Category Archives: Uncategorized

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Comparing Cameras

The Nexus 5 was an amazing phone for its time. For $350 you could get an unlocked phone with stock Android and a phenomenal camera. It was only 8 megapixels, but it had features like HDR+ and OIS, which were revolutionary for 2013.

Unfortunately, over the summer my Nexus 5 died and I needed to get a new phone. I wanted to get a phone with a good camera, but it didn’t feel right spending $600+ on a flagship phone. I ended up trying the Moto E4. It’s an amazing phone for $129, but I didn’t like the camera, so I decided to upgrade to a Cyber Monday Moto G5+ for ~$200. It has a Sony IMX362, the same sensor that’s in the Pixel 2. The f/1.7 lens is great too. The camera doesn’t have OIS, and it lacks a lot of the hardware-based image post-processing present in the Pixel line, but it seemed like a decent compromise to me.

Meanwhile, my wife just upgraded her Nexus 5 to an iPhone SE. The iPhone SE has the same camera as the iPhone 6s, which has been favorably reviewed.

With 5 different cameras, I decided to take some comparison shots. read more »

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Vikings Lead NFL in Arrests since 2000

It turns out the Minnesota Vikings, recent recipients of nearly $500 million in taxpayer subsidies (which was a terrible idea for reasons outlined here), lead the league in arrests since 2000.

My source is the USA Today NFL Player Arrest Database. I basically copied and pasted all the records into a text file, then ran a little bash one-liner to count the number of arrests by team:

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Cloning a hard drive to a smaller SSD

I woke up Saturday morning, walked into my office, and was greeted by the sound of a grinding hard disk. Upon further investigation, the hard drive in question was an old 320GB Seagate hard drive that I use to store all of my OS files. The remainder of my files are stored on a RAID5. Normally I’d be upset about a hard drive that was about to fail, but this gave me an opportunity to replace my primary OS hard drive with a solid state drive. It worked out just fine, of course, but migrating the data from my old hard drive to my new hard drive was not as straightforward as you would expect it to be. My goal here is to document all of the steps you need to follow in order to migrate from a traditional hard drive to a smaller solid state drive.

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