Wednesday 19 July 2017

We're here to view the tapestries...

This is fun - the Irish tourist board have re-created Game of Thrones in the form of a scrollable tapestry. The Rains of Castamere panel is especially good.

 I wonder if it's real (rather than digital) and if they're going to tour it around?

Friday 14 July 2017

Tuesday 11 July 2017

Convert Apple binary plists to xml plists and back again

Apple binary plists can be converted to human readable xml thus:

plutil -convert xml1 binplist.plist

And, should you have the need, can be converted back again:

plutil -convert binary1 binplist.plist

It's worth noting that this is an in-place conversion that will overwrite the original file and so you should make a copy if whatever part of the OS you're messing around with first.

Monday 10 July 2017

CERN's data storage

An old short paper on some of CERN's data storage issues. It's interesting to note that even they managed to encounter unrecoverable file corruption issues.

Wednesday 5 July 2017

Things of interest.

Things of interest for early July 2017.

  • I've recently rediscovered John B.Calhoun's Behavioural Sink/Universe 25 stuff. I did read some of the original papers a decade or so ago but it's been so long that I appear to have forgotten most of it and it might be it's time to revisit them.
  • Apple's Photos.app machine learning appears to be improving in MacOS 10.13. I fed a couple of years of imagery into it over the last weekend and was surprised to find that it was able to identify and tag images of a friends wedding with no external intervention.
  • Explosion of the month goes to this Antares launch vehicle scattering itself around the Virginia coast.