As I wrote earlier: recently, I lost another bike computer so I needed a new one. I decided to get a more recent version of the Sigma BC line that I've been using for the past decade: the Sigma BC 16.16 STS CAD. These seem to be on the way out now, being sold out almost everywhere. But no obvious replacement that isn't more expensive and more complex, so I'm glad I got to get one of the last ones.
For the first time in a long while the Nieuwe Veenmolen, the local neighborhood windmill from 1654, is turning. Back in the day, it pumped away water to keep the area dry.
Permalink - posted 2023-01-30
Image link - posted 2023-02-14
I fell down a rabbit hole a while ago trying to come up with the definitive answer to the often-asked question "how can old movies be in HD/4K", which immediately leads to "how does film and digital resolution compare".
The answer to the first question is of course that film as a lot more resolution than standard definition TV, so just scanning the movies at a higher resolution will give you a sharper image than that old DVD or (shudder) VHS tape.
The problem with reasoning about film grain vs pixels or eyeballing images is that it's very imprecise. But we actually do have a tool that lets us compare digital vs film: the optical transfer function.
Integrated below a little tool with a slider to see for yourself where the tradeoffs are.
Read the article - posted 2023-03-29
Image link - posted 2023-05-13
Een kleine drie weken geleden viel het kabinet Rutte-4. Sindsdien hebben premier Rutte en alle vice-premiers aangekondigd na de demissionaire periode de politiek te gaan verlaten. Twee lijsttrekkers van de verkiezingen van 2021 waren al vertrokken en nog eens drie hebben aangekondigd niet verder te gaan. We gaan de verkiezingen van 22 november dus tegemoet met een flink aantal verse lijsttrekkers.
Read the article - posted 2023-07-26
I was watching the videos
But what really peaked my interest is that he made a tiny little interface to hook up SD cards to the Master's user port. I think it only uses four wires. There's a very small circuit board, but that only has some resistors to adapt the user port's 5 V to the 3.3 V used by SD cards. Apparently, that's all the hardware you need for reading (and writing?) SD cards. Wow.
Could this also work on an Amiga?
Image link - posted 2023-08-27
When I was 24, I decided to give up my job and go to college and study computer science. If I'd have known how many database classes that involved, maybe I would have reconsidered.
Back then, we had a big server that ran a RDBMS (relational database management system) that hundreds of students all used together. These systems were big, complex and expensive. (Oracle made its fortune selling RDBMSes.) MySQL and PostgresQL are somewhat more streamlined free and open source RDBMSes. Much better, but firewalling, user authentication and backups are still somewhat of a headache. But hey, if you need a database, you need a database.
Enter SQLite.
Read the article - posted 2023-09-04
In this post, I want to have a look at how SQLite interacts with Unicode. (Also see my post The (dark) magic of Unicode.) As explained here, SQLite doesn't have full Unicode support unless that support is explicitly included when SQLite is compiled.
So what does this mean in practice?
Read the article - posted 2023-09-05
After looking at the SQLite Unicode behavior, it's now time to do the same for MySQL. Coincidentally, I'm currently migrating some old databases that were created in the very early 2000s to a more modern environment. I think those old databases were from the MySQL 3.x days, before MySQL gained any sort of Unicode support. Those old tables are thus still in the latin1 (ISO 8859-1) character set.
But I encountered some MySQL/Unicode weirdness...
Read the article - posted 2023-09-21
20 years ago today, the TV show Mythbusters aired its first regular episode on the Discovery Channel, after three earlier pilot episodes. And soon after, I had found a new favorite TV show.
Finished software is software that’s not expected to change, and that’s a feature! You can rely on it to do some real work.
We need more of this.
But: how do you write software that will keep working for decades to come? Certainly don't look at Apple for this, they keep changing their CPU architectures every decade or so and after a transition period, the old stuff is dead.
Could WebAssembly be the solution? This is a pretty fast binary format that almost any programming language can be compiled to.
Read the article - posted 2023-11-01
Image link - posted 2023-12-22