If you have a Gmail account, you can take advantage of a feature known as plus addressing. Plus addressing, as the name implies, allows you to append a plus sign, followed by any series of letters and/or numbers, to your email address. This can come in handy if you want to determine who is sharing your email address or if you want to create special rules to route emails to different folders in your inbox.
For example, if your email address is JohnSmith@gmail.com and you are signing up for an account at Company123, instead of providing your regular email address, you can provide JohnSmith+Company123@gmail.com. All emails with plus addressing will still be sent to JohnSmith@gmail.com. However, if you later receive spam emails with that plus address, it will be obvious that Company123 shared your email address with them.
As another example, you can use plus addressing along with Gmail filters to automatically apply labels or to categories your emails. Let’s say that you want to add your name to the email distribution list for your child’s elementary school. You could submit JohnSmith+Elementary@gmail.com as your email address and then create a filter (or category) as shown in the next 2 images.
Perhaps a lesser known but related feature is dot addressing in which you have the option to add periods anywhere in your email address. Periods in Gmail addresses are simply ignored, so you can add any permutation of periods such as John.Smith@gmail.com or J.o.h.n.S.m.i.t.h@gmail.com. The same filters and categories can be applied to your dot addresses.
Read more in this Gmail blog. Have you found other uses for Gmail plus addressing or dot addressing? If so, let me know how you’ve taken advantage of these features.
Did you know that you can track your Eleven Table Tennis (ETT) player statistics online? The statistic that is likely of most interest to most ETT players is their Elo rating. Other statistics of interest may be their historical match results and recent wins and losses. While you can view these stats in the VR game itself, there are also 2 websites that I know of where you can browse these stats.
The second is 11ClubHouse which has most of the features of the official Eleven VR website but also features the ability for the community to comment on each player in terms of friendliness (via the Fair-play-o-meter) and a guestbook where players can leave feedback on other players. Here’s my 11ClubHouse user profile: https://11clubhouse.com/903406/.
As you can see, after seemingly hitting a plateau, a few days ago I just reached an Elo of 2100 for the first time ever. I don’t know if I just had some fluke victories or if I’m really improving, but to me the wins and losses and Elo ratings are less important than just playing and having fun. Hope to see you in ETT!
I was fortunate enough to experience the 2024 Total Solar Eclipse from Carmel, Indiana. While I was able to view the eclipse through my eclipse glasses, I also brought various recording devices to capture my surroundings from multiple perspectives. This blog entry provides some information about my setup.
Location, Location, Location. The first consideration, aside from being in the path of totality, was to determine the exact location from where I’d view the eclipse. I decided that in addition to directly recording the sun itself, it would be interesting to record the office building where I work—right before, during, and right after totality. From the parking lot (pictured above), I was able to get a good angle of the building, free from obstruction, as well as an unobstructed view of the sun.
Timing. For most people, an approximate time for the start and end or totality would suffice. Most eclipse viewers simply need to arrive before totality and might snap a few photos and videos to commemorate the event. I was slightly more constrained because I needed to ensure that I had sufficient storage space on my memory cards as well as battery life to capture my intended footage. To determine the precise start and end of the partial and total eclipse, I used the US Navy Solar Eclipse Computer. I grabbed GPS coordinates from Google Maps and entered them into the Solar Eclipse Computer but had to truncate them after 4 decimal places. I made sure to arrive shortly after the beginning of the partial eclipse which would give me an hour to get situated, look around, and set up all my equipment to prepare for totality.
GoPro. One of my recording devices was my GoPro HERO7 Black which I simply affixed to a 3D printed mount and placed on the hood of my rental car since it was one of the only objects above ground level. The purpose of the GoPro was to record a video of the office building and produce a timelapse video immediately before, during, and immediately after the 3.5 minutes of totality. I wasn’t able to attach the mount to anything, and despite there being a slight breeze, I was fairly confident that it would not move around during recording. Given my familiarity with my GoPro’s battery life, I began recording about 10 minutes before the onset of totality, as I was confident that I’d have more than enough RAM and battery life to capture all of totality and several minutes afterward.
Drone. My 2nd recording device was a DJI Mavic Mini. Its purpose was also to obtain a timelapse of the building but from a higher perspective. Approximately 7 or 8 minutes before totality, I flew the drone to 18 meters (59 feet) altitude, according to the flight data, and started recording. I simply allowed the drone to hover for the entire duration. While the drone stayed put for the most part, the 10x timelapse shows what looks like noticeable movement of the drone in all 3 axes which gave the building a “rubbery” appearance. I don’t know how much of this movement was due to the wind. In any case, I was happy with my timing, as the battery lasted through totality and plenty of time thereafter.
Camcorder. My 3rd recording device was a Canon VIXIA HF M301 camcorder with 15x optical zoom capabilities. Along with my eclipse glasses came a camera filter which was probably intended to be used with mobile phones, but the diameter of the filter was sufficient to cover the entirety of the camcorder lens. I used 2 pieces of clear tape to attach the filter to the camcorder so that it fully covered lens. I mounted the camcorder to a portable tripod and placed the tripod on a folding chair, mainly for the purpose of elevating it off the pavement of the parking lot so it was easier for me to make adjustments. Given that I had zoomed all the way to 15x, I discovered that I was only able to capture the sun for a few minutes at a time before it moved off frame. Therefore, I had to keep repositioning the camcorder before, during, and after totality. This meant that I was unable to capture a continuous uninterrupted video of the eclipse. Maybe next time I’ll consider investing in a solar photography tracking mount, but I was mostly satisfied with the results that I got without one. I noticed that when the sun was closer to the edges of the frame, the camcorder had difficulty auto-focusing on the sun, but that was not surprising.
The one obvious missing recording device was my Canon R6 full frame mirrorless camera which I alluded to here. I expected to have my hands full with all the recording devices above, and the addition of my R6 camera and another tripod would have added significantly to my luggage. Therefore, I made the difficult but practical decision to leave it at home. Maybe I’ll bring my “big” camera to a future solar eclipse. Overall, I was happy with the amount of planning that I put into this momentous occasion, and I was blessed with fairly clear skies and good weather, all of which amounted to an unforgettable event. You can enjoy my eclipse video here and below:
This is NOT an April Fool’s joke, although I admit that the title is a bit tongue in cheek. You see, about a month or two ago, following a Tesla software update for our Model Y, I was stopped at a red light. I was the first vehicle lined up at the intersection (i.e., no cars between me and the traffic light). While my traffic light remained red, the traffic light in the next intersection ahead of me turned from red to green, and that’s when my Tesla’s Green Traffic Light Chime (Autopilot settings pictured above) kicked in. The “ding” is supposed to alert you to the traffic light turning green, and at the time I remember wondering if my car would have proceeded to run the red light into cross-traffic if Full Self-Driving mode was turned on.
I can understand why my vehicle made the mistake since the 2 intersections were not far apart from one another. However, I also know that Teslas have the ability to judge relative distances, so it should have known that the traffic light that was closer to me was still red. Perhaps it failed to see one of the 2 traffic lights which is equally concerning. Tesla began replacing its ultrasonic sensors with Tesla Vision in 2021, so our 2023 Model Y (purchased in December 2022) should have been equipped with the newer technology.
I’ve experienced many other false alarms when the Forward Collision Warning alarms (also in the Autopilot settings pictured above) would scream at me on narrow winding roads near the UCLA campus, thinking that I was going to collide with either parked cars on the side of the road or with oncoming traffic. Note that even with Forward Collision Warning set to “Late” I have still been experiencing lots of false alarms. I assume that the artificial intelligence that powers the collision warnings was trained in scenarios where the roads were not quite so narrow and curvy. At a minimum, this erodes my trust in the Full Self-Driving feature. I also feel that these false alarms are startling and can be potential distractions or even safety hazards.
We were notified a few days ago that we were granted a 30-day free trial of Full Self-Driving (Supervised).
Notice that it explicitly states “You and anyone you authorize must use additional caution and remain attentive. It does not make your vehicle autonomous. Do not become complacent.” I might experiment with Full Self-Driving, but at this point I am not sure if I will rely on it routinely, as I have witnessed far too many instances where the car has mistakenly interpreted driving situations. Even if it makes the correct decision 99.99% of the time, that is 1 mistake in 1,000 (these are hypothetical numbers, as I do not know the actual accuracy rates), and any individual trip may involve hundreds, thousands, or more decisions. I think my views will change as the technology improves, so stay tuned...
It’s that time of year again—it’s World Backup Day. Have you backed up your important files? I use 2 external storage devices to backup my files, although they are both at home so are vulnerable to theft and disasters. What method(s) are you using, if any at all?
View some of my other posts related to backups to understand why it’s a good idea to back up your files.
On April 8, 2024, a total solar eclipse will pass over portions of Mexico, the U.S., and Canada. While a path of totality that traverses San Antonio, Austin, Dallas, Little Rock, Indianapolis, Buffalo, most locations in the U.S. will feature at least a 50% eclipse of the sun. That means a lot of Americans will be trying to experience the eclipse, whether it be by viewing it directly and/or taking photos or videos of the eclipse as I did in August 2017.
If you have concluded that you will buy solar eclipse glasses, and if you’ve paid attention to the references above, you know not to trust just any pair of eclipse glasses. The American Astronomical Society has a list of vetted suppliers. Make your your eclipse glasses are made by a supplier on this list.
If you’ve visited a U.S. national park and hiked any of its spectacular trails, you may have been given advice to wear weather-appropriate attire, use activity-appropriate footwear, bring sufficient food and water, travel in groups (or let someone know your plan if hiking alone), and various other helpful recommendations. However, we sometimes overlook one of the most important aspects of visiting national parks: getting there.
Although most people have cell phones with map applications (e.g., Apple Maps, Google Maps, Waze), we may be lulled into a false sense of security that those mobile map applications will get us to our destinations. In the absence of cellular service, those map applications may fail to work. That is why I recommend bringing a dedicated GPS device. I’ve used a trusty Garmin nüvi 650 for decades, and because it relies of line-of-sight communication with GPS satellites, it always works—even when my phone has lost cellular service.
Additionally, whether you use a phone-based or dedicated GPS, I recommend verifying ahead of time that named locations on your GPS device accurately represent your intended destination. For example, depending on the application you are using, if you select “XYZ National Park” it might pinpoint the geographic center of the national park which might be in the middle of the wilderness, or it might pinpoint one of several park entrances which may or may not be the entrance that you had planned to use. While visitor centers may often have named locations that are geographically accurate, campgrounds, trailheads, and parking lots may be less likely to have named locations.
If there are no named locations that match your desired destination, then I recommend finding its GPS coordinates. Some National Park Service websites like this one and that one will provide you with GPS coordinates for common destinations. If you are not given GPS coordinates, then I recommend using Google Maps to locate your destination on a map and grabbing its GPS coordinates. On a desktop or laptop browser, simply single-click on a location on the map, and Google Maps will tell you its GPS coordinates.
Tip: if you are given GPS coordinates in degrees/minutes/seconds, it may be helpful to convert them to decimal degrees for ease of entry into your GPS. Read my blog post about converting GPS coordinates for more info.
Finally, if you found GPS coordinates, don’t stop there. In addition to writing them down and bringing them with you on your trip, enter them into your GPS ahead of time and verify that it is really your intended destination. Don’t wait until you are actually driving to try to figure out how to enter coordinates into your GPS device. Plus, once you’ve entered the GPS coordinates, it is likely that they will remain in your “recently used” list which might make them more easily accessible when you actually need them.
So in summary, when navigating your way to and within national parks, I recommend 3 things to increase your chances of successfully navigating to your destination:
Bring a dedicated GPS device
Obtain GPS coordinates if named locations are unavailable
Enter and verify destinations in your GPS
With these tips in mind, hopefully you will spend less time getting to your destination and more time exploring our protected lands.
If you’ve used a global position system (GPS) device or an online map application, you may have noticed that geographic locations on earth can be precisely described using latitude and longitude values. Latitudes range from -90 to +90 degrees, where -90 degrees is the South Pole, 0 degrees is the equator, and +90 degrees is the North Pole. Longitudes range from -180 to +180 degrees, where 0 degrees longitude is the Prime Meridian on which the Royal Observatory sits in Greenwich, England.
You may have also noticed that there are 2 main systems for the communication of latitude and longitude: degrees/minutes/seconds (DMS, a.k.a. “sexagesimal degrees”) and decimal degrees (DD). In DMS notation, each degree is divided into 60 minutes, and each minute is divided into 60 seconds, just like a clock. Fractions of sections can be represented by decimals. In DD notation, the latitude and longitude coordinates are simply expressed as decimals, with a greater number of decimal places conferring greater geographic precision.
To complicate matters, in both DMS and DD notations, locations relative to the equator and Prime Meridian can be expressed using either positive/negative values or north (N), east (E), south (S), and west (W) designations. Positive latitudes are N of the equator, while negative latitudes are S of the equator. Positive longitudes are E of the Prime Meridian, while negative longitudes are W of the Prime Meridian.
There may be times when you may need to interconvert between DMS and DD notations. For example, if you need to navigate to a certain location and are provided with DMS coordinates, it may be easier (or possibly your only option) to enter DD coordinates into your GPS device. A free DMS-DD converter is provided by the Federal Communications Commission, and there are numerous other free options available.
For decades, it has been confusing for people to know if they should trust what they see. From the moment that Photoshop became a verb, it had been well known that pictures could be “doctored” to alter one’s perception of reality. In the past few years, artificial intelligence (AI) could be applied to alter videos as well.
Recently deepfake audio was in the news because of a fake robocall in which Joe Biden’s voice was digitally impersonated in an attempt to suppress New Hampshire democrats from voting. Do you think you can tell the difference between an authentic audio clip and one that has been digitally created through AI? Fortunately there is ongoing research that uses AI to help detect AI-powered voice cloning.
It seems that most airline passengers nowadays are receiving electronic flight notifications via email and/or text messages. Today I was waiting at LAX for an American Airlines flight to Orlando and received a series of flight delay notifications via email (example above) text messages:
As I sat for an extra 2 hours at the gate waiting to board the plane, each time I received a flight delay notification via text message, I could hear a collective groan from the other passengers who had received notifications at the same time. The groans grew louder with each successive delay. Fortunately I eventually made it to my destination, but I thought it was funny that we were all sharing the bad news in synchrony. As the saying goes, misery loves company.
I have a YouTube channel that I use to share my home movies. I do not monetize the channel and therefore am permitted to use certain copyrighted songs in my soundtracks, as long as the owners of those songs allow them to be used in that manner. Some song owners, however, do not allow their songs to be used at all, even if the channel does not monetize its content.
Recently I received a notification from YouTube that a video on my channel which I posted 9 years ago has now been blocked in 4 territories:
Upon viewing details in YouTube Studio, the song is “All Around The World (La La La)” by A Touch of Class (or “ATC”) and has been blocked in Denmark, Finland, Norway, and Sweden. It does not provide any additional information beyond what is pictured below.
My guess is that it somehow boils down to money, but I am unable to speculate about the laws or policies that led to this music being blocked in those countries. On the bright side, the video is still available in the United States where my main audience resides.
Apple introduced a Sports app in the iOS App Store. Upon quick glance, it appears to provide sports scores for MLB, MLS, NBA, soccer, and a variety of other leagues.
However, it does not currently support mixed martial arts (MMA) which is the sport that I follow most. For that, I will continue to use the ESPN app which does provide results of some MMA promotions.
There are many reasons why a 3D print can fail. As a beginner, I’ve made many mistakes while learning to print 3D models. Here are some reasons why my 3D prints have failed.
Bed Leveling. Even though my 3D printer has an automatic bed leveling feature, sometimes I get lazy and make many successive prints without leveling the bed. I hear from many experienced people that it is not necessary to level your print bed before every single print, but eventually it may be necessary to level the bed. I haven’t heard of a magic formula to determine when you should level your bed, but I’ve experienced print failures due to not leveling the bed after a long print job (e.g., 48 hours).
Z Offset. Sometimes after bed leveling, I don’t correctly adjust the Z-axis offset. This is often due to my laziness when performing the “paper test” where you want a piece of paper to be gently grazed between the nozzle and print bed. You see, I usually don’t bother removing all the filament from the nozzle before the paper test, so this results in me setting the Z offset too high which results in insufficient bed adhesion. The photo above illustrates that a pile of spaghetti can be the result of setting the Z offset too high.
Nozzle Temperature. When I first started 3D printing, I heard that 200 degrees C was a good starting point for printing PLA filament, and I had success with many prints at that temperature. However, it later occurred to me that depending on the filament that you purchase, there may be different recommended temperature ranges. Many of my print failures have been due to setting my nozzle temperature too low. Nowadays I default to a nozzle temperature of 205 degrees C, but I pay more attention to the recommended temperatures of different filaments and may adjust the slicer settings accordingly.
Heat Break. My prior 3 examples have all been related to settings that can be configured on the 3D printer or slicer software. This last example is related to a piece of hardware, the heat break. The heat break is designed to pass heat from the heater block (which heats up the nozzle) to the heat sink. You see, the filament is supposed to melt only in the nozzle and not anywhere upstream of it. The filament tube is meant to channel the filament to the heat break and should never melt. My Creality Ender-3 V2 Neo comes with a standard heat break which in some circumstances can result in a jam due to melting of the filament tube or filament melting too far upstream of the nozzle. My fix to this problem was to upgrade my heat break with a design that puts a little more distance between my filament tubing and the nozzle. Check out this video for more information:
I hope this has been helpful. Can you think of other reasons why a beginner might not get successful prints?
My wife recently received an invoice from Bay Area FasTrak for a toll violation. I had previously received a similar invoice from FasTrak after accidentally entering a freeway in the FasTrak lane in southern California, so I suspected that it happened to my wife as well. Personally I feel that the FasTrak freeway onramps should be more clearly labeled and optimized for nighttime visibility (that was when I unknowingly used FasTrak), but that’s a different topic altogether.
It turns out that upon inspecting the invoice, it claims that the toll violation occurred on Freeway 101 in the Bay Area (we were not in the area on the date of the alleged violation), and the photo evidence showed a vehicle make and model that is different than my wife’s Tesla. The resolution of the photo in the hardcopy invoice did not permit us to clearly see the license plate, but I was able to retrieve a digital version of the photo online (pictured above). It turns out that FasTrak system transposed 2 characters of the license plate which erroneously linked the toll evasion to my wife’s car. We submitted an online dispute, and this was a portion of their reply:
Thank you for contacting the Bay Area FasTrak Customer Service Center. I appreciate that you brought this issue to our attention, and I will process your dispute for violation ##### concerning the license plate numbered ABCDEFG.
I have reviewed the violation and the images associated, and found the license plate in the image is ABCEDFG. I can confirm this violaton has been dismissed and transferred to the correct vehicle. I apologize for any inconvenience or frustration this may have caused you. No further action or payment is required. If you need further assistance please contact the Bay Area FasTrak Customer Service Center at 1-877-BAY-TOLL (1-877-229-8655.)
I assume that FasTrak applies some sort of optical character recognition (OCR) technology to convert photo images into text-based license plate numbers. In my experience with OCR, it is common for images to be converted into the incorrect characters (e.g., incorrectly translating a photo of the number “1” into the letter “l” or vice versa). However, I’ve never seen an OCR error where a sequence of 7 characters are all correctly identified, but 2 of those characters have their positions incorrectly swapped—that seems to be what happened here.
In the end, I’m happy that the violation was dismissed, but it does highlight an opportunity for them to improve their technology, especially if they are going to be coming after people for money in a “guilty until proven innocent” manner.
Happy new year! Here’s my Meta Quest Recap for 2023:
According to the data, I spent 97 out of 107 active hours (90.7% of the time) playing Eleven Table Tennis. However, I believe the denominator of 107 active hours is inflated because my daughter occasionally plays with my Meta Quest (she does not play Eleven Table Tennis), and I assume that she contributes to the total number of active hours.
Many of my Eleven Table Tennis acquaintances on my Friends list tell me that Eleven is more or less the only game they play on their Quest. The same is evidently true for me. From my observations, Eleven has a loyal fan base.
