Alexis Birkill

Fine art photographer and software developer living in beautiful Squamish, BC!

[Alexis Birkill @abirkill]

@SquamishAlerts There's a video in a local Facebook group showing a plane looking very similar to this being lifted by helicopter, from about 2 hours ago.

[Alexis Birkill @abirkill]

@PSB_HQ @armyofcats Looks great! Any chance they'll be available internationally from the PSB online store? I know a lot of the merchandise is (understandably) only available within the UK.

[Alexis Birkill @abirkill]

@calanais @OpenAtMicrosoft If you publish it to the Microsoft Store I believe you don't need a signing certificate. Not suggesting this is a good answer to the question, just a possible workaround!

[Alexis Birkill @abirkill]

@calanais There's some reverse-engineering here: https://t.co/JnwKaIgTyf

I'm surprised they didn't include a cryptographic sig (or at least they don't appear to have done). Would allow users to verify the authenticity of stamps, which is apparently still an issue: https://t.co/Pnc7w2l52s

[Alexis Birkill @abirkill]

@calanais I think the problem is that the spec found is intended for customers to print their own barcodes to help with routing, whereas these barcodes are for RM usage for authenticity. I'm guessing there's either another spec we haven't found, or the spec isn't public.

[Alexis Birkill @abirkill]

@calanais Those don't seem to fit the spec either, they start 'JGB S111' for first class or 'JGB S112' for second class, but 'S' isn't listed as a valid information type, and the class should be in position 7, not position 8 as it seems to be here.

[Alexis Birkill @abirkill]

@calanais I was looking at this just yesterday! From what I can tell the published spec isn't complete, the Mailmark 2D code on the Christmas card I received from @humphrey_hippo and @haytor doesn't match the latest version of the PDF spec I could find (Sept 2020).

[Alexis Birkill @abirkill]

@calanais Be aware that routers that block DNS rebinding attacks (<https://t.co/NFSArq4jHj>) won't resolve domain names that point to a local address. Not a problem if you're only using it on a known network that allows it, but not recommended if you don't know where it'll be deployed.

[Alexis Birkill @abirkill]

@calanais On a Raspberry Pi I'm pretty sure you can read from the same GPIO pin concurrently in two scripts. You'll get a warning (because it's often not what you want to do) but it should work. No extra hardware required.

[Alexis Birkill @abirkill]

@calanais The detection is fantastic though, 100% recognition for people and vehicles with zero false positives in my experience. And pretty good recognition for some other objects you may or may not find in Bishop's Waltham...

[Alexis Birkill @abirkill]

@calanais I got three 1080p streams working well on a RasPi 4, if your camera can do 720p substreams then you can get a lot more -- mine aren't very flexible in that regard. I do use the Coral accelerator for object recognition though.

[Alexis Birkill @abirkill]

@calanais @BittWareInc This or something in the same family, I think: https://t.co/TTO8kxXPRs

[Alexis Birkill @abirkill]

@calanais I upload to them all, the POST endpoints are generally fairly similar, but I think Wunderground is the most used. (Also owned by IBM).

[Alexis Birkill @abirkill]

@humphrey_hippo Brilliant!!

[qntm @qntm]

Today, 20211202 (2nd December 2021), is a palindrome in the YYYYMMDD format. It is the 83rd of what will ultimately be 366 palindromic dates in this format.