Some of these Crown Research Institutes that are now to be merged into a few larger groups (Earth Science, BioEconomy, etc) have only just wrapped up their last round of (Government mandated, internal) restructuring. So I suspect the next financial year (July 2025 onwards) will be rather disrupted too 😬
https://www.rnz.co.nz/news/national/539736/crown-research-institutes-to-merge-into-three-mega-science-groups
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Interesting talk at #EO2025 by Rob Norris about a microvm wrapper — quiz — for testing Linux kernels with a ~1 second startup overhead. It’s mostly bash script helpers and some config helpers, to boot a minimal Debian, originally aimed at facilitating OpenZFS development testing.
(If you want a video, looks like a similar presentation at BSDCan 2024 has a recording on YouTube; link at end of GH README.)
[#]EverythingOpen
https://github.com/robn/quiz
https://despairlabs.com/presentations/quiz-25/
https://despairlabs.com/blog/posts/2024-03-04-quiz-rapid-openzfs-development/
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Suppose, not entirely hypothetically, that the settings page of your flash was erased and never rewritten (and thus contains all 1 bits). Which causes your firmware to misbehave, and restart a lot.
Further suppose, also not entirely hypothetically, that your flash is inconveniently in orbit.
Your mission: rewrite the settings in flash. Also there’s no telemetry command that lets you do that, if the page is already erased 😬
(1 hour #38c3 talk, Dec 2024)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KdTcd94pVlY
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The earlier appearance of Matt Davis on Mr Bill’s podcast (along with Anthony Bisset; episode 21 from February 2020) is another two hours of in depth discussion of speaker design and room design for audio. (But old enough to be audio only.)
Also discussed is Room EQ Wizard, which does room acoustic measurements (AFAICT is written in Java). It seems to be one of the analysis tools they use. (Gratis software, with a multi-mic-array support in paid pro version.)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5IF8wTLw9P4
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The “Reference Sessions” is what happens when a mastering engineer who optimises audio rooms gets interested in great live sound.
Mr Bill’s (~90 minute) interview of Matt Davis (said mastering engineering) about the audio optimisation behind the Reference Sessions parties is a deep dive into room and speaker response to audio frequencies. Including way down into deep “feel in your body” sub frequencies.
(The video includes many of the audio response plots discussed.)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gmPXDKDQ1ZQ
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Really interesting (~30 minute) TheGeoModels episode (released today) explaining the geology behind why Southern California (especially near LA) is so prone to wildfires.
TIL that air dropping off high mountains onto much lower plains gets compressed, warmed up, and dried out in the process… which is a particular problem if the air came from a large inland desert in the first place, and is already fairly dry.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7vGbgN7dIuU
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Excellent #38c3 talk (last month) on reverse engineering the radio interface of a TI RF microcontroller (that can do Bluetooth and various other protocols). They found both a MCE (ARM M0 core for modem control) and an RFE (custom 16-bit RISC core for real-time RF control), via a built in mechanism that effectively uploads new protocols to the radio side from the application core. (~40 minute talk, given December 2024)
https://media.ccc.de/v/38c3-beyond-ble-cracking-open-the-black-box-of-rf-microcontrollers#l=eng&t=0
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FTR this will also affect the secure booting of Linux, as (inexplicably) all the Linux distros agreed to let Microsoft be the signing authority for UEFI booting of Linux too. (Linux “shim” updates are signed with the Microsoft Third Party CA, it also expires in 2026.)
It looks like Microsoft are extremely keen that only Windows updated the UEFI keys (so they can predictively resign the bitlocker key). And there’s lots of “OEM must push Firmware” cases, so end of support devices may be… stuck.
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TIL that a bunch of the Microsoft UEFI CA certificates are expiring in 2026 (October I think; page 8 of PDF linked). They’ll be ~15 years old by then so I kinda understand why they’re expiring. But OTOH they’ve never expired before or been updated in firmware world wide at scale before, so… 😬🍿
(Via 38C3 talk on getting into Bitlocker drive on Windows Home via bootloader downgrade attack and PXE booting.)
https://uefi.org/sites/default/files/resources/Evolving%20the%20Secure%20Boot%20Ecosystem_Flick%20and%20Sutherland.pdf
https://media.ccc.de/v/38c3-windows-bitlocker-screwed-without-a-screwdriver
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Oh joy, the YouTube auto-dubbing feature is apparently generally available (for the type of videos I watch) as of a few days ago. Which presumably means many more videos are going to be infected with additional random audio channels 😔
So far the only work arounds I’ve found are (a) don’t AirPlay (ie play on local screen or via a cable to TV), or (b) screen mirroring of local screen (which usually messes up the aspect ratios). Both let you choose the audio channel.
https://techcrunch.com/2024/12/10/youtubes-new-auto-dubbing-feature-is-now-available-for-knowledge-focused-content/
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Really starting to dislike the thing where YouTube seems to (auto generate?) audio on videos in additional languages, and somehow ends up with the non-original foreign language being the default audio language.
This sucks with AirPlay playback which AFAICT will only play back the 0th audio track: okay when that’s the original audio, but frustrating when it’s some random auto-translation (usually French or Italian as best I can tell).
The original language should be the 0th audio track 🤦🏻♂️
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“Lowdown Dirty Criminals” is a (~90 minute) surprisingly fun Kiwi take on a “Lock, Stock, and Two Smoking Barrels” style criminal caper revolving around two newbies who want to make it big but really aren’t cut out for this criming lark. (From 2022, available for streaming on TVNZ+ at present; CW: violence, sometimes over the top graphic gangster violence.)
https://www.tvnz.co.nz/shows/lowdown-dirty-criminals
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Interesting talk on eInk display technology (especially developing a custom fast refresh driver) from Hackaday Supercon 2024 (live streamed this past weekend).
Full frame eInk updates are inherently slow (due to moving particles through an oil suspension), but with careful planning a lot of that latency can be hidden by overlapping updates in different parts of the screen.
(~35 minute talk plus ~10 minutes of questions)
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=okjJURIejIY
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TIL that “Broadcom” have moved the Saltstack package repos, in a breaking change, on a few days notice, last week. AFAICT announced 2024-10-28, actioned by 2024-10-31, and only way I found out it was “could not resolve” the old repo domain name and searching for why.
As someone said in the Reddit discussion, this is… a very “Broadcom” thing to do :-/
(“Broadcom” acquired Saltstack in, I think, their VMware acquisition. I suspect it’ll just get worse 😢)
https://saltproject.io/blog/salt-project-package-repo-migration-and-guidance/
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Digging back further 2025-12-31 is the third date OneNZ has given for turning off 3G (and simultaneously 2G too 😮). I suspect “end of 2025” will stick since it now seems to be an “industry wide” date in Aotearoa.
Other than non-phone devices, the other fun seems likely to be older phones which will do VoLTE on their home network but not do VoLTE while roaming. Mostly those seem to be older devices (eg iPhone 8 kind of age, which is a 7 year old model) that only do VoLTE on their home network.
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The (Aotearoa) Telecommunications Forum page seems to confirm “late 2025” to turn off 3G support across all major networks (OneNZ, Spark, 2Degrees). With OneNZ explicitly saying 2025-12-31 (which I doubt will be off as the new year strikes 😃)
So far Aotearoa seems to be saying “need a 4G capable device to make emergency calls [after 2025]”, which implies it’s up to the owner to assess (not the telco). But who knows what fun lies 12-14 months ahead 🤔
https://www.tcf.org.nz/digital-living/consumer-info-hub/understanding-the-3g-shutdown
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Since Australia’s (mobile) 3G switch off has turned into chaos (thanks to a last minute decision to block all phones the telcos couldn’t prove would definitely make VoLTE emergency calls), I had a look into what’s planned in Aotearoa.
Looks like we have an extra year here (around end of 2025). And at least OneNZ have detailed tables of which phones will do VoLTE (ie voice over 4G data) on the home network, and if they’ll do it while roaming too.
https://one.nz/3g-switchoff/
https://one.nz/our-networks/volte/#voltecapable
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“If during the next twelve months any one of you says ‘but we’ve always done it that way’, I will instantly materialise beside you, and I will haunt you for 24 hours. And see if I can get you to think again.”
— Captain Grace Hopper, in 1982
(2 x 45-50 minute videos, released by the NSA a couple of weeks ago, of a delightful lecture from 1982. The quote above is about 25 minutes into the first video.)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=si9iqF5uTFk
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AW7ZHpKuqZg
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As I’d guessed the air con at #KiwiPyCon, at least in the main (“Plenary”) room, can’t quite keep up with the necessary air turnover to be safe with a large group without two way masking.
Over the 70 minute period this morning (welcome plus keynote) the CO2 levels in the 85% full room grew from about 560ppm to 1002ppm. (20 minutes later, just after the morning tea break it was still at about 700ppm, half full, for the next talk.)
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Day one of #KiwiPyCon seems to have achieved their Covid-safe goals: CO2 levels by me (measured with my Aranet4) stayed under 900ppm in the sessions I was in (typically 650-850ppm). And most people wore reasonable/good masks all the time (with everyone wearing masks most of the time).
Good enough I’m willing to go back tomorrow 💚
(I entirely skipped the “indoor dining in the centre room of the building” and the “everyone in one room” portions of today though.)
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