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Friday, April 12, 2019

Cheesy Tomato Based Pasta Recipe, Adding Subtitles to Video Files, and More

This is the latest in my series on quick, easy, and tasty meals:  

This is being placed here for my own possible records and for others to use if so desired. This is based on recipes online and an interpretation of restaurants that I occasionally frequent. The point of these recipes is to achieve the best taste, in the quickest possible time, at the cheapest possible price. That's why the ingredients are somewhat non-traditional at times. Here's the other thing, it's obvious that they can be altered quickly and easily to suit other core ingredients. Don't be afraid to experiment.

After eating a chicken, tomato, cheese style pizza recipe recently I wondered whether it was possible to do a really simple, quick, and good tasting pasta recipe along these lines as well. It very much is and is really easy depending on what's available at your supermarket.

The following ingredients are required:
- antipasto mix containing Italian herbs, sundried tomatoes, marinated feta cheese, olives, and oil. Available from many local supermarkets. If you can't purchase this you can make your own mix from Italian herbs, sundried tomatoes, diced feta cheese, olives, and oil mix instead
- diced tomatoes (can be from the can or diced fresh)
- garlic
- sugar
- salt
- pepper
- pasta

Cook pasta. Gently fry chopped garlic, and antipasto mix in some oil. Add diced tomatoes to this mix pan and pepper, sugar, and salt and continue to fry. Remove pasta from heat, drain, and stir into pan with pasta sauce. Garnish with salt, freshly ground pepper, and parmesan cheese to taste.

Someone recently asked me to add subtitles to some music videos for Karaoke. Sounds simple but can be tedious. There are some tools to make this easier though:
- you need a subtitle creator. I used 'subtitleeditor'. It basically creates a text file with lines of text which are designed to be displayed at various time markers while the videos is played back. It sounds simple but can be tedious especially if the timing of the music isn't rhythmic and you have to manually go through the song in slow motion to get timings right
Easiest way to add subtitles to a video?
- use online lyric databases to find the lyrics for the song in question
- burn the subtitles into the video using Handbrake, ffmpeg, etc...

Random Stuff:
- as usual thanks to all of the individuals and groups who purchase and use my goods and services
- problems with the F-35 JSF program reminds me of Soviet attempts at supersonic SVTOL jet fighters several decades back. They couldn't really make it work, lost a bunch of prototypes, and eventually abandoned their work. It'll be interesting to see whether the F-35 JSF program works or not in the long term...
- latest in science and technology
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Frank Chiller

Random Quotes:
- We're facing another outbreak of "whitesplaining."
"Whitesplaining" is an affliction that's triggered when some white people hear a person of color complain about racism. They will immediately explain in a condescending tone why the person is wrong, "getting too emotional" or "seeing race in everything."
Why doesn't Ralph Northam just stop talking?
Why doesn't Ralph Northam just stop talking?
The implication: These white people know more about how racism operates than those who've struggled against it for much of their lives.
- TIGER WOODS: “When I first turned pro, it was hosel, no adjustable weights. It was just glued hosels and go ahead and hit it. It was a different era, it was a different time, but now TrackMan allows us to cut down on our testing, cut down on our practice sessions, and we're not beating ourselves into the ground that way. For me, it validated feel, and so when I would feel something and then look at the numbers, it would validate it. Sometimes engineers may not always believe what I'm feeling or what a player is feeling and saying, but then the numbers can definitely validate it.”
- One minute he was snorkeling; the next, he had been scooped up by a whale. A Bryde's whale, to be specific, took Rainer Schimpf, 51, into its mouth as he was in the water off the coast of the South African town of Port Elizabeth last month, the Guardian reports.

"Looming up out of darkness below came a Bryde’s whale shooting up into the ball of fish, gulping all in its path," the marine conservationist, who was filming a sardine run at the time, tells AFP.

As his wife and a photographer looked on from their boat, his legs hung out of the whale's mouth. 

The whale had accidentally scooped him up while trying to eat sardines, Schimpf explains.

He took a deep breath, preparing to go underwater for a time, he said on a recent episode of Barcroft TV's web series Snapped in the Wild.

But after just seconds, the animal figured out something had gone wrong. It opened its mouth and "I was washed out with what felt like tons of water from its mouth," Schimpf says.

No one was injured during the incident, and Schimpf says he went right back in to the water to look for sharks. Bryde's whales can weigh up to 30 tons.
- JACKSON — The typical complaint call that Kyle Lash has received about moose in recent weeks goes something like this: “There’s a moose in my yard that won’t leave and I don’t know what to do.”

The Wyoming Game and Fish Department warden, along with his colleagues, has been inundated with calls from residents and visitors worried about moose lingering near bus stops, lunching at McDonald’s, napping in front yards and stubbornly sticking to plowed and compacted trails and roads. The sheer volume of moose reports has been unprecedented, and it’s not coincidental that the snow depth in Jackson on Tuesday topped out at 28 inches — tied for 1952 for the deepest snowpack ever for a March 19.

“I would guess I’ve responded to somewhere upwards of 50 to 60 calls, mostly over the last four weeks,” Lash said. “Ninety-nine percent of them, we’ve left the moose where they were. We’re just trying to ask the public for some acceptance of them being there.

“Our advice is that they go around the moose if there is a way around,” he said. “If you don’t need to get into your garage or can go around, just let the moose leave on its own. From experience, when we go in and try to chase a moose off of somebody’s property, a lot of the time it leaves aggravated, and then you have an angry moose running down the street, which could be dangerous for other people.”
- The Australian parliament has been told by Defence Minister Marise Payne and Defence Industry Minister Christopher Pyne that the cost of our Joint Strike Fighters will be in the vicinity of $US90 million.

Such a huge variation means that either Giovanni de Briganti has completely got his calculations wrong when applied to Australia, or Pyne and Payne may have misled parliament.

I do not have the ability to decide which of the alternatives are correct but there is a good chance that the Pyne/Payne $90 million vicinity estimate leaves out essential costs.

Giovanni de Briganti believes the aircraft’s engine is one of the costs they leave out.

Let me explain what I think has happened.

Defence officials for over a decade have been hoodwinking politicians on both sides by conveniently leaving out the massive expenditures required to get the JSF aircraft into service. At least in the past that has included leaving out the cost of the engine.

De Briganti believes the low cost estimate covers only a partially-completed aircraft about to leave the factory and not one that is ready for action, which is the only true cost. Pyne and Payne may have fallen into the trap.

The parliament needs to get to the bottom in the real cost of the JSF.

De Briganti emphasises that his $US206.3 million cost includes “engines, fixes and upgrades” — as any proper cost calculation would include.

A series of US defence officials have claimed that the cost of the JSF has been reduced thanks to the intervention of President Donald Trump. De Briganti disputes whether there has been a significant fall, so Trump may also have been hoodwinked.

There are three different JSF aircraft, which each have slightly different cost structures.

De Briganti calculates a “generic” F-35, which a notional aircraft used to compare unit costs from year to year. It is calculated on the basis of the average cost of one aircraft in each of the three versions (F-35A, F-35B and F-35C) in the same production lot.

He says that a direct comparison of the aircraft costs released by the F-35 Joint Program Office (JPO) shows that the cost of a “generic” F-35 has actually increased by $US7.63 million over the five years, 2012 to 2017.

According to de Briganti, JPO’s figures show that, of the three variants, only the F-35A saw its cost decline — a modest $3 million over those five years. Australia is buying the F-35A so at least the claim that we have had a cost reduction may be justifiable.

However de Briganti is adamant that the official Joint Strike Fighter costs produced by JPO only compare airframe costs, and for reasons it has not explained exclude engine and other costs.

If de Briganti is right then clearly the Australian parliament has been quoted costs for the JSF without the engine.

If he is right, words fail me.

De Briganti says his detailed analysis and indeed the JPO’s own figures contradict many public statements by Lockheed Martin and the F-35 Joint Program Office claiming that unit costs are dropping with each successive production lot.

In December, JPO Director Lt Gen Christopher Bogdan claimed that by the time the plane enters full rate production in 2019 the price will be down to $US80-$US85 million for an F-35A, $US110 million for a F-35B, and $US96 million for an F-35C.

These figures are the ones Pyne and Payne use.

Unfortunately, according to de Briganti, “Lot 9” aircraft being delivered today actually cost $US206 million, on average, including their engines, fixes, retrofits and upgrades, Not (repeat NOT) anything like $US85 million.

Furthermore, de Briganti says the JPO continues to award contracts for “Lot 9”, so it is likely the unit cost of “Lot 9” aircraft will continue to grow.

Pyne and Payne might say we are parroting what the Americans tell us.

That’s not good enough.

Our parliament and the public deserves the full facts.
- A tech project called Omnisense is capable of predicting cyberattacks days before they actually take place, the developers claim.

Developed by an international tech company Hyperion Gray in cooperation with University of California, Omnisense is the company's proposal to US Intelligence Advanced Research Projects Activity (IARPA) Cyberattack Automated Unconventional Sensor Environment (CAUSE) 2015 initiative.

CAUSE aimed to create a cyberattack prediction product which could also provide the intelligence with details of the upcoming attack, Forbes report says.

Based in one of Hyperion Gray scientist's home in Canada, Omnisense is said to be constantly monitoring the Internet via a number of "listening servers" dotted all across the planet. These servers seek to analyze the activity on the web and decipher a particular computer, which a suspicious activity — such as network scan or password guessing — is emanating from. Once the specific machine is located, Omnisense is said to carry out a "deep scan" looking for software being run on it, as well as looking up any domain names associated with its IP address, before giving it a security threat score.
It is undisclosed how exactly the system gets its proverbial hands on the running software list, since this information is not openly available on the network. Normally, only the computer's owner or administrator knows what software the system runs.

However, the developers appear confident in a comprehensive "internet weather repot" the system produces daily, saying this report would allow security experts to know "what way the wind is blowing."

"It's a lot of data," says Jason Hopper, the company's software research scientist. "I've been active in security monitoring [for a long time], and I'm shocked by the sheer volume of scanning and brute forcing. It continues to surprise me how much there is."

"Security teams can use this to block sources of attacks before they're actually seen on a network, or take some other preventative action as they see fit," Hopper added.

Hyperion Gray says the system has already proven itself by allowing an unnamed company to identify an upcoming attack four days before it actually happened.
According to IARPA spokesperson, both Hyperion Gray and its wonder machine existed before they became a part of CAUSE initiative, adding that it was not the initiative that got the company off the ground, Forbes report says.

Hyperion Gray claims people concerned with protecting their privacy can contact the company and ask to blacklist them from Omnisense's scope. According to Hopper, a large number of people from around the world have already contacted him — "from farmers in the UK to the government of India."

Still, the Omnisense is not omnipotent. There's one weakness the developers acknowledge: while the system is apparently capable of detecting large botnets (networks of computers armed with malware), it is unable to predict or detect a single "targeted" attack carried out by a single machine.

"If someone sits down at a keyboard and decides to attack another person, that's extremely difficult to prevent," Hopper added.
- A rule of thumb is that your iron no. should have around: (iron no.) x (1000 rpm.)
So for a 7 iron your spin rate should be around 7000 rpm.
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Saving Money (without Sacrificing), Random Stuff, and More

- use price matching when you can to get an extra discount. Note, a lot of companies advertise low prices just to get you through the door. ...