I own an Audioengine D1
DAC which I love. It’s
very Appley in design. Since I bought it two years ago, I have
continously learnt to notice ever so subtle differences in quality of
music playback, to the point that I can easily tell apart compressed and
uncompressed music, and somewhat the difference between new and used
equipment. A double blind test is definitely in order to prove the above
abilities.
Recently reading over the spec of my D1 DAC, I saw that it resamples
everything to 24bit/96Khz for playback. From past knowledge, I knew that
resampling is a very complex and resource hungry operation and the small
silicon inside the DAC cannot possibly do the best that can be done. So
after a bit of searching online, I managed to force Pulseaudio on my
Linux machine to always stream 24/96 bitstream to my DAC, and do
software resampling on my main CPU. It sure is a power hungry process.
The highest quality sampler, src-sinc-best-quality eats up 40% of
my one core of a Xeon 3.2Ghz CPU! And that’s per stream, so if I have
music playing and watch a youtube video, that’s one CPU core gone.
src-sinc-medium-quality drops the usage by more than half, to 13%
without any noticable difference.
BPAY is an electronic bill payment system in Australia which
enables payments to be made through a financial institution’s online or
telephone banking facility to merchants who are registered BPAY
billers.
BPAY, Wikipedia
To pay for a bill, you need a Biller Code and Reference
Code which are numbers with varying number of digits. This
information is printed on the paper bills for instance where you can use
them when paying for the bill online. It’s only recently that BPAY has
rolled out a QR Code standard to ease the entering of these numbers in
bank phone apps.
I wanted to know how the BPAY information was encoded so I could
transfer my existing Biller and Reference codes to my phone without
manual error. Unfortunately I couldn’t find anything online. The easiest
way I thought was to figure out how my phone app reads it. The only bank
right now that has an app with BPAY QR
Code scanning functionality is Commonwealth Bank. So I copied the
app out of the phone, disassembled it using apktool and went
digging.
I lost my credit card a few days ago and as soon as I realized that, I
called up my bank. When searching for the right number to call, I went
to their website and found my way to the contact page. As I was dialing
the first digits of the number, I noticed something seriously wrong: the
page was not secure (ie no HTTPS). I stopped. I began googling the phone
number and only after seeing it on several places did I call the number
to order a new card.
After the call, I wondered if it was only my bank. I was saddened to see
that out of 40 banks and credit card providers in Australia, only 7
had secure contact pages. I have notified most of the others about
the issue.
If your bank is one of those with non-secure contact pages listed
further down the page, you should do a little research online first
before trusting the information on those pages.
While we cherry picked out of red and green
Opportunities kept falling in between
Our conscious moments red shifted to left
We were sound asleep at the midnight theft
Sirens and strobe lights woke us up
You saw the light and I saw the dust
What do you do when you lose a game
Cheat and lie, don’t admit you lost
You used to make up stories that
only you could wrap your mind around
You used to tell me jokes which
in complexity of each I drowned
You used to take detours
down the streets that no one went
You used to paint the world with colors
that only you dreamt about
But now
You let stories with no soul
demean your mind and spirit
You let tasteless and petty jokes
rob you blind of your wit
You let fear of loneliness
keep you in line with everyone
You let the world paint your dreams
all that made you so special
soon will vanish, soon will be gone
You are a doll
You always carry a heart melting smile
on those cherry bomb lips, with style
You’re a dangerous, deadly little doll
You take away the air out of our lungs
by your electrifying laughs
your white summer dress
your dreamy walk and your flirty talk