Soon after I moved in here last year, there were a number of suspicious incidents in the shared garage. I’m told a rental car was stolen and later found by police, and another time a rummager took some items, including keys to some motorcycles. At least one of the incidents did not involve the door being accidentally left open, but we weren’t sure if they had a key or taped a lock open or something.
Anyway, it seemed some more theft might be imminent, so Paul bought a Nest camera and installed it in the garage. It’s worked pretty well, sending notifications to all our phones on activity in the garage. There are false notifications due to light changes from vehicles driving by, but it’s alerted me to the door being left open many times. One such time, we got the alert in the middle of the night and found a video of someone poking around. He took a few things, but we’re not sure what exactly.
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One third of four multiplied by three is not four, according to the OS X calculator. I know this quirk is due to behind the scenes floating point arithmetic, but it’s interesting Apple hasn’t found a way to cosmetically fix this considering this calculator might be the most commonly used one in the world!
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I’ve only ready a few stories on the Apple controversy, but I’m increasingly anxious, hoping civil liberties prevail. This is a bit of a journal entry combined with some comments I want to remember, so I’ll give a bit of background in case I read this in …
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Periodically timing myself playing the card game Set.
Finding 10 sets: Count 13x3 cards, starting timing before laying out 12 cards, stop timing after first set found after only 12 cards remain table. If 1 minute passes without set, add three cards.
2016-03-16: 13:40, 5:57, 13:20, 6 …
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Week 8 of my first 12 week year is over, and I scored 50.4%. This is about the same as last week.
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Last month, before I realized there was going to be a thousand GOP and Democratic debates, I was still tuning in to each one, though often late, as they caught me off guard. During the Feb. 6 GOP debate, I actually empathized with Marco Rubio, as several times he seemed to nearly shed tears.
Today, Rubio dropped out of GOP nomination race, finally. Not that Trump or Cruz are any better ideologically, but they at least seem more likely to be able to handle the pressure of the job.
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“Government Surveillance” is scary, and a great episode of “Last Week Tonight with John Oliver”. The show, from last March, features man on the street evidence Americans are poorly informed about surveillance, as well as an interview with Snowden in which Oliver portrays the government programs in the context of dick pics. This perspective seems to turn the issue from something Americans care little about to something deeply personal and repulsive. (And it isn’t the sending of the dick pics that is repulsive.)
Oliver may have helped build momentum behind this issue by making it personal, but it was still somewhat removed since we don’t know of many specific cases. Now that Apple is very publicly fighting the government on a specific case, I hope more people see the light and unite for civil liberties.
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I signed up for Comcast’s XFINITY Internet service this week, despite a deep seated aversion to contributing to the reign of a giant monopoly. Time will tell if I can live with the decision, but so far, it’s not looking so good. They have already done a hard pull on my credit report illegally, as I did not consent to it and they explicitly told me no such pull would be done since I was paying a $100 deposit. Additionally, the speeds are not as advertised. My attempts so far to deal with both these issues have wasted a lot of time and have been unsuccessful.
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Week 7 of my first 12 week year is over, and I scored 50.1%. This is much worse than last week.
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I’ve always been perplexed by the small amount of media coverage about the Japanese nuclear disaster at Fukushima after the 2011 earthquake. I guess after years of consistent incidents and higher radiation recordings than ever before, it ceases to qualify as “news”, but the repercussions seem far reaching and …
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I began studying Japanese vocab and characters through WaniKani in May 2014, a few months after I moved to Japan. After five months, I wrote about my struggles to get caught up with the program due to intentionally advancing through the levels as quickly as possible to maximize my benefit …
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I finally got a fast Fourier transform working on an Arduino Due! This is not exactly a final product but just a documentation of progress. I am working my way toward beat detection, but am still getting a better feel for FFT processing and observing different types of music and beats. Below is some information about how I got up to speed, and at the end are videos of where I am now.
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