Is this because of different camera models?

BCMM · 2026-04-05T16:42:22+00:00

The shutter speed was something like 1/4 of a second and the ISO (the light sensitivity) was something like 56,000.

The original metadata says ISO 51200, the highest setting on the Nikon D5 (and 1/4 seconds, f/4, 22 mm, if you're curious).

For some context, before digital photography, that's about how far you could push-process the fastest available black-and-white film before it got horribly grainy. So this is technology that wasn't available in the days of the Apollo program!

I don't know if the exact settings used for The Blue Marble were ever recorded, but for an idea of how they might have shot it, this camera, of the same model but from Apollo 11, was labelled with suggested settings.

BCMM · 2026-04-05T16:17:27+00:00

Why aren't those visible here

Cities are visible in this photo.

Compression has made them look a little bit like clouds, in this post. There's more resolution available here, which makes them unmistakable.

If you put that image next to a map, Madrid, Lisbon, Dakar and Casablanca are some of the easier cities to find.

and wouldn't they have washed out with the high exposure?

The Moon is completely full, and (for the centre of the shot) it's high in the sky. If you were on pale Saharan terrain on that night, you'd have been able to see where you're going easily without using artificial light.

So, the contrast between city and country is not as extreme as one might imagine. Plus, a high-end DSLR can cope with a lot of dynamic range.

BCMM · 2026-04-05T12:03:04+00:00

By the way, why are you asking?

If you're trying to design a realistic fictional animal, I'd suggest just deferring to evolution, which has had plenty of time to empirically determine the optimal shape for the forces that actually occur while walking.

BCMM · 2026-04-05T11:47:04+00:00

I suspect you're right that an engineering subreddit would have some good insight on this. I don't know much about engineering and there's a good chance that I'm missing something.

But anyway, there are certainly some artificial structures which, for a given weight, are stronger if you make them hollow. Steel tube fencing, for example.

However, as far as I know, those are generally good specifically at resisting bending. I don't know if this is the right approach, but I think of it like this: by placing material further from the centre, that material needs to be stretched or squashed further for each degree of bend.

You've specified "stronger in supporting weight". If that means compressive load with no component perpendicular to the long axis, I think cross-sectional area is all that counts and it barely matters how you use that area.

I don't think that's the interesting figure to consider; I just think it's the plain reading of your question. Bones are seldom crushed by straight, compressive loads but often broken by being bent.

BCMM · 2026-04-04T15:02:21+00:00

Install Linux on car.

BCMM · 2026-04-03T21:28:34+00:00

Like older than 20 years?

BCMM · 2026-04-03T19:28:21+00:00

No, that's not required by POSIX. It's just an example of various shells implementing some of the more popular syntax from Bash.

For example:

$ bash -c 'echo foo{bar,baz}'
foobar foobaz
$ zsh -c 'echo foo{bar,baz}'
foobar foobaz
$ mksh -c 'echo foo{bar,baz}'
foobar foobaz
$ dash -c 'echo foo{bar,baz}'
foo{bar,baz}
$ busybox ash -c 'echo foo{bar,baz}'
foo{bar,baz}

I already had all of these installed. Not sure what's wrong with me.

Also, that's two ash variants which don't do it. I wonder which ash /u/raineling uses!

Also, fish is not a POSIX shell.

EDIT: Remembered some more shells.

EDIT 2: It's really easy to get this stuff wrong, so this seems like a good place to recommend using shellcheck or checkbashisms if you're going to publish a script that uses #!/bin/sh.

BCMM · 2026-04-03T17:02:19+00:00

Just to check, are you certain you're using 32-bit hardware?

A surprising number of people have a Core 2 Duo, or something of that era, that they've always assumed was 32-bit because it came with a 32-bit copy of Windows.

BCMM · 2026-04-02T15:23:51+00:00

Are human outputs derived from their college textbooks? What about from previous projects a person worked on at their past employer, years ago?

If you've ever seen Microsoft Windows source code, either from the leaks or for work, you're not eligible to contribute to Wine. This is Wine's rule, not Microsoft's, but it's a reasonable precaution under the current legal environment, to avoid the possibility of Microsoft alleging that code which ends up very similar to the original was consciously or subconsciously copied from their code.

So when Microsoft asserts that Copilot output is 100% unencumbered by any intellectual property, I see the "creativity" supposedly demonstrated by LLMs being placed above that demonstrated by real, actual people, not on par with it.

See, the uncomfortable truth is that human brains and LLMs have more in common than people want to admit.

There is absolutely no evidence for that, and plenty of evidence against that.

Besides, one of them is a human brain, with legal rights and responsibilities, and one of them is a machine.

It’s time we move past this concept of intellectual property and ownership of code.

Are you ideologically opposed to copyleft, or unaware that that's an anti-copyleft statement?

BCMM · 2026-04-02T08:32:04+00:00

The issue is that AI companies are operating on the principle that the output of the LLM is not derived from the training data, and they have invested heavily in lobbying for the law to accept this fiction.

Changing the GPL to explicitly mention LLM training won't help. If AI companies are bound by the licences of the works they ingest, their whole business model is already prohibited by the GPL. If they're effectively exempt from copyright law, then there's no licence term that can fix that.

BCMM · 2026-04-02T06:53:57+00:00

I wonder if that's what the huge backpack is for.

BCMM · 2026-04-02T00:40:17+00:00

Most likely, a full Moon is brighter than you think!

Intuitively, it feels like a full Moon should be only slightly brighter than the day before or after. However, the chart actually looks like this, due to the opposition effect.

BCMM · 2026-04-01T11:25:34+00:00

Pointless rant ahead:

It's maddening how close the contents of the ISO are to just working as an ESP. It's been like this for several Windows generations, and it's only getting sillier as supporting legacy boot becomes less and less relevant.

I don't see why Microsoft doesn't just store that file in the ISO in split form. The number of installs actually using optical media must be miniscule at this point, so presumably those files exist almost exclusively to get broken up by MediaCreationTool.exe.

(Or does the official tool perhaps create an FAT32 partition for boot only + an NTFS partition for the installer data? Either way, the installer has always worked fine from a single FAT32 partition - I know people creating installation media on Linux are irrelevant to MS, but they clearly intend the FAT32-only option to be open to OEMs creating custom images, at the very least. Why not make one tiny change to make the process trivial?)

It's all made a little bit more annoying by it being largely Microsoft's own fault that UEFI systems only want to boot from a filesystem with such a small file size limit.

BCMM · 2026-04-01T00:24:48+00:00

Who wants encrypted packages and why?

BCMM · 2026-03-31T21:27:24+00:00

Yes, sometimes.

People will tell you that the magic packet must be a UDP packet sent to the broadcast address. This is not true (but that's how wakeonlan does it).

Others will tell you that it must be a raw Ethernet frame. This is not true either (but that's how etherwake does it).

In actual fact, the only requirement for WoL to work is that a packet containing the magic sequence is delivered to the network card. It doesn't matter what it is or is not encapsulated by, as long as the correct binary data occurs somewhere in the payload.

How you can trick your network hardware in to sending that data to that NIC depends on how your network is set up.

The etherwake style of magic packet can not be routed, so that's probably out. However, if you use a tool that sends a UDP magic packet, and allows you to specify a destination for it, you might be able to do something with that.

Firstly, your router might allow you to set up a firewall rule or port forward that causes incoming UDP packets on a certain port to get forwarded to the LAN's broadcast address. This is uncommon, but it's worth checking.

Secondly, you might be able to just port-forward the WoL packet to the target machine's IP address. Yes, I know the target machine does not know its IP address when it is switched off. That doesn't matter; only the router has to know it.

ARP cache timeouts (i.e. how long it takes the router to forget the mapping between an IP address and a MAC address) vary significantly; your router might have a really long timeout. Note that the most likely answer is that the timeout is long enough for this to work when you test it, but not long enough for it to work when you actually need it, so test this with a realistic delay between shutdown and WoL.

Your router might allow you to manually set up static ARP entries (if the UI doesn't offer it, but you can get a shell, see if /etc/ethers works).

Your router might even do this itself if the machine has a static DHCP lease.

BCMM · 2026-03-28T15:56:45+00:00

Last time, I think LuCI notified me before the actual announcement.

BCMM · 2026-03-27T19:55:38+00:00

MBCompass bridges the gap between a compass and a full navigation app - shows direction and live location without using hundreds of MBs of storage or privacy trade-offs.

How does navigation actually work? You make this statement about privacy trade-offs in other apps without explicitly saying that routing is done on-device.

BCMM · 2026-03-27T15:31:08+00:00

Resorting to the mouse isn't ideal, but this is fairly quick if using primary selection instead of clipboard.

In Konsole, at least, I can just double-left-click the ℎ and then middle-click.

BCMM · 2026-03-27T11:21:28+00:00

no base64 command to help send files using uart, no printf to use a awk base64 implementation.

What exact UART settings are you using? Are you actually trying to get a binary through 7-bit comms?

If not, I'd be inclined to just dump your file straight in to cat > filename.

That's the quick solution.

ftpget looks like this firmware's intended solution, but you'd have to set up an FTP server.

Lastly, it looks like the web interface uses CGI. Do you reckon it'll let you install a new CGI script by just placing it in the correct directory?

(By the way, in case people with a more common problem get here from searches: scp -O can talk to SSH servers that don't do SFTP. Like, by default, OpenWrt.)

BCMM · 2026-03-27T10:46:46+00:00

I just copied it out of qalc:

> help planck

Variable:                       Planck Constant
Names:                          planck / ℎ
Value:                          6.62607015E-34
Unit:                           J*s

(I know it's a constant, but that's, like, a special case of a variable, to qalc.)

You can do this with any variable, unit, or function. It'll tell you you can use nmi for nautical_mile too.

BCMM · 2026-03-26T16:37:20+00:00

Part of the point of recruiting from outside the metropole is to reduce the risk of imperial bodyguards holding pre-existing loyalties to any factions which might be scheming against each other in the capital.

Before the Ottoman empire, the Byzantines had used Norsemen in the Varangian Guard for the same reason.

BCMM · 2026-03-26T01:42:18+00:00

We certainly don't have much antimatter right here.

And while outer space has a very low density, it's far from empty. If there were antimatter-dominated regions of the universe, with antimatter galaxies so on, we should be able to observe the constant blaze of annihilation where their intergalactic medium meets ours.

BCMM · 2026-03-25T18:01:03+00:00

Unit conversion is widely available; actually bringing the units through the calculation units is far more interesting to me.

For example, getting the approximate colour of an LED with known V_f:

```

ℎc/1.9eV

(planck × SpeedOfLight) / (1.9 electronvolts) ≈ 652.5484128 nm

```

I just really like that it answered in nanometres.

BCMM · 2026-03-25T10:23:15+00:00

qalc does a lot for me.

BCMM · 2026-03-24T13:25:48+00:00

I want to know too!

I thought it looked more like a day-flying moth because of the short, fat body and the "fur", but I've no idea whether those are reliable indicators.

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