I was speaking with a medical professional about the effectiveness of wearing a mask. There are a number of different types of masks, the N95 for example actually will filter out 95% of the airborne particles. This is an especially effective mask to wear in order to prevent from getting the corona19 virus.
There are other masks that are not of that same quality but health professionals ask, actually implore everyone to wear a mask as there is a belief this will help to prevent the spread. The logic is common sense, if people cannot easily spread airborn particles containing the virus then things will obviously be better.
Where is the proof?
Well, now there is proof. Hong Kong scientists have been conducting research on hamsters to prove that masks help to reduce the rate of spread. I only wish that I could have seen the little hamsters running around with little masks on.
It is pretty hard to not see what is going on in the USA with respect to the pandemic. There are a lot of reasons why things might not be doing so well there when compared to other countries.
Not wearing masks
Opening bars, restaurants, gyms, shops
Opening other crowded venues
The current cheerleader and chief has suggested that perhaps because so many tests are being done they are showing more people who are infected. Well, yes that might be the case to a minor level but taking tests is just holding up a mirror to reflect the current situation.
What is the conspiracy? Well, the president wants fewer tests and then I read in the newspaper that the federal government will be ending funding of various testing sites. This decision shortly after the president suggested reducing the testing would make everything look better sounds suspicious.
This was a pretty clumsy way of trying to eliminate these statistics. Not only was it clumsy but quite a few of these federally funded sites were in one of the states, Texas, where the numbers were increasing. This was pretty worrisome, especially for the people in Texas, so within a few days this decision was reversed.
Wow, I wonder how we could somehow eliminate the nasty statistics that make the covid19 pandemic look bad in the US.
hmmmm
What if we forced all of the hospitals in the USA to change how and to whom they submit their covid19 statistics.
If I didn’t know better I would look at this and think that perhaps someone thinks that everything is ok and perhaps everyone might forget about this if we could really hide some of these unflattering statistics from Covid 19.
Posted incorona times|Comments Off on Too many tests results in too many results
The biggest story in the newspapers over the last few months is not just bush fires.
Donald Trump’s impeachment
Bush fires in New South Wales, Australia
Prince Harry steps down
Kobe Bryant dies in helicopter crash
UK withdraws from European union
The covid19 pandemic has actually received quite a lot of press for a lot of reasons mainly the destruction to human life. Unlike an epidemic which is an outbreak in a particular region or community a pandemic is an epidemic that spreads over multiple countries or continents.
I was speaking with a doctor at my local hospital about the effects of the pandemic on the emergency room. Here in Germany, after the lockdown of many shops, the emergency room does test for the covid19 virus but unlike some other countries a fairly low percentage come back as positive.
My doctor was talking about the differences in hospitals around the world. Earlier in her career she did a internship at a hospital in the US. What is the difference between a hospital in the US and a hospital in Germany?
In both hospitals the staff are required to purchase their own shoes and stethoscopes. In both hospitals the doctors and nurses wear scrubs and heal the sick.
The most surprising difference is that the doctors in America must clean their own scrubs. Yup, at the end of the day they change into street clothes and pack their dirty scrubs into a bag to be washed at home. I always like to hope my home washing machine will do a fabulous job but I work in IT. When going to work I don’t get exposed to sick patients, strange diseases nor have anyone bleed on me. I might get some dust on my pants from crawling under desks but I think a standard wash machine will take care of it.
During normal non-covid19 times the doctors in America don’t have to wear a mask, well outside of the operating room. This is also true in Germany but the difference is that in the USA wearing personal protection equipment is optional. At my doctor’ hospital it is required to wear a mask and the physicians risk being fired if they are not wearing a mask. Oh, the masks are also provided by the hospital.
I never thought about the sources of spam nor the types of spam until I started this blog. I must not have this site configured very well as I receive spam daily. I have tried to set things up to filter spam out but the spammers are actually much more clever. That is why today I am writing about payday loans.
I have been around and in some countries it is possible to have payday loans where the annual percentage rate is calculated to be the equivalent of 2600% and can even be advertised on the television. Wow, that is a hefty percent, boy am I glad that the USA doesn’t stoop to such business practices.
Well, I guess that last sentence was created with out a lot of thought or research. Of course payday loans are legal and I suppose even thriving in the land of the free. Not even in America’s heartland is it possible to escape.
What is a payday loan
A payday loan is a small short-term loan that is taken out with the intent of covering an immediate need that cannot be met with existing resources. Because this loan is a very short term it is expected to be repaid once you receive your next pay check. The average length of a payday loan is two weeks. A payday loan differs from a traditional loan in a few key points. A traditional loan is paid back in installments while a payday loan must be paid back in a single lump sum. Also installment loans are of a much longer duration ranging from months to years. The biggest difference of the two is the amount of interest paid for the privilege of the loan. A traditional loan interest rate is usually in the single digits while a payday loan is easily in the digits.
Wow, 100% interest? Nah, usually more like 400 or 500% interest but it is never really advertised that way. It is usually more in the way of a fee charged for the use of the money over life of the “loan”. I was looking at one such payday loan website to see just how much it might cost for a quick loan.
Finance charge. A finance charge will usually range from $15 to $30 per every $100 you borrow. If we use a two week loan as an example, your finance charges can cause interest rates grow to as high as 400-780% APR.
I guess they do advertise that the loan may have a 400% interest rate.
How to calculate APR.
For this example I am going to assume the following.
loan amount of $250
Fee of $20 per $100
loan duration two weeks
Annual percentage rate (APR) is calculated with the following steps.
Divide the finance charge by the loan amount ( 50 / 250 = 0.20)
Multiply the result by the number of days in a year (0.20 x 365 = 73)
Divide this result by the length of the loan (73 / 14 = 5.214)
Multiply by 100 to make this a percentage ( 5.214 x 100 = 521.4%)
The APR is not quite so intuitive as the common but incorrect calculation of what is the cost of the loan divided by the amount of money ( 50 / 500 = 0.2 ) multiplied by 100 to make a percentage (0.20 x 100 = 20%)
Rational for a payday loan
I get why someone might get into a financial bind. The alternator on their car breaks on December 26 which is also the same month their second child was born. Unexpected costs are both unexpected and hard to cover.
The payday companies are charging more interest than a bank because they are not expecting to build a long business relationship and it is possible that you might not pay them back. They do need to cover their costs and be able to continue to stay in business but it does seem that a 50 dollar fee for a two week loan of 250 dollars is excessive.
Perhaps using the word loansharking is not quite accurate. That word tends to conjoure images of someone who might break your leg if you don’t pay the load or come up with the “vig” by the end of the week. I guess a more accurate word might be usury.
Usury
The practice of lending money at unreasonably high rates of interest.
During my research I found another source which does clearly describe the process.
Posted inprogramming|Comments Off on Payday loans or modern day loansharking
I guess with small bit of information we are seeing what must be an unexpected surge in testing in some of the US states that have reopened. Much kudos for the states to go above and beyond to get some extra statistics in this time of turmoil.
The only thing that would be better to create a exceptionalism in testing would be to have a few large organized indoor events or perhaps a outdoor protest or two.
Not only bank robers wear masks.
Based on all available information this is not Don Ho#s brother
Wear a mask for the win.
Posted inSoapbox|Comments Off on Pandemic Times – Testing for the win
I remember reading an internet joke which was a job placement. It was looking for someone who would be willing to work for 40 hours a week, clean up messy spills and deal with diapers and up to 128 hours of unpaid overtime. Without actually referring to the positions title, “mom”, the list of all the tasks and hours sound pretty incredible to the average person who does not have this list of responsibilities.
I think about this
as sometimes when I read articles about some of the voice operated
assistants that are being invited into people’s living-room. Who
would have thought even a few years ago that you would ask personal
questions of a computer device that you might not say to a coworker
or to your parents. This information is not only going to a big room
full of computers but in many cases they are being stored for later
analysis and evaluation by people.
Siri What are the symptoms of a STD?
Alexa I weigh 120 pounds am I obese?
Cortana Where is the best place to bury a body?
Google now How many sex partners are too many?
Not only are you sharing your most private thoughts but you are actually helping a nameless faceless corporation get better at understanding speech. Nobody actually thinks that this will be used against us in the future. Despite the lack of enough people to analyze everything I might have to say considering that there are millions of other Americans or billions of other Asians this becomes less of a problem when you start to include computers into the mix.
Thinking about being spied on at home is not something that usually causes any lost sleep. If you don’t want to be spied on then don’t give your money to a corporation that will be mining through your personal life trying to maximize their profit on their knowledge of you. What usually gets me is how many people are willing to trade their personal details for little or nothing.
Just recently a smart phone app Zao will allow you to upload a few photos of your face with various differences (blinking, moving mouth, …) to allow their system to analyze your face so it can then create deep fakes of other video footage. Your face could then replace Leonardo DiCaprio as the star of the Titanic or perhaps you become Tony Stark of Ironman.[1]
For me what is
shocking is not just the people giving up their likeness but that the
company could if they wanted create a database of people. The users
sign up with their telephone number which allows a unique id for
people who are already providing their picture.
The company whose app created such a stir was forced to issue a statement on pledging changes after critics attacked the app’s privacy policy, which had in it “free, irrevocable, permanent, transferable, and relicenseable” rights to all user-generated content. [2]
The most important
aspect of this situation is the input data for their developers. As
a software developer it is often difficult to get good test data.
This particular app had become an overnight success and ended up on
the top download spot in the Chinese IOS store despite the with it
despite rather draconian permissions.
Neither the Chinese
government nor Zao are the only companies or governments that want or
use facial recognition. Abuses of facial recognition will inevitably
occur simply due to the number of closed circuit television cameras
and the ravenous nature of both private industry and government to
track people.
I cannot stop the
eventual tides of survellience but I do have the power to not invite
the intruders into my house.
Building a personal computer is not quite as simple as building a house out of legos but in some ways it is similar. All of the parts are standardized and the parts are simply plugged together. The process can indeed take a while depending on any difficulties you encounter.
A lot of this time can be consumed while unpacking boxes, finding or selecting which parts are relevant for your build (AMD vs Intel) or even plugging together all of the cables. In my case I connected up the motherboard on the table and worked through all the issues (memory in my case) and then disconnected quite so the motherboard could be moved into the case.
Most of the cables are big and unambiguous when being connected up. However, this does take a while and can be difficult depending on the size of the case and the size of your hands.
The only big surprise for me was when trying to connect the last few tiny cables from the case to the motherboard. For reasons not known both the reset button and the power button cables were both labeled power button. It turned out that these are just for creating a temporary connection on the motherboard and it did not matter which was used.
The other big surprise was that the cables need to be connected with a specific orientation. The power cable contains a tiny triangle which represented the positive lead.
What parts did I eventually decided on?
PC Case
Phanteks Luxe with tempered glass
Motherboard
Gigabyte x570 Aorus Master, with AM4 socket
CPU
Amd Ryzen 9 3900x, with AM4 socket
CPU Cooler
be quiet! Dark Rock PRO 4
Graphic card
GeForce GTX 1650 SUPER OC
Memory
Crucial 32gb x 2
Disk drives
4TB WD Black
Power supply
650 Watt be quiet! Dark Power Pro 11
Case fans
140x140x25mm Corsair ML140Pro red LED
Posted inDIY|Taggedpcbuilding|Comments Off on Building a personal computer – the grand finale
Cable management is
just a term that means you will organize the cables as nicely as
possible. If you are new to pc building you might think that means
laying the cables between the graphics card and any other cards
installed in the case.
This might also be
the case but cable management usually takes place on the back side of
the motherboard. All tower cases regardless of their size have two
side panels. The main panel opens up to the main area where the
motherboard is located and pretty much everything else.
It is the other side
panel that is usually where most of the cable management occurs. The
power, and other cables, are usually a bit longer than they need to
be and this extra cable needs to be stowed somewhere.
This storage area is
usually only a few centimeters deep but that is more than enough
space to hold the extra length of cables. These cables might be
attached directly to the case with zip ties or in some higher end
cases there may be additional connectors or facilities.
PC Build and cable
management
Posted inDIY|Taggedpcbuilding|Comments Off on Building a personal computer – cable management
There
is actually more to fans than big ones can push more air. There are
essentially two different styles of fan.
The
first type of fan is PWM style. PWM stands for pulse width
modulation which is a variable speed fan which is controlled by PWM.
These fans have a four pin connection which is used for both powering
the fan and controlling the speed. This types of fans can be
controlled in a number of ways.
These
fans can be controlled by an external switch on the case itself or it
can be controlled via the motherboard. Controlled by the motherboard
typically means the temperature is being monitored and the fan is
being ramped up based on the temperatures received.
The
ability to speed up the fans only when needed make them perfect to
help have a cool system but also to have a quiet system.
The
second type of fan is a static pressure fan. These fans run at a
constant rpm and are good for pushing air with some force. This type
of fan is typically used for pushing air through radiators where the
extra pressure is needed to get through the aluminum fins. Because
these fans only run at a specific speed they do not have the same PWM
control so they only have a three pin connector.
Selecting
a fan
RGB
Fans
Up
until now I have not been involved with RGB peripherals including
fans. RGB fans behave similar to other fans except that they have
another lead – a 4 pin connector which will control the colors.
Only the colors are controlled by this cable.
This
cable cannot be connected to a regular 4 pin fan cable connector but
instead of a 4 pin RGB connector. This connector may be on a
motherboard but may also be part of separate a RGB controller from
another vendor.
I
choose a system that was rather limited in the RGB and my motherboard
actually does have RGB connections. I choose a few fans that
were LED lit but not pure RGB fans. Perhaps in the future I will
enhance this aspect.
My case choice was
actually rich as far as airflow goes. My case choice, “Phanteks
Luxe with tempered glass”, came with four 140mm fans, two in the
front, one on top and one in the back. I decided to get a small bit
of color so ordered a three led lit fans for on top
Note: These fans are
obviously flat so how can you know which direction they are pushing
the air? The answer is on the edge of the fan is an arrow showing
the direction of airflow.
Posted inDIY|Taggedpcbuilding|Comments Off on Building a personal computer – about fans
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