Slowly

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This is a fun experiment, but it’s not precisely the peaks and troughs of the actual waves themselves that you’re seeing, it’s the maximums and minimums of the amplitude from those waves interfering with their reflections. You see the interference pattern, not the waves.

They’ve used the exact same reasoning to excuse running down actual pedestrians on crosswalks.

Dark table corrects lens distortion based on the design of the actual lens, not the image itself. The grid it just to check in after the fact. I’m not aware of similar tools in GIMP. It’s trivial in Darktable though, as long as your lens is in the database.

Don’t use a fish-eye lens, it’s lense distortion will be the worst and most difficult to correct. Use a lens with a longer focal length, ideally a prime lens with a fixed focal length. If you maximize focal length and distance to your object as much as is feasible, you will have already flattened the image (minimized lens distortion) a lot. If you use a prime (fixed focal length) lens from a popular brand, Darktable can remove the remaining lens distortion.

You can remove all lens distortion by using a pinhole camera, which has no lens. But that’s probably going to be a tricky setup without an expert.

I also have strong opinions about Christmas lights.

Unfortunately, they do not perfectly align with Technology Connections. We agree is almost all respects: flickering is bad, purple is not a valid Christmas color, white lights should be warm and not bluish. I just can’t agree about this one thing though, I LOVE the super saturated colors of LEDs for the red, blue, and green lights. I care much less about the saturation of the yellow and/or orange lights.

VULFPECK /// Earworm

Glad I’m not the only one that noticed the odd bench. But I have another theory. It looks like a rotating device of some kind for the seat so that if the bench is wet from rain or covered in snow, one can rotate it to a dry side for a dry seat. I doubt the homeless, even the poor or lower classes, would have been allowed anywhere near such a garden as this anyway unless they were serving someone.

Every movie is a muppet movie waiting to happen.

“No Country for Old Men”, with the killer played by Sam the blue eagle.

“Brokeback Mountain”, with Kermit and Foxzie Bear playing the leads, no human roles.

Rowlf as the unexpected lead in “Lawrence of Arabia”, “Fistful of Dollars”, and “Fistful of Dollars”. In Lawrence of Arabia, only the other British soldiers are played by humans. In the Spaghetti Westerns, the only humans are the women.

“Smokey and the Bandit”, with Kermit as the Bandit, Rowlf as the trucker, the bride played by a real person, Miss Piggie as Smokey, and Fozzi Bear as the groom/deputy.

“The Blues Brothers”, starring Kermit and Fozzi as Elwood and Jake. All the other characters are Muppets, but the bands are played by real blues musicians.

“Brazil”: Kermit as Sam Lowry, Robert Dinero reprising his role as “human” Tuttle, Miss Piggy as Sam’s mother, and Jill Layton played by the only other human.

God what a naive and toxic attitude. This peak toxic troll thinking that has absolutely no place in any useful discourse. With all sincerity, you should really seek help. I really do pity you. This isn’t flattery. I’m not angry. I’m not celebrating you. I don’t care to hurt you. You’re just a sad fool and I hope you find a way to be better.

I guess the secondary directive of the Federation is to gatekeep having fun?

Animation isn’t for children by default. Only boring, unimaginative people talk that way about animated stories.

Star Trek has always had violence.

Star Trek has often had profanity. In another alien language sure, but we all knew which Klingon words were curses.

Does sophomoric humor graduate to senior humor when it’s subtle enough that you didn’t catch it as a child? Humor is SUPER subjective and VERY sensitive to the current zeitgeist, so comparing humor across a franchise that has been around this long seems a little absurd. Data pushed Crusher into the ocean for a laugh, that seems pretty sophomoric to me. Bones regularly joked about Spock’s racial differences, that also seems pretty crude by today’s standards.

I’m absolutely seeing more of them. They’re all relatively new stickers on newer and older cars. They’re all of about the same few designs. They’re actual bumper stickers, not magnets or signs hung with suction cups in a rear windows, so they’re basically permanent. Permanent student driver stickers just don’t make any sense for their supposed purpose. The stickers are going to last so much longer than it would normally take anyone to become a mostly proficient driver.

For real though, why are there so many people (who are obviously not new or student drivers) driving around with those stickers? They seem to drive around like that sticker is a license to act like a complete fool on the road and is almost entirely unlike the dumb things your average student driver will do.

They’re almost certainly talking about the TNG episode “Pen Pals” where data makes friends with a little girl whose planet is dying.

So you’re looking for validation, not an honest discussion. This whole thing just got more weird. You’re weird.

The Samsung gear watches all support Spotify offline playback. All the wearOS watches support as much local media playback as the hardware allows (I think), but managing that local library is pretty tedious and awful. Especially if like me you either listen through streaming services or streaming from a library of FLAC media on a NAS at home. With the Spotify app on my watch, I just select a playlist to be downloaded while I’m connected to WiFi and that’s it. It is not flawless though, sometimes the Spotify database or authentication gets fouled up and you’re unable to fix it until you return to WiFi. But I haven’t had many issues with it since Samsung switched away from their own bespoke watch OS to wearOS.

Most Americans could name at least one famous Waldo, Ralph Waldo Emerson. Okay maybe not most anymore, people are dumb, but if you said the name then the literate ones might know he was a poet. I don’t think I’ve ever met anyone named Wally or even heard of someone with the name, not even as a nickname.

For running, I got a smartwatch that can store some music locally, so I don’t need to be connected to listen. Still not perfect, kind of a hassle to use, and doesn’t always work perfectly. Almost miss those tiny iPod nanos. I feel like portable dedicated music players have gone backwards in features and usability with the rise in popularity of perpetually connected Internet devices and streaming services.

I don’t know how to say this delicately. It looks vaguely metaphorically vaginal.