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ashmud

260 karma · joined August 4, 2011

"Oft as not, in talk or script, we'll force the use of some long hard word, and with it, blunt the keen edge and dull the sharp point of what we want to say." - H. Phelps Gates
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ashmud··on Mercedes Boots Robots from the Production Line
Fanuc also has a collaborative robot:

http://www.fanuc.eu/de/en/robots/robot-filter-page/collabora...

ashmud··on “Soul Food of Japan” – Buraku cuisine conceals a history of discrimination
Title begins with  (0x0008). Source page title does not appear to have it.
ashmud··on Hacked Together 118 GB Floppy Disk
Before those, you had double density "DD" disks -- and extended density "ED" disks after that. With the sleeve encased floppies you could even throw in single-sided and double-sided variants. Growing up, we had a lot of 1200KB 5-1/4 disks. IIRC, they were enough cheaper than 1440KB 3-1/2 disks for close to the same storage.
ashmud··on Hacked Together 118 GB Floppy Disk
Reminds me: Sysinternals Sync on Windows.

Always, always sync -r after writing to a zip drive on Windows. Even minutes after you think it is finished writing, do not trust the OS to have finished flushing to disk.

ashmud··on Hacked Together 118 GB Floppy Disk
Light reading about optical disc packet writing for anyone new the subject:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mount_Rainier_%28packet_writin...

ashmud··on Stripe Atlas
> 15. Age restricted products or services (which are the most products/services)

Wouldn't you need to be the age of majority to use Stripe at all?

ashmud··on Why I don't want stuff
I am surprised big box hardware stores do not have programs to rent out bigger ladders. Personally, I do need a smaller ladder frequently, though. Community/family can be a good way to share tools, too.

I have re-bought tools/parts I was fairly certain I already had, but simply did not have the time to sift through things to find. Especially for home projects that I had a small window to work on and I did not do my due diligence ahead of time to look for them.

ashmud··on Tesla Motors Acquires Tesla.com: We Speak with the Seller
Not as interesting as the nissan.com story, I take it.
ashmud··on Flash-Free Video in 2016
I hope you don't have to deal with ActiveX/SEED (South Korea), too.

Ref: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SEED

ashmud··on Decentraleyes: A Firefox addon to prevent tracking via free CDN providers
It wouldn't hurt to get SQLite Manager and periodically check what's in the browser databases. For example, if you buy anything online you might find your credit card number in there.
ashmud··on Decentraleyes: A Firefox addon to prevent tracking via free CDN providers
If your browser usage patterns include frequent "private browsing" or frequent cache clearing, this can be a noticeable speed boost.

I often using "private browsing" as a way to get another login session (e.g., login a test user while still having admin user logged in).

ashmud··on Tatsuo Horiuchi: The 73-year old Excel spreadsheet artist (2013)
It still has a row limit (and other limits), just bigger now (1048576).

Ref: https://support.office.com/en-us/article/excel-specification...

ashmud··on My Experience With the Great Firewall of China
Some VPN configurations appear trivially easy to detect:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9949559

ashmud··on Whatever happened to the laptop computer? (1985)
I remember using a laptop with a color LCD around 1992. It truly was almost unreadable, like trying to read something written with a morass of fallen leaves.
ashmud··on Netflix Is Now Available Around the World
I've basically given up on Netflix for movies I want to watch and will rent one-offs from Amazon (digital) for older movies, or Redbox (physical) for current releases. The kids are our biggest users, though. It was a pleasant surprise for Netflix to pickup the HtTYD TV series and produce a new "season."
ashmud··on The Amazon Whisperer (2013)
From what I can remember, Amazon has always been full of mostly useless reviews. Disclosing that products were provided for free does little to change that. About the only thing that does is let the parties involved "white wash" their hands of ethical issues.

Occasionally, there will be a shining star. Recently I ordered an AIO printer and a reviewer had a fairly comprehensive reviews on multiple models, almost at a short article length.

Music seems to be one category where I sometimes find value in the reviews. It seems like people are more forthcoming about their music tastes, even though subjective, than what they think about utilitarian products.

ashmud··on The Amazon Whisperer (2013)
Possibly, depending on what rate this is happening. I'd wager that this gets them brownie points with the public, similar to a "connect with fans" approach. Chalk it up to a form of marketing and budget it that way.
ashmud··on Recently Bought a Windows Computer? Microsoft Probably Has Your Encryption Key
From only reading the article, it looks like they're shipping BitLocker already on, and that the recovery key Microsoft has is the BitLocker recovery key for the already enabled BitLocker configuration. Turning BitLocker off and back on resets this key. As long as you don't send it to Microsoft after re-enabling, Microsoft won't have it.
ashmud··on US State Names and Abbreviations as PHP Arrays
Possibilities:

N-1/+1 joke, since Delaware was the first (by date of ratification) state.

Discussion around incomplete sets (do you include "military" states or other non-"50 state" territories?).

Ad hominem attack on removed entity (claiming entity is unimportant).

ashmud··on US State Names and Abbreviations as PHP Arrays
Suggestions, based on what we also have/use.

Datasets: Languages (human), SMS Carriers

Language: SQL

ashmud··on A History of Punctuation for the Internet Age
Thanks. That makes more sense. I didn't initially make the connection between "Page Turner" and book review.
ashmud··on Shielding your files with Reed-Solomon codes (2008)
> If a drive is failing, it will usually collapse into read only mode and let you know that it is failing, giving you ample time to recover data.

Do you have any real world references of this kind of fail behavior occurring? I only have experience with mechanical HDD failure (RAID drives gone bad -> degraded until rebuild; non-RAID drives getting massive bad sectors; non-RAID drives click -> dead). I've read about drives supposedly being able to enter a "nice" readonly mode, but that was a couple years or more ago, about SSDs. More recently, I've only read about drives either entering readonly mode until power cycle, then completely inaccessible; or simply lockup and completely inaccessible.

ashmud··on Shielding your files with Reed-Solomon codes (2008)
Multithreaded (Intel TBB) version of par2cmdline (archive.org link):

http://web.archive.org/web/20150607135928/http://chuchusoft....

(Apologies for not directly answering the question.)

ashmud··on Netflix socks detect when you've dozed off and pause your TV show
For reference (screenshot of 4chan thread):

http://i.imgur.com/dgGvgKF.png

ashmud··on Netflix socks detect when you've dozed off and pause your TV show
People who have rough feet that don't want to destroy the foot-end of their bed linens (polyester ones at least).
ashmud··on Netflix socks detect when you've dozed off and pause your TV show
It definitely skips the opening credits on the shows my kids watch (Octonauts, Cat in the Hat, etc.). For better or worse, both of these also have another song in the episode near the beginning (the same song, every episode).

This is on a Roku 3, not sure if it's a different experience for other devices.

ashmud··on A History of Punctuation for the Internet Age
Is there a longform article of the topic? I don't read terribly many New Yorker articles -- is this typical article length? Reading [this article], I feel like I'm taking a little sample taste of a few slightly disjointed points.
ashmud··on How the Food Industry Engineers the Need to Eat
Stonyfield and Fage make full fat yogurts, for example. I do not remember seeing any at the grocery chain giants, though. More specialized groceries (e.g., Whole Foods, some "ethnic" stores) may carry a full fat yogurt.

http://www.stonyfield.com/products/yogurt/smooth-creamy/whol...

http://usa.fage.eu/product/fage-total-7-oz

ashmud··on How the Food Industry Engineers the Need to Eat
I find that eating something with fat and protein does a better job than fat alone. On days when I add in a mozzarella cheese, I feel satiated much longer than a fruit+nut bar alone (also have a tablespoon of coconut oil in my coffee).
ashmud··on NASA Open APIs
The entire document is written in a pretty informal style.
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