With the flow, right of middle. A memorable acronym to remember where to position yourself on the river Thames.


With the flow, right of middle. A memorable acronym to remember where to position yourself on the river Thames.
Which TV will have the best picture quality in 2023? There is a lot of talk about the headline flagship sets from the consumer electronics arms of the OLED panel manufacturers, LG and Samsung, with Sony’s A95K QD-OLED successor yet to be announced, but the truth of the matter may just have been staring us in the face all along.
Let’s summarise what some of the biggest TV YouTubers and Audio-visual websites have to say before reaching a conclusion.
RTINGS.com provides measurements for several popular TVs and top of the line LEDs measure and are perceived as much brighter and more impressive with bright full screen scenes than top of the line OLED TVs, whether WRGB OLED or QD-OLED.
For 10% peak and 100% sustained brightness respectively, RTINGS.com gives
So to summarise, the latest 2023 OLEDs are 30% to 50% brighter than last year for sub 10% white windows but for full screen white are perhaps just 20% brighter so for viewing in a daytime room or bright high APL scenes with, for example, sunshine, snow or sports both of the new OLED technologies, QD-OLED v2 and MLA (META), remain much less impactful than LED designs.
Micro LED achieves the holy grail of professional reference mastering monitor black and bright performance like the 31 inch Sony BVM-HX310 but is too expensive a technology for mass market consumer sets for now and several years to come, with lower energy consumption being one of the technical challenges needing to be overcome.
Each bin defines the absolute maximum number the bin can contain. A bin of 10 will contain numbers up to 10 so 9 and 10 but not 10.1. In other words, the bin contents are less than or equal to (<=) the current bin and greater than (>) the previous bin.
In short a bin contains numbers up to and including the bin’s number but not a fraction over the bin’s number as shown in the examples above.
People usually give their age as rounded down and age limits operate in that way too so a 17.9 year old can’t vote in the UK. If we want to find the number of people aged say 15-18 we need to use the Excel ROUNDDOWN function to make sure someone who is 18.3 or 18.9 appears in a 15-18 bin defined as 18. The previous bin in this example would have to be 14 to capture 14 year olds but not 15 year olds.
A quarter of a million people, or 0.3% of the population of the UK that is alive today, or one in three hundred people in the UK have actually spoken to the Queen.
That figure assumes she spoke to on average 23 new people at each of the 21,000 engagements she attended during her 70 year reign, an average age of her interlocutor of 35, an average lifespan of interlocutor of 75 years (it is 81 in the UK in 2022) and the vast majority of her interlocutors being UK inhabitants.
If we include the 307,000 people she sent a 100th birthday telegram to and the 927,000 couples she sent a 60th anniversary message to that brings the figure up to 2.6 million people in total (alive or dead) she has directly communicated with, though this is an overestimate since there will be overlap between these these cohorts.
Since the written communications were over a period of 70 years, and assuming an average age of the recipient of the written communications of 80, 200,000 could be assumed to still be living, making for up to half a million people in the UK in total who are alive now (2022) having received direct communication from the Queen.
If you have any other thoughts or figures on these estimates please leave a comment below.
Of course, the Queen’s influence was felt by many more people, including myself. Her devotion to duty with good humour and intelligence is just one of the legacies she will leave us with.
May you ever rest in peace Ma’am.
If you don’t have the funds or inclination to pay for Vizio or Lucidchart here are a few tools for easily creating a variety of common diagrams, from flow charts to entity relationship (data structure), dependency, UML and presentation graphics. Some don’t require any drawing or layout skills whatsoever and allow you to produce clear professional looking diagrams quickly just by typing concise human readable text – no manual and time-consuming drawing, positioning, resizing, formatting and alignment of objects and connectors!
Org Chart
https://whimsical.com/organizational-chart-BLVgnvNgT2jxnxui5Xz2Ng
Flow chart
https://whimsical.com/swimlane-diagram-NPTsYh6pkkgQ83NbcytwXy
See also Activity diagram for the equivalent in the internationally agreed UML notation.
Activity, Class, Gantt, Mindmap & more
Archimate Diagram
Archimate is an internationally agreed standard, in the style of UML, that lets one describe pictorially all elements of Enterprise Architecture from motivation like drivers, goals and outcomes to business processes, data, applications, technology, strategy, capabilities, courses of action (like projects and programmes) and deliverables.
https://plantuml.com/archimate-diagram
All Plantuml diagrams can be constructed, shared and saved via
http://www.plantuml.com/plantuml
and
however since the URLs are so long (the URL encodes the script that describes the diagram) a URL shortener can be employed for easier sharing and embedding.
Tip: change the real URL you land on using the shortened link above from the format
https://www.planttext.com/api/plantuml/png/{long string}
to this format
https://www.planttext.com?text={long string}
to be able to edit the diagram!
Here is the new URL of the revised diagram, in the SVG format this time, which can be scaled without loss of resolution:
Note: if you change the diagram the URL of your edited diagram will also change, which means that you will need to change the diagram URL embedded in any documents that refer to it if you want them to reflect your edits. Of course, if you simply download and include the generated png file in your document you need to change the document whenever you revise the diagram too. The upside is that anyone can revise the diagram in future without having to recreate it from scratch and without needing any software – just internet access. One isn’t even dependent on a particular website since the ‘long string’ from http://www.plantuml.com/plantuml/uml will also work at https://www.planttext.com and one can even install one’s own diagram server:
https://plantuml.com/faq-install
Class and many other UML diagrams
https://plantuml.com/class-diagram
Also allows one to quickly write: Sequence diagram Usecase diagram Class diagram Object diagram Activity diagram (here is the legacy syntax) Component diagram Deployment diagram State diagram Timing diagram
ER Diagram
https://graphviz.org/Gallery/undirected/ER.html
Dependency Diagram
These can be very powerful by providing insight into the chain of dependencies and relationships within a system. Graphviz allows diagrams in the simple ‘dot’ graph description language to be constructed, shared and saved via e.g.
https://dreampuf.github.io/GraphvizOnline
http://magjac.com/graphviz-visual-editor/
App Wireframe
https://whimsical.com/web-app-wireframe-MQJZk63o4PSpJES2zPTXLx
Slide Presentation Graphics
Icons
Other tools
https://app.diagrams.net/ (formerly draw.io, fiddly on a phone)
https://docs.google.com/drawings (needs sign up, cumbersome on a phone)
http://dia-installer.de/ (needs installation on a desktop OS so unusable on a phone)
https://www.lucidchart.com (needs sign up, app installation on phone and free version limits documents and objects per document)
Hope this helps – feel free to share your favourite diagramming tools and resources in a comment!
At least 157 MPs have publicly declared their support for the Prime Minister including those listed in the tweet below.
The latest figure can be seen here: https://twitter.com/johnestevens
The list above may not include some of the latest declarations of support – you can search Twitter for “support prime minister” e.g.
If you have a more up-to-date figure feel free to tweet a reply here.
If you want to show your appreciation for someone’s message or photo in a WhatsApp group chat but don’t want to bother everyone in the group with a notification of your reaction there is now a way by simply long tapping the thing you want to react to and selecting your emoji reaction.
This was a feature request raised over 6 years ago but better late than never I guess!
https://www.quora.com/Why-doesnt-WhatsApp-let-you-like-someones-message
Top Gun: Maverick wasn’t what I was expecting but was none the less enjoyable for that.
We know from the now 2 year old ‘making of’ trailers how much effort went into capturing the real life flying scenes but for me the visual spectacle didn’t translate to the big screen significantly more than the equivalent scenes from the original.
What did unexpectedly move me was the maturity of the story elements around the characters. Top Gun was almost a coming of age movie about internal conflicts but TG2, rather like Trainspotting 2 finds new material in the things that matter to its now older and somewhat wiser protagonists. Managing relationships in a new mindset with less bravado but more recognition and acceptance of oneself and others and knowing that sometimes we just don’t know.
Yes, the plot may be ridiculous and we can see the manipulations coming but nevertheless I found myself welling up at those moments of mass audience acknowledgement of some of life’s truths and values. Hard work, honesty, tact, camaraderie, courage, compromise, humbleness, mutual respect and understanding.
We may not know the answers but perhaps the message is that sometimes just trusting our instincts is more valuable than thinking, conveyed in the somewhat hackneyed but pithy line:
Don’t think.
Just do.
Like a son, TG2 may inherit some of its forebear’s characteristics but is an entity of its own. Enjoy the ride.
This is a collection of links, in various evolving categories, helping one quickly develop insights into and predictions from data.
https://github.com/jupyter/jupyter/wiki#statistics-machine-learning-and-data-science
https://www.ataccama.com/download/dq-analyzer
Reduce dimensionality by either selecting the most informative features or transforming them into a low-dimensional manifold using dimensionality reduction methods e.g. PCA, LLE, etc. https://machinelearningmastery.com/feature-selection-machine-learning-python/
Predict https://towardsdatascience.com/random-forest-in-python-24d0893d51c0
This article is now available as a video!
There are a lot of glowing reviews of the latest flagship TV from Samsung, the S95B. Samsung Display’s new and much awaited QD-OLED technology brings extra brightness and colour volume to the inky blacks of regular W-OLED technology, but if you scour the TV reviewer videos, AV websites and shopper reviews you’ll find a surprising number of less than positive aspects reported too.
I’ve summarised those I’ve found so far below but leave a comment if there’s anything I’ve missed.
Starting with a thread of 15 issues based on this TV YouTuber’s findings:
I’ve lumped these problems, plus those from other sources, into a set of categories:
Physical e.g. size
Only comes in 55 and 65 inch sizes: https://www.samsung.com/uk/tvs/oled-tv/s95b-55-inch-oled-4k-smart-tv-qe55s95batxxu/
11/ Panel can be bent in shipping: https://www.amazon.com/SAMSUNG-55-Inch-Quantum-Built-QN55S95BAFXZA/product-reviews/B09VHBXY63
15/ Bright lights near the screen make blacks grayish
8/ Cleaning with water can leave spots, though this might help: https://lifehacks.stackexchange.com/questions/17639/how-to-remove-water-stains-from-tv
User Interface e.g. OS and remote
13/ Tizen OS is laggy: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tizen
“an uninspiring smart platform”: https://www.reviewed.com/televisions/content/samsung-s95b-oled-tv-review
Small remote with no back-light: https://www.bestbuy.com/site/reviews/samsung-55-class-s95b-oled-4k-smart-tizen-tv/6502216
Picture Processing e.g. black crush, blown highlights, colour accuracy, upscaling, motion handling, HDR modes.
9/ Out of the box, filmmaker mode is brighter than movie mode and shadow details are too dark: https://www.samsung.com/us/support/answer/ANS00079295/
10/ In some modes eotf is pushed too bright affecting mid tones
Inaccurate or oversaturated colour and luminance:
1/ Colour fringing with dark objects against a light background: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chromatic_aberration
3/ Shadow details can be crushed or overly bright: https://www.howtogeek.com/728797/what-is-black-crush-on-a-display/
4/ Dark scenes can trigger dimming (tho not the only OLED to do this)
2/ Low bit rate content shows aliasing and smoothing artefacts: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spatial_anti-aliasing
14/ Smooth gradation can show posterization: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Posterization
5/ Motion can show ghost trails
12/ Motion interpolation introduces artefacts: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Motion_interpolation
No Dolby Vision HDR mode: https://www.reviewed.com/televisions/content/samsung-s95b-oled-tv-review
Quality Control e.g. bugs
Screen cuts off the edge of images: https://www.amazon.com/SAMSUNG-55-Inch-Quantum-Built-QN55S95BAFXZA/product-reviews/B09VHBXY63
6/ Auto colour gamut and auto input switching are unreliable: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gamut
7/ Picture settings reset unexpectedly
Longevity – OLED tech is based on organic materials which wear out
Brightness – QD OLEDs can get bright but are nevertheless still much less bright than some LEDs
It’s the brightest OLED we’ve tested to date but S95B doesn’t get as bright as some of the brightest LCD/LED TVs:
https://www.reviewed.com/televisions/content/samsung-s95b-oled-tv-review
Value – price to performance is not the best
Cheaper LEDs like the Sony X95K and its kin have as many strengths and come in larger screen sizes
Finally, trust your eyes – look at some footage of a real life scene and see which TV looks more realistic and involving. And if the measurements of the TV you prefer are worse than some other TV then the measurements are measuring the wrong things – things that don’t necessarily reflect our perception.
And beware the shills and bots lurking in the comments – you need look no further than those in my last video to see the kind of unsubstantiated hype they come out with!
Image credits: cottonbro