Author: Paolo Redaelli

Predation is set in the wrong time!

Posted on by Paolo Redaelli

Earth looked very different long ago. Search for addresses across 750 million years of Earth’s history.

This according to Ancient Earth globe! What a cool site! I promptly looked where Milan were at dinosaurs time, 66 million years ago:

Milan were on the coast of a tropilcal ses

Then my mind went to the Predation Role Play Game setting. This is the map of the Earth where Predation is set:

Made by Butterfron from DeviantArt

According to the setting itself and to the reviews it is 66 millions years ago, just “a little” before Cretaceous–Paleogene extinction event, marked by K-T geological boundary (Cretaceous–Tertiary) which wiped away dinosaurs.

Do you see any difference? Let’s pan the globe and put them side by side:

Ehi, Predation is set the wrong time! They told us it was set just before the asteroid. Well, for an arbitrary definition of “just before”. A little difference of “only” 27 millions years. Someone please tell SATI that the clock of their time machine is badly screwed. Or they made it by purpose?

Predation is set in the Turonian age!

Turonian’s Earth, according to Wikipedia

7 Command-Line Tools That Make Your Life Easier

Posted on by Paolo Redaelli

Of those 7 Command-Line Tools That Make Your Life Easier | by Daan I’ve found 4 really useful

  1. Enhancd memorizes all directories visited by a user and use it for the pathname resolution.

  2. Thefuck is a great tool that corrects errors in previous console commands.
  3. Git stats
  4. Autojump keeps track of the directories you use the most from the command line and stores this information in a database
  5. Bat is basically a clone of the cat command that comes with syntax highlighting and Git integration.

Troll dice roller and probability calculator

Posted on by Paolo Redaelli

Recently I’ve been looking for an alternative to AnyDice, probably the most known and widely used Dice Probability Calculator. It’s really good but it has a huge con. It’s proprietary, the source code is not available.

Enters Troll, dice roller and probability calculator which has a somehow raw and crude user interface but its sources are available to download.

Thanks Torben Mogensen for creating Troll (currently on http://www.diku.dk/∼torbenm/Troll).

I’ve hastily made a mirror of it. It is an academic project: there are no copyright tenses, there is no license, the documentation is made in LaTEX and there is an article which has been published as a paper at the ACM Sigplan Symposium on Applied Computing, 2009.

Well, that’s good enough for me. It also makes me rediscover ML languages as it is written in Moscow ML which looks like quite a stable language. Sadly it’s not in repositories of the major distributions (Debian, Ubuntu, Fedora). It’s available “only” as ZIP, TAR Ball, On GitHub, as PKG File, DEB and Win.

Keep cooling

Posted on by Paolo Redaelli

I was looking for a way to keep cool my Fairphone 2 while avoiding to depress its performances when I found “The best way to keep your cool running a Raspberry Pi 4″ by Jeff Geerling.

Good to know! 😃

Why on the earth one would have to think about keeping a smartphone cool? Various, I dare say:

  1. One would like to use it on a summer beach. When the environment temperature is more than 33⁰C the less the heat the better
  2. The AOSP (Android Open Source Project) I use is not optimized for my phone, so the CPU gets hot (80⁰C under load, the case gets so hot that one want to place it on a cool surface). Or I shall update the firmware but I fear to brick it. After I freed my Xiaomi Rednote T8 I’ll try to load LineageOs or /e/ on my Fairphone (remember you can buy a Fairphone 3 or other phones with /e/ preinstalled!)