I've been experimenting with making kimchi. Basically, I use the Fermentation kit from Ball Jar. Looks like the second attempt on the left was successful. The first attempt on the right will go directly to trash! I just followed the basic recipe on the guide, substituting sriracha instead of chili powder.
Bento Rice and Tilapia Fish
With boiled eggs and zucchini. Lemon Pepper spice sprinkled on fish, and sriracha on rice bed.
I don't eat this every day. I have been informed that Tilapia is a bad fish to eat, but they're cheap, you know?
I was looking at old articles and one of them caught my eye: The specification for a 3M computer. If you want to know about 3M computer:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/3M_computer
Basically, it has a Megahertz of CPU speed, a Megabyte of memory, and a Megapixel display. Preferably under a Megacent of price ($10,000). Somewhere down there in the Reference section, there is a funny story about how Steve Jobs tried to sell a consortium to Brown University, and the interesting thing about the story is that the 3rd M is MegaFlop.
A Flop is basically a Floating Point of Instruction. A Megaflop is basically a million of them in one second. The old Macintosh doesn't have a math co-processor, hence, no FLOP, just plain old CPU painstakingly doing the old computation the hard way.
Of course, that was before. Nowadays, I don't want a 3M computer. I want a 3G computer. What's 3G computer?
A Gigahertz CPU, a Gigabytes RAM, a Gigabit Bandwidth.
Notice that I don't really care about screen resolution nor do I care about Flops. As far as price is concerned, it should be under $100, but if it comes in a set, it should be at $300 max.
If you know me, then you know that I carry Raspberry Pi Zero as USB Dongle to be connected to my Chromebook. Actually, it also connects to my Smartphone, via VNC, as well as to my Raspberry Pi 4, which is my "fancy" computer at home for video editing and 3D graphics.
Is Raspberry Pi Zero (Raspi Zero) a 3G computer? No. Its specifications are 700 Mhz CPU, 512 MB RAM, 480 bps (USB2) Bandwidth. The original Raspi Zero was clocked at 1 GHz, but when it comes to RaspiZeroW got down-clocked to 700 Mhz, 800 Mhz overclock. Using it via VNC robs down its capability further. RAM and Bandwidth is only half of what I wanted. So suffice to say that a Raspi Zero isn't a 3G computer, but it's actually about 1/2 of a 3G computer. To point out the things in its favor: $10 for RaspiZeroW! Cheap.
Is there a solid 3G computer? Yes. Enter Raspberry Pi 4 (Raspi 4). It has 4 cores fo 1.6 Ghz, 4 GB of RAM, and USB 3 Bandwidth. Basically, it not only fulfills 3G computer specification, it went over in all dimension by 4 fold. Price? I got mine for $55. complete kit is only $300 including monitor and memory cards. That's a good deal.
And yet, for my daily drive computing, I still use Raspi Zero. Why? Why should I use some underpowered computer? Well, I just don't need that much of computing power. Sure, I need it for 3D graphic, for which there is never enough CPU speed, but for everything else, it's enough. Mostly.
Lately, I've been running into issues where the program needs 3GB or RAM, where even if I'm willing to wait for the program to finish, I can't because there's not enough Memory available. Raspi 4 has enough memory, so I've been running such resource hungry programs there.
But more often than not, I'd pull the old Linux CLI, and write my own scripts from scratch, and enjoy not only a fast, lightweight program for me to use, but one that is custom-made for my workflow, as well as bug free. Why wouldn't it be? After all, if there's a bug, I'd just fix it, since the source code is *right there*!
Yes, it's true. You can have the equivalent of the old Cray supercomputer for only $5!
I say equivalent, not identical.
The original Cray Supercomputer cost 13.5 million dollars. That's sometime around 1985. It actually has liquid coolant mechanism. And yet, fast forward 15 years later to sometime around year 2000, and common desktop model regularly meets the same specifications, and did it without the liquid cooling part. A simple fan will do!
Now fast forward 15 years later to sometime around year 2015. The Raspberry Foundation has Model A and Model B, and it has about the same specification as the desktop model in year 2000, and therefore the same speciifications as the original Cray. The model that piqued my interest, however, is the Raspberry Pi Zero.
I just set up the Raspi Zero model, not the ZeroW, as USB Device Dongle, thanks to Ben Hardill instructions. And it works fine. ZeroW costs $10. But the original Zero, lacking WiFi, only costs $5. Hence, a $5 Cray supercomputer.
I remember from long ago, there was an article in a computer magazine (I forget the name of the magazine) that was written by Penn Jillette. Yes, the magician. In it, he was writing about how one of his friends was bragging that he wrote a spell checker program that manages to spell check MahaBharata in 90 seconds. Somehow that story stuck with me all of these years. So, when I finally hooked up my Bugglegum computer that is Raspi Zero, I'd be interested in its performance.
As you know from previous posts, I was deep into learning how to type. I decided to write my own typing tutor program because all the other typing tutor programs out there do not allow for easy wordlist customization. Well, part of the dictionary customization is to grep some words out of the dictionary. I just happen to have 100 popular text from Project Gutenberg. To which, I simply added the Mahabharata.
The process is basically concatenating all text into one gigantic file, then reformat to one word per line, and uniquely sort it. Then I run a diff with the standard dictionary that comes with the OS. the result is the wordlist I'm looking for.
My Raspi 4 manages to filter out 100 MB text file in just 1:33 minutes. Or about the same as Cray, but with much more data involved. How about my Raspi Zero? Well, it ran out of memory. So it didn't make it.
I then split the file into manageable chunks, and those are about 15 MB file. It took Raspi Zero about 90ish seconds to process the file. Considering that that's about the size of Mahabharata, I can safely say that I have the equivalent of Cray supercomputer at the size of a bubblegum, for $5.
By the way, the processing the whole file took Raspi Zero about 10 minutes for the whole thing. Good for coffee break or something.
Speaking of progress, I am somewhat disheartened to know that Java VM takes 495 MB in memory. Considering that RaspiZero only has 512 MB RAM, the whole thing must run on Virtual Memory, and therefore slow. But that's topic for another time.
Yes, that's 95 words per minute. Another 5 wpm and I'll reach my goal. It has been a slog, something I do everyday.
Since I wanted to practice mistyped words, I ended up writing a series of scripts on my Raspberry Pi which is a typing lesson scripting, because why not?
I'll be sharing it in the future, as my learning Linux continues.
That's the rest of the linux commands. Some of those is part of OS layer, instead of user layer. I suppose that's unavoidable. How many of those do you know?
I've been relearning Linux basic commands and it turns out that it is incredibly powerful. There's a lot you can do with it, even without going into some specialized scripting language such as Perl. So, looking at that list, how many do you know?
92 wpm today. Learning how to type does help a lot. I'm getting that much closer to my eventual goal of 100 wpm. It's true what they say. The faster you type, the less mistake you make.
455 keystrokes means that I have the potential for 91 wpm, had I have 100% accuracy. Hopefully, that will increase to 100 wpm soon. That's my goal. after that, just work on accuracy until I get 100% every time.
Still, I'm happy with the speed of my progress so far.
I was following Ben Hardill's instruction on how to turn Raspberry Pi into USB device. This is a great benefit for me since I can then access Raspberry Pi without having to turn my phone into a hotspot. I'm using Chromebook to do it, by the way. VNC works, but slow. SSH works, but not X mode. If I want to use X mode in SSH, I have to use my Raspberry Pi 4. It works there.
I ran into a problem in writing files to root directory. I cannot access it directly, so I had to do something like "sudo nano /boot/usb" or something like that, instead of cd into /root and go from there. Another problem is that Wifi is non functional as USB device. I don't know enough to fix it. Something about sub network?
Chromebook is good enough, though. I have VNC and SSH programs, and SSH has "Mount SFTP" option, or some other file sharing method, so I can copy files from one computer to another. I have to VNC into the Raspberry Pi first, though, and put SSH file on there. I do it with "sudo touch /boot/ssh" command. Somehow, the file get erased everytime. I probably will have to add it in startup script somewhere to make it permanent.
But it works. VNC is rather slow and jumpy. SSH works fast, though, and I prefer it for doing some heavy duty coding, although graphical projects isn't good to be done via SSH. So, thank you Ben Hardill for writing up the instruction to turn my Raspberry Pi Zero W into a USB device, suitable to turn my Samsung chromebook into a "real" computer!
In case, you're wondering: Yes, I'm using Raspberry Pi Zero W as my daily coding computer.
It is rather encouraging that my typing speed went up to 80 wpm. Sure there's plenty of mistakes along the way, but considering that my masximum potential is 88 wpm without mistakes, I'd say that that's a definite improvement.
The idea, of course, is to type up to 100 wpm so that I don't have to slow down while typing what I speak. Time will tell whether or not I will achieve this by the end of the month. Normal speech speed is about 120 wpm, but I talk rather slow.
I have been journaling my life lately. I tried to do it with Bujo, or Bullet Journal. Unfortunately, it didn't work. I do seem to have come up with a workable method based on Project Management principles.
Unfortunately, I neglected the need to migrate from one book to another. So, I was lost for a while. I tried to solve it by buying thicker journal, the brown one you see in the picture, but I realize that without proper method, it would be just delaying the problem.
As I see it, carrying one thick book is equivalent to carrying two. Therefore, I can migrate from one book to another. I just need to carry two books until the migration process is complete, then it's back to just one book.
I like Leuchtturm better than Moleskine, but I couldn't resist things that are on sale, and so bought bulk journals for cheap. Too bad, they're lined instead of dotted. But it will work well enough.
Cheap personal pizza done quick. It's faster than delivery or frozen:
1. Grease frying pan.
2. Put tortilla in the frying pan.
3. Cook until warm. Flip.
4. Put tomato sauce, cheese, topping.
5. Cover pan.
6. Cook until desired doneness.
Enjoy!
