So I'm plotting bitrate of media files, as one does, and I see this fun graph! (#1)

Zooming in you can see it really spikes at 20m33s in... (#2)

Checking that part of the media file and I find... pure static! (#3) Cool seeing how the encoder decided to spend all those extra bits to capture static.

Interesting animation style in "Predator: Killer of Killers". Characters are animated at 12 fps, but the background is at 24fps.

In this example with a tblend visualization, you can see the background moving constantly, but the character only moving every other frame.

Whenever I see someone has a blurred out their house in Google Maps, I make a point of finding the same house in Apple Maps and staring at it extra hard. And looking up the SF assessor property records...

Taking the 2.5 day Amtrak sleeper train from SF to Chicago now! They don't have WiFi... so I'm running this free public service for my fellow passengers. (severely speed limit, but just enough for texting and basic comms)

LLM powered Home Assistant voice is pretty cool! But sometimes you run into funny problems like "I do not feel comfortable turning off the Chrome Anglepoise outlet without a valid reason to do so". (Claude obviously!)

You know when you open a media file in `mpv` and then accidentally delete it? Well it can be recovered! Nothing new here but was fun doing it myself: gist.github.com/varenc/49ba1...

(requires convincing the process with the open FD to copy the file... fortunately easy with mpv's lua scripting)

Securing the world by updating this README to avoid having woefully insecure and pwn-able advice: github.com/oxan/home-as... (I love that project btw, readme aside)

Kudos to the otherwise sketchy data broker, socialcatfish.com, for abiding by my CCPA request to give me my data, and then delete it! They gave me my data with Dropbox link, which gives feels like a personal touch. Also funny that they listed 'Asdasdasdo@gmail.com' as one of my emails...

This text, which links to a URL asking for my Blue Shield account password, is apparently *NOT* a phishing scam. Blue Shield literally texts you asking you to type your password into a non-official domain and you're just supposed to know it's not phishing.

The urine storage tank on the ISS, which streams metrics to the internet, is currently down to 6%! Lowest it's been in awhile. Those astronauts might need to drink more water.

metrics: iss-mimic.github.io/Mimic/

Use pISSStream to follow the ISS urine tank live: github.com/Jaennaet/pIS...

Figured out how to sort of get free internet on United flights!

$ curl -H 'Host: unitedwifi.com www.google.com' 'http://www.google.com/robots.txt'

Without paying for WiFi, this lets you make a real HTTP request to Google! Explanation to follow...

The Natural History Museum in NYC gives you a ticket as a QR code. The QR codes just encode a ticket order #, which is sequential... seems like I could generate some valid QR codes for someone else's predicted order #!

HELLO BLUESKY!! Time to actually try and use social media.

@amtrak.com Your on-train Wi-Fi network seems misconfigured. All clients can see each other and each other's broadcast traffic, leading to a broadcast packet storm. This can degrade performance, not due to high bitrate, but due to excessive airtime usage.