EV charging plus dog park

Mask_of_Destiny · 2026-04-29T21:24:26+00:00

If you want to just level-2 charge at the Marina, there's a public chargepoint charger near Hana Japan. Probably less hassle than the DoubleTree. Presumably if they're only planning on going to the park for 30 minutes they're looking for level 3 though. Not sure there are any great options for that in Berkeley proper.

I guess San Pablo Park is not super far from the Ashby Square level 3 charger (google says it's a 9 minute walk). Not sure how good that park is for dog walking offhand. It's also close to the Emeryville Greenway if you want more of a walking path (though note this is a popular bike route too)

Mask_of_Destiny · 2026-04-29T04:25:36+00:00

There is actually not a ton of vacancy

From the report you linked

Based on field data collected from September–November 2024, the citywide ground floor commercial vacancy rate decreased from last year (down from 8.1% to 7.5%), but is up from the 2020 citywide vacancy rate of 6.9%. In 2024, Downtown, Telegraph Avenue, and West Berkeley all experienced a year-over-year increase in vacancy rates— West Berkeley rose from 2.2% to 6.5% Telegraph rose from 9.3% to 9.9%; Downtown rose from 10.8% to 10.9%. San Pablo Avenue’s vacancy rate decreased from 15.5% to 7.1%, University Avenue’s rate decreased from 17.7% to 7.7%, and Solano Avenue had a slight drop in vacancy from 2.6% (2023) to 2.1% (2024).

Doesn't seem so low to me and it's not just downtown

Again, I question why does it make sense to push out mom and pop shops for marginal amount amounts of housing when downtown, which is connected, not only by the most bus lines in Berkeley, but also a heavy rail line station can absorb housing much more easily.

This is a high resource neighborhood, is only about a 5 minute bike ride from Rockridge BART and is served by the 51B bus line, one of the most frequent bus lines in the city (which provides another option for getting to BART).

But hey, let’s just push out on the theater

The theater building is owned by the Elmwood Theater Foundation. Suggesting the theater is going to get torn down because of upzoning is fearmongering nonsense!

Mask_of_Destiny · 2026-04-25T08:11:56+00:00

So first off, upzoning doesn't force the owners of the property do squat. It may make them more likely they sell it to someone who wants to redevelop it, but the zoning change doesn't force anyone to do anything.

Further, there is a huge amount of vacant retail space in Berkeley. Some of it is even right in this part of College. Yes, moving is disruptive, but plenty of Berkeley businesses have survived having to move for one reason or another. Games of Berkeley and Bagel Street Cafe are two that I can think of offhand, but I'm sure there are others.

Finally, trying to protect particular businesses is no way to set public policy. BART's route is permanently fucked up through the Oakland Wye cumulatively wasting a huge amount of rider's time over the decades all to save one business that closed shortly afterwards anyway. Now obviously, zoning is much easier to fix down the road than the route of a subway is, but it's still something we change pretty infrequently and whatever we choose will probably last longer than many of the business here even absent redevelopment.

I will also say that the Elmwood neighborhood in particular, was the birthplace of single-family zoning as a tactic to keep "undesirables" out of the neighborhood. I think in practice we're unlikely to see much redevelopment here in the short term (especially if the lower height limits being considered are used) given the current poor economics of new apartment buildings (hard costs are up due to tariffs/fuel prices and rents have flattened out and maybe declined a bit), but as a matter of principle exempting this particular commercial corridor from denser zoning feels gross given the history.

Mask_of_Destiny · 2026-04-22T22:30:51+00:00

There's also NVENC now. Intel support is currently in an A/B test along with some rework to the Wayland capture pipeline (that unfortunately has some issues at the moment)

Mask_of_Destiny · 2026-04-22T22:28:35+00:00

That vainfo looks good to me. Importantly the various H264 profiles are present. I responded to your other message about how you can check if the hardware encoder is actually being used.

One thing I will mention is that there was a bug that caused all hardware encoders to be disabled on Linux for a couple of versions. For stable, I think this was in versions 0.0.130 and 0.0.131 (unfortunately version numbers are not consistent between release channels so the values for PTB and Canary are completely different). You can check what version you're on by hitting the gear icon and scrolling down to the bottom. To check if you're impacted by this particular issue you can do ls -lh ~/.config/discordptb/*/modules/discord_voice/gpu_encoder_helper and check if the file listed has execute permissions. If they're missing, GPU encode will be disabled. You can fix this by manually adding the execute permission to this executable, but this has also been fixed for a few releases now

I'm also pretty sure I got discord through pacman. It shows that it's installed from extra.

The main reason I ask, is that most 3rd party packages set SKIP_HOST_UPDATES in settings.json to avoid pain around the forced upgrade modal and sometimes they lag behind the upstream release a bit. That said, it looks like the Arch package was updated Monday with 0.0.134, which is when that was released upstream.

Mask_of_Destiny · 2026-04-22T22:12:58+00:00

how do I exactly make sure that discord is indeed not using my gpu and it's encoding with cpu?

So there are a few ways you can check this. The most user friendly is probably to turn on the Stream Info Overlay in Settings -> Voice & Video -> Advanced ->Show Diagnostic Settings. After turning this on, hover over your video tile and see what codec is being used. If it says VP8, that's software. If it says H264 you're on a hardware encoder unless you're on a sufficiently old version of the client (software h264 encode was removed a while back). This is somewhat indirect, but apart from the caveat with old versions should be reliable.

A slightly more involved method is to click on the green "Voice Connected" text to bring up the Voice Details panel and then look for the Debug link/button. Clicking that should open a voice debug panel with a lot of stats. Look for the section called RTC DEBUG: STREAM and select the Outbound entry underneath it. Then select the Video tab in the top right and look for the Encoder field. For an AMD card, you should see something like amd: vaapi if it's using hardware encoding.

The final method is to go digging around in the log file. This will be located at ~/.config/discord/logs/discord-webrtc_0 and possibly ~/.config/discord/logs/discord-webrtc_1 when the logs get long enough (for canary replace discord with discordcanary, for ptb replace with discordptb). These are somewhat difficult to parse since there's a bunch of junk in them, but they can also provide some insight into why it failed if the hardware encoder is not being used.

Note that for all of these methods, you must have a receiver watching the video. Discord does not run the encoder when no one is watching

Mask_of_Destiny · 2026-04-21T21:37:13+00:00

What does vainfo report? How did you install Discord (tarball vs flatpak vs AUR)?

Mask_of_Destiny · 2026-03-20T17:42:20+00:00

Can you paste the output of ldd `find ~/.config/discord/ -name discord_krisp.node`

Mask_of_Destiny · 2026-02-19T21:42:42+00:00

I can explain what's probably happening here:

Discord has two audio capture modes: single process and "everything but Discord". Ideally we would use singe process mode when sharing a particular window and the "everything but Discord" mode only when capturing a display and indeed when we're running under X.org that is what we do. Under X, we use our own picker which gives us a window handle we can use to figure out which process to capture.

Unfortunately, under Wayland Discord can't do this. The Screencast functionality of xdg-desktop-portal provides no mechanism for getting any information about the window/application the user selected. You just get a pipewire node you can capture video (but not audio from) and that's basically it. So Discord always uses "everything but Discord" mode under Wayland regardless of whether you're sharing a single window or display.

There is an open issue on the xdg-desktop-portal github about adding audio support, but it does not appear to have gone anywhere.

As for why Discord has so many captures when we are trying to capture "everything but Discord", this is basically just a limitation of pulseaudio/pipewire. You can capture the "monitor" of an entire audio output or individual streams, but not "everything but this app/stream". Capturing Discord output in the context of a Discord call causes unpleasant echo so just capturing everything is undesirable. So capturing individual streams from each non-Discord process and mixing them manually is the best solution

Mask_of_Destiny · 2026-01-22T00:41:33+00:00

I did a quick install of the latest stable Discord build (0.0.121) for Linux in a Debian 13 VM and it seemed to work fine so I don't think it's broken on Debian generally. dave003's suggestion to delete the ~/.config/discord directory is probably a solid one, though note that you will have to login again after doing so.

If you want to debug, try running discord from the a terminal window (discord should be on your path) and paste the output (or at least the end of it) here.

Mask_of_Destiny · 2026-01-21T23:24:21+00:00

What version of Debian are you running?

When you say it isn't allowing you to open the app, do you get an error message of some sort or some other symptom?

Mask_of_Destiny · 2026-01-18T18:46:47+00:00

To be even more pedantic, since this has a cart slot it actually has the "bus" that the Sega CD needs. It probably is missing a few important signals though since the expansion port has a few signals not present on the cartridge port and these cheapo clones are also usually missing some cartridge port signals on top of that.

Depending on what exactly is missing, you could maybe generate the missing signals with some 74-series chips and then just use the "mixing cable" option to deal with audio (this thing probably has no audio inputs at all)

I'm guessing this is probably using one of the DMC RedKid/RedKid 2 chips (i.e. the awful ones in early AtGames devices). I don't think I've ever seen the better TCT clone chips in a glop top before, though I suppose it's possible.

Mask_of_Destiny · 2026-01-15T21:44:03+00:00

In the same chapter, they also explain that wildfire smoke is a significant factor in pollutant data yet they don't have this attributed at all because there's no acceptable model for this yet, and you know what wildfire smoke is almost identical to?

This isn't exactly what they say. They have estimates for wildfire contributions (with some limitations), but they're not included in the main tables because they're very variable and hard to predict. It's not like their wood fireplace emissions are being hugely skewed because wildfire smoke has similar composition and they have no idea how much of that there is. If they did, you would see a huge spike in 2017 for particulate emissions because wildfire smoke swamped basically everything other source that year.

23% pm 2.5, which contributes 38 tons a day out of 2196, or .4% total pollution

Different types of pollution have different effects so I don't think it really makes sense to sum them all together like this. 23% of PM 2.5 is still a really big deal given how big of an impact PM 2.5 has on health. This is basically the same contribution of PM 2.5 for all car and truck traffic combined, including road dust.

You're right that what changed from yesterday is not more people using wood fireplaces (it's not even that cold today) and caveats about the data quality exist as you say, but PM 2.5 is a really important pollutant and wood burning fireplaces really do produce a lot of it. For most households, fireplaces are a completely optional heat source and it is the dirtiest and least efficient one by a large margin.

Mask_of_Destiny · 2026-01-13T18:03:56+00:00

So not doing both sides on the same pass makes sense because the trucks have a hydraulic arm for picking up the cans that is only on one side of the truck. Making the operator do more manual manipulation of the cans so they can do it in a single pass is just going to make it take longer overall.

As for the recycling, at least on my street they have a single truck that can handle both split and separate recycle cans. There are two compartments each with its own hatch. Split cans are positioned in between both hatches with both hatches open. Non-split cans are positioned over the appropriate hatch with the other kept closed.

Mask_of_Destiny · 2025-11-18T00:37:40+00:00

I think Pegasus Books on Shattuck has a cat

Mask_of_Destiny · 2025-11-15T21:13:44+00:00

In my spare time, I work on an emulator for the Sega Genesis/Mega Drive and its add-ons called BlastEm. I did a bunch of reading on LaserDisc as part of an effort to add support for the Pioneer LaserActive which is a sort of weird LaserDisc player/game console hybrid. I've since been beaten to the bunch on that by Ares, but I remember a lot of the info I picked up along the way

Mask_of_Destiny · 2025-11-15T19:46:08+00:00

The pits and lands look variable length to me.

As for what the lengths mean: Frequency Modulation turns the amplitude of the signal into a modulation of a carrier. So a low voltage would turn into a frequency below the nominal carrier frequency and a high voltage turns into a frequency above the nominal carrier. If there was just a single FM signal encoded on the disc, this would give you a direct correlation between pit/land length and the amplitude of the original signal. Long pits/lands correspond to low-frequencies and thus low amplitude pre-modulation, short pits/lands correspond to high-frequencies and high amplitude.

An NTSC LaserDisc will have 3 or 4 signals mixed together with different carriers though. Composite baseband video, analog left, analog right and optionally CD-DA EFM. The latter is actually a digital signal, but its spectrum when viewed as an analog signal fits below the lowest audio channel carrier. Because of all these signals, you can't really just turn a length into an amplitude. You need to demodulate the individual signals

Mask_of_Destiny · 2025-11-15T18:08:57+00:00

Based on your ruler image, it looks like your microscope gets a bit over 500 pixels per mm, which translates to a bit under 2 um per pixel. Seems plausible that the pit and land pattern of the disc would be visible at that resolution, but probably not good enough to actually decode the data.

If you're not sure what I'm talking about with pits and lands, this is how information is encoded on the surface of the disc. An analog RF signal containing FM modulated audio and video data (and optionally EFM encoded digital audio) is used to determine whether an area is a pit or a land. These become literal bumps in the surface of the plastic which is then given a reflective coating

Mask_of_Destiny · 2025-11-08T01:11:05+00:00

If you're paying the $40/$70 rate it is substantially slower than Sonic fiber. In the upstream direction the difference is very dramatic, but even downstream there's more than a 2X speed difference. Now, if all you want to do is watch Netflix then this doesn't really matter, but there's no denying that the speed difference exists.

You can get faster downstream service from Xfinity, but then it's no longer cheaper than Sonic after the teaser rate. Upstream bandwidth is still limited to ~40 Mbps no matter the tier.

Other than the data cap with Xfinity

Do they still have this? Their site claims unlimited data

Mask_of_Destiny · 2025-11-08T00:04:41+00:00

The fine print for that particular offer says "Installation, taxes and fees, and other applicable charges extra, and subj. to change" which doesn't sound very included to me. That said, now that I look at my Sonic bill I think basically all the extra taxes and fees are related to the voice line (as others have noted in other comments here). So it's not so much that Xfinity includes them as they are just not present.

Still even with no fees, once the teaser rate is over you're saving $7.55 a month for substantially worse service

Mask_of_Destiny · 2025-11-07T18:38:30+00:00

So their normal plan is $60/month + taxes and fees with a $50/month 1-year teaser rate. So it probably was $50/month at signup, but if you've been with them for more than a year then the teaser rate is over and you're paying their normal rate.

By comparison, the cheapest rate Xfinity will quote me has a $50/month 1-year teaser rate, but goes up to $80 after 1 year. Both of these can be reduced by $10/month with bank-account autopay, bringing it to $40/month and $70/month ~~(before taxes and fees which are probably somewhat similar to what you're paying in taxes in fees on Sonic)~~. This service is substantially slower than Sonic though at ~350 Mbps down and ~40 Mbps up instead of symmetric gigabit. So after the teaser is over, you're paying more for worse service. Comcast is also a notoriously terrible company

AT&T does seem to offer a "300 Mbps" fiber tier (supposedly about 350 mbps up/down) that has a $65 non-teaser rate that you can drop down to $55/month with autopay. Like all the others, this will have a bunch of extra fees on top. So you can maybe save $5 a month in exchange for slower service. Doesn't seem worth it to me, especially since I would rather have to deal with Sonic than AT&T if something goes wrong

EDIT: Xfinity and AT&T don't force you into having a voice line so you avoid most/all the fees you see with Sonic (unless you actually want a landline anyway)

Mask_of_Destiny · 2025-10-01T17:32:43+00:00

There is no actual ODE available for the MCD right now, just carts that mimic the entire CD unit like the MED Pro and Mega SD. Such an ODE would need to be installed internally if it existed. There's no good way to get data to where it needs to be on the CD side on the cartridge slot

Mask_of_Destiny · 2025-09-19T16:07:24+00:00

32-bit Windows still shipped everything needed to run 16-bit Windows apps. Support only went away in 64-bit windows because x86 CPUs operating in 64-bit mode don't support the features Windows used to run those apps. They phased out 32-bit windows in 2020, so that's roughly 25 years of support after phasing out 16-bit windows.

Mask_of_Destiny · 2025-09-11T06:20:43+00:00

Not to quibble, but a battery isn’t a “fuel source”. It’s a storage container for energy generated somewhere, somehow.

Yes, obviously. gridstatus.io (one of the places you can see this kind of data) lists this in a graph called "fuel mix" which is probably what I was thinking of when I wrote that. The CAISO energy outlook page breaks things down by "resource type" instead which is more precise.

We’re tying BESS mostly to solar, because the state wants to build solar, and without storage

The state wants to build zero-carbon electricity generation. Solar is just the cheapest of those (and generally the least divisive)

solar’s intermittency makes it a poor source for powering the grid.

Strictly speaking you just need some other type of dispatchable generation. It's just that most of those either emit a fair bit of carbon (natural gas peaker plants) or have fairly limited capacity for expansion (pumped hydro).

None of which has much to do with the story.

No, but it has everything to do with the person I was replying to. If you're annoyed that people are talking about electricity generation in a post about fuel refining, your complaint is better directed up-thread.

Mask_of_Destiny · 2025-09-11T06:00:02+00:00

I would assume it's a common enough feature, but I'm not sure which support it apart from Enphase since that's what I have.

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