Daily Tech News 28 March 2022

• I mentioned in a separate item on my blog that I've narrowed my house search down to two - though of course this morning a brand new four bedroom house popped up right in the centre of my price range - and I have someone checking on one of the properties for me because I have... Questions.

  There's at least seven doors and one flight of stairs that aren't indicated on the floorplan, the main bathroom apparently occupies four separate rooms, there's a window that opens out onto the patio which is in turn entirely inside the house, and I think I might need to replace the carpet...

  Well, turns out you can find anything if you poke around long enough, including the last time this house was on the market back in 2015, and the photos and the floor plan from then.
  
  Yes, there are exactly seven doors missing from the current floorplan - and one missing from the old floorplan, which shows not only a solid wall in that place but the kitchen sink on the other side.
  
  The stairs are in the front hall, which is not what I expected. I thought they were at the back of the adjacent living room. That makes the front hall narrower of course but it adds light from above, and this plan shows that the loft area is larger than I had thought.
  
  The main bathroom really is split into four separate rooms which, well, okay; overall it's 15'x12' so even with separate rooms for the bath and the shower it's not exactly cramped. Honestly, the bath room by itself is bigger than my entire bathroom.
  
  And I probably will need to replace the carpet.
  
  On the upside, someone with some interior design sense has been in there in the past seven years and replaced the old custard yellow paint in the dining room and kitchen with eggshell and white respectively, and probably added $50,000 to the valuation in one shot.
  
  The 2015 photos don't make it look nearly as nice as the newer ones, and specifically the newer photos leave out the hallway and the stairs. But if they've just gotten rid of the custard yellow plague there as well, that should look much better than it did. And if not, painting is the one home maintenance task I have real experience at.
  
  
  
• The Australian Stock Exchange expects more delays to its blockchain based trade records system. (ZDNet)
  
  Originally expected to go live in April - last year - it's now set for April next year, but they've already advised that they're likely to miss that date as well.
  
  I'll give them credit for that: If you know that your project is going to miss its deadline a year in advance, that means that someone is paying attention. I've seen - and rescued in some cases - projects that sailed straight into their deadline with no warning and no working code.

• Existing geothermal plants around the Salton Sea could be updated to extract $5 billion worth of lithium per year in addition to the 432 megawatts of power they produce. (Fast Company)
  
  This seems like a good idea. Geothermal - unlike wind and solar - is a viable baseload power source, where it is available. (It's available everywhere if you're prepared to dig deep enough, but that's expensive.) And 20,000 tons a year of free lithium might be enough to start curing California.
  
  
  
• The plain text internet is coming. (The Protocol)
  
  I'm so old I remember when the internet was plain text.
  
  ...
  
  Yeah, that's actually old.
  
  
  
• When slower is faster: The rise of Python in scientific computing. (The Coop Blog)
  
  This presents an interesting case where converting a program from Fortran to Python made it 100x faster. Python itself is 100x slower than Fortran - or more - but it has a ton of easy-to-use, highly optimised libraries for scientific computing. And straightforward Fortran code you write yourself can't compete with libraries refined over decades by thousands of programmers around the world.

posted by Pixy Misa at 05:00 AM

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