Quite a while back I settled on Plex as my media server. I have thousands of MP3s, thousand of photos, plus personal videos and even ripped movies and TV shows from DVDs. I happen to use my Raspberry Pi 4 running Ubuntu as a server, but Plex works with most popular platforms. You pay for the server, and clients are free.

We mostly listen to music on Amazon Alexa using Spotify these days or just stream WWOZ using Alexa and TuneIn. I thought it would be nice to be able to listen to my old MP3s on Alexa, since the alternative is using the Apple TV Plex client. Not a huge hassle, but not as easy as Alexa. I recall trying this a while back, unsuccessfully. The Alexa plugin still gets poor reviews and two stars, but thought I would give it a try.

With instructions from Plex, got it working almost immediately. Now I can just say Alexa, ask Plex to play music by John Coltrane and it works!

I am pretty much 100% in agreement with Prof Jacobson, although I’m sure he is much more informed than I am. On thing you have to remember is there are millions (billions?) of dollars being spent on sophisticated advertising campaign to keep established players (oil, gas and coal) in charge. Will it be “easy”? Actually I don’t see any reason for it to be difficult. Certainly easier (and much cheaper) than dealing with the effects of doing nothing. From the Guardian (UK).

‘No miracles needed’: Prof Mark Jacobson on how wind, sun and water can power the world

I dont usually comment on this sort of nonsense, but I happen to like M&Ms quite a bit, and have for as long as I can remember. So the Right Wingers don’t like the cartoon spokescandies? If Mars had any guts they would make a special Tucker Carlson edition with all white candies. BTW, I thought the green one wore heels.

M&M’s replaces cartoon ‘spokescandies’ with Maya Rudolph following ‘woke’ backlash from Fox News

Many years ago I worked in Minneapolis. One day I was at lunch with my friend Kamal from New Delhi and Adel from Cairo. We started talking about the weather, and then which city was further south, New Orleans, Cairo or Delhi. We argued a bit, and I don’t remember exactly what side each of us took. It was intense enough that when we got back from the office we found a world map and checked. All were darn near the same latitude. Just had a look at the on line Latitude and Longitude Finder and sure enough, New Orleans: 29.951065, Cairo: 30.044420 and Delhi, India: 28.613939.

When I look around I mostly see strong trends of renewables replacing oil, gas and coal. Ran across a chart today that shows one place this trend is broken. Data only up to 2021. From Our World in Data.

Electricity generation from fossil fuels

Good read for anyone interested in why some projects do better than others. I think I can give this a slightly different spin. Innovation is all about trial and error, emphasis on error. Your ongoing development needs to tolerate errors to make substantial moves forward. Nukes don’t let you fiddle around with techniques they way other technologies do. So innovation (i.e cost savings) seldom happen. On the flip side, small scale tech like solar allows for all sorts of tweeks at all levels. This leads to large, compounded improvements. Back to the energy grid portion: a nice quote below.

Well, the data on that is in. Wind and solar have plummeted in costs and grids with higher penetration of renewables are actually more reliable than coal, gas or nuclear heavy grids using industry standard metrics for outages per customer per year.

The Nuclear Fallacy: Why Small Modular Reactors Can’t Compete With Renewable Energy

Was thinking about Louis Armstrong’s private tape collection. I read about it a bunch of years back and thought I would see if they had made it on line someplace. It a combination of music and conversations made in his home in Queens, NY. Ran across this pretty amazing site, from the Louis Armstrong House Museum. Will have to spend some time out here looking around.

That’s My Home – Louis Armstrong House Museum Virtual Exhibits

How common is corporate fraud? From an academic paper published by Springer:

We find that two out of three corporate frauds go undetected, implying that, pre Sox, 41% of large public firms were misreporting their financial accounts in a material way and 10% of the firms were committing securities fraud, imposing an annual cost of $254 billion on investors.

How pervasive is corporate fraud?

We noticed these missing from the store a while back. Looks like they are gone. From slate.

The World of Crackers Has Lost a Giant

Things nonagenarians would tell their younger selves. From Sahil Bloom.

Life Lessons from 1,000 Years