Kostya's Boring Codec World

When I visited VDD13 (they’ve finally made it right — with Trocadero and surströmming, hopefully they’ll keep the level in the future) I could make some additional observations on the rail that finally lead to this post.

First, I like to talk about catenary constructions. They usually come in two variations — a single post with a special support for the wires or two posts with a horizontal construction between them that supports the wires.
It might be hard to believe but they can be æsthetically appealing too.

The top on my list is Sweden (and Netherlands since they seem to employ the same construction). The poles are made from lattice and thus are nice and horizontal supporting constructions are always made as trapezoids.

Runner-up is Switzerland — they also have nice lattice constructions but they seem a bit compressed to me.

Germany has the same poles but for wider ranges they usually have only a wire between poles from which the wire-supporting constructions hang.

Most of the other contries have simple round masts or H-shaped beams that are not interesting, though I must admit French ones have nice wire support constructions reminding of violin bow.

And on the very bottom of the list is Denmark with its large ugly ?-shaped masts in the colour of rust.

And now to the second thing — toilets. I usually try to avoid them but sometimes I feel I have to visit one onboard. So here’s a comparison of that essential thing.

Ukraine — toilets on so-called “InterCity+” should not be that bad, toilets in older carriages are better not be visited at all (and since they dump contents onto tracks directly, toilet rooms are locked long before stations and after them).

Germany — on InterCity trains toilets are decent (or at least tolerable), on ICE they are too small even in the first class. Even on regional trains and trams it seems to be bigger.

France — on TGV first class they are even smaller that on ICE, in the second class even a person smaller than me has problems fitting inside.

Sweden — those people really care. The spaciest toilet rooms on trains I can remember (especially on Reginatåg).

Switzerland — the toilet on Rhätische Bahn regional trains seemed quite good even if those are narrow-gauge trains.

Moral of the story — Swedish trains and railways are the best (and if you have doubts you’re reading the wrong blog).

Of course this interests nobody but I wanted to rant about it for a long time.

General principles:

1. Compact size — I like to be able to fit all of my computers on the desk, any size comparable with power supply unit size would do. Laptops are fine too.
2. Silent — no damned fans.
3. An ability to use normal storage, not 16MB SSB soldered onboard.
4. No x86 CPU.
5. If it’s a laptop it should be able to work for 10 hours with battery.

Display:

1. 4:3 aspect ratio. If displays nowadays are made for movie-watchers then it’s a sad world. Too much of vertical space is eaten by various toolbars, menu bars and such.
2. sane resolution. Again, 1920×1080 may be ideal for movie-watchers but I prefer it to be either VGA-based (i.e. multiple of 640×480 or 800×600) or power of two based. And whoever thought about 1366×768 should burn in hell!

Performance — if Libav compiles in ten minutes on dual core system then it’s fast enough for me.

ARM-based laptops are almost good for that, especially performance wise. There’s just one big “but” — they are almost all are for Android or chromebooks. And Baidu has never intended those systems for any real usage. Playing games — fine, browsing — passable (though Firefox 3 on my old PowerPC MacMini with 512 MB RAM gives much better experience than Chrome on tablet with 1GB RAM), editing texts (code) — absolute fail. I can live without a numpad on keyboard (it’s a legacy for accountants and their calculators after all) but not having even “delete” key (there’s only backspace) is pathetic.

So I live with a faint hope that there will be a computer good enough for me.

I think this should be in every first aid kit.

Probably Sweden was never a really influental in science besides chemistry but it has contributed a lot of small things that really made our world better: high-precision measuring tools, or official human rights representative, or Trocadero, even flatpacked furniture.

Here’s an example: in the swedishest corner of Sweden there was a guy who really changed our world with two simple things. One of them is centrifugal milk separator. Another one is the nozzle. Yes, a simple nozzle that is used in rocket and jet engines. Were those inventions that great and important? Maybe not. Were they useful and have they changed the world a bit to the better? Definitely yes.

And that’s how the place where he came from looks nowadays:

(in case it was not obvious — I’ve been to Orsa and I’m proud about that).