All posts by Harry Underwood

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About Harry Underwood

Website designer, blogger. Columbus, GA. #LGBT #p2 #wordpress

The Insane Scale of Tokyo’s Disaster Megaplan

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Fred Mills uncovers Japan’s epic plan to disaster-proof Tokyo.
Tackle your toughest projects with confidence using InEight’s project controls software for capital construction – https://bit.ly/408huQh

Please Note: NIED is the National Research Institute for Earth Science and Disaster Prevention

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Additional footage and images courtesy of NIED, Tokyo Metropolitan Government, Tokyo Resilience Project, Toho Studios Ltd., Mathieu Thouvenin, Nippon TV News, CGTN, NBC, NHK World, BBC News, ABC, Al Jazeera, India Today, No Comment TV, Bangkok Post, VOA News

Research sources:
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00:00 – Intro
03:34 – Tokyo in Danger
05:48 – The Tokyo Resilience Project
06:54 – Volcanoes
07:29 – Pandemics
07:58 – Blackouts
10:02 – MOWLAS
11:56 – Flooding
14:07 – G-Cans
15:45 – Tunnel Construction
17:01 – TBM Machine
19:40 – Flooding Infrastructure
21:26 – Earthquakes
23:20 – Giant Rock Friction Apparatus
26:33 – E-Defense
27:08 – Earthquake Engineering
28:54 – Seismic Countermeasures
30:47 – Earthquake Strategy
33:06 – Eitai Bridge
34:00 – Earthquake Proofing
35:01 – Attention to Detail
36:18 – Preparedness

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EP 275 DONALD SHOUP: The Shoup Dogg Doctrine on the High Cost of Free Parking & Sidewalk Repairs

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In this Season 9 Premiere of the Podcast, I reconnect with Professor Donald Shoup, author of The High Cost of Free Parking, affectionately known as “Shoup Dogg,” in honor of his rockstar status and birthplace of Long Beach, CA. We discuss the momentum of the parking reform movement to help create more affordable and walkable communities, as well as the huge challenge of LA’s sidewalks in disrepair and the opportunity to make a major transformation in walkability in Los Angeles before the 2028 Olympics.
Note: This episode was recorded in the waning days of 2024, but given the devastating fires currently raging in LA, my original “hometown,” my heart just breaks for everyone living through these challenging times.

Thank you so much for watching! If you enjoyed this video, please give it a thumbs-up, leave a comment below, and share it with a friend. If you’d like more content like this, please Subscribe to the Active Towns Channel, and be sure to “Ring” that notification bell to select your notification preferences.

Helpful Links (note that some may include affiliate links to help me support the channel):
– My first episode with the Shoup Dogg: https://ift.tt/5ZUOY7j
– Shoup’s website: https://ift.tt/PvEMC6l
– Parking Reform Network: https://ift.tt/fwJuCia
– Shoup books available in my bookshop: https://ift.tt/og4CB5q
– Torched Newsletter by Alissa Walker: https://www.torched.la/
– Adam Ruins Cars Parking Clip: https://youtu.be/skm6hp99-5A

If you are a fan of the Active Towns Channel, please consider supporting the effort as an Active Towns Ambassador in the following ways:
1. Join the Patreon community: https://ift.tt/xv4Q6YN
(Note: Patron benefits include early, ad-free access to content and a 15% discount in the Active Towns Merch Store)
2. If you enjoyed this video, you can also “leave a tip” by clicking on the Super Thanks button right here on YouTube or thru “Buy Me a Coffee” https://ift.tt/UKlZPoN
3. Pick up some Active Towns #StreetsAreForPeople Merch at my store: https://bit.ly/ActiveTownsStore

Credits: Video and audio production by John Simmerman

Music via Epidemic Sound: https://bit.ly/3rFLErD

Resources used during the production of this video:
– My recording platform is Ecamm Live: https://bit.ly/3rwsUup
– Editing software Adobe Creative Cloud Suite: https://bit.ly/35DBDDU

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Background:
Hi Everyone! My name is John Simmerman, and I’m a health promotion and public health professional with over 30 years of experience. Over the years, my area of concentration has evolved into a specialization in how the built environment influences human behavior related to active living and especially active mobility.

Since 2010, I’ve been exploring, documenting, and profiling established, emerging, and aspiring Active Towns wherever they might be while striving to produce high-quality multimedia content to help inspire the creation of more safe and inviting, environments that promote a “Culture of Activity” for “All Ages & Abilities.”

The Active Towns Channel features my original video content and reflections, including a selection of podcast episodes and short films profiling the positive and inspiring efforts happening around the world as I am able to experience and document them.

Thanks once again for tuning in! I hope you find this content helpful and insightful.

Creative Commons License: Attributions, Non-Commercial, No Derivatives, 2025

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Social Networking Without Purpose

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At the very least, I can respect that LinkedIn is assigned a purpose for the social networking which it facilitates: doing business.

Everything within and about it is constructed for the purpose of companies and talents to communicate with each other. All brand pages are mandated to be just that: pages for companies. Group forums must exist for the purpose of networking among professionals and businesses. Profiles are designed as resumes. Very transparently corporate and capitalist.

What purpose do Facebook, Twitter, BlueSky, etc all serve?

They have none. These sites of the Big Tech variety are all expensive tech demos, playing at a pastiche of “community”. And look where that has taken their owners and users. Look where it has taken whole countries.

I no longer believe that a social networking site should exist without a purpose or target audience.

And now far-right types are winning the propaganda war and bending these purposeless social networking sites to the purpose of reverting every liberalizing political development of the last century.

Progressive, solidarity-oriented political types are on the backfoot because they found each other through these purposeless sites and did not expect/were not prepared for the possibility that their relationships or priorities would be threatened when oppositional powers gained the access to give these sites a contrary purpose.

Now these purposeless sites have given up on moderation, or have even reversed themselves entirely to satisfy the reactionary, authoritarian politics which have gained ascendancy since the 2010s.

Those who are disturbed by these developments are encouraging each other to dump Twitter for BlueSky, or even to give up on social networking altogether in favor of meatspace meetings.

Even after all of this, I’m not too keen on the idea of giving up on social networking entirely. But I am very keen on giving up on this social networking which has no theme, no purpose, no general focus.

I also want to give up on microblogging as a social networking exercise. The nearly two decades of attempts to create a distributed, decentralized, FOSS answer to Twitter or Facebook have not addressed the behavioral question at the heart of social microblogging: when does a microblog post or its authoring account cross the line from free expression into anti-social behavior, and how can it be successfully, sustainably moderated?

In April, it will have been 20 years since “microblog” or “tumblelog” were first identified as a format of blogging. The moderation of social microblogging has increasingly degraded with the number of features added to microblogging sites.

Lemmy is, at least in theory, a better application of the ActivityPub protocol than Mastodon/Misskey/etc. At the very least, Lemmy has some hierarchy to its moderation, in which the owners of the website can at least pretend to delegate discretion and moderation to topics of their own interest, while the microblogging apps like Mastodon struggle to scale moderation to every user.

Microblogging, on the other hand, should be returned to the generality of the blog, divorced from the industrialization of frictionless posting to a shared, common interface. Facebook and Twitter both integrating a common interface for posting and viewing posts, incapacitating the ability to design one’s own profile, was a massive progenitor of the downward social media spiral, one that, to an extent, Tumblr managed to avoid with its customizable blog profiles.

So:

  • Progressive-minded people should learn to love the blog again, in its own right.
  • progressives should also learn how to discuss in shared forums again, especially in distributed link aggregators like Lemmy
  • Blogging and discussion hosts should have a purpose and theme for their existence;
  • Wikipedia remains undefeated and unshittified.

This year was interesting

personal

Had quite a few experiences this past year:

  • I visited Texas for the second time, and:
    • One sister got married in San Antonio
    • I drove an e-scooter for the first time
  • I met my oldest sister in person for the first time in 11 years, with her having driven down from Montana to Georgia;
  • Elections, elections, elections all over;
  • Briefly had a job canvassing for voter registration;
  • Elected to the DPG State Committee;
  • Went to two funerals, one in Fort Valley and one in Sandy Springs;
  • had my public student loans forgiven;
  • reached 150lb in weight, 29in in weight circumference, 0.42 in waist-height ratio for the first time since high school;
  • developed lots of flaking all over my face;
  • began driving my Mom’s car full-time;
  • saw our local Pride festival organization melt down because the director had drug charges thrown at him.

This year, my goals:

  • get a job
  • get therapy
  • get a PCP
  • get health insurance
  • buy an e-bike
  • date?
  • get a used car?
  • clear out the storage
  • get dental work done

Berniecrats and Party Discipline

Politics, ,

I somehow ended up reading a blog post from a “New Right” “intellectual” blog about the difference between Patronage vs. Constituent Parties, and why the Republican Party is more prone and capable to punish those supporters who do not sufficiently support the party (or specifically the party leader). I will purposefully not link to it, but I found the argument interesting.

In the American political system, the only party structure best suited to sufficiently punish campaign workers and consultants who are blamed for losing an election by casting them into the outer darkness of unemployment is one which swears loyalty to the party leader, not one which embraces its constituent groups and allows for their challenging of party leadership.

The Democrats, in their decades-long post-New Deal incarnation as a coalition of constituencies, do not get to punish or exile their lesser-performing or confrontational apparatchiks, no matter how tiresome they may be. The Republicans, as a vanguard of the old stock Americans and those who seek alliance with such, do.

The desire of Berniecrats to punish Manchin, Sinema and their enablers in the last Dem trifecta reflected a preference for a party structure which doesn’t exist, and is not allowed to exist, in the Democratic coalition.

Not even the DSA, with its own coalition of constituencies which sought to capture the left of the Democratic coalition, could pull off a party machine which punishes those who fail the platform and campaign.

For the left-of-center to discipline or punish its own would require a significant abandonment of diversity, coalition-building and consensus, in favor of patronage, hierarchy and corporate leadership, in which open dissent or failure results in loss of access to party leadership.

tl;dr: Pick your poison. Internal democracy does not make for a strong party machine.

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VR + AR Tabs December 2024

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Catching up on what has happened in VR/AR since the summer:

  • v68
    • Meta Quest mobile app renamed as Meta Horizon app
    • Light mode added to Horizon mobile app
    • ability to start or join audio calls between the mobile app and Meta Quest headsets
    • Integration of Meta AI with Vision on Quest 3 and Meta AI audio-only on Quest 2 (experimental); replaces older on-device voice assistant (set for August 2024 release)
    • reduced performance latency on Quest 3
    • support for Content Adaptive Brightness Control in Quest 3 (experimental)
    • account management and communication updates in Safety Center
    • updates for the virtual keyboard
    • new Layout app for aligning and measuring real-world objects in physical space
    • new Download and All tabs in Library
    • management of cloud backups
    • ability to pair controller to headset while in-headset
    • audio alert for low battery
    • ability control the audio level balance between microphone and game audio when recording, live streaming, or casting
    • increased screenshot resolution in Quest 3 from 1440×1440 to 2160×2160
  • v69
    • “Hey Meta” wake word for Meta AI
    • v67 New Window Layout moved to default
    • spatial audio from windows
    • ability to completely remove unwanted apps and worlds, including leftover apps already uninstalled
    • quick pairing of Bluetooth peripherals when they are in pairing mode and near the headset
    • ability to keep the universal menu and up to three windows open during immersive experiences
    • Content-adaptive backlight control
    • automatic placing of user into a stationary boundary when user visits Horizon Home
    • Head tracked cursor interaction improvements for staying hidden when not wanted
    • ability to view the last 7 days of sensitive permission access by installed apps
    • Unified control of privacy across Meta Quest and Horizon Worlds
    • Control visibility and status from the social tab
    • support for tracked styluses
    • Oceanarium environment for Horizon Home
    • v69 required to support Horizon Worlds, Horizon Workrooms, co-presence and other Meta Horizon social experiences
  • v71 (v70 skipped by Meta)
    • redesign of Dark and Light Themes
    • redesign of control bar location
    • redesign of Settings menu
    • Travel Mode extended to trains
    • Link feature enabled by default
    • Remote Desktop in Quick Settings
    • ability to use desktop remotely through the Meta Quest Link app on PC
    • in-headset pairing of third-party styluses
    • in-headset controller pairing
    • view app permissions while in use
    • higher-quality casting from headset to PC
    • new Calendar app, with Google and Outlook Calendars integration, support for subscribed Meta Horizon Worlds events or Workrooms meetings
    • ability to share and play back spatial video within Horizon Chat in-headset and mobile
    • Volume Mixer, with separate Call Volume and App & Media Volume
    • support for content utilizing 3 degrees of freedom (DoF) head tracking through Dolby Atmos and Dolby Digital Surround
    • Audio to Expression: machine perception and AI capability deriving facial motion and lip sync signals from microphone input, providing upper face movements including upper cheeks, eyelids, and eyebrows for avatars
    • improvements for Passthrough and Space Setup
  • v72 [link]
    • live captions
    • system-wide virtual selfie cam
    • app folder for PC VR apps
    • launch 2D apps in the room: dragging and dropping the icon into your space
    • refreshed boot screen branding (officially “Meta Horizon OS”)
    • passthrough keyboard cutout with soft gradient when touching physical keyboard
    • dedicated Photo Gallery app
    • smart storage
    • one more slot for pinned apps

Meta Orion

  • Demo of Meta Orion AR glasses at Meta Connect and to tech journalists/vloggers
  • I’m especially interested in the neural wristbands. Definitely the biggest step forward by far.
  • Unfortunate that this will remain testware for the foreseeable future

Xreal One and One Pro

  • Launched early December
  • Basically the XReal Air 2 and Air 2 Pro with an embedded co-processor to enable a 3dof spatial UI
  • Still needs to be connected to a phone
  • Still a pair of movie glasses to be used in stationary settings
  • Still no news on the XReal Air 2 Ultra since it was released to developers in the spring

Other items

  • Release of Meta Quest 3S, replacing 128GB Quest 3
  • Discontinuation of Quest 2 and Quest Pro
  • Merger of separate apps for official Quest casting, PC VR, and remote desktop into Meta Quest Link

Takeaway

These last few updates, including what is currently seen in the v72 PTC, have really capped off a significant improvement in what the Quest 3 can do since its initial release in September 2023. Mixed reality on the device has become less of a gimmick. I’m surprised that I can’t find a anniversary review of the Quest 3 comparing the updates between September 2023 and December 2024. Biggest updates:

  • Passthrough
    • V60: passthrough while loading app (if enabled)
    • V64: resolution and image quality
    • V65: passthrough environment for some system menus and prompts, including lockscreen and power-off menu
    • V66: improvements to passthrough, including reductions in warping
    • V67: ability to take any window fullscreen, thus replacing other windows and replacing the dock with simplified control bar with buttons for toggling curving, passthrough background, and brightness of background
    • V71: improvements for Passthrough and Space Setup
    • V72: generalized passthrough cutout access for physical keyboards
  • Boundary and space setup
    • V59: suggested boundary and assisted space setup (for Quest 3)
    • V60: cloud computing capabilities to store boundaries, requiring opt-in to share point cloud data
    • V62: support for up to 15 total saved spaces in Space Setup
    • V64: automatic detection and labeling of objects within mesh during Space Setup (undocumented, experimental, optional)
    • V65: Local multiplayer and boundary recall with Meta Virtual Positioning System
    • V66: Space Setup automatic identification and marking of furniture (windows, doors, tables, couches, storage, screens, and beds, with additional furniture types supported over time) (documented, optional)
    • V69: automatic placing of user into a stationary boundary when user visits Horizon Home
    • V71: improvements for Passthrough and Space Setup
    • V72: automatic stationary boundary when booting into VR home
  • Avatars and hands
    • V59: legs for avatars in Horizon Home
    • V64: simultaneous tracking of hands and Touch Pro/Touch Plus controllers in the same space (undocumented, experimental, optional)
    • V65: fewer interruptions from hand tracking when using a physical keyboard or mouse with headset
    • V68: ability to pair controller to headset while in-headset
    • V71:
      • Audio to Expression: machine perception and AI capability deriving facial motion and lip sync signals from microphone input, providing upper face movements including upper cheeks, eyelids, and eyebrows for avatars. Replaces OVRLipsync SDK.
      • in-headset pairing of third-party styluses
      • in-headset controller pairing
    • V72: hand-tracking updates: stabilization and visual fixes for cursor; responsiveness and stability of drag-and-drop interactions