Westinghouse Sign
The Westinghouse Sign was a large, animated, electric sign advertising the Westinghouse Electric company and located in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, U.S.A. The sign was best known for the huge number of combinations in which its individual elements could be illuminated. The sign was removed in 1998 when the building on which it was mounted was demolished to make way for the construction of PNC Park.
The various corporations which have carried the Westinghouse name have erected countless signs and other promotional devices during the past 140 years, including many in the corporate hometown of Pittsburgh. A cubic Westinghouse sign stood in downtown Pittsburgh for approximately thirty five years and was so familiar that it was allowed to remain in place until 2002, even after the building it marked the Westinghouse Tower was no longer owned or occupied by Westinghouse.
Change in daylight per day
Spring is rapidly approaching, or already here, depending on where you live. Every year it always seems to me that the length of daylight increases a little bit day by day, and then suddenly, one day, it’s light until 7:00 PM! I wanted to see if this was just a perceptual effect, or if there was an actual increase in the amount of daylight change per day.
I obtained a table of sunrise and sunset times from the US Naval Meteorology and Oceanography Command, and plotted the data in Gnumeric.
Daylight in Pittsburgh, PA
The pink and yellow lines show the sunrise and sunset times in minutes after midnight. The teal line shows their difference, the total sunlight per day in minutes. The dark blue plot shows the change in minutes of daylight, the first derivative of daylight. We see that during the spring, the change in daylight increases, slows, reaches zero at the summer solstice, and then descends into negative numbers for the fall. Very interesting.
Convert M4A into MP3 with GNU/Linux, recursive and multithreaded
On a similar thread as an old post, Convert M4A into MP3 with GNU/Linux, I needed to convert a bunch of iTunes M4A unprotected audio files into standard MP3 files. With iTunes’ fondness for sorting by artist first, then by album, I ended up with a ton of single-file folders, making any scripting a bit of a pain. Also, converting a bunch of M4A files to MP3 is something that should be done in parallel on a multi-core CPU.
Here’s a snippet using find and xargs‘ multi-threading support to recursively find all M4A files and convert them to MP3 with as many threads as you want.
First, here’s the convm4a script that is called from the find/xargs line. Call it with a single argument, the location of an M4A file. The script with change to that directory and convert the file to a similarly-named MP3 file. Put this somewhere on your PATH (possibly in ~/bin/) and be sure to chmod +x convm4a.
#!/bin/bash
DIRNAME=`dirname "$1"`
FILENAME=`basename "$1" .m4a`
#echo "$DIRNAME"
cd "$DIRNAME"
faad -o - "${FILENAME}.m4a" | lame - "${FILENAME}.mp3" &> /dev/null
Test out that script to make sure it works. Then, run this line from the top of the directory full of your M4A files:
find -name '*\.m4a' -type f -print0 | xargs -P 4 -n 1 -0 convm4a
The -P 4 means to use four concurrent executions of convm4a, and the -n 1 means to only pass one argument to each invocation of convm4a. Change the number 4 to reflect the number of threads you want to run. You probably don’t want to exceed the number of CPU cores in your computer.
Perl and CPAN
Perl is a scripting language. Some people really like it. I have my own feelings about it, but that’s for another day. Perl has a system to install add-on modules called CPAN, that competes and conflicts with the native package manager on a Linux install, but sometimes the only way to install a random package is to use CPAN. Here’s a quick little guide on how to do that. Standard disclaimers apply.
sudo perl -MCPAN -e shell
install Bundle:CPAN
(press enter a bunch of times to allow CPAN to access the web and do updates)
reload cpan
install Module::Whatever
Repeat that last line for each package the perl script requires. Takes a lot of trial-and-error to find all the packages you need to install. Good luck.
Palo Verde Nuclear Generating Station
The Palo Verde Nuclear Generating Station, commonly referred to as Palo Verde Power Plant, is a nuclear power plant located in Tonopah, Arizona, about 50 miles (80 km) west of central Phoenix, and is currently the largest nuclear generation facility in the United States, averaging over 3.2 gigawatts (GW) of electrical power production in 2003 to serve approximately 4 million people. Arizona Public Service (APS) owns the largest portion (29.1%) of the station and operates the facility. Other owners include Salt River Project (17.5%), El Paso Electric Co. (15.8%), Southern California Edison (15.8%), PNM Resources (10.2%), Southern California Public Power Authority (5.9%), and the Los Angeles Dept. of Water & Power (5.7%).
Palo Verde is the only nuclear generating facility in the world that is not located adjacent to a large body of above-ground water. Instead, it evaporates water from the treated sewage of several nearby municipalities to meet its cooling needs. The water consumed by the Palo Verde Nuclear Generating Station represents about 25% of the annual overdraft of the Arizona Department of Water Resources Phoenix Active Management Area.
via Palo Verde Nuclear Generating Station – Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia.
Grand Coulee Dam
The Grand Coulee Dam is a hydroelectric gravity dam on the Columbia River in the U.S. state of Washington. In the United States, it is the largest electric power-producing facility and the largest concrete structure. It is the seventh largest producer of hydroelectricity in the world, as of the year 2008.
The reservoir is called Franklin Delano Roosevelt Lake, named after the United States President who presided over the completion of the dam. The foundation was built by the MWAK Company, a joint effort of several contractors united for this purpose. Consolidated Builders Incorporated, including industrialist Henry J. Kaiser, completed the dam. The United States Bureau of Reclamation supervised the contractors and operates the dam. Folk singer Woody Guthrie was commissioned by the Bonneville Power Administration to write songs about the Columbia Basin Project; the songs Roll On Columbia and Grand Coulee Dam are part of that series.
The Grand Coulee Dam is almost a mile long at 5223 feet (1586 m). The spillway is 1,650 feet (503 m) wide. At 550 feet (168 m), it is taller than the Great Pyramid of Giza; all the pyramids at Giza could fit within its base. Its hydraulic height of 380 feet (115 m) is more than twice that of Niagara Falls. There is enough concrete to build a four-foot wide, four-inch deep sidewalk twice around the equator.
via Grand Coulee Dam – Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia.
Character LCD Megademo
Hedelmae made a character LCD demo for the Assembly 2003 wild competition. It uses a 20×4 character LCD. Nice work!
I used a modified LCDproc (for Linux) as the backend. Only the character set and the update speed were changed. All the actual graphics and animation was custom code. The effects were written into a 1bit 20×12 buffer then converted to 20×4 and finally LCDproc updated the image on the display.
Fish Ladder
A fish ladder, also known as a fishway, fish pass or fish steps, is a structure on or around artificial barriers such as dams and locks to facilitate diadromous fishes' natural migration. Most fishways enable fish to pass around the barriers by swimming and leaping up a series of relatively low steps hence the term ladder into the waters on the other side. The velocity of water falling over the steps has to be great enough to attract the fish to the ladder, but it cannot be so great that it washes fish back downstream or exhausts them to the point of inability to continue their journey upriver.
via Fish ladder – Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia.
Peshtigo Fire
The October 8, 1871 Peshtigo Fire in Peshtigo, Wisconsin, is the conflagration that caused the most deaths by fire in United States history. Having occurred on the same day as the more infamous Great Chicago Fire, the Peshtigo Fire is mostly forgotten. On the same day as the Peshtigo and Chicago fires, the cities of Holland, and Manistee, Michigan, across Lake Michigan, also burned, and the same fate befell Port Huron at the southern end of Lake Huron.
Mandelbrot Set Viewer
A few days ago I made a Mandelbrot Set Viewer using a graphic LCD and an Arduino. I made a fun video with a sweet soundtrack and I’ve got all the code and schematics posted.