This is my blog about programming, technology, politics and other random stuff of interest, where information might be hard to find or be otherwise scattered across the vast internet.
It seems as if Amazon has problems with functional dependency of its product data.
Depending on with language is chosen on the Amazon.de webpage, for example German, there are books where the website language used remains English. In addition to that, this results in totally different editions of the books being displayed or different sellers being listed for the same book.
Also, when selecting “Foreign books” on an author’s Amazon page, nothing is selected, although one might expect to be shown the author’s original, untranslated works.
Sometimes, multilingual editions of books (which are mostly used for teaching foreign language at schools) show up instead of a particular edition in a desired language.
Shopping cart and wish list
There have been instances where I was unable to move items between different wish lists with a failure message from Amazon claiming it could not move the item, while said item was definitely not on the destined wish list.
This also fails when trying to add the item to a particular wish list directly form the product page. It makes not difference whether the item in question is already in the shopping cart or not during the time of trying to move it to the faulty wish list.
Shopping cart bottlenecks
When moving items from the Amazon shopping basket to the “Save for later” section, it is only possible to do this for one item at a time, and also only after each individual item has been moved is it possible to even click on the next item. This creates an opportunity for the underlying code to be restructured in support of faster operations.
Link rot
From the book “Superfreakonomics”, a link claims to lead to a webpage for the entire series of books, including “When to rob a bank”, “Think like a freak” and “Freakonomics”. However, when clicking the product link for the latter (https://www.amazon.de/dp/B074CB84JK?binding=mass_market&ref=dbs_dp_sirpi), Amazon claims it is unable to find the page:
Book editions varying in the number of volumes
When books gain additional volumes with newer revisions, one example being Rosenberg’s Molecular and Genetic Basis of Neurological and Psychiatric Disease, which fit in a single volume for its fifth edition, but grew to include a second volume in its sixth edition, product pages can list any part of the multi-volume editions along with books from the single volume editions.
Another example would be Karl Popper’s The Open Society and its Enemies, which initially was comprised of two volumes, but was later released as a single volume edition.
War is the single most unproductive economic activity known to date, en par with environmental pollution. But while we still have not figured out how to prevent the emergence of warring activities, could there be a way to transform war preparation efforts into something that is also useful during times of peace? After all, the physical principles that enable the massive destruction of livelihood also have the potential to protect from many naturally occurring hazards.
Build missile and rocket storage facilities in a way they can double as delivery systems for projectiles that can immediately be fired at incoming asteroids when there is no enemy threat that requires fitting the weapons to delivery systems like aircraft. Scientists at the Los Alamos National Laboratory simulated nuclear explosions directed at asteroids to deflect the object trajectory (https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.3847/PSJ/ad0838/pdf).
Fitted with landing gear and braking parachutes, decommissioned cruise missiles could find use in time-critical courier delivery. Development already done on the JDAM guidance kit that makes unguided bombs “smart” could serve as a starting point. The SSM-N-8 Regulus I and SSM-N-9 Regulus II cruise missiles of the Cold War era were fitted with landing gear during testing to enable them to return, landing like planes on a runway.
Civil shelters (also in private homes / public or commercial buildings) can serve a dual purpose as shelters for wartime and natural threats like storms (homesteads in the Tornado Alley of the US Mid-West sometimes have them, while cyclone-prone areas in tropical regions could certainly benefit) or, a less likely event, asteroids. A prime example of dual use is Peking, where during the summer of 2023, with its unprecedented heat waves, they opened shelters for people looking to escape the extremely high temperatures outside.
In Peking, where each building is required to have underground shelters even today, and an estimated 1 million people live in dwellings built into former shelters dating from the 1960s and 1970s, a time when the threat of nuclear war between communist China and the Soviet Republic seemed imminent (Sino-Soviet border conflict along the Ussuri river in 1969). Construction of the 85 square kilometer wide complex dubbed “Nuclear City” was completed in 1979.
Appropriate shielding requires use of high-density concrete containing baryte or magnetite to shield against gamma radiation, or boron in the form of borate minerals or to be effective against neutron radiation. Elevator shafts are made from high-density concrete to reduce noise emissions. Crane counterweights are also made from this type of concrete. While 80 % of global baryte production is currently used for drilling fluids in fossil fuel exploration, civil shelters are a better use of the material.
Existing Swiss shelter building codes need a closer look: do they require use of radiation-shielding high-density concrete? If not, their strategy has major flaws.
Neutron bombs have been described as humane weapons which only affect humans (or, by extension, biological lifeforms) while leaving infrastructure such as buildings and equipment intact.
What remains unstated are the effects of neutron activation, where elements in the vicinity of the explosion absorb the neutrons and become radioactive themselves, emitting gamma radiation.
A comprehensive table of neutron activation energies for many elements can be found at:
Ventilation in Swiss-style shelters relies on a hand-cranked system if the power goes out. This means that in order for people to be able to sleep during the length of the required sheltering period, which could be 4-5 weeks, there must be several people occupying the shelter. In order to alleviate this restriction, build hydroponic systems into the shelters, where the plants / algae provide oxygen, and fish provide food. During peacetime, those systems can be part of a local food chain.
Building resilient underground structures that incorporate large-scale facilities would make civil shelters feasible at scale and double as structure for peacetime housing.
Soviet-era closed cities still exist in Russia today and serve as proof that such concepts do work.
Manufacturers of tunnel boring machines like Herrenknecht or Aker Solutions could find additional business in the construction of fallout shelters in built-up areas.
Underground facilities for large-scale particle physics experiments such as the Large Hadron Collider at CERN already contain high-density concrete in critical sections of the design. When old accelerators at CERN are dismantled, the remaining tunnels could be turned into a shelter superstructure. However, this is an unlikely scenario, as the LHC will continue to serve as an accelerator stage for future, even larger particle accelerators.
Ultrasonic drilling could also find applications.
Since the height of the Cold War, fallout shelters have been reduced in numbers. The current situation with Russia threatening Ukraine shows that this may have been a mistake.
So what could be a more sustainable approach to building fallout shelters?
Looking to Scandinavia and Switzerland, where large shelters are built into underground parking and recreational facilities for use during peace time.
Manufacturers of fuel storage tanks could use available production capacity to build shelters from the same geometrical designs which can then be buried underground on private property to provide basic shelter. In times when there is concern for public safety, e.g. when unexploded ordnance is found nearby, residents could shelter in place instead of having to be moved to a special safe location.
During the Cold War, German motorways were built to function as airstrips with the middle lane separators removed, and rest areas along highways doubling as aircraft parking. Those road sections featured reinforced surfaces in order to handle the higher weights of aircraft compared to cars and trucks.
Ventilation equipment of large bunker structures could serve as direct air capture inlets during peaceful times, diverting the air intake away from wartime sand filter units to carbon dioxide scrubbers, this way aiding in the climate change recovery effort.
Light-gas projectiles
Attach a thin-walled cartridge containing pressurized hydrogen gas to the bottom of a projectile to achieve propulsion velocities exceeding the Earth’s escape velocity.
Re-manufacture surplus shaped charges and kinetic energy penetrators to be used with Voitenko compressors for aerospace applications.
All the above examples can serve as a hint that forced dependence on any technological path or the abandonment of one, like it happened in 2011 with the German exit from nuclear power and like the planned exit from fossil fuel-powered vehicles by 2035 in the EU, are not totally beneficial when looking at the whole picture. It is the network effects that count.
In September 2014, the US senate passed legislation claiming that resources on asteroids belong to the entity that discovers / mines them.
Alternative process: phytomining, where plants that are so-called hyperaccumulators take up the metal and incorporate them, creating high concentrations of metals in their biomass.
“Pressure to Power” describes technology that recovers energy at distribution stations of gas pipelines where the pressure is reduced before distribution to local users. (expansion turbine)
For crude oil pipelines, this has already been realized in 2018 with the Trans Alpine pipeline from Italy to Austria using the potential energy from the pipeline traversing the Alps to recover some of the energy required for pumping the crude oil.
Pigging devices currently used to inspect and clean pipeline networks could be modified to a form of hydraulic transport using the existing fossil fuel and gas pipelines, although it would require the constrution of a greater number of receiver stations than those that currently exist. Such “pigs” are already used today when multiple products differing in composition are sent into the pipeline at the same time, with the devices limiting mixture of the different products.
In a long shot, those ships could serve as launch platforms for space exploration because moving platforms closer to the equator reduces the amount of rocket fuel needed to reach orbit.
If used in fuel cells instead of engines or turbines, crude oil, natural gas and methane hydrate will remain viable sources of energy in the the future.
With the beginning of the Russian invasion of Ukraine, there has been a scramble among European countries to secure enough new LNG supplies to counteract the dwindling Russian deliveries of natural gas through pipelines such as NordStream 1.
As LNG requires the prior existence of LNG-capable terminals onshore, the lack thereof creates major hurdles when it comes to severing the ties with Russia in the energy domain. Luckily, there are special ships called FSRU (Floating Storage Regasification Unit) which are capable of turning the liquid natural gas back into gaseous form which can then be injected into the existing European pipeline network.
LNG carrier ships should be designed to also allow the transport of ammonia to facilitate a hydrogen economy. Built as FPSO ( Floating Production Storage and Offloading Unit), they could make use of surplus wind energy and produce ammonia. The first of those ships is named P2XFloater.
Using deep geothermal drilling to produce supercritical water to be fed into the steam generators of existing coal power plants can help provide clean energy using former fossil fuel power plants. Deep geothermal wells can be drilled almost anywhere in the world, not just where there is volcanic activity. An improvement over conventional drills are gyrotrons that use microwave energy. While the gyrotron can stay at the surface, a waveguide can deposit the energy where it is needed. Existing wells can be used as a starting point to reach initial depths of 500 meters or more, from where the microwaves can extend the wells to the necessary depths of 5 to 20 kilometers.
Exhausted oil formations can be used to harness geothermal energy while providing energy storage much like a battery. The process uses water injected into a deep well, while using a second well to extract highly pressurized, heated water when needed. This can be done for many hours after injection has completed, thus effectively storing energy.
Water passing through iron-rich underground rock formations results in the production of hydrogen, a resource that can be tapped by drilling and then feeding hydrogen motors in a similar manner to current gas wells (so-called “orange hydrogen”).
It is also possible to directly source naturally occuring hydrogen (so-called “white hydrogen”).
This series of four articles in a style similar to a stream-of-consciousness format wants to shed some light onto the challenge we face in times of enormous climate challenges:
The proposed taxation of estimated fossil fuel reserves realizes a concept of fictionalized gain that forces companies to exploit all available resources, which is detrimental to global climate when done with current technology, i.e. without carbon capture. (It remains to be seen how the similar concept of advanced flat capital gains tax will affect private ETF investors)
In-situ mining of oil sands and leaching of ore deposits promise new ways to extract resources from otherwise unviable deposits.
In-situ coal gasification would allow to exploit coal seams without having to dig them up, while simplifying the process of carbon capture. Products of this advanced process are syngas and synfuel. This technology also enables exploitation of undersea coal reserves that would otherwise be inaccessible. (https://petrowiki.spe.org/PEH:In-Situ_Combustion)
In addition, fossil fuel deposits contain non-negligible amounts of radioactive material, which, when they are released into the environment during the conventional firing process, are more harmful than if these elements (such as thorium) were to be extracted from the fly ash and used as fuel in nuclear power plants. With the fly ash stripped of radioactive elements, it can used in concrete for building construction or roadway surfaces more safely.
Drilling fluids account for about 80 % of global baryte usage. Finding alternatives to free up baryte for use in high-density concrete applications of fallout shelters needs to be of higher priority.
Fossil fuel infrastructure can be given a second, more environmentally beneficial, life, in an effort to enable future developments that are independent of a certain technology path:
This includes the modification of processes ion existing refinieries to shift production from combustible fuel to LOHC (liquid organic hydrogen carrier). Using toluol and benzyl chloride to create dibenzyl chloride in a Friedel-Crafts alkylation yields a diesel-like LOHC that allows hydrogen to be transported in a liquid without cryocooling requirements. One liter of this LOHC can bind 650 litres of hydrogen, facilitating a mobility concept that does not need high-pressure vessels.
Quite often, printing a document in full color mode is not only unnecessary, but also a waste of resources.
In order to save ink, time and money, you can simply use the draft mode available in your printer menu. The downside of this method is that you cannot preview your document in draft mode. The preview will always give you a full-color version, regardless of printer settings.
[UPDATE, February 2023: I just discovered this is not accurate anymore, using Windows 10. On Mac OS X, using Apple’s color management system ColorSync with Quartz PDF filters allows you to modify PDF files in a similar way. However, Apple’s documentation on this is minimal. See this page from their official support websites or https://github.com/benwiggy/QuartzFilters for a third-party resource.]
At least for Linux systems you have the option of creating a grayscale version of the document and saving it to a PDF file; however, it will again result in a full-color version, which is unexpected. This makes it necessary to process the PDF file using additional tools so you can get a proper grayscale version of your document.
In this post, you will learn about the tools to help you customize your document so it uses minimal ink, yet is clearly readable and can be checked before you waste paper and ink on a botched print.
To begin with, we will use Ghostscript. Binaries for Linux, Windows and Mac can be downloaded here.
Using any shell on Linux, use the following to command to process your file (let’s call it input.pdf for now) and turn it into a new file named result.pdf.
These series of GhostScript commands take your PDF file, convert it to grayscale using a predefined strategy and generate a new PDF file that can be printed as-is. Note that not all command line options I am using here are fully documented by Ghostscript. This initally was what made me write this article: to help others learn about advanced options that are available but hard to find in the Ghostscript tool.
When generating a PDF from a Word document that was created using a version of Microsoft Office 2010 or later, please be aware that some features can cause GhostScript to fail at converting certain or even all document sections.
This article contains a growing collection of resources on FPGA bitstream formats and toolchain details as I find out more about the various vendor’s implementations. It is a continuation of the article published on my old blog.
Over the past couple of years, many projects have developed open source alternatives for proprietary solutions in the IT industry. One of the last areas of proprietary domination includes reconfigurable computing chips. This technology is becoming more and more important as the advantages of FPGAs over conventional processors in speed and energy efficiency become evident.
Even Microsoft has been testing FPGAs to accelerate their Bing search engine.
While there is a wide range of tools available to program the many flavors of microcontrollers like AVR, PIC and Parallella (which happens to be a completely open design), and to flash BIOS chips, similar capabilities are missing in the open source world for field-programmable gate arrays, or FPGAs.
Tools to develop and compile the necessary VHDL or Verilog code to be run on FPGAs are already available, such as Icarus or GHDL.
In order to use the compiled code with an actual FPGA, each vendor has their own tools:
Xilinx offers the free XSE Webpack, Altera seems to have at least a partly open source tool called STAPL (Standard Test and Programming Language), yet to flash the resulting binary code, further proprietary tools are needed.
Lattice Semiconductor, which offers a board to use with the Raspberry Pi computer, is doing the community a huge favor by providing access to affordable hardware.
urjtag.org supports various bitstream formats as well as JTAG adapters, and is under active development. STAPL, however, is not yet supported by urjtag. For now, binaries and source code for a STAPL compiler and player are available from Altera.
A while ago, my monochrome Samsung Xpress M2825ND laser printer, which has been in use for several years now, stopped printing while the red LED status light kept flashing furiously.
According to the printer manual, this signalled a temporary error condition that should be easy to fix.
However, further testing revealed that when pressing the diagnostic button on the printer, the status and test messages would be printed just fine on paper.
After ruling out every possible cause I could think of, I bit the bullet and ordered a replacement photo conductor unit.
Much to my surprise, this solved the problem of print jobs not being executed.
To me, that does not make sense at all. According to the manual, this printer’s photo conductor unit has a lifetime of about 9000 pages, which I am certain I had not reached yet. And still, even though the issue seemed to be a worn PCU, when in diagnostic mode, it would work just fine.
The key takeaway here is this: the printer seems to be malfunctioning and the single flashing LED only gives so much information. As to why a supposedly failed photoconductor unit would still be able to produce crisp diagnostic printouts is beyond me. A more torough investigation into the printer firmware may be warranted to confirm my suspicions, while in light of the ongoing supply chain issues, trying to keep the device functioning is the preferred way to go, even if I have been wanting to replace the monochrome model with a color multifunction printer from rival company Kyocera that comes with a document scanner to handle all the paper that I am still having to deal with.
Have you experienced similar issues? This starts to look a lot like planned obsolescence to me, which is something I absolutely oppose.
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