Peter Lyons

Quick Thoughts: Universe Lifetime

January 02, 2016

Introducing Quick Thoughts

Thinking about ways to share my tech thoughts and engage with the Internet, I've been feeling frustrated by twitter's tweet length limit and ensuing conversation and clarification struggles. But also the relatively high friction of a blog post has been limiting as well. A new idea I'm going to try is to quickly log "Thoughts of the Week" then edit and curate them into a weekly blog post. I'll be doing this using the tagging feature in my mjournal open source journaling software.

Tyranny of Noise

NYT: Sound Architecture

This one is close to home for me. I'm sensitive to noise and am baffled that common American single family homes and apartments do great at creating visual privacy but have abysmal acoustic privacy. Lately I've been getting more and more annoyed with the helicopter-level sounds my gas furnace makes and the sounds of the ductwork snapping as it expands and contracts given the very cold temperatures we have had the past two weeks. I'd love to live in a house with radiant heating at some point to enjoy the quiet.

Fast Charging Nexus 5X

Sigh. Yet another mess. If you have a Google Nexus 5X or 6P smartphone, here's the article that explains the goats you need to sacrifice to get the "charging rapidly" to work.

DJB and Cosmological Theories

Leave it to DJB to include this beauty in the docs for the TAI64 timestamp format used by multilog:

Integers 2^63 and larger are reserved for future extensions. Under many cosmological theories, the integers under 2^63 are adequate to cover the entire expected lifetime of the universe; in this case no extensions will be necessary.