Centroid.EU Blog

Cmdr Peter a Resistor

February 26th, 2021

Recently NASA used a funky code in the parachute on Mars for the Perseverance Rover. I spelled DARE or something in binary. But textiles can have other indicators such as colours. For a limited time only there is a colour code at the top of this blog (front page).

You may have noticed the line at the blog where a HR html sign was before. This line is colour coded after resistor colours. So my resistor code is Violet, Orange, Grey, Orange, and optionally Violet again. It spells out 7383(7) or when you look up those letters on your household phone pad P,E,T,E,(R). I'm commander Peter a Resistor, welcome to my unit.

I know that a student of psychiatry in Halifax once asked me "is there a certain colour you can't see?", making me wonder if they are searching for colour blind people. I assure you I am capable of seeing the entire spectrum of colours except with indigo right beside violet I have trouble with. Carry on!

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What am I day-dreaming of? Mercury

February 24th, 2021

I'm astonished all the things that one needs for colonisation of Mercury are in the Elon Musk suite of companies. Ie. Rockets and tunneling machines. Because on Mercury you would land on a crater that has eternal darkness, which are found at the poles. From there tunneling aparatus would be used to dig out into the middle of the planet and hyperloops and mass drivers that operate in tunnels to gather enough speed to lift payload off the planet. Since Mercury has a slight atmosphere you can't just use these mass drivers on the surface (mass drivers are like railguns). If tunnelling at quite a depth from the surface is possible (1 km deep perhaps?), then caverns could be erected underground that are bonded with hyperloops and that part of Mercury is never really exposed by sunlight since it's easy to move everyone to cooler parts with a hyperloop.

So what could be shot off from Mercury? Raw materials to build space stations perhaps, the payload would bypass earth and trade with Mars, Asteroid Belt, Callisto and Enceladus/Titan. What I envision for the payload to be slung into space with the mass drivers and there they would extract a solar sail to be pushed even faster into the direction they're going. Another destination could be Venus where materials are needed for building floating and non-floating cities. Perhaps Venus could use some of the helium found on mercury, perhaps also ground stations on Venus could use tunneling expertise. It is unclear wether Venus has life. If it does have life that would put a damper on terraforming the planet. Because who in their right mind wants to commit genocide on an alien species. Mercury is on my mind lately, but so is Callisto which is the only moon of Jupiter that humans can live on. But that's another story.

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Open Source getting death threats

February 19th, 2021

I will slaugher you is the threat that the author of curl got. Curl is a utility that is widely used in the world. A company I worked for used curl in some components of its network. It is widely known. This is an attack on open source and I do hope Daniel S. goes to the police to report a death threat against him.

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A lost week

February 19th, 2021

I didn't get anything done this week. I was waiting on a part to replace a broken usb3.0 hub. I got it and stuff started working again, but the part should have arrive here on wednesday at the latest.

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VW, Apple and cars from Asia

February 16th, 2021

In this article (slashdot.org) the VW CEO says he is not worried. I think he should be. Apple has made swiss watchmakers and other PDA makers like blackberry pretty upset and worried. I think we are in times that a lot of key technologies are coming together. I read in popular mechanics a long long time ago (35 years past) that cars from asia are gonna be shipped to europe under the ice of the arctic by cargo submarines employing a MHD drive (caterpillar drive / magnetohydrodynamic). This was a californian fantasy since popular mechanics was a californian print. A ship with a fusion reactor (lockheed claims they have one) could have enough power for a MHD drive, and the route from asia to europe via arctic is short. Watch it unfold before your eyes VW. It may happen.

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Open and Closed

February 16th, 2021

In a month is my birthday. I'm turning 45 years old. My successes were mediocre in this lifespan, but I have made a giant contribution by open sourcing delphinusdnsd from day one. I'm building on top of it soon, and soon I'm going to turn to a closed source model, and I will try to protect my contribution against others, unless they pay me money. Hopefully what I have planned will make me money by the time I'm 60 which is in 15 years plus a month. I need this money in order to retire because I've never had enough money to really invest in retirement. I'm also hoping my health will stay good for the next 15 years. So what am I working on? In the plans is something that has to do with DNS, clusters of servers and OpenBSD. Also my work in trying to port my G5 to OpenBSD will be contained in this. My life is getting serious, I can't afford to take too many side roads anymore. Of what's ahead I'll maybe talk about it some more here. On to the next 15 years!

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I'm a hoarder and I'm a tech hoarder

February 12th, 2021

At home I rarely like to throw things out. Like recyclable garbage. I want you to take a look at this youtube clip (linus tech tips) can you identify yourself with this persons household? If you can, you're like me too. I stopped counting how many things I have with a CPU chip, (over 15?). On top of that I see a couple burned out lightbulbs in front of me, why haven't I thrown them out? Well for one I'm confused on the recycle policy, so it's still here. I have a lot of cardboard from amazon purchases too but I did throw out the styrofoam in them. I don't think this is a mental illness it has to do with my genes somehow, that would make you and I similar if you too are a hoarder. I have a broken ipod, why don't I throw it out? Because it may contain private things that another guy with clue can unlock and use. This is my train of thought. While I do feel a bit sorry for myself in this I think there is more to this story.

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Grafenrheinfeld Reactors hold no fuel anymore

February 10th, 2021

According to this (german) the fuel rods have all been removed from the local nuclear fission reactor, which was closed down in 2015. Oh my goodness it took almost 6 years! My question that I'll shoot off into the ether is, when will they wreck the towers and buildings? What will become of the site? How much longer will nuclear waste be held there? Will nuclear waste from other power stations be held there? These are all questions that make me go hmmm. I had seen job openings of companies that are near there, but because of their close vicinity to this nuclear site I did not want to work there. Basically the sooner it's gone the better. Erect a wind or solar park there or something, I wouldn't want the site be used for anything else. Also see the following articles here: good weather ahead?.

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Goal for the next 2 years - a RPI cluster

February 7th, 2021

I'm considering making a 6-8 node raspberry pi cluster. This is with a RPI 4b - 8 GB or better category SBC's. The idea was born a few years ago. So, if I'm in employment in 2 years I'll fulfill this, otherwise I'll be short on pi's. We'll see. RISC-V is taking off so I'll see if I can get some RV SBC's instead of Raspberry Pi's if they are worth getting. It stays fun either way!

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35 Years of Personal Computing History

February 7th, 2021

Here is a list of computers I had the pleasure of purchasing before 2020

2x Intel P-II-350,1x Sinclair ZX-81,1x PC-Engines APU 4,1x PC-Engines APU 2, 1x Intel Xeon E3-,1x Intel Pentium 200,1x Intel Pentium 120, 1x Intel Core i7 4core,1x Intel Atom N270,1x IBM-PC 486-66DX2, 1x IBM-PC 386-SX25,1x Commodore C-64,1x Celeron CPU N2940,1x Apple Mac mini, 1x Apple MBP Core i5,1x Apple G4 Cube,1x Apple G3 iBook,1x AMD C-60 "Ontario", 1x AMD Athlon64 3500+,1x AMD Athlon 1000, 1x Core i3 NUC, 1x Core i3 Workstation 1x Apple G5 PowerMac

The approximate aggregated clockspeed was 60000 MHz and aggregated memory was roughly 100 GB. 2021 marked 35 years of personal computing history.

Computers since 2021 I have received or purchased:

Type			Clockspeed	Agg Clks	RAM		Agg RAM
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------
1x Raspberry Pi 4B, 	4x 1.4 GHz, 	5600 MHz,	8 GB RAM,	8 GB

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