2015 Subaru Crosstrek maintenance schedule
This page has a great rundown of the 2015 Crosstrek maintenance schedule.
Grab your kopecks and play some games
With locations in Moscow and St. Petersburg, Russia, the Museum of Soviet Arcade Machines is filled with vintage arcade machines that date back to the Soviet era. They also have a museum of smells, old phone booth and mail boxes, and soda machines. Go along with Real Russia to check it out.
Remove Subaru Crosstrek window switches
If you have a 2015, 2016, 2017 Subaru Crosstrek and need to pull/replace your window switches – this is a good video on how to do it. You have to unscrew the door panel screw in the inside handle recess and pull the door panel off to access the 2 screws and the wire harness you’ll need to access to remove the trim piece and associated windows controls.
Ocean’s 11 shot analysis
Ocean’s 11 is an amazing movie – one of my favorites. It has a fantastic style and creates a unique feel and atmosphere. Besides the fun, unique, energetic soundtrack by David Holmes, it has a really slick visual style that really accentuates the characters. CinemaStix shows how Steven Soderbergh uses a series of seemingly simple shot and cut decisions to enhance the actors’ unique energy to create the rhythm of the movie.
It’s surprising how much of a movie’s feel comes from simple choices in how it is cut (or not cut) . I can appreciate it because I know that a ton of the feel of my landscape photos comes during the post and editing phase.
The Solar System in your living room
Quantum Solar System (QSS) features miniature replica planets that float and orbit around the Sun using magnetic levitation technology.
Some of the neat features:
- The positions of the planets are in real time, synchronized with NASA.
- You can position the planets at any date: Past, Present or Future. For example, you could observe the position of the planets at any historical date in the past or in any astronomical event of the future.
- You can observe the evolution of the orbits in a shortened time. Ex: you can convert 6 days into 1 second to speed up the movement of the planets.
- If you want to relax watching the movement of the planets, you can move all the planets at the same time and at the same speed, in this way all the planets move maintaining their position relative to each other, it is as if the platform rotated on itself.
- The Sun is a lamp. Sunlight will illuminate the planets.
Combining ChatGPT with Boston Dynamics Robots
How could this go wrong? Smart as ChatGPT and fully autonomous.
Robotics and AI enthusiasts at the YouTube channel Underfitted recently upgraded their Boston Dynamics Spot quadruped robots with ChatGPT.
Pumping your own gas in Oregon
After a 72 year ban on self-serve gas, despite it passing unilaterally through the Oregon house and senate, and despite the governor waffling and ‘wanting further input from citizens’ before signing – as of today you can now pump your own gas in Oregon.
Don’t worry – local news is alway helping with instructions for scared residents that are sure this is what’s about to happen all over the state:
Hacking the original XBox and Tesla
This is a great video on the various issues that led to the hacking of the original XBox.
It turns out, a similar method by causing a processor fault has recently been used to hack Tesla cars recently.
Google Tensor Processing Units – version 4
I’ve written about Google’s custom silicon TPUs before (Google’s Tensor Processing Units – v1).
One of the big reasons for Google and others web services to develop their own custom chips is that general purpose CPUs are flexible but typically need a lot of power. That power costs a lot of money in electricity bills and cooling costs in huge data centers. So, why buy chips with lots of stuff you don’t need when you can build your own – and save millions of dollars a year in a data center with lower cooling and power costs?
In just a 6 years, Google has managed to design and build 4 ever increasingly capable AI data center chips. They had somewhat humble beginnings – but they are becoming increasingly powerful. Now they have just published information about TPU version 4.
What is this new chip capable of?
- a nearly 10x leap forward in scaling ML system performance over TPU v3
- boosting energy efficiency ~2-3x compared to contemporary ML DSAs, and
- reducing CO2e as much as ~20x over these DSAs in typical on-premise data centers
Even crazier, it’s the first system to use purely optical switching.
TPU v4 is the first supercomputer to deploy a reconfigurable OCS (optical circuit switching). OCSes dynamically reconfigure their interconnect topology and are much cheaper, lower power, and faster than Infiniband. The figure below shows how an OCS works, using two MEMs arrays. No optical to electrical to optical conversion or power-hungry network packet switches are required, saving power.
Add to this, the newest version claims to be 1.2-1.7x faster and 1.9x more efficient than nVidia A100 chips.
Worth a read.
Links:
- TPU v4: An Optically Reconfigurable Supercomputer for Machine Learning with Hardware Support for Embeddings: https://arxiv.org/ftp/arxiv/papers/2304/2304.01433.pdf
- https://cloud.google.com/blog/topics/systems/tpu-v4-enables-performance-energy-and-co2e-efficiency-gains