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cremevax

@cremevax@infosec.exchange

Former dev. Infosec-curious + a million other things-curious too. Pronouns: she/her/OMG not her again. Extremely queer. Democracy enjoyer.

My handle is a shoutout to the mythical 80s Usenet host kremvax, but not so funny now, is it?

This profile is from a federated server and may be incomplete. For a complete list of posts, browse on the original instance.

jerry , to random
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ITS BOAT DAY!

video/mp4

cremevax ,
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@jerry thank you for introducing me to this song, it’s been a joy. Have fun riding the dolphins!

cremevax , to random
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Hi folks, it’s the weekly (that is, and environs) poop toots.

With this week's data, we're seeing plenty of Covid at all three county sites. Let's start with the West Point (WSPT) sewage treatment plant: the Sars-CoV-2 7-day rolling average more than doubled since last week. The last 7DRA number was calculated on 6/4.

WSPT is one of three King County(-ish) sewersheds in this dataset. You can find overviews, individual sewershed results, and a breakdown of variants for the state wastewater surveillance program, along with other metrics like case counts and hospitalizations for Covid-19 and other respiratory illnesses, at https://doh.wa.gov/data-and-statistical-reports/diseases-and-chronic-conditions/communicable-disease-surveillance-data/respiratory-illness-data-dashboard#WasteWater. If you go to the page and click "learn more" in the statewide view tab, you can find out lots of details about how these data are calculated and how to interpret them. The dashboard gets updated every Wednesday (generally).

Note: when the state switched over to new data providers in September, they also removed the previous historical data from the graphical interface. That's because the two providers used different methodologies that made direct comparisons difficult. Unfortunately, it also removed valuable context for interpreting the results. So, keep in mind we're just seeing what happened in September 2023 until now.

cremevax OP ,
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The Brightwater sewage treatment plant (BWT) in Woodinville also continued to climb up. The last averaging calculation is from 6/5.

cremevax OP ,
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The last of the three King County sites is King County South (KCS) treatment plant, and its 7DRA is also headed sharply up. It's nearly where it was back in the January peaks, ugh. The last averaging calculation is from 6/4.

cremevax , to random
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I've never used automated denoising tools on my images before, but I was playing around with an image I shot in Desolation Sound, #britishcolumbia last week and gave Photoshop's "AI denoising" a try. This was a low-light shot taken from my boat; since I was bouncing around on anchor, a long exposure wasn't going to work, and I went to ISO 80000. Hence the massive amount of noise, muddying the image.

The first image is my original plus a few minor tweaks. The second image is the same, plus denoising (default level). Folks, this just blows me away. #photography

This is the same image as before, with denoising applied. There's much more definition to the sailboats, and you can begin to make out stars in the not-quite-dark sky.

cremevax OP ,
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So I did a quick denoising bakeoff, comparing the Photoshop/Camera Raw denoiser to two other popular denoising-focused applications, Topaz Photo AI 3.0.3 and DxO Photolab 7. For the heck of it, I also tried one of scikit-image’s denoiser APIs, which I’m guessing is a wrapper for OpenCV.

My original image, shot at ISO 80000, is in the toot above. You can also see what Photoshop/Camera Raw produced with its default denoising settings. I’ll unlist the rest of the follow-up toots so as to not clog up everyone’s timeline. #photography

cremevax OP ,
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The next tool I tried was Topaz Photo AI. I’m using the free trial version, which doesn’t let you save images. So what I have here is a screencap of its zoomed-in output, with the original on the left and the denoised version on the right. To my eye, the Topaz Photo AI version looks a bit more pleasingly natural than the Photoshop/Camera Raw version.

I gather than Topaz’s denoiser used to be sold as a Photoshop plugin, but is now a standalone photo editing app, costing $200. I’m a hobbyist beginner, so that’s a bit tough for me to justify. But I can totally see why pros and prosumer types would happily use this tool.

cremevax OP ,
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@jerry I know, just what I need -- another expensive hobby. :)

cremevax , to random
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Greetings all, it’s the weekly #washingtonstate #kingcounty (that is, #seattle and environs) #COVID #COVID19 #wastewater toots.

The West Point (WSPT) sewage treatment plant Sars-CoV-2 7-day rolling average continues to bounce around the levels its been at for weeks, with maybe a very slight uptick that’s hard to see on this graph. The last 7DRA number was calculated on 5/14.

WSPT is one of three King County(-ish) sewersheds in this dataset. You can find overviews, individual sewershed results, and a breakdown of variants for the state wastewater surveillance program, along with other metrics like case counts and hospitalizations for Covid-19 and other respiratory illnesses, at https://doh.wa.gov/data-and-statistical-reports/diseases-and-chronic-conditions/communicable-disease-surveillance-data/respiratory-illness-data-dashboard#WasteWater. If you go to the page and click "learn more" in the statewide view tab, you can find out lots of details about how these data are calculated and how to interpret them. The dashboard gets updated every Wednesday (generally).

Note: when the state switched over to new data providers in September, they also removed the previous historical data from the graphical interface. That's because the two providers used different methodologies that made direct comparisons difficult. Unfortunately, it also removed valuable context for interpreting the results. So, keep in mind we're just seeing what happened in September 2023 until now.

jerry , to random
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A few more pics from today. Various orchids and another of the red daisy. Any feedback/critiques?

#bloomscrolling

image/jpeg
image/jpeg
image/jpeg

cremevax ,
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@jerry so beautiful. Really nice work.

cremevax , to random
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I hope you aren’t sick of images yet. I got some time to work on a couple more images from Friday night in Washington State.

A wild sky of magenta and yellow with stars behind over a campfire, plus somebody’s headlamp

cremevax OP ,
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@jerry :blush: thank you!

cremevax , to random
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pic from .

Hope everyone came back happy with the show.

cremevax , to random
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I was out to dinner tonight with friends who were talking about how they were going to get around in Europe on an upcoming trip.

This caused me to start drumming the table and saying Trans! Europe! Express! in a heavy German accent. Everyone gave me a puzzled look.

I pressed on in my terrible fake accent: Station to station!back to Düsseldorf City! meet Iggy Pop and David Bowie! Trans! Europe! Express! Still getting completely blank looks.

Familiarity with Kraftwerk lyrics seems utterly foundational to me and clearly our society has failed. SMH.

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