I'm one of the "Apple Loyalists" seriously considering Linux. It's fairly easy to experiment with software (my main difficulty is Lightroom, currently looking at Corel AfterShot Pro). I've heard System76 isn't great hardware despite the convenience of shipping with Linux, but I'm not sure what the best options are.
Looking for a 15" laptop that can do RAW photo processing, I've come up with the Asus ZenBook Pro and the Dell XPS line. I've found articles on installing Ubuntu on both; they sound like they have some issues but it can be done.
Are there clear winners for Linux laptops outside of System76?
My strengths are definitely on the electronics / software side; I did fine in stats in high school, but haven't done anything significant since. Thanks for the notes on tests of randomness.
If you'd like to chip in, all the data is available on github. I closed my post with a call for statisticians to come along and do a better analysis; maybe you're it! (: Glad to help you extract the roll sequence numbers if using summarize.py to pull it out of each die's summary.json is not your thing.
And yeah, that first chart was frustrating. The easiest tool to hand was Google Spreadsheets, but the choices are side-by-side bar graph and line + bar graph. As you said, clealry the wrong tool for the job, but at least it gets the point across. But that too is in github along with its source CSV if you'd like to make a better one!
I actually get frustrated with clickbait titles and summaries, so I wanted to pack as much information into the summary as possible. My goal was to intrigue people by telling them what they could hear more about, rather than luring them by leaving out interesting detail.
So yes, I was trying to write the abstract of a paper, more or less.:)
I haven't tried a floating test; that'd be interesting to compare.
I did measure the diameters of a handful of the dice, though, and found some correlation with die behavior. markfickett.com/dice#geometry for more on that.
Do you think the dice float with one side up because of bubbles inside them, or something else? I wonder how a die that's egg-shaped or otherwise irregular in shape (but not mass distribution) would behave in a float test.
I think it depends on what you have on hand. I had a microcontroller and a servo motor, but not a woodshop or a reliable DC motor. I like the simplicity of mechanical systems though, avoiding computer control.
My guess is it would also be hard to make the motor and the timer coordinate precisely enough, over 3000 rolls. You could add some interconnect so the camera is tripped when the cam gets to the top, though.
One advantage of computer control though is in chaining the whole system together, roll + photograph + analyze. Timothy Weber actually has a video of something very similar to what I did, but with realtime analysis; unfortunately no detailed writeup yet. timothyweber.org/dieroller
Waiting for the dice to roll definitely was the longest step. But I also ran out of dice (even though now I have 5 seven-die sets, and three assortments of d20s!), and was making graphs or improving the software (or sleeping / going to work) while the dice ran. So even though it's the right target for optimizing the overall process (as the longest part), there wasn't a lot of pressure to optimize.
Also, I got away with a pretty simple heuristic for finding the die in the picture; just looking for an area that changed and using a simple flood-fill to identify the area. (That part was just using PIL, not any OpenCV fanciness. More at markfickett.com/dice/#cropping.) Extracting multiple separate dice would make that step much harder, especially since you'd need to not only extract them but identify which die is which.
What do you think of my comparison of different numbers of rolls out of the sequence? I actually started with 8k rolls. But comparing (computer-selected pseudo-)random subsamples of the roll sequence, using 2k, 3k, or 8k all looked about the same, whereas using 100 or 1000 rolls was quite different. markfickett.com/dice#numrolls
I actually did some investigation of p-values along the way. For example the Koplow dice I tested, which were slightly fairer than average among the 19 d20s I ran, all have p 0.001 for their 3001 roll datasets. But what I want to say isn't "with X% confidence, this die is not fair". I basically know that to start with. I want to know "how does this die behave?"
Me too! (: Unfortunatley neither my camera's mechanical shutter nor my budget for recreational dice purchases supports that whim. But I think the handful I tested still proved interesting.
Now, if someone wants to donate some larger bags of dice, I might try to port this to a Pi and its camera module (with an electronic shutter). And maybe add a mechanism for swapping out one die for the next. That's starting to sound like another serious project!
For better or worse, all the dice I tested seemed to have fairly symmetricl distributions. That is, if they favor 20, they favor 1 too. Even the very "unfair" dice of the lot tended just to favor or avoid some random middle numbers. So, no good tidbit for the summary on how to roll crits.
[...] you're poisoning the spam filter rules, and making it harder for the filter to distinguish between legitimate and truly spammy email.
Worse, if you're doing it on a webmail client, you're essentially poisoning the communal filter.
Not necessarily. I hope a good spam filter takes the recipient into account as context. E-mail from Verizon to me? Spam. E-mail from Verizon to my co-worker with FiOS? Maybe not. E-mail addressing Mr. Smith delivered to neo@? More spam.
Like a QR code? I hear it's all the rage in Japan (and catching on pretty fast here, too).
I made some cards for my photography: front is a little section of photo with a QR code to that particular photo on my site, back is my name and URL. But, as it happens, I haven't actually really used them yet –as much because paper is inconvenient as because photography is a hobby, not a business, for me.
I always end up throwing away business cards –small paper objects do not have any permenant place in any of my filing systems –but a physical object with easy and non-error-prone analog-to-digital conversion seems useful (especially if they have space for annotation somewhere on them).
I don't remember setting it, but it's set to 'never' already. I'll keep an eye on whether it really disconnects as often as I thought.
For reference as to how to set it: a quick google says: Settings>Wireless and Network>WIFI Settings>Menu Button>Advanced>Sleep Policy to Never .
Reading comments, the smartphone + data plan + commercial SIP sounds the most promising. Sometimes I like to Figure It All Out, but right now asterisk and all sound like a bit too much trouble. I did buy the Nexus S, and am (as expected) finding mobile internet/maps/e-mail tremedously useful (or at least fun). And, I barely talk at all –I've had a PAYG for the last two or three years –so having that on the side (and forwarding missed calls to it) might be a good backup for occasional loss of coverage.
The people in the Clear store said they didn't throttle per-service (I specifically asked about SIP/VoIP, and they also mentioned torrents), though I don't know if they're authoratative (or entirely knowledgeable; they misheard 'SIP phone' as ZipPhone at first). But yes, a detail that's important to check.
On the Nexus S, you can set Airplane Mode but (possibly with the help of an app) still turn WiFi on, which leaves me with a "no service" message on the unlocking screen, but avoids any later complaints. Perhaps that's something similar to be done on the E71?
That sounds like it might be a great option. I'm totally new to SIP. Any recommendations for SIP providers, or what to look for? (Of course, I can go do my homework, but...)
Good to hear it has potential to work. My concern so far is mostly the missing incoming calls: I often turn on the phone (just testing in the house) and see that the WiFi has disconnected, despite apparent strong signal. (However, Line2's pricing seems more straightforward than Skype's, though Skype is what I initially looked at.)
Informative indeed! I glanced at Virgin Mobile but glossed over them mostly; but that plan sounds appealing. I do already have the Nexus S, but it's still within the 30-day return window (and although I enjoy it I probably wouldn't be heartbroken to switch); however, it looks like it might talk to their network.
Any comments on Virgin Mobile's speed / restrictions on tethering?
Actually, I'm trying to have both, and have them be the same thing. When I'm at home, the Spot (or other mobile ISP) would be my home internet connection; when I'm mobile, it would be mobile broadband, as well as voice (over WiFi to my phone). So it's very informative (if sad) to hear that VoIP over mobile is jittery – which matches some, but not all, of the few tests I've done.
I'm trying out a Clear Spot on a relative, and with the range set to 'high' (in probably very good coverage) it lasted about 4 hours driving around (so set to low probably it'd do better). It's good to hear corroborative reports. Most of the time, too, I anticipate being either at home or at work, so a quarter-day mobile time might be okay. If not, I'd rather buy and carry an extra battery than buy voice+data+sms+home. (However, it's not clear that the Spot warns you in any useful way of a low battery –I haven't tested that yet.)
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I'm one of the "Apple Loyalists" seriously considering Linux. It's fairly easy to experiment with software (my main difficulty is Lightroom, currently looking at Corel AfterShot Pro). I've heard System76 isn't great hardware despite the convenience of shipping with Linux, but I'm not sure what the best options are.
Looking for a 15" laptop that can do RAW photo processing, I've come up with the Asus ZenBook Pro and the Dell XPS line. I've found articles on installing Ubuntu on both; they sound like they have some issues but it can be done.
Are there clear winners for Linux laptops outside of System76?
My strengths are definitely on the electronics / software side; I did fine in stats in high school, but haven't done anything significant since. Thanks for the notes on tests of randomness.
If you'd like to chip in, all the data is available on github. I closed my post with a call for statisticians to come along and do a better analysis; maybe you're it! (: Glad to help you extract the roll sequence numbers if using summarize.py to pull it out of each die's summary.json is not your thing.
And yeah, that first chart was frustrating. The easiest tool to hand was Google Spreadsheets, but the choices are side-by-side bar graph and line + bar graph. As you said, clealry the wrong tool for the job, but at least it gets the point across. But that too is in github along with its source CSV if you'd like to make a better one!
I actually get frustrated with clickbait titles and summaries, so I wanted to pack as much information into the summary as possible. My goal was to intrigue people by telling them what they could hear more about, rather than luring them by leaving out interesting detail.
So yes, I was trying to write the abstract of a paper, more or less. :)
I haven't tried a floating test; that'd be interesting to compare.
I did measure the diameters of a handful of the dice, though, and found some correlation with die behavior. markfickett.com/dice#geometry for more on that.
Do you think the dice float with one side up because of bubbles inside them, or something else? I wonder how a die that's egg-shaped or otherwise irregular in shape (but not mass distribution) would behave in a float test.
Woah, that's great!
It looks like it takes more infrastructure than my setup, though. :)
If you want to join the thread above about number of rolls, I'd be curious to hear more of your thoughts.
I think it depends on what you have on hand. I had a microcontroller and a servo motor, but not a woodshop or a reliable DC motor. I like the simplicity of mechanical systems though, avoiding computer control.
My guess is it would also be hard to make the motor and the timer coordinate precisely enough, over 3000 rolls. You could add some interconnect so the camera is tripped when the cam gets to the top, though.
One advantage of computer control though is in chaining the whole system together, roll + photograph + analyze. Timothy Weber actually has a video of something very similar to what I did, but with realtime analysis; unfortunately no detailed writeup yet. timothyweber.org/dieroller
Also, I got away with a pretty simple heuristic for finding the die in the picture; just looking for an area that changed and using a simple flood-fill to identify the area. (That part was just using PIL, not any OpenCV fanciness. More at markfickett.com/dice/#cropping.) Extracting multiple separate dice would make that step much harder, especially since you'd need to not only extract them but identify which die is which.
What do you think of my comparison of different numbers of rolls out of the sequence? I actually started with 8k rolls. But comparing (computer-selected pseudo-)random subsamples of the roll sequence, using 2k, 3k, or 8k all looked about the same, whereas using 100 or 1000 rolls was quite different. markfickett.com/dice#numrolls
I actually did some investigation of p-values along the way. For example the Koplow dice I tested, which were slightly fairer than average among the 19 d20s I ran, all have p 0.001 for their 3001 roll datasets. But what I want to say isn't "with X% confidence, this die is not fair". I basically know that to start with. I want to know "how does this die behave?"
I would want a 100 of each ...
Me too! (: Unfortunatley neither my camera's mechanical shutter nor my budget for recreational dice purchases supports that whim. But I think the handful I tested still proved interesting.
Now, if someone wants to donate some larger bags of dice, I might try to port this to a Pi and its camera module (with an electronic shutter). And maybe add a mechanism for swapping out one die for the next. That's starting to sound like another serious project!
For better or worse, all the dice I tested seemed to have fairly symmetricl distributions. That is, if they favor 20, they favor 1 too. Even the very "unfair" dice of the lot tended just to favor or avoid some random middle numbers. So, no good tidbit for the summary on how to roll crits.
[...] you're poisoning the spam filter rules, and making it harder for the filter to distinguish between legitimate and truly spammy email.
Worse, if you're doing it on a webmail client, you're essentially poisoning the communal filter.
Not necessarily. I hope a good spam filter takes the recipient into account as context. E-mail from Verizon to me? Spam. E-mail from Verizon to my co-worker with FiOS? Maybe not. E-mail addressing Mr. Smith delivered to neo@? More spam.
though I can't say they're exactly appropriate for business use...
As I discovered while trying it out with my brother and his girlfriend. Bump me! Hey, didn't work. Bump me harder. Don't worry, my phone can take it.
I also have Flash Your QR on my phone, to this end.
And, says Google, there is some effort to standardize contents, including MECARD (vCard but shorter markup).
Like a QR code? I hear it's all the rage in Japan (and catching on pretty fast here, too).
I made some cards for my photography: front is a little section of photo with a QR code to that particular photo on my site, back is my name and URL. But, as it happens, I haven't actually really used them yet –as much because paper is inconvenient as because photography is a hobby, not a business, for me.
I always end up throwing away business cards –small paper objects do not have any permenant place in any of my filing systems –but a physical object with easy and non-error-prone analog-to-digital conversion seems useful (especially if they have space for annotation somewhere on them).
I don't remember setting it, but it's set to 'never' already. I'll keep an eye on whether it really disconnects as often as I thought.
For reference as to how to set it: a quick google says: Settings>Wireless and Network>WIFI Settings>Menu Button>Advanced>Sleep Policy to Never .
Reading comments, the smartphone + data plan + commercial SIP sounds the most promising. Sometimes I like to Figure It All Out, but right now asterisk and all sound like a bit too much trouble. I did buy the Nexus S, and am (as expected) finding mobile internet/maps/e-mail tremedously useful (or at least fun). And, I barely talk at all –I've had a PAYG for the last two or three years –so having that on the side (and forwarding missed calls to it) might be a good backup for occasional loss of coverage.
The people in the Clear store said they didn't throttle per-service (I specifically asked about SIP/VoIP, and they also mentioned torrents), though I don't know if they're authoratative (or entirely knowledgeable; they misheard 'SIP phone' as ZipPhone at first). But yes, a detail that's important to check.
On the Nexus S, you can set Airplane Mode but (possibly with the help of an app) still turn WiFi on, which leaves me with a "no service" message on the unlocking screen, but avoids any later complaints. Perhaps that's something similar to be done on the E71?
That sounds like it might be a great option. I'm totally new to SIP. Any recommendations for SIP providers, or what to look for? (Of course, I can go do my homework, but...)
Cost per month with iPhone (AT&T):
$40 for 450 minutes
$25 + $10/GB over for 2GB
$10 + 10/ea for 1000 text messages
Plus residential internet:
~$40
Cost per month with Ideal Plan:
$40 for unlimited data
Good to hear it has potential to work. My concern so far is mostly the missing incoming calls: I often turn on the phone (just testing in the house) and see that the WiFi has disconnected, despite apparent strong signal. (However, Line2's pricing seems more straightforward than Skype's, though Skype is what I initially looked at.)
Another reason to move to Canada, then.
Informative indeed! I glanced at Virgin Mobile but glossed over them mostly; but that plan sounds appealing. I do already have the Nexus S, but it's still within the 30-day return window (and although I enjoy it I probably wouldn't be heartbroken to switch); however, it looks like it might talk to their network.
Any comments on Virgin Mobile's speed / restrictions on tethering?
Actually, I'm trying to have both, and have them be the same thing. When I'm at home, the Spot (or other mobile ISP) would be my home internet connection; when I'm mobile, it would be mobile broadband, as well as voice (over WiFi to my phone). So it's very informative (if sad) to hear that VoIP over mobile is jittery – which matches some, but not all, of the few tests I've done.
I'm trying out a Clear Spot on a relative, and with the range set to 'high' (in probably very good coverage) it lasted about 4 hours driving around (so set to low probably it'd do better). It's good to hear corroborative reports. Most of the time, too, I anticipate being either at home or at work, so a quarter-day mobile time might be okay. If not, I'd rather buy and carry an extra battery than buy voice+data+sms+home. (However, it's not clear that the Spot warns you in any useful way of a low battery –I haven't tested that yet.)