Sometimes when I wander the streets in search of beauty, I come across man's efforts to improve our function, our world. But looking at our attempts I wonder whether we are not doing more harm than good.

Compare that to a scene just 200m away... Surely we can do more to improve the visual impact our urban areas have?

I recently purchased a brand new 15" MacBook Pro 2017 with TouchBar fully maxed out. It has the latest software patches.

This is the third time in a month that I am greeted by this display when I open the lid after not being used for a couple of days, connected to the USB Type C charger:

At a recent lunch at the International Buddhist Temple in Richmond, I was presented with a menu I presume to be in Mandarin.

Clearly I cannot read Mandarin, so I decided to use Google Translate on my phone to translate the menu in real time:

I recently fooled around with photographing a hamburger in my studio, and at the same time playing around with the high resolution mode on my Olympus OM-D E-M1 Mark II camera. Unfortunately, when I took the photo, the studio flash did not seem to get triggered when in high resolution mode. So all I got was a black frame. I decided to take a look at it in post processing nevertheless.

Turns out that the highest pixel value according to the histogram and pixel readout is 1. Most are 0. Since an RGB image is represented by 8 bits per channel (Red, Green and Blue), it means each channel can have 256 different values. I was curious to see how much data was still lurking in the darkness.

In modern times, electronic devices are ubiquitous. Since it is so cheap to create CPUs, RAM and other logic used to build computers, electronics are no longer limited to basic, dumb systems such as old school calculators.

With the age of IoT and other stupid acronyms amongst us, potentially any device you plug in to an AC outlet or using batteries of some kind could potentially be based on a basic von Neumann architecture. This in turn, though very loosely related, means it probably has at least two levels of control logic, typically three:

1. Firmware (known sometimes as BIOS, which is software running inside of dedicated microprocessors)
2. Software (This includes Operating Systems, Applications etc. usually installed on hard drives or SSDs)
3. (Optional) management interface, such as IPMI. This is a separate computer running alongside a server that allows remote, offline access to the server for management purposes.