Allen Very Serious Versfeld

https://mastodon.monoceros.co.za/@uastronomer

Urban Astronomer Podcaster
Director at Monoceros Digital Consulting
AWS gun for hire, Linux/Unix consultant
We do managed Mastodon hosting - ask me!

He/him (Linux)
He\him (Windows)

Sometimes I write articles for universetoday.com

Lapsed #astronomer, exhausted #dad, small business owner, reader of books, player of #games, wrestler of #python, #admin of systems, will help you do stuff on #AWS.

#SouthAfrica

Space stuff: https://www.urban-astronomer.com
Work Stuff: https://www.monoceros.co.za
Age: Middle
Chocolate: Is life

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Published at

2024-08-29T20:36:12Z

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Last Notes

2024-09-02 07:11:09

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Okay this is interesting. Starlink should be pretty easy to block - park a signal jammer near a base station and it should be trivial to remove it (and all starlink customers using it) from the network.

2024-08-30 11:05:22

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So it seems like the streaming companies aren't even the primary villains here. It's the labels, like it's always been?

2024-08-30 10:28:08

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I saw a Rick Beato video once where he tried to actually do the maths to figure out what artists actually get from streaming services, and found it extremely difficult because the rates are so variable depending on all sorts of factors like how many people share the copyright to a song, what the licensing regimes are in different territories, and so on.
His conclusion surprised me - if i understood it correctly it turned out to be approximately the same as with the old model.
See, you obviously can' compare rates because streamin pays for each time a song gets played, but you can never know how many plays come out of any given CD sale, or how many people happened to be listening to a single play on the radio. But you can look at how much money big artists are depositing into their bank accounts, and this was what appeared to be much the same as it was before.
But... I'm not sure I understood it correctly, and his analysis was on big hits not small artists and his point wasn't actually anything to do with streaming vs sales but rather how opaque streaming deals are
Anyway, video here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pY15RzKZeJ0

2024-07-08 17:27:17

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Mmm. I live in a home built to South African standards, which essentially boil down to "WE ARE A HOT COUNTRY WINTER ISN'T REAL IT COSTS TOO MUCH TO MAKE WINDOWS CLOSE PROPERLY I'M NOT LISTENING LALALALALA"
I'm pretty sure we have a colder experience of winter despite objectively being much warmer than most countries simply because we let it inside our homes.

2024-07-08 16:48:56

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Wow.
currently 5ºC here, I'm wearing multiple layers in the hot room (where we keep the inverter and all the computers) and wishing I had a blanket 🥶

2024-07-02 12:38:23

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Oh I'm sure it's doable - build a sensitive enough receiver with the right antenna and you can do amazing things. But can you take that equipment out of the laboratory and miniaturize it enough to be able to use it in public at a till without attracting suspicion? If it was 50 meters then you could hide it in your car in the parking lot, but 2 meters is close enough that you need to disguise it as a phone or something.

2024-06-25 08:51:36

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Oh, another memory: I once solved tic-tac-toe (We called it 'Noughts and Crosses') in the same way. It turns out that there are only a very few number of actual possible games, once you realise how many positions are just rotations of each other.

2024-06-25 08:30:26

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Oh, I just remembered wondering what would happen with 3 dice, instead of 2. I repeated the random trial, which obvs took much longer. I can't remember if I figured out how to chart the range of possible combinations, though, or what my conclusions were.

2024-06-25 08:15:18

As a school kid, I always had some dice with me. Just loved them. It was handy for a quick bit of ttrpg, but really I just loved the dice themselves.
And one day I noticed how many games involved 2 D6s, but how seldom you ever got a 2 or a 12, while 7s came up all the time. And also? NEVER a 1. So I got thinking.
The mystery of the 1 lasted a few seconds, I'm sure. It's pretty obvious. But the rest?
So I started rolling dice behind my books in the back of the class, again and again, and drawing a little histogram of the results. Sure enough, 7 was the most common, followed by 6 and 8, and so on down to 2 and 12 being very rare. Woah! But why?!
I had a clue: There was more than one way to get the various answers: You could get 6 by rolling 1+5, 2+4, 3+3, 4+3 and 5+1. But there was only one combination each that gave 2 and 12.
So I drew a little grid, similar to how we used to draw out our times tables: 1 2 3 4 5 6 on the horizontal, and the same on the vertical, to map out every possible combination of ways the dice could land. And then I drew another histogram of the frequencies of the different results in that table. It was the same shape as my random trial!
Obviously I didn't have the vocabulary for what I was doing that I do now. I hadn't even heard the word "Histogram" before (we just called them bar graphs because what's the difference!). But I'm still pretty proud of teenaged me for getting so much learning out of a boring maths lesson.

2024-06-20 12:54:28

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Hey, I had a similar experience with a Takealot vendor (Mine was a device that failed under warranty, they kept sending it back as "Tested, Fixed" when it was clear they hadn't even opened the packaging.)
I eventually went public on social media, and that's when I learned that Takealot's social media team have a LOT more clout than their actual support team. They sent a courier to collect it one last time then gave me a full refund so I could buy an equivalent new unit (from another supplier!). Weeks later, the support team called to let me know that the supplier was insisting that I was lying and would I like to continue with my case 🤣

2024-06-16 07:28:08

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huh. Oops!
This is the price i pay for trying not to give that guy my attention 😋

2024-06-16 07:10:31

So weird question that i haven't seen anybody ask yet, apologies if they have, but how on earth does Elon expect Twitter to come up with that much money? Didn't he drive their value down to 4 billion or something?

2024-06-08 13:18:21

I wrote a thing
https://www.universetoday.com/167300/where-did-venuss-water-go/

2024-06-04 07:42:25

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I recall reading somewhere that she deeply resented the implication that she was dirty. Took it as a slur on her class and her ethnicity.
Which, yeah, was absolutely plausible, if not for the ever-growing pile of bodies she left behind her :(

2024-05-25 06:25:04

Hi! Just checking in to see if Threads has embrace extend extinguished the fediverse yet?
All your Mastodon servers coping with the sudden crushing load of all that threads traffic?
Vulnerable accounts managing to stave off the promised flood of abuse and stalking and doxing and privacy violations?
It's been a while now and I'm worried that nobody's talking about this anymore, just making sure you're all still here?

2024-05-10 09:29:03

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xkcd-protocols.gif

2024-05-09 09:52:35

I have a birthday coming up and all I can think of is how I've left it too late to have a mid-life crisis.
No sports car. No mistress. No sudden interest in extreme sports. What a waste :(

2024-04-15 07:01:22

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I'll definitely look that up, thank you! I don't panic when it happens, since I'm in my 40s and I kinda feel like if it was going to kill me, it would've done so by now, but it's still unpleasant and a little worrying.

2024-04-15 06:41:21

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Hmm. Mine happens seldom enough that I probably wouldn't catch it.
Still, thanks for the info!

2024-04-15 06:06:12

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This sounds more like me. What does SVT stand for?