Matt Blaze

Captured with the Rodenstock 40mm/4.0 HR-Digaron-W lens (@ f/6.3), Phase One IQ4-150 back (@ ISO 50), Cambo 1250 Camera.

This humble, somewhat dilapidated shelter, a few miles south of SFO airport, once housed a medium wave aviation beacon (NDB). It currently hosts a variety of aviation surveillance sensors. Its location is also waypoint on the way to SFO runway 28R.

Essential infrastructure, integral to so much of the modern world, is often nearly invisible.

Infrastructure is heroic.

FAA "BRIJJ" Station, Foster City, CA, 2024

All the pixels, none of the flight delays, at https://www.flickr.com/photos/mattblaze/54128020212

#photography

@synx508 @casandro @hzulla yes, exactly. The software changes required to have cron behave in a way that’s more friendly to the power grid are relatively trivial here. The issue is (apparently) that no one realized (or cared) that synchronized surges in computation can now have a measurable impact at scale (which is an interesting effect).

@mpjgregoire I’m sorry, but why are you asking? This is an incredibly broad, open-ended question that would require quite a bit of effort to answer properly. There are multiple variables at play that make this a non-trivial question.

@mpjgregoire I’m sorry, but why are you asking? This is an incredibly broad, open-ended question that would require quite a bit of effort to answer properly. There are multiple variables at play that make this a non-trivial question.

@quinn What software license is that released under?

Thanks for the information about the evils of proprietary software. I had never heard anything about this before. And this “free software” you speak of certainly sounds intriguing.

Perhaps you have some literature or a manifesto of some sort that I could read? Just leave it by the door as you’re running away from the guard dogs I’m about to release.

@casandro @hzulla Um, if open source or free software or whatever buzzword the kids are calling it these days solves this problem, why wasn’t it solved already? As you pointed out, cron’s code has been re-implemented many times over the years.

Open source is nice and all, but it didn’t anticipate or solve this.

It was touch-and-go there for a while, but it looks like we somehow made it through another Cybersecurity Awareness Month.

@MLE_online “razor blade-free apples”.

(In fairness, this is nowhere near as sinister as it looks. "Soupy Island" (so named for its original sponsorship by the Campbell Soup company) offers fresh air and free meals and outdoor recreaction to Philadelphia area children and their families. But from the outside, it looks like a great place to end up horrifically murdered.)

Bonus spooky photo of the day.

With a few exceptions (mostly towers atop downtown switching offices in populated areas), no one was trying to make any of this utilitarian communications infrastructure beautiful. It was form strictly following function, built to be reliable and rugged.

But there was, I think, quite a bit of beauty to find in it. Perhaps we'll look at our current neighborhood cellular towers, now often regarded as visual blight, the same way decades after they're (inevitably) gone.

Infrastructure is heroic.

The San Jose Oak Hill Tower is unique in a number of ways. This particular concrete brutalist design appears not to have been exactly replicated elsewhere; it was site-specific. It sits atop an underground switching center (that was partly used for a military contract), which explains the relatively hardened design.

Today the underground switch is still there, owned by AT&T, but the tower space is leased to land mobile and cellular providers. The old horn antennas at top are disconnected.

For much of the 20th century, the backbone of the AT&T "Long Lines" long distance telephone network consisted primarily of terrestrial microwave links (rather than copper or fiber cables). Towers with distinctive KS-15676 "horn" antennas could be seen on hilltops and atop switching center buildings across the US; they were simply part of the American landscape.

Most of the relay towers were simple steel structures. This brutalist concrete platform in San Jose was, I believe, of a unique design.

Captured with the Rodenstock 50mm/4.0 HR Digaron-W lens (@ f/4.5) on a Cambo WRS-1600 camera (with about 15mm of vertical shift to preserve the geometry), the Phase One IQ4-150 back (@ ISO 50) in dual exposure mode (which preserves a couple stops of additional dynamic range into the shadows).

The tower's shape is irregular; it tapers slightly.

The wide angle and panoramic orientation give a bit of context, alone on a hill (which is being rapidly encroached by adjacent residential development).

AT&T Long Lines "Oak Hill" Tower, San Jose, CA. 2021

All the pixels, but operator assistance is no longer available, at https://www.flickr.com/photos/mattblaze/51261791084

#photography

@mhkohne @ChuckMcManis @ai6yr what fraction of fuel use on a large passenger ship is propulsion? (I have no intuition whatsoever here)

@20002ist @ai6yr You can save several dollars a year this way.

@20002ist @ai6yr This even works at home! Just go to the nearest hotel and confidently walk up to the front desk as if you're a registered guest and ask for toothpaste. They never check!