Zed Shaw coins the term Beggar Barons in his blog post on being a popular software author
begged
to make significant changes to software to accommodate the large company’s needs.
The recent
situation
involving
Python vis-à-vis the Apple App Store
reminds us of this phenomenon via Zed’s article.
Python with
iOS
or
Android
requires using libpython in a compiled application, rather than the more typical terminal use–although there are apps that bring that experience to mobile devices as well.
Generating a range of datetime data is a common data analysis and simulation task across programming languages.
Matlab and GNU Octave can also generate datetime vectors.
Optimizing compilers may enable
strict aliasing.
For a wide variety of existing projects, strict aliasing provides additional optimization.
For some projects, such as
MUMPS,
memory leaks have been observed that are resolved by disabling strict aliasing using GCC flag “-fno-strict-aliasing”.
Compilers with ability to switch on / off strict aliasing include:
tl;dr: When connected to a captive portal, try visiting
http://neverssl.com
to trigger the portal.
Public WiFi often has
captive portal
login.
Portals may coerce users to accept terms and conditions and absolution of liability before accessing the Internet.
The portals may be worked around by DNS tunneling, MAC spoofing, etc.
Many users just tolerate the portals.
Web browsers may try to trigger captive portals by checking servers, in case the OS hasn’t already triggered the captive portal.
Sometimes captive portals aren’t triggered.
HSTS
blocks HTTP captive portal redirects.
Try visiting a deliberately non-HTTPS portal-triggering site like http://neverssl.com
Devices on networks that block the platform’s automatic network checking may indicate like:
Connected, no Internet
If there’s not a captive sign-in webpage, the network connection may still work to non-Google sites.
The importance of the firmware difference is that the Cobra 19 Ultra 6 has a more limited feature set, and jumpering either of the white outlined jumper holes that the Anytone or Albrecht radios use for expansion next to the CPU has no effect on the Cobra 19 Ultra 6.
Users should instead consider the Radioddity CS-47 over the Cobra 19 Ultra 6 for expandibility and key features including NRC noise reduction and
CTCSS / DCS coded squelch
that the Cobra 19 Ultra 6 lacks.
From practical in-vehicle use, the speaker is adequately loud.
However, there doesn’t appear to be a noise blanker (NB), which means ignition noise may significantly degrade reception in some vehicles.
There is an automatic noise limiter (ANL) that helps with some other types of noise, but the missing noise blanker and lack of digital noise reduction (DNR/NRC) means that the Cobra 19 Ultra 6 is not as good a value as more modern radios in the same price range.
There is no “dual watch” channel capability, but this may not be a requirement for many users.
RF Gain is essential on any CB radio and the RF gain adjustment range of the Cobra 19 Ultra 6 is good.
Typically RF gain between 9 to 30 (bigger numbers if interference increases) is useful to reduce background noise without reducing receive range too much.
The radio appears to use audio compandoring, which helps improve apparent audio SNR.
The radio has a traditional signal squelch as well as “auto” noise squelch.
The general problem with noise squelch across CB radios is that overmodulated AM signals can close the squelch regardless of how strong the signal is.
Setting the RF Gain and Squelch for any AM CB radio is best done by:
open the squelch – static is heard.
set the RF Gain so that faint static and/or skip signals are heard.
On firmware version 1.1, entering scan mode is different than the user manual states.
To enter channel scan, press and hold the microphone “up” or “down” button until the radio goes once through all 40 channels, then the radio beeps and release the button.
The radio then scans all 40 channels repeatedly.
Unfortunately, there does not appear to be a way to skip channels in scan mode.
This means the radio will often stop on channels 6, 11, etc. with high power stations that may not be what the user wants to listen to.
In Matlab,
fitsread
is used to read specific frame(s) from a FITS file.
Read frames one at a time from a large multi-frame FITS file in MATLAB.
This avoids overwhelming RAM or taking an excessive time to load just one or a few image frames from a FITS file.
Example: sequentially read and plot each frame of a 4096-frame FITS file, with each frame being 256 x 256 pixels.
for i = 1:4096 currFrame = fitsread('myFile.fits', PixelRegion={[1256],[1256],i});imagesc(currFrame)pause(0.05)end
GNU Octave FITS reading is done with the
cfitsio
package using a
similar API.
The no-cost
AMD AOCC compiler
is tuned for AMD CPUs, akin to how Intel oneAPI is tuned for Intel CPUs.
For a RHEL-based Linux, install the downloaded “.rpm” file like:
The
AOCL libraries
provide accelerated math functions for AMD CPUs for several popular libraries for use in C, C++, or Fortran.
AOCL is compatible with AOCC and other compilers as listed in the AOCL downloads.
5G wireless network providers across the United States and elsewhere are turning on 5G standalone mode (SA), that can enable significantly more data bandwidth and lower connection latency.
Some phones, even recent phones, are not properly capable of supporting 5G SA even though they work fine in 5G NSA (non-standalone mode) that operates like 4G LTE.
Recent Android
releases and carrier updates
have disabled 5G SA for certain phones that previously had 5G SA enabled due to data connectivity problems when the carrier enabled 5G SA.
A symptom of lost data connectivity, possibly due to 5G SA incompatibility, is the phone signal showing 5G signal bars with an exclamation point.
What may possibly but not always help is to turn off 5G in the phone network settings by setting “Preferred network type” to “LTE” or similar instead of “5G”.
This may force the phone to use 4G LTE instead of 5G, which may work better for data connectivity.
However this does not always help.
If a newer phone on the same network carrier works fine with 5G SA, then the phone with data connectivity problems may need a software update or carrier update to fix the problem, or simply a newer phone may be needed.
The Network Cell Info
app can show the network type and signal strength, and may help diagnose the problem.