shinyhappyrainbows

Mark Rober, the eponymous "former NASA engineer" of the memes, and all round brilliant debunker and educator has just uploaded a "fun" video about obstacle detection and crash prevention tech in cars. Apparently, nearly all "self driving" models of car use LiDAR obstacle detection. Can you guess what Tesla use? Hold your guess and watch Mark's video... Honestly, right now, the people I feel worst for are those who fell for Elon's lies and went with a Tesla. I normally have little sympathy for "lemon" buyers, I'm a cycling advocate and an "urbanist" who vehemently believes cars have become the bad master rather than out good servants they promised to be when they cleaned up cities suffering "horseshit pollution." But, right now, that "flash rat with a gold tooth" and his "pretend uncle Donny" is caught out in more lies and BS that ultimately is leaving people with expensive family transport tha...

The world descends into its stupid destruction as I write this link...

I've lived in Melbourne nearly 16 years, now, the anniversary is June, and the Bay Trail is one of my frequent haunts, yet it was literally only this month that I discovered there's a model of the Solar System, spanning from St Kilda Marina, down to the docks of Port Melbourne, at a scale of 1 in 1 billion. Even cooler, right near the model of The Sun, is Proxima Centauri, because, by amazing coincidence, the 4.1 lightyears between our star and its nearest neighbour, scaled down by a factor of 1 billion, is roughly the circumference of the Earth! Bugger me. If you walked from Port Melbourne, to the North Pole, continued walking from there, down the other side of our planet, to the South Pole, and back to the St Kilda Marina, you'll find a model nearby the Sun model of Proxima Centauri, as well!!! (I won't tell anybody if you cheat, though, it'd be a big ask to make the long way compulsory.) So, I've marked up the approximate in Ride With GPS ... I'll be ...

One little perturbation in the Force and I'm both paralysed and monotropic. I should "grow up", big deal, I have to wait for the trike I've bought... yeah well... IT'S SO EFFING HARD! I can't focus on projects, I'm obsessing over recumbent cycle touring videos on YouTube, it took me 3 days (may have been 5) to put my freshly dried laundry away and the cat is sick of my figiting. Lucky for the "Lovely Linda," she's away in New Zealand for another week, she's only going to have to put up with it for two weeks. I have to live with it, every waking second, waiting, waiting, waiting, my patience is dissolving, I'm figiting and revolving 'til I'm tired... So I did this, ready for the trike's arrival. I took this image... Then broke all my environmantism and data hygiene rules, sending it to an AI for this image... Which I then gave the stupid caption, all so I could also be waiting for another week before I could afford th...

I've written about this sort of idea recently, only I was wondering about doing it with my multitrack and a sort of "kansas city standard," tone shift keying for MIDI. I'd also been wondering about having a separate track for each MIDI channel, or multiple, multichannel tracks. So I started researching the necessary standard libraries for Arduino, the interfacing... the madness sets in... Then Floyd Steinberg pops up in my youtube feed promoting this little gadget... Apart from somebody having already done what I wanted, this does it better because, give this the biggest SD card it can read and write, and it'll record everything you play, timestamped at starts and stops (stops after 3 seconds) for the rest of your life! Cool! I can ditch my MIDIcorder project, save up a few pennies (nearly 300000 australian "pennies", AU$293) and my scope is exceded. What this thing does is, when your piano, synth or, in my case, guitar synth is plugged in, it record...

I now have a redbubble store . I was wrong. There, I said it. I didn't want a Trisled Gizmo afterall, I wanted a Greenspeed GT20. You know, that "annoying" thing where, even before the bike shop have met you, they know what you actually want and they'll gently steer you to what's better suited to you? It's not even price or fit, it's not their brand, but another they carry. It's the machine-of-best-fit. Not in size fit, but fit for purpose. I'm buying a Greenspeed. Yesterday, I jumped on the VLine train to Morwell, in Victoria's Gippsland Basin, a sizable town in a lush (by Australian standards) pastoral paradise, busy with agribusiness and farming. It's also home to what is the home of Australia's next best known recumbent, Trisled, who also sell Greenspeed since Ian Sims passed and his family sold the business overseas, as well as the Terra Trike range. I set up a time with them to visit and test ride and, while Trisled's mach...