Google Lens Determining the Year

"This is a photo of the Justizpalast (Palace of Justice) in Munich, Germany, taken around 1970."

Ok, that is impressive from Google Lens. The photo was taken in 1969. Presumably the metadata about images in the training set includes the year when the image was taken often enough for it to have associated the shape of automobiles with a range of years.

I absolutely understand the belief that Google rushed out its AI too early, resulting in embarassing snafus. I do however wonder, had Google not gotten its work into the field, whether it would have the opposite problem now: being perceived as incompetent, hopeless, obsolete. Google's AI work at DeepMind has been very strong and done very early, were they to demonstrate an inability to bring feature to market that would also be damaging.

Personally: I value the AI features but do not yet trust them. I'm willing to give it time.

Nextdoor Emails Ads to Non-Users

I received an email from Nextdoor, clearly a paid advertisement targeted at people who live in my town.

The person who paid for the ad is asking something fairly innocuous, trying to build their business by generating enthusiasm on Nextdoor. Fake enthusiasm, but that is the way capitalism works nowadays.

I decided to obscure the name of their business because I don't really consider them to be a bad actor in this. Nextdoor is.

I am not a user of Nextdoor.
I have never been a user of Nextdoor.
I have no account there.

However, my mother was an active user and, as I learned today, likely allowed Nextdoor to access her contacts. Nextdoor's privacy policy article about this mentions names, email addresses, phone numbers, and "other information" will be harvested from uploaded contact information. Clearly it includes the postal address as well since Nextdoor targeted a geographical ad at me.

Nextdoor is selling access to me, without any kind of relationship with me and never having provided any value to me whatsoever. Someone had an account, therefore my information is free for them to monetize and do with as they please.

This stuff mostly fades into the background. Even while drafting this post, LinkedIn sent an email of "Denton, this top CEO is answering your questions live" which is clearly also a paid email advertisement targeted at me. I pay for LinkedIn Premium, but my information is nonetheless still used to juice some additional revenue. I receive this stuff regularly enough that don't even think about it, but Nextdoor stood out.

privacy@nextdoor.com

I wrote to privacy@nextdoor.com:

Referencing https://help.nextdoor.com/s/article/Information-for-people-who-don-t-use-Nextdoor-Products, may I have a copy of the information Nextdoor has for my email address?

They responded:

We’re sorry to hear that this email was unwelcome.
 
Upon review, there is no account associated with your email address, therefore we cannot provide a copy of your information.
 
From time to time, Nextdoor receives information from third parties about non-users. In your case, we received your information from a third-party partner and used this information to invite you to join your Nextdoor Neighborhood.
 
I can confirm that we have deleted from our systems the personal information associated with the email address that you used to contact us.
 
Let me know if you have any questions.

I didn't mention anything about an email. Apparently they get enough complaints about this practice that they just assume it is so.

Rent Then Versus Now, 32 Years Later

When I first moved to California in 1992 I rented a one bedroom apartment in Mountain View at a complex called The Shadows. I remember it being $900 for a 700-750 square foot apartment with one bedroom and a small kitchen.

The apartment complex is still there. Rent for that apartment now starts at $3295 per month.

Passport Cards

In November 2024 we decided to renew our US passports. We also ordered Passport Cards for the first time. The cards arrived 18 days after we mailed in the forms, without paying for expedited service nor even for express mail.

The Passport Card is a stiff plastic card, slightly thicker than our driver's licenses. It is not as broadly applicable as a traditional Passport Book:

• There is nowhere to put a visa nor anywhere for entry/exit stamps.
• It is specifically not valid for international air travel, though it can be used to board a domestic flight and is Real-ID compliant.
• The card is considerably cheaper at $30 versus $130 for a Passport Book, at least as of the timeframe we ordered in late 2024.

Most importantly though: it is rugged and fits in a wallet. It is much more reasonable to have a Passport Card with you at all times than it would be to carry around a Passport Book, and the card is a valid proof of citizenship. It can be used within the United States, can be used for travel within the Americas, and will allow re-entry into the US even if you have lost the regular Passport Book.

One caution: in another ten years when it comes time to renew, both the Passport Book and Card will need to be turned in for renewal. Keep good care of both, if one is lost then the renewal of the other becomes a Lost Passport event which requires DS-64 and DS-11 forms to replace. The DS-11 requires birth certificates and other proof of citizenship, just like getting the passport for the first time required.

Family Use of Signal Messenger Status Report

About six weeks ago we moved our family chat over to Signal Messenger after considering alternatives WhatsApp and Telegram. We are a mix of very technical, somewhat technical, and non-technical users. Signal has been quite usable.

• We have 1:1 conversations between each of us, and a Family group chat.
• We've used it for group video calls and voice, text and images.
• We paste silly GIFs and use emoji to react to things.

It is, quite simply, fine. We use it for all of the important conversations now.

A+, would recommend. If you are looking for alternatives to WhatsApp, because reasons, Signal is fine for groups of all sorts.

AuthaGraph World Map Projection

The AuthaGraph map projection projects the Earth's surface onto a triangular pyramid which is then unfolded and transformed into a rectangular map. The size and position of the continents and oceans are much more accurate while preserving a rectangular shape for ease of use — and our comfort, that maps are usually rectangular. Its designer, Hajime Narukawa, won a 2016 design award in Japan for this effort.

 

I just think it is neat. I've tried using the Dymaxion triangular projection but it just looks so weird that it distracts from the point it is trying to illustrate. People instead get lost in the sharp edges of the map. It looks dangerous.

 

Inovative map projections which do not exaggerate the land area of Canada and Greenland seem especially relevant right now.

Sauna Heaters and AI Misinformation

It started, simply enough, as a search for manuals for a sauna heater. The nameplate says it was made by AB Bahco in Enköping, Sweden. Google confidently informs me that this heater does not exist.

According to the faceplate the heater was made by the Ventilation division of AB Bahco. Snap-on Tools bought AB Bahco in 1999. I wrote to Snap-on customer support asking for PDFs of owners manuals or other documentation. Their response was as one might expect.

"The assortment of products Bahco offers is limited to professional hand tools, metal cutting saws, files and rotary burrs, wrenches and spanners, sockets and accessories, torque tools, impact tools and bits, screwdrivers, pliers, automotive special tools, electronics and fine mechanical pliers, extractors, refrigeration tools, tool storage, woodworking tools, pruning tools, and forestry hand tools.

I do not believe we have ever made saunas or sauna components."

I'd provided pictures of the heater with the original inquiry, but still I sympathize: the acquisition was 25 years ago, and clearly motivated by Bahco's power tool product lines. Google says Bahco doesn't make sauna heaters. What else is a customer service rep short on time going to respond with?

Thus I am left trying to add facts to the machine's training corpus, with a blog post. I feel like I am poking at the bear with a stick.

Let this be a record on the Internet of a thing which exists: AB Bahco sauna heaters, made in Enköping Sweden, do exist. They were sold in the United States in the 1950s and 1960s, distributed by the Viking Sauna corporation based in San Francisco, California. The model we have is a 9 kilowatt unit labelled "BTD 9."

I don't have owners or repair manuals, only the simple circuit diagram on the label. It is a very simple unit with just a thermostat control. We added a mechanical timer on the control circuit to ensure we don't accidentally leave it on.

I am still seeking manuals, if I find them I will update this post with links. If you have owners or repair manuals and are willing to scan them in, please contact me.

Hannover Stadtarchiv Success

Earlier this year the Hannover Stadtarchiv put their indexes online in Arcinsys. Last week I think I found a record for a relative I've been researching for a year.

I knew that Klara Koch was born between 1909 and 1925, and that she married someone named Holz. The Stadtarchiv said Koch was too common a name to search for without knowing a date, but with the indexes available I can spend as much time on it as I want. I think this is it: Theodor Holz married Klara Koch in 1933. It is record number 1614 in 1933 at Hannover Standesamt I, which I've sent in an order for.

A Tale of Two Crises: Y2K and O₃

"Y2K," or 1/1/2000, was 25 years ago today. Dire predictions of how bad the Y2K Bug might be, with the failure of computing systems leading to widespread disruption, did not manifest. NPR chose what has become the dominant framing, a cynical take that Y2K was overblown and a delusional over-reaction. A nothingburger.

It is easy to see why one might believe this. Since 1/1/2000 we have lived through a seemingly neverending series of grift bubbles: the dot-com bust, subprime mortgages, cryptocurrencies, etc. It is easy to assume that Y2K was surely similar, a cynical hype cycle enabling some kind of profiteering.

 

Y2K Spending

To be clear: money was spent. Y2K remediation wasn't just some developers combing through COBOL, as is often depicted. It was more cost effective to simply replace a lot of computing systems from the 1970s and 1980s with something more modern.

Development of the modern Internet was accelerated by Y2K spending. The new systems were usually Windows Server or some form of Unix, with TCP/IP and robust networking built in. Businesses in many industries, their upgrade cycle moved up to meet Y2K demands, could make their service available on the Internet years earlier than they otherwise would have. I think we can even see it in the oft-cited productivity gains of the late 1990s.

Yet all of that effort and all of that spending wasn't in service to a fake grift. It worked. We fixed it. We actually fixed it. It is perhaps difficult to comprehend from our vantage point in 2025, but we faced a large problem and we solved it with a correspondingly large effort.

 

The Ozone Hole

We will digress for a moment to a different topic which might not seem related, but is: the Ozone Hole of the 1970s and 1980s. It is another formerly big problem which seems to have gone away — not entirely solved as the hole is still there, but the ozone layer is recovering. A common reaction is to question whether it was overhyped.

A lot of people put in a lot of effort for a lot of years replacing chemicals which caused most of the damage to the ozone. Money and political capital were spent: every nation on Earth ratified the Montreal Protocol mandating the phasing out of CFC manufacture.

It worked. We fixed it.

 

Why Not Now

The important discussion is not whether large challenges of the past were somehow not large challenges. The important discussion is why we have been unable to rise to similar challenges now.

• Climate change is everywhere but we're still debating whether it will be so bad and equivocating on what to do.
• Covid-19 should have led to HVAC retrofits to improve indoor air quality but it instead empowered antivaxers to rip people's masks off.

Within living memory we have risen to challenges requiring the whole world to cooperate, a feat which seems impossible now.

1. Then, the forces uniting us had the most effective means of coordination and of broadcasting their message: the UN and governmental coordination, and a mass media which created a shared reality.
2. Today, the forces dividing us have the most effective means of coordination and broadcasting their message: online social media and an entirely separate infosphere.

Apple Photos to immich

In my continuing quest to ensure that we have local copies of all cloud data like photos, I re-discovered that we had about 11,000 pictures in Apple Photos from when we had an iPhone in the family.

iCloud Photos Downloader (icloudpd) is a command line utility which uses Apple's API to download your files from Apple Photos. Apple's API seems quite good, one can download the original resolution files without restriction or limit. icloudpd prints each filename to stdout as it runs. It took about 5 hours to download 11,000 photos and videos, 376 GBytes of data altogether.

Once downloaded to the local filesystem, immich-go imported the files to immich while suppressing duplicates as it went. Of the downloaded files, less than half were new. The rest had apparently made their way to Google Photos at some point, and already imported into immich.

As an added bonus with the photos deleted, we no longer need to pay Apple for so much storage and were able to drop down to a less expensive tier. We now have just enough to back up the iPads.

Mail-in Apostille in California

An Apostille is similar to notarization to certify a document, but intended for use in another country. Apostille is defined by a Hague convention between nations, and certifies that a notarized document in the originating member nation is true and suitable for use in another member nation. One might, for example, get Apostille certification of a marriage certificate to verify one's marriage elsewhere. The document, in English, would be trusted as authentic — though might additionally need a sworn translation into another language to be actually useful in that other nation.

The California Secretary of State is the certifying authority for the state. They run periodic pop-up locations in major cities for people to bring in their documents. In December of 2024 I tried to use one of these pop-ups in San Francisco, but the line was 3+ hours and I gave up before getting to the front.

One can instead mail documents to Sacramento, with a cover letter and return envelope. At the time of this writing the cost is $20 per document. I mailed in documents with a check on December 9th 2024, and received an Apostille dated December 21st. The documents arrived at our home on December 26th, slightly slowed by Christmas. So, expect roughly a two week turnaround.

Wind Turbines and Bird Deaths

The practice of painting one blade of a wind turbine in order to increase its visibility to birds is becoming commonplace. Avian brains are not wired to detect such enormous structures as a threat, but increasing the contrast and making the movement more visible helps them see it as something dangerous to be avoided.

To be clear: this is a good thing. Harming birds, even unintentionally and without malice, is bad and taking steps to avoid it is good.

But this is another example of bad faith attacks, launched carelessly and repeated endlessly, turning into a multi-year effort by the clean energy industry to respond to. The number of birds involved was tiny, less than 0.02% of bird deaths. A study in South Africa found 848 birds killed, over the course of four years, across 20 wind energy sites. This is not a large number.

The next set of allegations about wind power are harder to refute because they are completely fabricated: that wind turbines cause cancer, or that offshore turbines kill whales.

The people making this stuff up do not want to challenge clean energy to be better. They are not interested in seeing improvement to address whatever harm they cite. They are only interested in deterring the deployment of clean energy because money from fossil fuels funds their movement. It is all in bad faith, and the disproportionate cost falls on clean energy to address.

Hannover Stadtarchiv indexes online

My wife's mother was born in Hannover, Germany, and her family lived in the Hannover area for many generations before that. In the chaos of World War II the family lost contact, and her mother emigrated to the US having met only one set of grandparents and little information about earlier family history. Over the course of the last four years we've managed to find records of her family going back many generations, and find several modern cousins via DNA matches.

Which brings me to a bit of news: this research in the Hannover area is a bit easier now. The Hannover Stadtarchiv holds records which have passed the time ranges where they are protected by Personenstandsgesetzes (privacy laws, often abbreviated PStG):

• 110 years after a birth
• 80 years after a marriage
• 30 years after a death

The Stadtarchiv has been thinly staffed for over a year, and its response times to inquiries have lengthened greatly compared with several years ago. A request sent early in 2024 took eight weeks to get an initial response, and many more weeks to followup.

To try to improve the situation the archive has started putting more of its material online, starting with indexes of birth, death, and marriage registers. The indexes are free to access, allowing one to find a specific record before reaching out to the Stadtarchiv to get access to it.

This is really neat! For example the 1911 Geburtenbuch index from Standesamt Hannover I is available, and my wife's great uncle August Koch is on page 52.

The Arcinsys site is somewhat difficult to navigate, but does work. To give it a try you'd create an account and go to the Hannover Stadtarchiv object. Click "Show Associated Objects" to descend into the list of Standesämter and links for their available indexes.

 

This is a followon to two earlier articles about the process of genealogical research in Germany:

• German Genealogical Research
• Getting Started with German Genealogy

physicaladdress.com notes

We pay for a service to maintain a mailing address separate from our home address, where the mail is intended to be available from wherever in the world we happen to be. We settled on physicaladdress.com for this service. Our mailbox is at their Laguna Beach location, as we wanted a California address.

We chose physicaladdress.com based on their operating model: they directly operate all of their locations. Many competing services offering virtual mailing services subcontract the actual postal handling to Mailboxes, Etc and similar franchises, where one's mailing address could become suddenly unavailable with no recourse if the franchise closes or moves. We wanted more surety than that, some of our documents would be difficult to redirect on short notice.

When letters or packages arrive, the envelope is scanned and an email notification sent.

One can choose to immediately shred the envelope without opening it, or open and scan the contents. Much of our correspondence is fine with just a scan to act on. The tier of service we use includes 30 envelopes per month, ten of which can be opened and scanned.

For documents where the original is important it can be forwarded. A recent example cost $0.76 to send the original letter sized envelope, delivered via USPS in a slightly oversized beige envelope. It arrived at our home in three days. In a nice touch, the sending address is our specific mailbox so any problems in delivery will be sent back where we can see what happened. They can forward mail anywhere in the world, with appropriate postage charges.

We've been using the service for a few months and are quite happy with it.

Daily Google Drive backup using rclone

I still make regular use of Google's Docs, Sheets, and so on but make regular backups to a local drive which is itself backed up off-site. I've settled on the following script, run from cron in the middle of the night. It sends email on failure, and reports success on Mondays just so I'll see that it is working. It is saved as /usr/local/bin/gdrive_sync.sh.

root@pve:~# cat /usr/local/bin/gdrive_sync.sh
#!/bin/sh

tmpfile=$(mktemp)
/usr/bin/rclone sync --fast-list --transfers=32 --create-empty-src-dirs \
	--exclude-if-present=exclude-from-rclone-sync \
	--drive-acknowledge-abuse \
	denny-at-example-com-google-drive-backup: \
	/pool1/GDrive/denny@example.com > ${tmpfile} 2>&1

if [ $? -ne 0 ]; then
	echo rclone Failed
	rm -f ${tmpfile}
	exit 1
fi

extra=$(grep -v -e "Duplicate object found in source" \
        -e "Duplicate directory found in source" ${tmpfile})
rm -f ${tmpfile}

if [ "${extra}" ]; then
	echo rclone errors found
	echo ${extra}
	exit 1
fi

dow=$(date +%w)
if [ ${dow} -eq 1 ]; then
	# Report success once per week
	echo Successfully backed up denny@example.com Google Drive
fi

exit 0