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Tim McCormack
@timmc@better.boston
mastodon 4.3.8+glitchGardener, software developer, and nature enthusiast.
I use hashtags instead of CWs for uspol (US politics).
I have other accounts, but this one tends to be more for Boston-area things, MA and US politics, and nature stuff.
177 Followers
54 Following
50 Posts
Joined November 15, 2022
pronouns:
he/they
website:
location:
Somerville, MA, USA
languages:
📖 en, es; ✍️ en, ~es
Last year I threw some cattail seed heads into the muddy, marshy area next to the CPX flyover. Looks like some have taken hold!
I think the area is intended as a stormwater detention basin, but I'm not sure. Sometimes there's a pipe flooding water into the area even when it's not raining, so maybe it has another purpose. But plants are growing in there in any case, and so I'd rather seed it with native stuff so it doesn't end up full of invasives.
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@slembcke @0xabad1dea This is from the "missing GH status page": https://mrshu.github.io/github-statuses/
Good night to open the windows, I think. Smoke should be clearing away from #SomervilleMA in the next hour according to https://firesmoke.ca/forecasts/current/ and the forecast shows temperatures dipping to a pleasant 17°C, and not too humid.
Looks like The Smog is coming back to the #Boston area tonight.
https://firesmoke.ca/forecasts/current/ is a pretty great resource.
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@noplasticshower@infosec.exchange @briankrebs@infosec.exchange Doesn't seem like a good deal. If your AQI monitor is separate, you can use it anywhere. And the Corsi-Rosenthal box can turn back into a regular window fan when you need it to.
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@festlicheameise @clew @Adrenochrome Yeah, I'm intrigued by that little sideways bump on the tool bases.
I suspect it actually acts as a detent so that pivoting the tools out requires outward pressure on the spine, but click back into place when upright.
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@kitkat_blue @anildash I mean, by that logic, pretty much everything is tainted.
Some of our medical knowledge, for instance, comes from some Pretty Bad Places.
I don't like that they used LLMs to build the tools to do the training, but it sounds like the resulting *model* is clean.
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Positive for lead: A small plate, Made In China.
Looks like it's some of the white paint, but oddly not all of it.
(It doesn't show up well in the photo, but almost all of the outlining had glitters of green.)
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Apparently our doorknobs fluoresce green, which means they're probably manganese glass. (No, not uranium glass, which would be colored under white light.)
This is why the lead test tells you to shine the UV light before the spray to check for *existing* fluorescence. :-)
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@danluu Don't worry, someone from the relevant team at GitHub has said on HN that they "won't do it again".
(Someone else on HN has started a betting market on that claim, heh.)
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@SnoopJ @cliffle @ekuber @bitprophet I have a *lot* of complaints about emoji but they're from a place of caring about text encoding, not about the space being taken up.
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@joebeone@techpolicy.social This reminds me of using my (dumb) cell phone to unlock shopping cart wheels.
(The phone isn't the important part—just like in your situation, it's about using a speaker to induce currents in a radio receiver. Although it might be that the shopping cart radios don't require harmonics. I didn't make the MP3 files I'm using...)
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@overholt@glammr.us @meredithw@wandering.shop @universalhub@mastodon.online O'Laughlin Pond, at the north of the Quabbin, between that and Route 122.
It's dammed off from the Quabbin but I assume water flows into the reservoir under some circumstances, and that's why they were posting about it on the MWRA site.
There's also currently a photo accompanying the alert (attached).
One article I found: https://www.wwlp.com/news/local-news/franklin-county/pilot-rescued-after-plane-crashes-into-pond-near-quabbin-reservoir-in-new-salem/
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@waldoj Yup. It's not even like the FSF has any kind of irreplaceable expertise or something where it might make sense to pay attention to *some* of their statements... they're just an organizing body.
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Soil lead testing is *expensive*, over $100 per sample.
A $6k analyzer would break even at 60 samples. That's a neighborhood of people's yards tested.
I'm having some trouble finding out whether this is a reliable method, though, and what the drawbacks might be.
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Oh no, it turns out like half our bowls, plates, and dishes have a bunch of surface lead. 🤮
About half of our Corelle plates are leaded, and a set of Gibson Housewares cups and bowls are *very* heavily leaded.
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@gkrnours @0xabad1dea Ooh ooh, I can answer this!
Given that 100% is hard to reach and 0% is not, we can use a simpler version of the logit function and take log₁₀(1÷(1−.89)) = ~0.96 which means it's still a tad below 1 "nine".
(The full logit function is log₁₀(x÷(1−x)) and is useful when both 0% and 100% are hard/impossible to reach.)
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@m750 The snow brick technique works pretty well on those conical piles on the roadway next to driveways. You can get a lot more snow on them this way. The bricks fuse together and get stronger over time, which is neat.
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@knizer I wonder if there have yet been any films in which a character watches Inception.
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I thought the main issue with using a perovskite-based lead test with soil was that you need a 1) quantitative test of 2) extractable lead, neither of which this method provides.
But it turns out the larger problem is that soil already has stuff in it that fluoresces green. :-) Some kinda fungal stuff goin' on.
(I wonder if baking the soil would destroy the existing fluorescence?)
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@Methylzero@mast.hpc.social Obviously the entire technique would itself have to be validated against a large range of samples that are split and submitted for lab testing. But I'd be up for footing that bill if it could unlock a more immediate and lower (amortized) cost soil test method.
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@Methylzero@mast.hpc.social That's one of the things I've been wondering about—there's the hardware (range, sensitivity, etc.) and then there's the quality of the onboard software. I can easily imagine them skimping on the latter, especially if part of their customer base is going to do all the "real" analysis offline anyhow.
(On the other hand, I've also been wondering how tightfisted analyzers might be with their data.)
If you have a kid in Somerville public schools, I made a calendar file for all of the 2026-27 holidays (except for winter and spring breaks): https://lab.brainonfire.net/calendars/Somerville-school-holiday-SY26-27.ics
(It would be nice to have one with those, plus early-release days, but the tiny tool I wrote only supports full-day events. That's fine, now there's less to manually enter.)
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If it's herring, could they have jumped that high?
Did birds drop them there? (What kind of bird would grab the fish and then *not* eat it, and also decide this little walkway was a great place to contemplate whether to do so?)
Was someone carrying fish and then just like... dropped them?
Great piece on how vendor capture works in the US government, a process that causes massive overspending:
https://www.niskanencenter.org/vendor-capture-and-the-limits-of-fast-government-reform/
(Complete with solutions.) h/t @waldoj@mastodon.social for linking this in his blog.
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@kitkat_blue Basically, I'm arguing against the "and yet you live in a society, curious" frame.
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@Epic_Null@infosec.exchange @briankrebs@infosec.exchange Yeah, the only thing I'd want to do differently here is not get duct tape gunk on the window fan. If I build one I'm probably going to wrap the fan in foam and pressure-fit it into the filters.
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@Methylzero@mast.hpc.social Ah, that makes sense!
One thing I'd been wondering is how you would get a concentration without knowing the denominator. Soil is largely going to be light elements that the detector can't even see. :-/
So the addition method would allow per-sample mass calibration. That's pretty cool, but slow, and produces lead-contaminated waste. Though I wonder if I could use a less toxic addition? It wouldn't calibrate on lead specifically, but might help with concentration overall.
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Some of the kid's toys have lead paint on them as well. It's largely in the grooves, so I guess a lot of the lead has already been rubbed (or licked) off. :-/
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@PedestrianError@towns.gay @scottsthoughts@better.boston That's bonkers. I've never encountered it, though.
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@Methylzero@mast.hpc.social Oh, I would definitely be compromising on accuracy. The main thing I'm not sure of is how much of a compromise it would end up being.
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@IceWolf@masto.brightfur.net @scottsthoughts@better.boston As far as I can tell, these are the items that are most readily sold via blackmarket.
I've recently seen some people (presumably not from the US) express surprise and confusion that US cities can just... pass laws!
Which I found funny at first, but on further consideration, there's an interesting question: What qualifies a local geographic region as being *able* to pass laws?
I'm not clear on whether every area in a US state is already in a local-governing body. What does it take for a portion of a state to organize into a place that can have local laws?
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@matdevdug@c.im I think it's an intrinsically hard problem simply because fraud is pervasive in *any* system that deals with money, and that drives up overhead. High overhead kills microtransactions.
I don't think it's impossible, but it's really hard to get right, and if you screw it up the fraudsters can kill your business/protocol/whatever and you have to start all over again. Starting over isn't cheap, because each time you want to introduce a new solution there are network effects to overcome.
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I want to recommend FluoroSpec but there's one really annoying disclaimer I have to add:
The guy is hella spammy.
I got 3 emails from him within the *first hour* after purchasing the kit, informing me of the affiliate program that I had now "joined". And another a couple days later. I hadn't even gotten the product yet.
As usual, I had left the "send me spam" checkbox empty, and as usual, someone decided to ignore it.
So... maybe use a disposable email address. Or buy from a competitor.
What's with these vehicle barriers deployed in #Boston at the intersection of Mass Ave and Commonwealth Ave?
Looking forward to this PorridgeFest tomorrow that people keep talking about.
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@mwichary@mastodon.online @jhooper@techhub.social I feel like Dave might have been *setting it up* and got cut on one of the parts.
(Perhaps just wrangling a new blade onto it.)
Any recommendations for a Boston area sticker printshop? Looking to possibly get a small run of *outdoor* stickers made, ones that can tolerate rain and direct sun for some years.