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I've been prototyping agricultural lights. The prototype design uses a laptop power supply, a colander, an ice cream tub and about 240 5mm circular LEDs. They look terible but they're really cheap to make because the power supply costs more than all of the other components. The prototype only consumes about 5 Watts of electricity. Given that the LEDs are about 30% efficient, that is about 1.5 Watts of visible light. That's completely inadequate for use as a grow light. However, it is sufficient for domestic lighting and other uses. It is also sufficient to develop the design further. Most importantly, the prototype currently lacks safety features. I also want to add networking. Although, after obtaining preliminary feedback from experts, LTS [Long Term Support] for networking isn't good and may be restricted to 9600 Baud serial.

Two of these lights were shipped to an agricultural/environmental gathering/conference hosted by Mitch Altman. There was space in the middle of two facing colanders for a spherical cow plushie. This invocation of rubber chicken protocol trivially confirmed delivery of the lights.

Before sending the prototype lights to the conference, I hawked the prototypes around my local lighting and hydroponic shops. The response was wholly underwhelming. At the lighting shop, before I had removed a prototype from a bag while asking "Would you be interested in a...", the first impression led to the terse response of "Nah." At my two nearest hydroponic shops, enthusiasm was also lacking, although I got as far as demonstrating powered lights to the owner each shop. In response to variable brightness LEDs, one said "They all do that." However, feedback was vaguely useful because one suggested researching the McCree curve and the other advised against working on yet another proprietary network protocol. Apparently, over the last four years, at least one protocol per year was commercialized before it failed. With the recent increase of Internet connected devices, I suspect that the quantity of failed protocols is greatly accelerating.

Hydroponic retailers are also underwhelmed by equipment which compliments natural sunlight and doesn't require any configuration beyond physical installation.

I sent extensive documentation to the conference and it is quite obviously written before I got feedback. Regardless, it describes the design with sufficient detail to maintain it or reproduce it. It also includes a large amount of speculation including ideas for a significantly larger version, a significantly smaller version and use of the agricultural lighting on an industrial scale in conjunction with other equipment. This is a tidied and hyperlinked version:-

#### Augmented Light Controller ####

==== Rationale ====

It is possible to boost plant growth with artificial light. This is prohibitively expensive for low value plants. It is especially expensive to grow illegal plants in a sealed environment in which natural light is completely absent. Methods to reduce cost include stealing electricity and use of sustainable energy.

Sustainable energy is popular because it allows "off grid" use. Furthermore, sustainable energy largely moves the unit cost of energy to the initial cost of installing hydro-electric, wind or solar collection. Although efficiency may decline over multiple years, replacement systems are increasingly efficient.

Indeed, after many decades of pioneering such systems, we are now at the knee of the curve where the collection, transportation, storage and usage of electrical energy at a domestic scale now exceeds 5% total efficiency. With improvements to solar panels and LEDs, total system efficiency may exceed 20% by 2050. This would allow "off grid" farming up to the Arctic Circle with less than 100m² of solar panels per adult (and considerably less in tropical regions).

A neglected method of reducing energy consumption is augmenting natural light with synthetic light. Although C3 and CAM plants happily thrive on 2kW/m² of light, there are advantages to staggering and extending the duration of light. To minimise damage to plants (for example, from lensing of dew on plant leaves), it is desirable for an augmented light cycle to lead or lag the natural light cycle. This is implemented with custom software running on fairly generic hardware.

[Diagram omitted. Graph of brightness over time. Bell curve (in pale red) "Natural Light" overlaps with bell curve (in pale green) "Synthetic Light". Sum of curves (in pale yellow) "Total Light".]

==== Implementation ====

---- Hardware ----

Circuitry is implemented on 5cm×7cm prototyping boards. Each light has one controller board and three LED boards. The 18×24 holes at 0.1 inch spacing are barely sufficient to host 12 strings of up to eight 5mm LEDs in series. (One row and column is unused.) This is achieved with triangular packing and (nominally) two heights of LEDs. Strings are arranged as pairs (which mostly work) and everything is powered from a replacement Sony laptop power supply which provides a regulated, unisolated, switched mode supply of 19.5 Volts. It is strongly recommended that a power supply targets an older laptop. New laptops require less Voltage than old laptops. However, energy efficiency can be maximised by minimising Voltage drop. Therefore, it is convenient to obtain a "replacement" power supply for an old laptop.

Use of a switched mode power supply is not suitable for agricultural use where water and electricity are often mixed inadvertently. However, it is suitable for further development.

Empirically, the 19.5 Volt supply is sufficient to power eight red LEDs, eight orange LEDs, seven yellow LEDs, seven olive/gallium green LEDs, seven gallium blue LEDs and/or six pink/purple LEDs. Presumably, infra-red, ultra-violet and white LEDs can be deployed in similar quantities.

[Diagram omitted. Pale green board has 12 columns of triangular packed circles. Two columns each have eight pale red circles. Subsequent pairs of columns each have seven or six pale circles and end with dashed circle outlines which raise the total in each column to eight.]

Each of the three LED wafers are soldered with common anode. Channels across all wafers are gated with 2N2222A transistors with current limiting resistors to Port D of a DIP [Dual In-line Package] Atmel ATMEGA328P. (Wiring/Arduino pins D0-D5.) The remainder of Port D, is connected to an LDR [Light Dependent Resistor] and a switch. Fly leads for the LDR and switch are quite fragile. Use of tack or tape is strongly recommended to provide strain relief.

Although D0 and D1 may be used with the micro-microtroller's dedicated UART rather than power switching, use of D0-D7 is more convenient on a small board. In the medium term, multiple channels of a custom wire protocol are required. This is not satisfied by reserving two UART pins.

At present, it is significantly more important that the micro-controller's dedicated I2C pins are not obstructed. This allows the least obstruction when experimenting with I2C thermometers. This is intended to ease implementation of thermal shutdown.

[Diagram omitted. Circuit diagram/block diagram has 20V and 0V rails. "Voltage Regulator" connects to both rails and "Micro-Controller" which connects to "Sensors". 20V rail connects to six strings of LEDs (in pastel rainbow) which connect to a diagonal of six NPN transistors which connect to "Micro-Controller" and 0V rail.]

With the current arrangement, one binary input is trusted and this input is used to switch all power. It is extremely bad practice to trust inputs in this manner.

An example of this practice is Toyota's accelerator pedal where two potentiometers were connected with a SIP [Single In-line Package] connector wired as ground, power, pot, pot, power, ground. Unobstructed paths and the use lead-free solder allows formation of tin whiskers. A tin whisker between power and ground quickly resolves itself. A tin whisker which gangs potentiometers effectively halves their resistance. A tin whisker between Voltage sense and the power rail spuriously indicates full acceleration.

Another example of this practice is the anti-stall system in a Boeing 737 Max. This was only connected to one of the two air speed sensors. Erroneous readings from a faulty sensor were not ignored but prevented an aircraft from gaining height. This led to two crashes and 346 fatalities.

The lighting controller should not be scaled without safeguards. The current implementation is for development of such safeguards.

---- Low Voltage Power Regulation ----

Power regulation is rather arcane and may be skipped.

[Diagram omitted. 10 pin ICSP connector and 6 pin ICSP connector commonly used with Atmel products.]

An Atmel ATMEGA328P (with optional six pin ICSP [In Circuit Serial Programming] connector) obtains a lesser Voltage via an LM317T. This controller board is suitable to drive six channels up to 800mA per channel at 30V. Future iterations of this design will push to envelope to 1.1A per channel at 48V.

The use of an LM317T variable Voltage regulator was a failed test. A series of floating Voltage regulators may power a micro-controller directly from mains electricity. Unfortunately, this requires a very large number of passive components. Furthermore, it is extremely inefficient with energy because the majority is wasted as heat. A further failure was the attempt to use an LM317 with an NE555. Use of a 555 usually indicates use of a dumb, stock circuit or something smart. An accepted use of a 555 is to only use its internal resistors. This potential divider circuit has the properties of matched values and close thermal coupling.

[Diagram omitted. Diagram of 555 containing potential divider connected to three external lines. Remaining 2/3 of block hatched with text "Other Stuff".]

Specifically, if a resistor value drifts due to Joule heating, the others rapidly follow due to their proximity. This occurs regardless of current flowing through each resistor. Unfortunately, a 555 fails to work with a 317 because a 317 specifically limits current to a maximum of 100µA while re-injecting it to the floating output. This specifically requires low value resistors otherwise the derived reference exceeds range and no Voltage regulation occurs. A dimensional analysis of current multiplied by resistance is Voltage. The current is drawn from the potential divider and cannot be sunk. Indeed, this is not desirable because it is not energy efficient. Unfortunately, the current drawn by the 317 and the resistance provided by the 555 leads to a value which is useless. Therefore, the devices are incompatible.

---- Metal Chassis ----

All hardware is mounted with electrical insulation in a metal chassis with ventilation grills. Specifically, the LED wafers are mounted in a triangular formation around the edge of a Poundland cooking colander and the insulation is cut from white plastic Sainsbury vanilla ice cream tubs. Although this looks laughably amateur, it is only intended to boot-strap a more serious design. The total BOM [Bill Of Materials] per light is approximately £16 (US$22). Of this, the 90 Watt PSU is £9.49 (US$14) and may be shared among multiple lights.

It is possible to mount six or more LED wafers in a colander. However, when a colander is mostly covered with LEDs, the reflective property of the colander is under-utilised.

Mirror image wafers were implemented with the intention of simplifying soldering. However, the lack of rotational symmetry is quite jarring. Therefore, mirror image wafers have been discontinued.

[Diagram omitted. Circle containing central block, three surrounding blocks with rotational symmentry and three dashed outlines which would form six way rotational symmetry. Peripheral blocks are wired to central block with rainbow lines.]

During use, LED wafers get quite warm; presumably about 40°C during sustained use. Thermal expansion and proximity of LEDs on wafers leads to cracking noises. In future iterations, LM75A I2C temperature sensors (with accuracy ±2°C) will be mandatory within each LED cluster. AVR micro-controllers also have a temperature sensor within the analogue section but the accuracy is only ±10°C. Other micro-controllers may not have a temperature sensor of any form.

---- Firmware ----

12 bit PWM [Pulse Width Modulation] with granularity of 1µs (cycle time of approximately 120Hz) is implemented across six channels in software. Although the target hardware provides PWM on some channels, software portability is paramount. Although development has greatly benefited from the idiot-proofing of the AVR processor architecture, it is significantly cheaper to deploy firmware on WCH's 8051 micro-controllers, such as a CH340 or CH554 (the infamous 25¢ micro-controller). This reduces micro-controller cost by a factor of 30 or 40.

A POST [Power-On Self Test] fades all channels from minimum to maximum in sequence. Modifications to this sequence will provide firmware version identification. Additional channels were planned for diagnostic lights. However, the main six channels have been sufficient for this task. For example, while diagnosing a compiler bug, one channel was used to provide indication of a bounds check. Underflow was displayed as 10Hz flashing with 1/3 duty ratio and Overflow was displayed as 10Hz flashing with 2/3 duty ratio. If this is not sufficient, a debug string can be emitted in Morse code.

The main algorithm maintains a delta summation (increments/decrements) as a 32 bit variable. Due to one of many compiler bugs in GCC 4.8.1 cross-compiling from armv6t to AVR, it was not possible to implement the 32 bit value as a global variable. Therefore the Wiring/Arduino loop() hook-back maintains state within its own endless loop. Other compiler bugs include -O3 eliminating endless loops and multiple calls from main() to loop().

Summation is used to implement an approximation of colour temperature by stepping through a rainbow of six colours and pulsing zero or one of the channels. This is intended to lag behind natural light by approximately four hours. It is also intended to moderately amplify a change of season. Therefore, plants boosted with augmented light should continue flower and fruit with the natural season.

In normal operation, the augmented light controller produces no visible output for the first hour of operation. This is correct behaviour but is quite tedious when testing. Therefore, a switch has been provide which accelerates the summation process by a factor of 240. (Four minutes are compressed to one second.) During daylight, this allows confirmation of LDR position within 20 seconds. It also allows the augmented light cycle to be manually advanced after installation or power failure.

Ensure that the LDR does not receive direct or reflected rays from any augmented light otherwise the light controller will be locked in an undesirable feedback loop where lights correctly switched on but never switched off.

Given that the rainbow of LEDs provide spectral peaks at 30nm or so throughout the human visible spectrum of light, it is possible to replace the firmware and generate arbitrary spectral peaks with the same hardware. When combined with A/B testing, it is possible to determine the most energy efficient lighting for different species of plants. This information may used to modulate augmented light output. Given that the six or more identified variants of chlorophyll are typically most sensitive to red and blue, it is expected that yellow, green and purple may be reduced but not eliminated.

It is unlikely but other arrangements of colour may be more suitable for agriculture. Cool white plus red and blue provides a generic base for agricultural lighting but re-emission of photons to provide a broad spectrum of yellow is not the most energy efficient arrangement. It also creates an unwanted spectral peak around green, blue or purple which may disrupt plant life-cycle.

[Diagram omitted. Pale green board has 12 columns of triangular packed circles. Pairs of columns represent red, white, blue, red, white, blue.]

---- Code Quality ----

Firmware is developed with the Wiring/Arduino digital I/O API. However, it is not linked, tested or deployed with the standard Wiring/Arduino LGPL library. The code quality of this library is objectively awful. As an example, digitalWrite() is slow and bloated due to indexing three look-up tables; one of which has 16 bit values. This requires adding a value to a base pointer then left shifting by one bit and then adding the value to another base pointer. Clearing a bit also requires inverting a value obtained from a table. In all cases, this can be reduced to accessing two of three tables with no shifts or inversions.

As a further example, pinMode() uses a macro from Arduino.h which uses pointer arithmetic. This is contrary to the MISRA standard which was originally developed to improve code quality in the automotive industry but is now used in other critical industries, such as aerospace and healthcare. Although agriculture is relatively dull compared to these industries, there is no excuse for lax practice which needlessly increases MTBF [Mean Time Between Failure].

Agricultural lighting may cause electrical fire. In a domestic environment, this may lead to homelessness. In many cases this reduces crop yield. It is for this reason that good practices will be followed rigidly. This includes watchdog timers, thermal shut-down, parity checks, strong CRCs, static analysis, assertions, fuzzing, redundant sensors, two phase commits and hardware interlocks.

==== Other Applications ====

Six channels of lights may be arranged as two redundant sets of three channels or three redundant sets of two channels.

---- Stage Lighting ----

Two sets of RGB [Red, Green, Blue] LEDs may provide arbitrary colour for stage lighting. This is most useful if the lighting controller works with a communication protocol, such as DMX.

[Diagram omitted. Pale green board has 12 columns of triangular packed circles. Pairs of columns represent red, green, blue, red, green, blue.]

---- Home/Office Lighting ----

If power output is restricted to half of the maximum, it is possible to control three sets of warm white and cool white LEDs in a pleasing manner. Specifically, colour temperature can be set independently of brightness. This allows home or office lighting to minimise sleep disruption. This may be set with switches and/or dials, set automatically via an LDR and/or configured via a network communication protocol.

[Diagram omitted. Pale green board has 12 columns of triangular packed circles. Pairs of columns represent cool white, warm white, cool white, warm white, cool white, warm white.]

---- Industrial/Event Lighting ----

Dumb arrangements of cool white light are typically used for flood lighting. This is not the most energy efficient arrangement. This is especially true if LEDs are retro-fitted to legacy light sockets. On large structures (bridges, tall buildings) systems using 370VDC are common to minimise Voltage drop across long spans of wiring. However, many of these systems would benefit from using narrow bands of LEDs to further improve efficiency.

==== Regulations =====

The light controller has been developed in anticipation of laws within multiple jurisdictions. The majority of competing designs do not fulfill these obligations.

---- Colour Rendering Index ----

European regulations require certain categories of lighting to attain 80% accurate illumination compared to sunlight. In the long term, this is likely to be raised to 90% and then 95%. CFL [Compact Fluorescent] lighting does not meet this requirement. White LEDs do not meet the long term objective either.

Test wafers have low chromatic coherence. Specifically, shadows have two rainbow fringes. However, sunlight also has low chromatic coherence due to white hot sunlight being split into direct yellow light (with a dark purple shadow) and indirect blue. Some experimental lights use nano-particles to simulate this scattering.

---- Right To Repair ----

Right To Repair legislation is intended to counter planned obsolescence, abandonware, proprietary lock-in, pollution and landfill of working electronics and frustration of customers who are unable to adapt or repair their own equipment. Proposed European regulations will ensure that all LEDs in luminaires can be replaced. This is vehemently opposed because it would eliminate the majority of products from the European market.

---- Recycling ----

Electronics manufacturers within Europe are required to pay towards disposal. If a minimal amount of electronics is manufactured (determined by weight), a flat fee is payed. This is believed to be £35 per year for one tonne or less of electronics. Larger quantities incur larger fees and the responsibility to accept returns. Although the regulation appears to be comparable to Data Protection costs and obligations, the fee is payed to a private contractor. In the UK, RecoLight has the majority of the market. However, recycling of LEDs is currently quite crude. Currently, boards are ground to dust and the dust is heated to extract gallium and other useful material. This is quite energy intensive but less intensive or damaging than mining more minerals.

==== Future Development ====

---- Network Communication Protocol ----

A 256 bit cell network protocol is being developed. It is intended to be a slow-speed ATM Lite protocol which can be implemented in the firmware of an 8 bit micro-controller. Specifically, it should be possible to implement an eight port network switch using a micro-controller with 2KB RAM. The use of cell networking (rather than packet networking) allows packets of arbitrary size to be switched. Indeed, using AAL5 (commonly used to implement PPPoE or PPPoA over ATM) or similar, it is possible to switch 9KB Ethernet jumbo frames via a micro-controller with 2KB RAM. Optimal choice of 32 bit CRC raises maximum packet size to almost 13KB.

In terms of the OSI seven layer network stack, layer one and layer two are implemented although efficiency improvements are desirable so that more throughput may be obtained with cheap, slow micro-controllers.

Many network communication protocols operate as an open loop or provide minimal signal integrity. Lighting controllers are intended to provide reliable operation in conjunction with water pumps or other equipment by implementing a protocol similar to XA distributed transactions.

Surplus bandwidth may be used for agricultural analytics, home security, voice communication and/or slow-scan video.

---- Nybble Virtual Machine ----

The target architectures have a 16 bit address space. Up to 56KB may be EEPROM or OTP [One Time Programmable] EPROM although many of these options are more expensive than 256KB of paged serial EEPROM and a 32 bit micro-controller.

As a contingency, a 32 bit stack based virtual machine with 4 bit instructions requires 2KB ROM. This allows up to 60 kilo-nybbles of code to be distributed without external storage and/or paging. Unfortunately, nybble code runs with significant performance and energy penalty compared to native code. Until a nybble compiler is written, it also requires writing an application in nybble assembly.

Regardless, it has several desirable features which makes it suitable for extended functionality. It works on most micro-controllers supported by GCC. It has better code density than x86. It is fast enough to implement software only PWM for lights and servos. It is fast enough to process network buffers and implement network switch routing. It is also possible to have multiple virtual machines within one micro-controller. One possible arrangement is a virtual router for the other virtual machines.

At present, this functionality will not be used. However, the option exists to make extreme manufacturing savings or add significantly more features. Indeed, confidently having the option to compact code and/or virtualise functionality may defer or avoid such necessity.

---- Industrial Agriculture ----

A six channel lighting controller is sufficient to develop an industrial version which may switch up to 3kW of LEDs with energy supplied from lead acid batteries, 110VAC, 220VAC or 440VAC. The toy implementation is sufficient to develop and test watchdog timers, thermal shut-down and staggered power switching co-ordinated over network.

The prototype will be re-implemented as a single-sided, copper clad, surface mount triangular wafer with an approximate length of 20cm. Six or more 48 Volt channels require 15-18 LEDs per string. This can be arranged as three sets of six clusters of LED rings in a space-filling fractal curve with three way rotational symmetry.

[Diagram omitted. Pale green triangle with 18 pale yellow circles; six per corner arranged in triangle formation, all connected in series. Magnified section shows six cricles in a circular rainbow representing LEDs. Wiring within magnified section is staggered to allow a maximum of one wire to pass between LEDs.]

One or more of these wafers may be bolted to a passive cooling chassis which optionally contains a Galvanically isolated, continuous mode Çuk transformer which is intended to operate safely at 100% humidity. To minimise signal noise, the transformer and LEDs will pulse at a common multiple of 50Hz and 60Hz. Transformer switching and power factor management may use an optically isolated channel from a micro-controller (which also functions as a network switch for the wafers). Obviously, power management requires a hardware interlock to ensure safe operation and boot-strap to power the micro-controller.

Customers may wish to use branded LEDs, such as Nichia, Cree, whatever Philips is this week - and all of the second tier brands. This may require replacing all of the LED surface mount pads in CAD software. Hopefully, this process is compatible with dumb auto-routing of the LED strings.

---- The Square Kilometre Problem ----

When designing an industrial network, people typically sketch tiers of network protocol (often including Ethernet and RS-485) without consideration of cost, bandwidth, long-term reliability or availability of parts. Systems involving radio communication often have no consideration for power, scale or security.

These approaches are wrong. Instead, a cost effective system can be obtained by considering an infinite plane of agricultural lights, water pumps, nutrient pumps and moisture sensors being used indefinitely. Horticulturists tend to be very practical people who have no time for infinities. Thankfully, an infinite plane of hydroponics can be approximated with a practical example. Some of the world's largest industrial greenhouses are suitably measured in square kilometres. Anything of this scale can tiled while approximating a system with optimal TCO [Total Cost of Ownership].

Assuming square packing of 30cm diameter buckets with no access paths and one moisture sensor per bucket, approximately 11 million sensors are required per square kilometre. From this consideration alone, use of almost every protocol with a small address space can be eliminated unless there is bridging to a larger address space. Anything with IEEE802.15.4 header compression will also fail.

Waterproofing and connectors are a significant cost which do not depreciate with Moore's law. Use of radio is an obvious attempt to reduce the cost of connectors and corresponding water traps. However, one micro-controller may have dozens of crimped moisture sensors which do not require connectors or waterproofing. We minimise cost by minimising the spanning tree of connectors and wire. The calculation is only tempered by the practicality of installing and maintaining each cluster of moisture sensors.

Another consideration involves water tanks. Ebb and flow systems have a reservoir of water which is pumped to and from plant roots every two, three of four hours during daylight. Most of the time, the water does nothing. It is possible to multiplex the reservoir. For example, it is possible to have one tank in the middle of eight clusters of plants. This raises many questions. Does the water get pumped directly between clusters, does it go via the tank, or both? What happens if there is a leak? What happens if a pump fails? What happens if re-planting requires one section to be skipped? Can tanks be pooled together? What happens if a virus, bacteria or fungus spreads between clusters of plants or pooled tanks? The simplest arrangement is for everything to go via one independent tank. However, every variation requires MTBF calculations based upon unknown figures.

For domestic use, water may be pumped with aquarium pumps. Although these have low throughput and are irreparably damaged by sustained dry pumping, they are cheap, waterproof, work with local mains electricity and widely available. Unfortunately, aquarium pumps are unidirectional and fairly unreliable. This can be overcome by redundancy. The typical arrangement is one outbound pump back-to-back with two return pumps. This reduces probability of sustained plant root flooding due to pump failure. Pipe junction leakage is also minimised because three way cross or swept splitters are only incrementally less reliable than T or Y splitters.

To further counter unreliability of water pumping, it may be possible to monitor back-EMF of aquarium pumps. Although this does not cover all failure modes, it allows near continuous operation when using commodity parts. In all cases, it would be particularly desirable if a pump controller switched multiple sets of two, three or four mains power aquarium pumps while working autonomously with moisture sensors.

---- Lighting Over USB ----

Some companies specialise in PoE [Power over Ethernet] lighting. At launch, PoE cost US$50 per port and this excludes cabling and equipment using the port. PoE is now cheaper. However, it remains significantly more expensive than USB. PoE has advantages with span and bandwidth but these are not a concern in the majority of cases.

The reliable network protocol fits within a 24 byte packet payload. Therefore, it may be tunneled over USB. This allows the minimal implementation to be a USB dongle of the same size as a BlueTooth dongle. USB protocol allows up to 63 devices per USB host port. PCI/USB bridges and similar typically allow four ports per card to be added to a computer. Dedicated USB bridges may significantly extend the address space. Leaf nodes may be manufactured for £0.20 (US$0.30) or less.

[Diagram omitted. Green rectangle has four pin USB A connector. "Oscillator" connects to "Micro-Controller" connects to a rainbow of six LEDs. Rectangle has dimensions 18mm×11mm.]

In the minimal implementation, PWM is capped at the LED's preferred Voltage. For example, if a 3.3V blue LED is powered from 5V USB, PWM for the blue LED is limited to 66% duty ratio. PWM for a 2.7V red LED is limited to 54% duty ratio. Inputs should be transparently scaled down otherwise the spectrum will saturate in an undesirable manner.

If none of the LEDs are driven at their maximum duty ratio, it is possible to implement Charlieplexing, an awful technique, presumably implemented by someone called Charlie, in which two LEDs may be wired back-to-back and selectively driven by the differential Voltage between two micro-controller pins. This can be extended such that n pins may drive up to n(n-1) LEDs. Examples with 60 or more LEDs have been implemented. It is possible to drive six LEDs with three pins and obtain an average of 33% duty ratio.

Devices connected via any network communication protocol should remember their state of operation so that useful behaviour is observed. This requires storing one integer or a small set of flags in persistent memory (after the oscillator trim value and thermometer trim value, if any):-

State 0: Device has never been connected to a valid network. For USB devices, device has never been suitably queried by a program running on the USB host. In this case, device should run default stand-alone behaviour. For an augmented light controller, input should be taken from the LDR. Water pump controller should run a default schedule. For USB lighting, LEDs should be set to full brightness. Animatronic controller should run default program.

State 1: Device has previously been connected to a promiscuous network. Effort should be made to re-connect to network. If network is not found then operation should revert to stand-alone behaviour.

State 2: Device has previously been connected to a promiscuous network. Effort should be made to re-connect to network. Diagnostics should indicate error condition. Device does not revert to stand-alone behaviour.

State 3: Device has previously exchanged keys with a host and paired. Effort should be made to re-connect with previously trusted host. Diagnostics should indicate error condition. Device does not revert to stand-alone behaviour. Operation in this state may require switch or jumper to be set. Clearing this state may require host releasing device from pairing, removing switch or jumper or re-flashing device. For some devices, leaving this state would be regarded as tampering with security. Therefore, some devices will only work in this mode and resist casual replacement of key material.

In many common configurations, a large number of interchangeable devices may be connected to a network. However, network addressing may be relatively transient. For example, connectors may be swapped or inadvertently jostled during gardening. Furthermore, USB devices may obtain addresses in a fairly random order. This can be countered by providing a name field and/or asset tag field. This allows devices and their location to be associated with a human readable text name while allowing numeric addressing.

Where the device name field is longer than the network protocol payload, the name is sent and received in chunks. When setting a name, the obvious method is to hold intermediate chunks in RAM. However, RAM is a premium commodity within a micro-controller. Therefore, double buffering should be used within the persistent memory and a flag should be used to indicate which version is live.

Despite writing approximately 4500 words, there were a few things that I forgot to include.

Firstly, I didn't mention why I started writing my own version of the Arduino library. I erroneously thought that an Arduino Nano was supplied with a 20MHz crystal oscillator. An Atmel ATMEGA328P works quite reliably at 20MHz if it has a reliable 5 Volt supply. However, it works quite reliably over a wide Voltage range if it is only clocked at 16MHz. Indeed, I confirm widespread reports that it works outside of the range specified by the datasheet. Unfortunately, it took a while to resolve timing problems and generally get experience, confidence and a feel for the capabilities of this architecture. Essentially, I was specifying the compiler constant -DF_CPU=20000000, deploying it on a slower system and then wondering why the timing delays were out by about 25%. Duh! After reading library code, header files, disassembling code and generally being frustrated by the incomplete interrupt driven Arduino time delay code, I wrote a more portable version which should hopefully work on an 8051 and other micro-controllers. A similar situation occurred after disassembling Arduino I/O functions. The result is a smaller, faster, more portable implementation of delay(), delayMicroseconds(), pinMode(), digitalRead() and digitalWrite(). This covers a surprisingly broad range of Arduino projects and isn't subject to LGPL terms.

Secondly, the arrangement of the 16MHz crystal and decoupling capacitors adjacent to the DIP micro-controller was unconventional but quite effective. On a 0.1 inch grid, a two pin crystal with 0.2 inch spacing was placed diagonally in the X, Y and Z plane. This allows the crystal to be placed very close to the micro-controller. Relevent pins on the micro-controller are power, ground, xtal1, xtal2. Without spreading pins of the crystal, one pin is placed 0.1 inches from xtal1 and the other is placed 0.3 inches from xtal2. Decoupling capacitors are connected from each pin of the crystal to ground. The crystal sits diagonally against board and DIP socket. It provides a thermal buffer when soldering and the surrounding micro-controller pins aren't particularly obscured. Furthermore, the decoupling capacitors fill a narrow region of the board which would otherwise be unused. This arrangement looks incongruent but it is compact, reliable and practical.

Thirdly, don't buy 28 pin narrow DIP sockets. Two 14 pin DIP sockets are cheaper. That's partly why Atmel popularized a 28 pin narrow DIP format. Admittedly, it allows a DIP scale micro-controller to be manufactured with less material. However, people who buy 28 pin narrow DIP sockets are imbeciles.

I also sent source code and compiled code. License unchanged from previous iteration. The major difference is that the PWM cycle frequency has been raised from 4 seconds to approximately 120Hz. It also has a fancy power-up sequence.

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end

(Usual instructions for uudecode process.)

I don't follow celebrities closely and it for this reason that I tend to lump them together. Of the ones that I can recall, these look similar and/or have similar names:-

• Actor Elliot Gould and musician Ellie Goulding.
• Hilary Swank, Justin Bieber and Miley Cyrus. In addition to the Miley Bieber meme, Hillary Swank won an Oscar in 1999 for portraying a transgender character. You never see them in the same room at the same time.
• Actor Owen Wilson and politician Boris Johnson. Boris Johnson refuses to say how many children he has fathered. Perhaps Owen Wilson is one of them?
• Actually, all of the Redgrave family, Sheen family, Wilson family and Johnson family.
• Journalist Christopher Booker and screen writer Charlie Brooker.
• Sportsball manager Fergie, musician Fergie and aristocrat Fergie. To make matters more confusing, two of them have collaborated musically.
• Actor Robert Pattinson and character Les Patterson.
• Actor Jeff Daniels, actor Peter Davison and commedian Pete Davidson.
• Kenneth Branagh, Richard Branson and Eddie Izzard. Two of them look similar and usually have beards. Two of them can act. (Hint: Not Richard Branson.) And two of them have made the very bold fashion statement of beard, lipstick and stilettos.
• Perez Hilton and Paris Hilton. This was particularly confusing when Paris had a boyfriend also called Paris.
• Musician James Blunt and business failure James Stunt.
• Actress Zooey Deschanel, musician Katy Perry and presenter Suzi Perry.
• Tony Robbins and John McAfee.
• Actor Malcolm McDowell (from the film Clockwork Orange) and actor/musician Sting (from the film Quadrophenia).
• Actor Daniel Day-Lewis and actor Damian Lewis.
• Actor Michael Gambon and actor Ian McKellen.
• Actress Scarlett Johansson and musician Paloma Faith.
• Actor Martin Freeman and actor Jeremy Renner.
• Presenter Dallas Campbell, actress Bryce Dallas Howard (from anthology series Black Mirror) and actress Annalise Basso (from anthology series Electric Dreams).
• Actor Dustin Hoffman, Dustin Lance Black and Dustin Moskovitz.
• Writer Virginia Woolf and writer Elisabeth Bear.
• International terrorist of dubious extraction Obama and international terrorist of dubious extraction Osama. (It's an old joke but it's still funny.)
• Donald Trump who claims to be the President Of The United States depite a minority of the population voting for him and Donald Tusk who claims to be the President Of Europe despite no-one voting for him.

Trip Through Time

• Actor/commedian Jim Carrey and actor/commedian Jack Lemmon.
• Model Claudia Schiffer and actress Brigitte Bardot.
• Actress Kelly Brook (a curvaceous brunette who often portrays a love interest) and actress Kelly Lebrock (a curvaceous brunette who often portrays a love interest).
• Justin Long could be the offspring of David Schwimmer and Keanu Reeves.

The Same With Long Hair

• Elon Musk + Brian May's hair = Sigourney Weaver. Furthermore, all three are associated with space. (Brian May has a doctorate in astrophysics and is a keen astronomer.)
• During the television series Taskmaster, commedian Rob Beckett repeated an observation from trolls that commedian Sara Pascoe looked like Rob Beckett with a wig. Sara Pascoe was far less amused about it than Rob Beckett.
• Donald Trump and his ex-wife Marla Marples.
• Boris Johnson and Rachel Johnson.

Confusingly Bald

• Jeff Bezos and Dr. Evil, although my friends note that Jeff Bezos looks like every bald super-villian including Mini Me and Ernst Stavro Blofeld.
• Presenter Greg Wallace and actor/commedian Alexei Sayle.

A Full Head Of Black Hair

• Simon Cowell (former manager of band One Direction) and Simon Fuller (former manager of band Spice Girls).
• Politicians: Tony Blair, David Hameron, erm, Cameron, Nick Clegg, Ed Milliband and David Milliband.
• Actors: Clint Eastwood, Hugh Jackman, James McAvoy, John Cusack and Russell Crowe.
• Actor Bruce Willis and actor Jerry Doyle.

If you enjoyed this, you may also enjoy:-

• Warpdog's Celebrities Who Look Like Matresses (via the Walthamstow Tourist Board).
• Face swaps.
• Face blends (such as Trumputin).
• Nominative determinism where people have appropriate names.

Edit 1: I forgot to add:-

• Gordon Brown and Nigel Lawson.
• Adrien Brody and Brent Spiner.

In the comments, there are great anecodotes and suggestions:-

• UID1813 suggested Elijah Wood and Daniel Radcliffe who are disturbingly similar.
• UID2252 suggested L. Ron Hubbard and Ron Howard. This is the beginning of a good meme. Specifically, I enjoy a good L. Ron Howard film.

On Tue 18 Jun 2019, FaceBook will launch a cryptographic currency which is presumably called SuckerCoin, erm, ZuckerCoin. I don't have any cryptographic currency due to the concerns about energy consumption and the lack of security but I would like to draw your attention to the most famous quote from a totally fictional character in the film: The Social Network, erm, a statement from Facebook's majority shareholder, Mark Zuckerberg:-

Zuck: Yeah so if you ever need info about anyone at Harvard
Zuck: Just ask
Zuck: I have over 4,000 emails, pictures, addresses, SNS
[Redacted Friend's Name]: What? How'd you manage that one?
Zuck: People just submitted it.
Zuck: I don't know why.
Zuck: They "trust me"
Zuck: Dumb fucks

How long will it take for this anti-social asshat to be imprisoned? We know that Mark Zuckerberg is an untrustworthy shit. However, I would like to know to what extent Mark Zuckerberg is an untrustworthy shit. Mark Zuckerberg's business associates portray him as collecting money for services not rendered (ConnectU) while simultaneously outsourcing work on a competing platform and not paying for the work (TheFacebook). Given the strategic national importance of Facebook, I remain broadly surprised that US courts decided against Mark Zuckerberg. However, just to the underscore the extent to which Mark Zuckerberg is an untrustworthy shit, between the settlement and the payout of a fixed number of shares to the Winklevoss Twins, Facebook (majority shareholder: Mark Zuckerberg) instigated a 4:1 share split. However, this is only the fifth most pressing concern.

When soliciting one billion messages per day, it is not acceptable to state that 99.9% of the messages are acceptable because that leaves one million messages per day that aren't. (Although, it is mildly comical that Facebook remains indeterminate about breasts after more than a decade of setting such rules.) However, the 99.9% ratio is beyond credibility. Hate speech on Twitter is measured at 2.5% of all messages and on Gab it is 4.5%. Yet we are expected to believe that messages across all categories are significantly more saintly on Facebook. However, this is only the fourth most pressing concern.

Among the problematic content is terrorist propaganda. Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act allows this to be freely published or not in a manner which maximizes shareholder value but this only applies within the US. Given that Kim Dotcom was arrested in New Zealand breaking US law then, surely, Mark Zuckerberg should be arrested in the US for daily, ongoing breaches of New Zealand law to present? Or perhaps this is supporting evidence for UID6957's assertion that we have "might is right" rather than "rule of law". However, this is only the third most pressing concern.

Unfortunately, Facebook's ongoing publication of material statements of relevance to the SEC is extremely spotty. It is extremely unfortunate that four years of Mark Zuckerberg's messages we accidentally lost prior to Mark Zuckerberg's testimony to US Congress. However, when the messages of the founder and majority shareholder cannot be recovered, it demonstates that there is no favor at Facebook. It is particularly unfortunate that a promise from Mark Zuckerberg to always keep Facebook (majority shareholder: Mark Zuckerberg) and Instagram (majority shareholder: Mark Zuckerberg) separate was among the lost messages. However, this is only the second most pressing concern.

My most pressing concern is Mark Zuckerberg's sporting prowess. Mark Zuckerberg is extremely keen fencer and was captain of his school's team. Indeed, we've all seen the videos of his numerous decisive wins in fencing competitions. He also discusses his loves of martial arts frequently. Talk of escape chutes and armed guards pretending (badly) to be programmers or any other matter which makes one think "chickenshit" are the calculated works of detractors and sore losers. Perhaps it is a misguided attempt by lackeys at Facebook to make Mark Zuckerberg seem like a common man of the people rather than a decisive leader with ambition to be President of the United States. As part of this campaign, repeated attempts have been made to suppress Mark Zuckerberg's application to Harvard University which includes:-

Every Tuesday evening, the bell over the Academy Building rings out and invites students on campus to convene at the Love Gymnasium. Each Tuesday, I answer that invitation and go to fence with my peers. Amidst a hectic week of work, fencing has always proven to be the perfect medium; for it is both social and sport, mental and athletic, and controlled yet sometimes undisciplined. Whether I am competing against a rival in a USFA tournament or just clashing foils, or sometimes sabres, with a friend, I rarely find myself doing anything more enjoyable than fencing a good bout.

Of course, only detractors would note that in the college admissions scandal, in which numerous parties have pled guilty to lying about extra-curricular achievements (most prominently in sport) that prosecutions are led by Harvard graduate lawyers and that there is a distinct disinterest towards prosecuting Harvard alumni. This underscores the unparalleled integrity found at Harvard University. Mark Zuckerberg's friendly rival and Harvard law drop-out, Bill Gates, will readily attest to such impeccable character.

Anyhow, I hope that Mark Zuckerberg is imprisoned for a very long time and that any attempt to run a criminal enterprise from jail is treated accordingly.

A friend has made a preliminary listing for spherical cows, penguins and suchlike on EBay. Due to EBay making PayPal compulsory and PayPal being shiftier than it's co-founder (the serial fraudster and US$5 billion corporate welfare king, Elon Musk), further sales and payment options will definitely be forthcoming.

Anyhow, spherical critters are currently available via EBay user spherical_critter_emporium and one random plushie is available for £10 with free global shipping. All proceeds after taxes, fees and materials go towards food and drink for whoever attends a weekly London geek meeting which you are cordially invited to attend. If the spherical critters are popular then it will be a free evening of food, drink and geekery.

After some back-and-forth, the text of the listing is as follows:-

♪♫ They're lumpy,
They're bumpy,
They're easily squashed,
Damaged and lost... ♫♪

♪♫ Spherical Critters!
Spherical Critters!
'Round and 'round
the absurdity goes!
Spherical Critters!
Spherical Critters!
Why we love them,
Nobody knows! ♫♪

These spherical animals not perfectly spherical nor are they living animals. They have a diameter of approximately 18cm (7 inches) but are easily squashed like a cushion. They are made from synthetic sponge and short synthetic fur. They have a small bounce to them which makes them surprisingly suitable for keepy-uppy or hackisack type amusement despite being smaller than a football and significantly larger than a hackisack.

Spherical cows are based on an old physics joke: "Milk production at a dairy farm was low, so the farmer wrote to the local university, asking for help from academia. A multi-disciplinary team of professors was assembled, headed by a theoretical physicist, and two weeks of intensive on-site investigation took place. The scholars then returned to the university, notebooks crammed with data, where the task of writing the report was left to the team leader. Shortly thereafter the physicist returned to the farm, saying to the farmer, 'I have the solution, but it works only in the case of spherical cows in a vacuum.'" Further spherical cow jokes can be found on the Internet including spherical steak searing pans and the Uncyclopedia's lunar migration cycle of spherical cows. We also recommend Rollin' Wild, a series of short animations which were shown in IMAX cinemas. (The spherical cheetah is particularly funny. Likewise for the scene with the cowshed.)

For quite a while, it has been possible to purchase spherical cow tshirts and cross stitching. However, spherical cows in any form have been in short supply. Therefore, we purchased stereotypical black and white splotchy Holstein cow print fur and began making spherical cow stuffed toys/plushies. This rapidly expanded into spherical tigers, spherical leopards, spherical ladybirds/ladybugs, spherical sheep (black or white), spherical penguins and, by special request, spherical Sully print which definitely isn't Sully from Monsters Inc because it is significantly darker.

Each of the patterned spherical critters is unique because it is cut from a different offset of patterned fabric. Regardless, examples shown are representative of future supply. If sources of fur fabric differ significantly then we will update pictures prior to sale.

Spherical critters are likely suitable for small children nominally of three years old, but please use your own judgement if buying for children, and ask us any questions you have. Each item is lovingly and ethically home made by genuine physicists from five pieces of car washing sponge purchased from Poundland and two pieces of synthetic fur typically purchased from Dalston Mill Fabrics and double stitched with rip-stops using the coarsest pound shop thread that money can buy. (Leopard print and Sully print was purchased from EBay seller midtexltd.) No innards are smaller than than 50 cubic centimetres (3 cubic inches) and the basic design has no outer piece which is significantly smaller than half of the surface area.

By special request, spherical critters are available in kit form so that you can sew your own spherical stuffed toys. Please ask us to list the design of your choice with or without scissors, needles and/or thread. All kits are supplied with cutting template (whether it is required or not) so that you can advance your skills with the least impediment. We typically list a pre-cut, pre-joined spherical tiger sewing kit supplied with sponge filling because it is easiest to complete. Also by special request, spherical critters are available with eyes, ears, tails, cow bells and/or other adornments. Please ask us to list any requested variations. However, please note that each addition will typically be £2 extra and eyes for stuffed toys may be more. With additions, they may not be safe for children.

Bulk discounts are available (contact us) and we challenge you to purchase unusual quantities so that we sphere pack them into unusual shaped parcels. For example, 10 critters will pack nicely into a tetrahedral pyramid. Indeed, with 41 critters in stock [at time of writing], we currently have the world's largest tetrahedral pyramid of spherical stuffed toys (see first picture). This could be yours for a reasonable price. You may laugh now but you'll be laughing even harder when you're avalanched by furry balls!

To keep any synthetic stuffed toy in optimal condition, occasionally brush lightly with a wig brush. Wash stains by applying diluted detergent to surface only. Do not soak. Do not machine wash. Do not use hair dryer. Do not place in microwave oven. Keep away from naked flame. Do not fold, spindle or mutilate. Ingress of water to middle of stuffed toy encourages mold. Excessive heat causes synthetic fur to curl or melt.

Unfortunately, due to the use of bright yellow synthetic sponge and relatively short synthetic fur, designs with significant quantities of light fur (sheep, penguin) may appear discoloured from some angles. This may be corrected in future if we can find uncoloured synthetic sponge or alternative filling at a similar price. Please let us know how we can improve this product or any other product.

Also, my friend currently holds an informal world record for a spherical critter tetrahedral pyramid with 35 spheres. We're now working towards 120 unless stock diminishes.

Edit 1: EBay listing with choice of critter.

On the first Tuesday of every month, from 7:30PM, geeks sew spherical plushies in the basement of McDonalds in Leicester Square, London, UK. Apparently, we will also be remembering MDC who is missing and presumed dead. Indeed, please make a particular effort to come along if you're in London and lonely.

I have some tobacco seeds on order and I was gratified to discover that the subject was already being discussed on SoylentNews. I've previously grown tobacco and the result was curious.

Firstly, I grew them in the office of a start-up company. This led to some interesting conversations:-

Investor: Oh, that's a pretty plant. What is it?
Me: Tobacco.
Investor: Tobacco!? Is that legal!?
Me: It is if you pay the capital gains tax.

Investors like businesses which are financially rational and a business which has cash crops as office plants is viewed as maximizing opportunity. In practice, most tax on tobacco is paid by the shipping container. Any attempt to pay a significantly smaller quantity of tax will be deemed as time-wasting by officials.

Secondly, tobacco seeds are astoundingly small. Many people smoke cannabis with tobacco. Although I strongly recommend against smoking concentrated cannabis, people mix all forms of cannabis with commercial tobacco. Some people find that good quality cannabis opens their lungs too much and therefore commercial tobacco is used to compensate. Given the similarlies of the grown plants, the seeds are surprisingly different. Cannabis seeds often have an 8mm diameter whereas tobacco seeds are often mistaken for poppy seeds and have a diameter of 1mm or less. An advantage here is that it is difficult to purchase less than 200 tobacco seeds and they are typically less than US$0.01 each whereas cannabis seeds may exceed US$3 per seed. A seed of each, if viable, often leads to 1kg of dried material. However, tobacco is significantly cheaper and comes with its own insecticide, nicotine, which kills almost anything except tobacco weavils (which are able to metabolize nicotine) or apes and monkeys who smoke it or chew it.

Thirdly, tobacco is a strange looking plant. When it is very small, it looks like lettuce. As it grows and flowers, it looks like foxglove planted among rhubarb. At the top, the flowers look like Digitalis [foxglove] with a long, willowy string of bell flowers in white, pink and/or light purple. At the bottom, the leaves are bulbous, round and look like rhubarb. Each leaf may exceed a square foot (0.1m²). Like cannabis, tobacco grown outdoors may exceed 9 foot (2.7m), even when grown in Northern latitudes, such as London or New York.

Fourthly, tobacco is is one of the tuber plants. It is closely related to potato, tomato and poison ivy. All of these plants can be cross-bred although the result is more poisonous than the initial breeds. Tobacco cross-bred with tomato is commonly known as tomacco. There is an episode of the animated series: The Simpsons in which Homer Simpson starts a tomacco farm. Obviously, this poisonous crop has no commercial value. However, most people thought that tomacco was a work of fiction whereas some people grow tomacco for fun.

Fifthly, organic tobacco is very different to commercial tobacco. Technically, commercial tobacco is not food. Therefore, it is not subject to food regulations. Therefore, tobacco has additives such as arsenic. What is the purpose of such additives? Some additives increase the speed and intensity of a nicotine hit. Others increase the burn rate of tobacco to increase consumption whether it is smoked or not. Commercial tobacco is also processed with solvants. Many people assume this is to ensure a homogenous product which smoothes natural variation between batches. However, the opposite is true. Tobacco manufacturers have teams of field representatives who ensure that stock is correctly presented to maximize sales. The field representatives also ensure that stock is rotated in lockstep. Meanwhile, manufacturers (who invariably produce multiple brands) ensure that nicotine dosing follows a ramping sawtooth pattern. The intention is to rachet consumption from 20 cigarettes per day to 40 and then 60. Switching to another brand fails to satisfy the deliberately intensified nicotine cravings because each brand is racheted out of step. Organic tobacco is significantly more like organic cannabis. The natural buzz from the plant can take 15 minutes or more to have full effect. Indeed, if anything is to be smoked, it should be smoked communally and socially in the chilled manner of illicit cannabis or a peace pipe of tobacco or cacao.

Sixthly, although smoking tobacco or cannabis is harsh on lungs, it is preferable to smoke both without solvants or accelerants. When smoked in this state, it is difficult to consume an excess which feels sickly. Although it is possible to chew tobacco and eat cannabis, both have downsides. Chewed tobacco has a particularly concentrated risk of mouth and throat cancer. Whereas, "space cookies" and similar may cause an overdose which may feel worse than a norovirus. Regardless, cannabis advocates are horrified that tobacco companies may wish to process and package cannabis in the manner of commercial tobacco while lobbying for restrictions which would make personal cultivation of cannabis and tobacco equally illegal.

Seventhly, the downsides of smoking have only become apparent as life-spans have extended. When a person was lucky to reach the age of 40, nicotine provided an effective fumigant. Bedbugs, which are able to obtain all moisture from air, are particularly inhibited by micro-particles of tobacco tar. Negative effects, such as lung obstruction, peripheral circulation obstruction, blindness or cancer from long-term smoking were very secondary considerations. Furthermore, smoking was seen a sign of sophistication and disposable income. Indeed, to cultivate sophistication, schools, such as the (male only) Eton College, made smoking mandatory. It amuses me greatly that people have been expelled from school for not smoking tobacco. Unfortunately, since then, advertisers have used false ruse of female empowerment with the intention of doubling sales and have used cartoons to lure children into smoking particular brands for life. Advertisers have also used doctors and professional sports to increase sales. Even when smoking commercial tobacco was known to be harmful to the general population, the same techniques were repeated as each country industrialized.

Eighthly, despite advances in hygiene and associated increases in life-span, tobacco retains a social rôle and a means of aiding drug delivery; most notably the stimulant nicotine partially counters THC and CBD, the active ingredients of cannabis. Perversely, we may be in an age where tobacco provides the most benefit to unhealthy people. Some people with epilepsy find that cannabis reduces symptoms but leaves them "stoned" and non-functional for much of the time. Although "stoned" is preferable to a potentially fatal epileptic fit, many in this situation do not find the benefits of commercial tobacco to be worthwhile. Organic tobacco, with or without cannabis, may also provide a creature comfort for elders in terminal decline.

Ninethly, organic tobacco may be preferable to electronic cigarettes or vaporizers. Although the heating element burns liquid in a more controlled manner, the reduced cost may increase nicotine consumption by a factor of two or more. Consumption of all additives may also increase by factor of two or more. Although the controlled burn reduces lung damage, the reduced tar reduces effectiveness against parasites, such as bedbugs. Electronic cigarettes are also a source of lithium battery explosion; typically when used, when carried or when charged.

Tenthly, a fair comparison of drugs has been hobbled by decades of prohibition which left, at most, one adulterated upper (commercial tobacco), one adulterated downer (alcohol) and a long list of chemical coshes on prescription. Despite this, it is within many people's first-hand or second-hand anecdotal experience that some legal drugs (prescription opiates, alcohol) are more dangerous than some illegal drugs (cannabis, mushrooms), when used by responsible adults, with the best of intentions. Although this is the optimistic case, it is generally accepted that juveniles will get "smashed" or "crunk" on anything available. With very few exceptions, the minimum age for cannabis, tobacco, opiates and possibly other drugs should be raised to 40 or more; historically the age of menopause, andropause, tooth loss and general decline. Whether or not this is considered extreme or impractical, the option of home grown, organic tobacco provides an additional path away from high intensity drugs, such as distilled alcohol, commercial tobacco or concentrated cannabis (which causes cannabis psychosis in juveniles due to use of unregulated, low quality solvants). Cannabis has often been demonized as a "gateway drug". Furthermore, if a succession of mass media reports are true then cannabis exceeded 100% known active ingredients by the 1990s. However, it is commercial tobacco and, increasingly, prescription opioids which are the gateway to drug fatality. This process would be deferred if home grown tobacco was intermittently available and reduced if it was consistently available. Likewise, partial legalization of cannabis in the US shows the benefit of cannabis when it is not concentrated, smuggled and sold alongside smuggled opiates.

Eleventhly, in the UK and the US, a disproportionate number of opioid deaths occur in rural areas. A cynic would suggest that urban rent/mortgage reduces disposable income. However, remoteness, even relatively, reduces opportunity. To these people, I urge them to grow their own tobacco outdoors. To anyone who does not have this opportunity, rural or urban, I have a partial solution. It requires some technology and is not ideal. However, cost may be minimal. Specifically, it requires growing tobacco indoors. Many have attempted "indoor horticulture", typically of cannabis where it is illegal. This has involved a serious level of shenanigans such as fully-enclosed environments which have been bricked-in to frustrate search warrants or smuggled children who don't speak the local language (or any language) to work as unpaid gardeners. It has also involved exotic air filtering and light cycles. The most profitable of these ventures have involved electricity meter rigging, meter bypassing or fraud. However, all of this can be averted by growing legal varieties of plants in harmony with nature. When it is legal and beneficial to expose plants to natural sunlight, the worst of the subterfuge can be stopped.

Theft remains as a problem. However, it is possible to implement an augmented light cycle where natural light is boosted with artificial light rather than replaced with artificial light. This is typically achieved by having an overlapping phase of artificial light which increases the apparent length of day but not the peak intensity. The optimal choice depends upon electricity pricing, available space and lifestyle. Given a free choice, I'd follow Bennett's Laws Of Horticulture:-

1. Houses are for people to live in.
2. Gardens are for plants to live in.
3. There is no such thing as a houseplant.

Unfortunately, I know many people who live in a space of 15m² or less and have no access to a garden. Please understand that the solution given is suboptimal but may be preferable to no solution. After much consideration involving control theory and circuitry (and a trivial amount of programming), I have implemented an augmented light cycle controller suitable for deployment on a micro-controller with an Arduino compatible API. This code is licenced for personal use, for growing tobacco or tomacco only, under a maximum of 1kW LEDs and further restrictions described in the source code. If this doesn't meet your needs then write your own or pay someone else to do it.

This implementation uses a LDR [Light Sensitive Resistor] and one persistent variable which maintains an accumulated total. This is sufficient to trail the natural light cycle by almost five hours. (Specifically, 2^24 milliseconds or so.) The output is six binary values which are intended to be connected to banks of LEDs of different colors. After a status LED briefly lights, nothing happens for more than four hours. This is very similar to the lucid dreaming glasses featured in Make magazine which should never be constructed due to the increased risk of fatal photo-sensitive epilepsy while sleeping. However, rather than periodically blinking one channel to indicate dreaming, six channels are sequentially raised from 0% to 100% using PWM which is specifically outside of the frequency which typically triggers photo-sensitive epilepsy. It is intended that the first channel is connected to red LEDs, the second to orange LEDs and suchlike. This provides a broad spectrum of light. Also, the resulting color temperature will be similar to the Sun when viewed from Earth. In particular, in a temperate region, LED blue light should be proportionate to season. However, this may require tweaking. Debug of horticultural software can be tedious due to timescale. Therefore, a second set of constants can be selected which skips the initial wait and reduces a day cycle to a few seconds. Ideally, -DQUICK should be added to compiler parameters. However, in the patronizing Arduino interface, it may be easier to bodge an #ifdef to #ifndef. Finally:-

1. The licenced 1kW power limit is partly for your safety. The Arduino API does not implement safety features available in a micro-controller, such as watchdog timer or parity exception. Scaling this system and deploying in an unattended environment is contrary to licence and outright dangerous.
2. Ensure that all electronics are splash-proof and raised from areas where water may collect in puddles. Make a pessimistic calculation and raise it above that level.
3. You are strongly advised to use a linear, wound, Galvanically isolated power regulator even if it costs at least four times and much as a switch mode power supply. Switch mode power is not typically Galvanically isolated and may be fatal where electricity and water are mixed. If you really want to use a switch mode power supply then ensure that it is a Galvanically isolated variant of a Ćuk converter.
4. You are strongly advised to use power factor correction.

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end

(Usual instructions for uudecode process.)

(If you enjoyed use of "eleventhly", search for Mark Twain's use of the word. For Mark Twain's opinion about tobacco, search for "old soldiers".)

I gave a spherical cow plushie to a physicist who works for a tech company. It has been on my friend's desk for a month and it has greatly cheered my friend and my friend's colleagues. My friend now wants to learn how to sew. This is for two purposes. Firstly, my friend wants to make a spherical penguin. Secondly, my friend wants to repair clothes. I am extremely willing to help because it has elements of a definitive plan. Specifically:-

1. It has a relatively finite scope.
2. It is a realistic, achievable goal.
3. It has a reward.
4. It has a sensible time-scale.

Admittedly, time-scale is the least constrained. However, I have instigated a plan to make this achievable. I met near my friend's office in the hipster part of London and I introduced my friend to the many haberdashery shops in Ridley Road Market. In particular, Dalston Mill Fabrics has the widest selection of cheap synthetic fur fabric. While in the area, I showed Fassett Square to my friend. The market and the square were used the basis for the BBC's main soap opera and on the second occasion that the set was created, it cost at least £86 million to re-create these unassuming streets in East London.

While wandering around, we made arrangements for a regular sewing session. This is now an open invitation to any member of SoylentNews who wants to meet in Central London.

After the London HackSpace closed for four months and then re-located to the vicinity of a failed makerspace (and midway towards a budding makerspace which failed due to the presumed suicide of one of its founders), many people from the London HackSpace chose to meet in Central London on Tuesday evenings in lieu of the London HackSpace social evenings (also on Tuesdays). This has now settled on the Montagu Pyke Public House in Charing Cross Road, Central London. (Nearest London Underground stations are Tottenham Court Road and Leicester Square.)

Some people boycott this venue on principle. The Montagu Pyke Public House is a Wetherspoon Pub and the founder, Tim Martin, is notoriously pro-Brexit and anti-Europe to the extent that he has removed French champagne from the menu, regularly writes about the topic in the pub's magazine, has pro-Brexit slogans on pub menus and even insists that staff place pro-Brexit signs at entrances which lambast the alleged British Prime Minister, Theresa May. Although, to remain competitive, most of the staff at the Montagu Pyke appear to be Spanish. Regardless, Soylentils are typically libertarian and with signatures, such as UID5690's "Secession is the right of all sentient beings", support for Scottish independence, British independence, Catalonian independence and/or Californian independence is more likely than not.

With few exceptions (most notably, Tue 25 Dec 2018 and Tue 1 Jan 2019), Tuesday meetings have continued for almost one year. We meet at 7PM sharp. Sometimes we stay at the pub and eat fish or steak. More often, we go to one of three restaurants in London's Chinatown: the comically named Wong Kei restaurant on the West side of Wardour Street (famously described by churnalist, Zoë Williams, in TimeOut magazine, as "the rudest restaurant in London"), the Kawloon Buffet in Gerrard Street (by the West Chinatown Gate) or the classier Mr. Wu buffet on the South side of Shaftesbury Avenue (on the same block as the Wong Kei). Actually, these restuarants are all within 100 metres of each other. A friend is also keen on McDonald's and so we've occasionally visited the local branches in Charing Cross Road and Leicester Square (on the West side of the square, to the left of the Lego shop).

We now have a standing arrangement to eat at the far end of the basement of the Leicester Square branch of McDonald's from 7:30PM on the first Tuesday of every month because it has the most space and best lighting to teach sewing. Although there are many sewing groups in London, this is best described a Sewing For Physicists. Indeed, after I mentioned De Broglie wavelength, my physicist friend instantly understood that any sewing error smaller than the length of fur would be completely hidden. Indeed, this is part of the reason that I chose spherical plushies to teach sewing. Synthetic fur is the easist material to use and the spherical shape incurs the least sewing for the most reward.

Anyhow, the invitation is as follows:-

• Meet on any Tuesday at 7PM sharp at the Montagu Pyke Public House for general discussion.
• If you want to learn sewing or make a spherical plushie then meet at 7PM sharp at the Montagu Pyke Public House or meet in the basement of the Leicester Square branch of McDonald's from 7:30PM or so on the first Tuesday of any month.
• Bring two car washing sponges to use as the filling of a spherical plushie. Three car washing sponges for £1 are currently available from PoundLand.
• Synthetic fur, cut to size and suitable for one spherical plushie, can be swapped for one McDonald's £0.99 cheeseburger. I will bring sufficient supplies to make three spherical plushies. My friend will bring a similar quantity of supplies. Patterns vary. They may include black and white Holstein cow print, tiger, leopard, ladybug and/or Sulley from Monsters, Inc. Alternatively, source your own fur. This is likely to cost £8 or more and leave you with a considerable surplus of material.
• All other sewing supplies can be borrowed or kept at no cost.
• If you want to do any other sewing project then please keep it very small. This excludes most clothing repair.

We had a practice run on Tue 5 Mar 2019 and we made significantly less progress than expected. I can hand sew and machine sew and I've worn entirely home-made clothes in public. So far, I've also made 19 spherical plushies. The first took me more than 90 minutes to sew by hand. They now take less than 45 minutes - and about the same again if adding ears. Unfortunately, a geek sewing newbie is unlikely to finish a plushie before the third session. Indeed, you can very probably defer plushie filling. Taking into account drinks at the Montagu Pyke Public House, eating and talking about random geek stuff and the basement section of McDonald's closing at 10PM, we may only have 90 minutes for each sewing session. Regardless, we have confirmed empirically that staff are unconcerned about a bunch of geeks sewing after we've eaten.

We're semi-seriously going to make a furry ball pool. After I gave away seven of my 19 spherical critters, the remainder are on my bed. I've slept while hugging three with each arm. From this, I believe that it would be worthwhile to explore a considerably larger quantity. A friend agrees. Unfortunately, cost and effort are issues. Plastic balls are £1 per 10 and considerably cheaper in volume. Each spherical plushie is about 25 times bigger. In small quatities, material and filling are cheaper per cubic unit. However, an expert with a sewing machine may require more than 15 minutes to make each ball.

Some final notes: Firstly, McDonald's in the UK went cashless at some point I don't remember over the last 10 years. Although I'll swap fur for food and a friend swaps food for cash, this works best if you bring cash in small denominations. Secondly, if you don't know us and we don't look geeky enough to approach then look for a black and bright orange tiger stripe furry ball with a six inch (16cm) diameter or a light gray wolf/husky hat. Thirdly, no video recording, no photography and definitely no flash photography.

We hope to see you on:-

• Tue 2 Apr 2019 (on the reasonable assumption that we have electricity four days after Brexit).
• Tue 7 May 2019.
• Tue 4 Jun 2019.
• Tue 2 Jul 2019.

and/or any other Tuesday.

I hoped that I could summurize 10 days of SoylentNews every week. I'll have to be significantly more brutal to achieve this and I'm concerned that the volume of text has doubled from Nov 2017 to Feb 2019. Regardless, this is an attempt at summarizing one day of articles from SoylentNews. I have a further three millions words covering three months. Quotes aren't attributed because I de-duplicate headers and then use text to speech at 300 words per minute. This makes sources indistinguishable with the exception of about three blowhards. The most prominent is UID6614 rôle-played by UID4512. Summaries select for insight, foresight and comedy:-

1. Samsung Galaxy Upcycle Initiative is Needed but Shouldn't Be - Given the energy consumption of cryptographic currencies (see here) this is generally seen as a greenwashing exercise. Concern that re-purposing old phones may reduce stock of old phones, encourage consumerism (and associated environmental cost). Also concern that re-purposing may require restrictive EULA and/or prevent use of radio interface. The latter may be a benefit if it was guaranteed to be disabled. May be preferable to run SETI@Home or Folding@Home on stock hardware.

2. Startup in Desperate Search for Ideas - Start-up repeatedly fails to make money with trivial ideas (slideshow, calendar, location tracking) and then adds block-chain before that also fails due to legal regulation. Comments about failing upward, "Success is when preparation meets opportunity and luck" and lottery winners going broke. For best snark, search for "So, let me get this straight: TMB and khallow, both noted billionaires of tech" and "I HATE you, khallow! I Hate YOU! You are an uncaring conservative ideologue, and I just wish I could just get quit of you! // Signed, your Brokeback Mountain Time Friend. p.s. When you coming home?"

3. RIPE75 Presentations Online - Apparently, Réseaux IP Européens couldn't find a venue in Europe and instead decided to hold a conference in the United Arab Emirates where European practices (such as alcohol, homosexuality and casual sex) are all illegal. RIPE is also incapable of publishing slides in a standard format, unlike NANOG.

4. Gravity Recovery and Climate Experiment Ends, "Follow-On" Launching Soon - GRACE. Catchy gibberish acronym.

5. ESPN Can't Afford Monday Night Football Any More - 108 comments about sportsball! I thought this was going to devolve into partisan politics or the merit of military funding being diverted into corporate sponsorship. However, discussion was on the merit of celebrities raising awareness about matters such as police brutality. "We are talking about justifying moral authority from an industry that is known for its murderers, rapists, abusers, armed robbers, cheaters, drug abusers, and other criminals. For decades, professional sports has turned a blind eye to the moral standards of their employees because the only thing that mattered was winning. As a result, now the public isn't remotely surprised when a player beats his girlfriend on camera, or murders someone." "My gym has ESPN playing on the giant TV in the mens locker room. For a very long time I've been subjected to 5-10 minutes of ESPN at a time. My observations are 40% commercials for old men products, 40% old male sportscaters and occasionally guests yelling nonsense about nothing at each other, and maybe 10% highlight reel commentary the kind of stuff you'd watch a youtube clip for if you weren't watching TV. The other 10% is weird banter, flirting with the elderly yet still hot MILF (GILF?) female hosts who appear to know nothing about sports and their only hiring criteria was affirmative action/hotness. // The commercials are moderately interesting because some day I want to age into being a cranky old man. Assuming I'm not already. So I know all the pills I should be taking in 30 years from watching ESPN ads, all of which have minor side effects like death or my dick falling off. For 5 minutes a day its kind of novel, the commercials I mean, not having my dick fall off." These demographics may explain why 15,000 account per day drop ESPN. Double dipping (or perhaps triple dipping) of subscription, advert breaks (up to 22 minutes per hour) and sponsor logos don't help. Also gives backgound about Rodney King. He was a scumbag.

6. AI and Quantum Algorithms Together Can Compute a Better World - "Fucking 100% marketing drone wankery." "What sort of problems in physics can AI (as we currently understand it) solve? // Look in TFA and you won't find answers to these questions. In fact, you won't even find the questions. // About the closest is the assertion that AI needs a lot of compute power and quantum computers are really fast thus, good for AI. But the big problems in AI are not because of inadequate compute power and it is far from obvious that quantum computers can help AI problems that are related to compute performance." "Current AI amounts to increasingly sophisticated curve fitting."

7. Alexa Can Help You Check Your Credit Score - "sudo make me a credit score sandwich" (Or perhaps, "Can I afford two tonnes of corn?") "where's the eula for when I do not agree to amazon and google saving my voice when I go to a friend of family members house?" "will the Facebook crowd eat this up?" "Of course they will, they've been mind-bleached of any thought about their privacy - they're the perfect product. After they'll eat it, they'll wipe their mouth with the latest advertised toilet paper (assuming their credit is in good enough standing to afford it)" "I agree, the crowd will rush over the cliffs, again. IQs have gone negative, humanity is now at risk." "Black Mirror - Nosedive" "Alexa like most silicon valley shit is made for SV hipsters who have no family or friends and live alone with their cats"

8. Consumer Reports Closes Consumerist - Insecure computing requires Consumer Reports more than ever. However, "Corruption is taking a very firm foothold, talk about the warning signs of a downfall." "There's no need to dream up conspiracy theories. Consumer Reports has been losing readership, subscriptions and therefore money for a while now. I even canceled my subscription." Difficult to use reviews when products are readily re-badged.

9. Set Up Private Blockchain With Ethereum - "I am interested in obtaining some of your Snowcoin, I hear your blockchain is very high-tech! If i get in on the ground floor, can you make me filthy rich? Yours, former Bernie Madoff investor." "If i get in on the ground floor, can you make me filthy rich? Yours, former Enron investor."

10. Bad Rabbit Used NSA "EternalRomance" Exploit to Spread, Researchers Say - "I have a bad feeling about this. Malware, that breeds like rabbits? At least it is not Tribbles, yet."

11. Hubble Observes Titanium Dioxide "Snow" on Hot Jupiter Exoplanet - "Oh, don't thank our taxpayers, thank our military who wants to be sure the whole world knows: A) we can drop whatever size bomb we want, wherever on the planet we want, whenever we want B) we have the optical sensing and data processing capability to see a ladybug on your ass no matter where on the planet you are, including indoors, and C) don't you forget it, thus the continued publication of ever more impressive miraculous feats of putting big things in orbit and bringing back incredible pictures of whatever."

12. We May Not Have Enough Minerals to Even Meet Electric Car Demand - "oh look, one of the electric car makers also has an active space program :D" "What a mess! We need that wall YESTERDAY. Like, the 1950s. To keep American minerals and vitamins in. We make beautiful nickels in this country but THEY won't tell you about it." "We've got plenty of irony. It's nickely, cobalty and lithiumy we need to find." "I had an environmental chemistry professor bring up this point a year or two ago. Our current methods of producing batteries, solar panels, and windmills can often be just as environmentally devastating as their combustible counterparts. NREL and other national labs have been pushing research into improving batteries and utilizing abundant metals, but I personally don't expect any quantum leap in the technology to solve major problems. It will take a multifaceted approach to achieve a sustainable future, all the push about for an electric fleet is pretty ridiculous when there are still many issues with the technology that have to be solved before implemented in scale. But hey, if it convinces snowflakes to re-elect you, set deadlines that you probably can't make, we're going to save the world right? All we need are 'conflict minerals', it's not like they're as bad as blood diamonds..."

13. Aliens May be More Like Us Than We Think - "Homo sapiens will go extinct in this very generation**. It will be replaced by Homo Faecebookensis. // ** We must allow some exception, though. There are fortunate people in this world without access to Internet, they'll last one generation longer." "Thats not blood, you've just popped a zit." Astrobiology? "It's hard science. With a sample size of 0. What could possibly go wrong?" "it could be argued that this is a field with much more grounding in reality than string theory. for instance the predictions are definitely easier to test." "A free and easy way of life is great, up until some other culture comes and destroys it." Dolphin sex. More dolphin sex. The merit of living in the Oort cloud with or without a fusion reactor.

14. Technology Seeks to Preserve Fading Skill: Braille Literacy - Braille literacy in the US has fallen from 30% in 1974 to 13% in 2018. Rely on technology? Cost is a significant issue and this assumes your native language is supported. Speech to text also assumes that you aren't dictating something sensitive. Braille literacy versus sighted literacy?

15. Nurse Who Was Arrested in Utah Receives Half Million Dollar Settlement - Nurse refuses to draw blood without patient consent, false arrest is filmed. Police officer who was being investigated for corruption was initially "counseled" then fired. Blood test was intended to exonerate police officer in coma. "will donate some of the proceeds to a fund that will help people obtain body camera footage and provide free legal aid for open records requests." 'one of the parties paying out the settlement is "the university that owns the hospital." They failed to protect the nurse from police violence, so they're at fault?' "Police officers need to carry their own individual liability insurance. Just as some other professions do. Police departments could subsidize these policies at the rate that ordinary officers would pay. But bad police will either face increased premiums or inability to get any insurance -- which will automatically disqualify them from police work. And without any flack from the union. Furthermore, the insurance underwriters would be motivated to investigate bad police and get to the truth because they are the ones financially on the hook." "Some sort of Federal anti-corruption agency that does undercover secret-shopper encounters with police would also be a good thing. If a cop beats the shit out of the FBI for no reason, I think it'll be taken a lot more seriously than if it happens to the rest of us." "The real award is closer to $300k after taxes" and risks jail if the tax is not paid. "The lawyers get 33%!" "She was pressured into doing something highly illegal to the point of handcuffing her and leaving her in a police car for 20 minutes. If she had buckled under to the pressure, she might have lost her job. And nobody did anything about it until her video ended up on the internet a month later." "Police officers will be barred from patient-care areas at a hospital in Utah that drew widespread notice when an officer handcuffed a nurse, hospital officials said this week." "Police departments and individual officers are still not getting the message after years of being in the public eye and poisoning the public trust." 'I don't get why people are so keen on huge fines to "the group" when they can just throw the culprits in prison. All this "big fines to the org" are the reason why bad CEOs and cops keep doing evil stuff. Nothing really significant happens to them. The more sociopathic or evil they are the less it matters to them that the group suffers. Yeah they get yelled at, or they lose their jobs and end up working for a different Police Department/Company, big fucking deal.'

16. Rylo: A $500 360-Degree Camera With Image Stabilization - "4k is not enough to match good FullHD or even HD if you have to crop a lot out."

17. Q4OS: A Very Flexible Linux Distro - Review - 32 bit support. Five year support. "And then someone mentions that apparently it uses systemd, so there is a limit to the flexibility after all. As in it's no more flexible than any other systemd based system." "This is like saying that the new Windows Creators Update is soooo flexible, it allows you to choose between notepad and wordpad." antiX 17 recommended due to removal of systemd. "If you want new, you should try Windows 12." "No thank you, I prefer being anally probed by a stick wrapped in barbed wire." "You're two revisions back! The new Corporate Motivators Edition comes with standard razor wire stick dipped in salt." "Remember the time you upgraded because you wanted to run the latest games... now you just need it to use the web... *sigh*" "we have web browsers that are an RAM hungry as Crysis. Crysis. Go figure."

18. Microsoft Engineer Installs Google Chrome During Presentation After Edge Freezes - "It wouldn't really surprise me if MS eventually wants to get rid of maintaining windows and concentrate on cloud services and office software. Those are the actual cashcows after all and windows is just a means to an end (selling office). Windows was very useful for keeping their customers locked in as long as it was a near absolute monopoly, but now that so many folks have de facto switched to android/ios as their main OS it might be more important for them to show their software works there too." "There are some shenanigans going on. More and more of their webstack is running in linux. DotNetCore, Visual Studio Code, Kestrel web server, MS SQL, Roslyn compiler (think C#). I think you can host just about everything in linux now. Development still seems partially stuck in windows but there are a lot more cli tools instead of ui. I'm seeing some weird shit in the ms dev world right now." "Nowadays they've stopped making usable GUIs and started telling people to use PowerShell." "The Windows 9x UI was actually quite an improvement over previous stuff. Nowadays you need stuff like Classic Shell to make the newer versions of Windows tolerable." Microsoft Edge was cancelled about one year after this incident.

After writing some scripts around espeak, I'm working through a very large backlog of text. I have espeak reading at twice its default rate of 150 words per minute and I sometimes "read" more than 100,000 words per day.

Unfortunately, my backlog includes SoylentNews. For more than one year, I've not been following SoylentNews very closely. Indeed, I've only been skimming SoylentNews since Apr 2018. So, I plan to read articles of interest on SoylentNews from Nov 2017 to present. I also plan to summarize the more thoughtful comments and the wittiest trolling. A digest may be intermittent and may purposefully lag by one year so that it acts as a retrospective.

Would this be useful? Is there anything that I should include or exclude? For example, I find astronomy presentations to be fascinating but I find astronomy articles to be samey. Even when an astronomy article gets my attention there isn't much I can contribute by commenting. I'll also avoid regional politics. To me, US politics seems like an endless procession of people who have escaped my attention. (I think Charlie Brooker and/or Adam Curtis had a similar opinion about political news.)

I'm currently busy because I received start-up funding (and use of a ridiculously swanky office). The first development deadline is on Mon 31 Dec 2018. The second development deadline is on Thu 31 Jan 2019. The third development deadline is on Sun 31 Mar 2019. Funding currently lasts until Fri 31 May 2019. Unfortunately, this has greatly curtailed my annual fun programming project for Christmas 2018. Previous efforts have taken three days. This took three hours.

I have implemented a small system which predicts the final moderation score of a message on a forum. This uses some search engine theory, such as postings and repetition limits. However, it doesn't use n-grams, stemming, weighting by word frequency or Bayes theorem. Indeed, a significant amount of theory has not been implemented and the result only makes predictions with a relatively weak correlation. This implementation only works with the output of SoylentNews and is heavily dependent upon certain attributes currently found in the HTML. It is also heavily dependent upon line breaks typically found within boiler-plate HTML. Regardless, the concept can be generalized and adapted for other forums.

One script collates words:-

cat /path/to/saved/soylentnews/discussions/*.html | ./collate.pl > collate.txt

The other script allows predictions to be compared against actual scores:-

cat /path/to/saved/soylentnews/discussions/*.html | egrep '(comment_score_|comment_body_)' | ./estimate.pl collate.txt | sort -r -n -k 2 | more

The second script can also be used interactively. This is minor source of amusement but is generally less insightful than browsing the collated statistics:-

./estimate.pl collate.txt

If you want to be argumentative, negative or defeatist then this script will confirm that you'll be unappreciated. For example, one of our resident trolls, SaltySpice, rarely scores above 1.2. In particular, from my cache of saved discussions, "Fuck MDC" scores 0.597.

begin 644 soylentnews-score20181224.tar.gz
M'XL("`ZZ(%P"`W-O>6QE;G1N97=S+7-C;W)E,C`Q.#$R,C0N=&%R`.U76U/C
M-A3.LW^%-KC$(0FV<R$MP6EW=K?MSG1X`*:=:1P8)Q%$7<?.2DHAW0V_O4>2
MKT`&.LNTW4'?0VR?<W0NNGQ'8?$ZQ!&/\#5KL6E,<=MQOW7;[:X]C<,PX'A_
M&5:^$`Z@W^N)I]OO]HM/`;?;Z5;<3M=UX.>@`W9NO^\Z%>14_@6L&`\H0A5.
M"?NXPEN+?4S_E6+GE;UBU)Z0R%YB&J+6;X:Q@T[5KCB&78'>Q(L%O*-3L3O0
M.\;)(N`Q%5932I8<G<5@(_<*^IDP4)%I$"IS!E;6F[K84^ALCL$N8C'E9+78
M-W9`EVXV)!:!&P;%'U<$HM1",H&-5QL8QO6<A-B:X4L2X9EEAO#PCD[/WKX_
M'M;KZ).!D#F-5Q%O-`;P3BX3DUO[:-[U)Z/SX7AO:).8*5NPYOB&>])(#-@@
M'++B*#FB.E5%7\@C<3%R6M^-&]7[SG87P0=\P3%=*`?U@12#/XO!)`34^D$H
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M<$Y*QUM*OD_NE^`RF,YA<(B1]0&O&?H&U'E-,$O9HB2+#::;0M4J<L/+UESH
M[:+QG@DNU6M:XJ90&(0HK</0R9T+U[974@]*LZUFI5GU>;7)5A/&J27&-)UF
MKZZD?\0DLFJHUE3#09C.=-JTC.?G?W4:GX-C'N/_7K>=W_\/'''_=SJNYO__
MCO]_(1,:T#7Z,:9/[`7_A/!ADZ/L=*LK_#*@P<)C<W*IR%=]W[*$)X>V?05T
M6%1Q:H]>MWX?VZ.@]=?8+H\:G0.Y@=QO^37@>V1?E0>S8C=X0'N>J6U[ZT@S
MU<E3F;89)+J+-);'G&*^HI%H&[+LC+UDV8*G/,5C9193YSQCQ1#+I/Q:(PV9
M2T%H%J093:G_0QOC48*4E_)TU+!3(*Y,ZG6*;'.OJ.S?@UI+1?+96MXQ3B[B
MTO21S(H$#.1\AX%+9%U4[ZD,!@\G*V[W#P07&Q8E&8BH:0Z*HJNE8#XO9@9?
K\$@8^4Y`]X7\B]#0T-#0T-#0T-#0T-#0T-#0T-#0T/B_X6]42<M9`"@`````
`
end

(Usual instructions for uudecode process.)