in my Panda board failed, huge amounts of bad sectors. Ive had it running with the power supply from the dead cubox and the sdcard as storage device.
That lead to out of disk space issues as fate is not just evil but its also big. So today the panda board has a new usb stick (SanDisk Extreme Go 64GB USB 3.1), which was the cheaptest brand name + fast one i found quickly.
Some benchmarks of the SD card vs the USB stick

sd card configure (-O1 gcc-4.4)
real 0m50.546s
user 0m24.523s
sys 0m11.164s

sd card build -j2
real 24m46.453s
user 38m38.586s
sys 3m14.938s

sd card fate -j2 -k
real 75m42.462s
user 104m30.688s
sys 8m33.727s

usb configure (-O1 gcc-4.4)
real 0m47.655s
user 0m24.719s
sys 0m11.297s

usb build -j2
real 21m25.833s
user 38m32.438s
sys 3m5.820s

usb fate -j2 -k
real 57m29.724s
user 103m6.180s
sys 7m30.867s

My i7-5820K box, which runs several fate client VMs also was showing signs of age, its main disk (Samsung SSD 850 PRO 512GB) showed an accelerating increase in number of reallocated sectors. That being after over 5 years of continuous 24/7 use by multiple FATE VMs, reading and writing. Ive a few days ago replaced it by a Samsung SSD 970 PRO 1TB. That also means theres spare space now for new fate clients if i find the time to setup something …

Filed under: FFmpeg,Hardware — Michael @ 11:12

2019-12-25

email problems

A few days ago i noticed a missing mail from james in my ffmpeg-devel folder. Checking my local logs, checking the servers logs it appeared as if it was sent to me and that i never received it locally. I saw some bounce but mailman doesnt seem to keep track of bounce details. James said it might be a fluke and i put it asside. But shortly later another 2 mails that reached the Archives and others did not reach me. So i opened an issue on gandi.net about this which iam using for my mail. A long while ago i switched to gandi as gmx was just a pain if something did not work …

Until this issue was looked into by gandi, i used a 2nd email address to receive mails from ffmpeg-devel reliably. I also as a precaution changed my password and then later went over most of my email setup to check for any potential bad configuration. In the meantime another mail, one from Andreas failed to reach me over gandi but received me over gmx. So i reported that to gandi with all the headers. On the 24th gandi after a bit of back and forth found the email. It was in a Junk folder that one can see in their webmail but which is inaccessible via POP3. There in fact where almost exactly 1000 mails in the Junk folder.
So i switched from POP3 to IMAP and fetched all, sending them through my own spam filtering i have locally. I have to shockingly say that a substantial number of these “Junk” mails, as in 5-10% where miss-classified and where not junk. Mails from the IETF list, from the debian lists, from ffmpeg, some buisness/finance related mails and many IRC logs, just to list what i remember now off the top of my head. The recovered mails seemed to cover a Timespan since july 2019. I do not know if mails prior to july 2019 “expired” in the Junk folder or if that was when this issue started. From my memory gandi did longer ago reject mails on reception so the sender would always get an error and know. Also it feels as if their spam filters where orders of magnitude more accurate in the past. I was a bit foolish to fail to guess that the well working mail service that gandi had wouldnt be “improved”.

Either way, the things of note are

  1. If you sent me a mail of importance and i didnt react, send it again, especially if it was prior 2019 mid july
  2. Avoid POP3, use IMAP, make sure you fetch all folders the times where companies cared about features working are over. In the past if one fetched mails via POP3 from a webmail thingy that had a spam folder one could get these mails with a “SPAM” header or SPAM keyword added to the subject.
Filed under: Off Topic — Michael @ 13:47

2019-10-30

Trees

Everyone on youtube, well all the science channels at least are collaborating on planting trees #teamtrees.
So i donated too because well. I like forests :). And in fact Trees are very important, life as we know it maybe would not exist without trees. Without trees all the carbon now locked up in coal might instead be CO2 in the atmosphere. Also so many lifeforms depend on trees …
Ahh and they are a great way to turn CO2 from the atmosphere into wood, the later does not cause global warming.

Here are some forest related pictures i took in 2019

Filed under: Nature,Off Topic,Pictures — Michael @ 10:39

2019-09-03

Main development machine failure

2 days ago before going to bed i started some tests on my box. When i woke up yesterday, i couldnt login remotely to the box, looking more careful the box was waiting for keyboard input during boot. It had issues previously and i intended to replace it for a long time. That was on hold because the ryzen 3950X isnt available yet which i wanted to use for a new box.
So i helped it boot, restarted the task and a bit later the box fans and disks spun down it rebooted again. My first thought was power supply or mainboard issue. The box after all was used alot and was somewhat old. I had a power supply laying around which was intended for my the future 3950X. So a little unhappy i moved the other machine that blocked access to the failing box away. Next with some dust mask and vacuum cleaner i removed many years of dust. Having removed all dust that failed to hold on. I wanted to check if it still booted, what temperature it reached and if maybe it worked now. The moment i switched it on i was glad i had the dust mask still on, for some reason more dust was blown out by the noctua fans. And it was interesting to see the dust coming out and some of it being sucked into my still running vacuum cleaner. The machine booted and i restarted the task, it didnt fail. So i tried again and then run fate in a loop. It reached 86°C cpu temp IIRC but it didnt fail or reboot again. Now a day later, the machine showed no further anomalies, it seems happy again.
This was the first time I ve had a system apparently failing from nothing but dust.

Filed under: FFmpeg,Hardware — Michael @ 21:50

2019-08-02

Amazon price errors

I just managed to order 15 euro worth of office stuff on amazon for 1 euro 22 cent. And together with buying my first 30 euro giftcard i should theoretically get a 5 euro coupon. So if that worked that means amazon will pay me 3 euro 78 cent for doing probably 2 separate free deliveries of things to me.
2 Deliveries because mysteriously it was out of stock so the gift card would come separate and first i assume.
Not as cool as that case where amazon recently managed to sell 13k USD equipment for less than 100, i wish i knew about that one in time :(
But still cool.

PS: The price already changed back to normal by the time iam writing this

Filed under: Off Topic — Michael @ 08:45

2019-05-23

EU elections 2019

A new EU parliament is being elected currently, (23-26 may depending on country). If you live in the EU and care about your future, you should vote.
Its only 1 in about 380 million potential votes. Not much effect you have but if you do not go then you have 0 and cant complain next time the EU passes a law that “noone” wanted.
You can check on saveyourinternet how your countries representatives and parties voted on the copyright directive. Looking at how politicians actually voted is better than listening and believing what they claim they will before an election.
Some related street Photography:

Leaning on a tree our nationalist party is campaigning.


A few streets onward, our greens are campaigning in the park with a picture of a tank.


Right Nationalist Party (FPÖ) giving out Chocolate and Flyers. Yeah they gave me some too as i passed by after taking this picture.


Right Conservative Party (ÖVP) posing for someone else taking pictures. I took one too.

Where are the greens, small left parties and our sozial democrats (SPÖ) ? I dont know, i didnt pass by any. I saw some campaign posters for the sozial democrats but forgot to take a picture, they IIRC called people to go to the election on it.

And some days later …

A vandalized campaign poster of the FPÖ. I think that was after a video was made public showing them discussing with russian oligarchs (or claimed to be oligarchs) about funneling money and contracts to them in exchange for buying a newspaper and manipulating elections with it. And also discussing how to move money around behind the “Rechnungshof”. Looks almost like a russian bear ripped the poster off.

Update 2019-05-24:

Finally run accross a SPÖ poster. Still no trace of NEOS and the other small parties but i also found a


Fox. It was faster than my camera liked.

Filed under: Uncategorized — Michael @ 11:30

2019-04-13

Photography

Some random pictures from my cameras sd card in chronological order (this is from end 2017)


Dont focus on me.


Dont step on me.


You shall not pass.

Filed under: Nature,Off Topic,Pictures — Michael @ 12:00

2019-02-25

Copyright EU #6

On the 20th February the EU governments approved the current text, the way i understand it, it next goes back to the EU parliament for a final vote.
I ve found a quick summary of the problem with article 13 on youtube.
There are also numerous articles from the EFF and basically everyone else about the directive. So whichever news site/creator you like, chances are (s)he said something about it. The really interesting or should i say scary part is, ive yet to find someone except the politicians and lobbyists who push this to be in favor of this change.
So who will the winners and loosers of this likely be if it passes ?
The one thing that seems obvious is that if any variant of this pass, getting some content from a creator to a consumer will involve more laws, more regulations and more risk for intermediaries. Thus it will, in two words, cost more. Increasing cost for consumers, decreasing income for creators. And consuming more paper for the extra bureaucracy. Likely less diverse sharing platforms, less diverse content. It appears that almost everyone would be loosing a bit if this passes …
Btw i almost forgot, the next EU parliament election are very soon. If you live in the EU please vote, no matter if you like or dislike the EU copyright directive, vote for the party you believe is best.
If you want to know how the members of your parties voted about the copyright directive, thats available on https://saveyourinternet.eu/act/ (currently its the previous vote, iam not sure how this page will change after the final vote).

Filed under: Uncategorized — Michael @ 20:29

2019-02-13

Copyright EU #5

Today the EU Parliament and council negotiators have agreed on a final Text. Next IIUC are the final votes of the various institutions.
I have not had the chance to fully read the text, just 1 page that was quoted on Twitter. So iam not in a position to really say what it means but what ive heared earlier today does not sound reassuring. Nor does it feel great that the public (like for example me) seems to basically depend on “leaks” from the law makers to know what is going on. Whats in the text, and so on. The EU should make their proposed texts and _ALL_ discussions fully uncut and un-delayed public.

Some sources of information: (the full text of the proposed directive might appear on these maybe)

Julia Redas Blog
Julia Redas Twitter
A short video about the situation yesterday
WBS (German lawyer) Discussing the yesterdays situation

Filed under: Uncategorized — Michael @ 22:04
« Previous PageNext Page »

Powered by WordPress