Mike Olson

@mikeolson
1.1K Followers
231 Following
3.7K Posts

Ex-Illustra, Sleepycat, Cloudera. Currently: Board member at Cityside. Working on: Climate. Politics.

Not a tech bro.

Mediumhttps://maolson.medium.com/
Websitehttps://www.olsons.net
Githubhttps://github.com/maolson0/
Not a Tech Brohttps://not-a-tech-bro.ghost.io/

Here's an excellent thing to do with four minutes of your life:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T4Upf_B9RLQ

A Day in the Life of an Ensh*ttificator

Digital products and services keep getting worse. In the new report Breaking Free: Pathways to a fair technological future, the Norwegian Consumer Council ha...

YouTube

XKCD: Centimeter Wavelengths

Title text: "Yes, the cosmic microwave background is great, but what about the earthly microwave foreground?"

Penzias and Wilson, while debugging the noise in their cm wavelength antenna accidentally discovered the cosmic microwave background radiation. They won the Nobel Prize in 1978.

What about IT people who spend endless hours troubleshooting WiFi that uses similar wavelengths?
🤔
https://xkcd.com/3224/
https://www.explainxkcd.com/wiki/index.php/3224:_Centimeter_Wavelengths
Credit: Randall Munroe
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Cars in SF are mowing over people and killing people all over. But yep the city decides to ticket.. cyclists

https://www.reddit.com/r/sanfrancisco/comments/1s3dpc9/psa_traffic_police_is_doing_a_cyclist_enforcement/

#BikeTooter #SanFrancisco

There's been no significant litigation to establish case law on FOSS licensing. That's always bugged me, but I get it -- we behave as if the licenses are valid (and, yeah, I think so?), and folks who consume the code have mostly caved when threatened with lawsuits.

But now it gets interesting. Models trained on FOSS will do clean-room implementations of GPL code to get rid of virality:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6godSEVvcmU

I'm out of the racket, but somebody oughtta take this one to court.

This Is Crazy

YouTube

Been a while since I mentioned this so I am allowed to rail about it once again:

Holy moly, Xcode on MacOS needs the most frequent updates of the most ginormous size of any piece of code I interact with. What I want to do is make some pull requests. What I'm gonna do is wait for Xcode to suck down a substantial fraction of Apple's IP and install it on my laptop.

Gasoline prices around the world, 16-Mar-2026 | GlobalPetrolPrices.com

Gas prices by country using official data sources.

GlobalPetrolPrices.com

I’ll be givinga talk on the project on Friday, Mar 27 at 6pm at UQBAR cafe in Berkeley, which is where the clock is hanging. Stop in if you’re in the Bay! If you come by early, 5 or so, you can buy food and drinks. I’ve had a lot of fun with this project and look forward to talking about it!

https://www.uqbarthecafe.com/calendar/clock-talk

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Clock Talk — UQBAR

Join us Friday, 3.27 @ 6:00 PM to unveil UQBAR’s new and improved Metric Clock! Mike Olson, the clock’s creator, will share the story and tech behind it, followed by a Q&A.

UQBAR

Here’s a video of it working with the front open.

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Hey guys, I built this clock. I had a friend help me with the woodworking for the case. I used an Arduino board as the compute platform and designed and 3D-printed the display components using several LED strips. I wrote all the code.

It shows hours and minutes, metric time and the current decibel level.

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