iamphilrae

Sounds like your company and the company I work for operate in similar areas. We focus on the indoor routing and positioning aspects, but are quite constrained by the effort of converting a floor plan or PDF of a CAD into a map. May be worth us connecting on LinkedIn to see if our companies could mutually benefit each other. My profile is my username here, without the “i am”.

So often one key point that is missed - use the right format for the right image type. In general, for photographs use JPEG, for illustrations use PNG or SVG.

I run a number of news website scrapers for various projects. Originally I ran them all on AWS EC2 instances and racked up sizeable bills. Recently though, I pulled an unused Raspberry Pi from my desk drawer, installed them all onto the Pi, and now run them for near free from my desk! Granted I need to be a little bit more efficient with memory and processor cycles, but that’s a fun little challenge. I find if you respect the websites in terms of not hitting them multiple times a minute (or only once an hour which I do) then you’ll very seldom get banned.

In my opinion, we need a mix of both. Trying to interact with an entertainment unit with some type of abstracted/bastardised joystick or touch pad is just plain awful. Whereas interacting using touchscreen is just so much simpler, plus allows for UIs that weren’t part of the original product development (e.g Apple CarPlay).

But for other things, we need dedicated physical controls that mean we don’t have to take our eyes off the road to use; for example, climate control, volume control, cruise control, hazard lights, etc.

A good manufacturer will integrate a mix of both, and user test at each stage of the manufacturing process to ensure what they’re doing is in the best interest of the user.

Audio CDs can survive a bit of degradation to the odd data bits here or there; the music will just skip the millisecond of missing data and your ears won’t notice. Likewise with vinyl. Data discs on the other hand have the issue that if a single data bit is lost, a whole file could be corrupted, especially if it’s a zipped file.

In addition, printed audio CDs are of a different build than CD-Rs which have been found to not be as resistant to moisture and light.

When using the screen for navigation, clarity and contrast of the map being shown is of upt-most importance, especially with the "glancing" nature one would view the map. A high-density screen could help aid this.

£35,000... so yeah, it did

Exactly that my point. My car is brand new, the model is brand new, yet it’s screen looks like it’s out the bargain basement of an LCD factory. In 5 to 10 year’s time when I replace the car, it’ll look even worse!

Seriously... it’s just some extra pixels?! The have picked cheap components, plain and simple.

My brand new Toyota C-HR comes with an entertainment screen that is not Retina display. Technology that has been out for half a decade and is found in the dirt cheapest of smart phones. It honestly doesn’t surprise me that the rest of their tech is so far behind.

I bought a falafel wrap from a basic market stall the other day in London and they didn’t take cash at all. Makes sense- less germs, less chance of robbery, easier accounts, better chance of adhering to tax laws, and better convenience to me as a customer.

I remember mentioning this in a comment thread on Instagram. One response came from someone in the UK who said something along the lines of... “It has been scientifically proven that our water contains high concentrations of cocaine, heroin and other drugs. That’s why I will only drink bottled water.” facepalm

I remember in the 80’s when travelling to Europe, whether you could drink the tap water was always a question to ask at the start of the holiday. 30 years later, we are now questioning our own tap water even though the rest of the EU and America have caught up, with water quality that is on par with anything that could be purchased in a bottle.

I’ve just flown London to Aberdeen (UK) and back with no need for ID. You certainly can still do this internally. An exception may be if your terminal is mixed in with international flights, then you’ll be lumped in with them at security.

Here’s a source from Nasa: https://climate.nasa.gov/news/903/coal-and-gas-are-far-more-...

And a quote:

“Using historical electricity production data and mortality and emission factors from the peer-reviewed scientific literature, we found that despite the three major nuclear accidents the world has experienced, nuclear power prevented an average of over 1.8 million net deaths worldwide between 1971-2009 (see Fig. 1). This amounts to at least hundreds and more likely thousands of times more deaths than it caused. An average of 76,000 deaths per year were avoided annually between 2000-2009 (see Fig. 2), with a range of 19,000-300,000 per year.”

I actually used it considerably for my news site bookmarks on my bookmarks bar. It was great for just catching up on the day’s headline. It’s a feature I sorely miss.

So your experience invalidates mine? I have endlessly seen website media folders throughout my 14 year career filled with PNG photographs uploaded by unknowing content editors through a CMS. This isn’t their fault, they’re writers and know no better. CMS tools should be set up by the developers to automatically convert to the right format.

Cases on the flipside includes developers using JPEG for everything. 100KB highly artifacted illustrations used throughout web layouts, which would be infinitely better as clear 10KB PNGs.

Even lower hanging fruit than optimising compression, is actually choosing the right image format in the first place. Put simply (very simply I may add), if it’s an illustration, use PNG, if it’s a photo, use JPEG. Once we’re over that hurdle, we can go onto managing compression techniques and attempting advanced formats such as SVG and WEBP.

All too often I’ve seen people encoding 8MP photos as PNGs and wondering why they’re all 50MB in size.

Next on the hit list is outputting images at the right size. If the image is never going to be shown greater than 500px wide, save a copy that’s 500px wide. WordPress has this feature built in- learn to use it if that’s your flavour of CMS. Your bounce rate will go down, I guarantee it.

My guess it is dumped back into the sea which will cause a seriously high salt concentrations close to the dumping site. However it’s net effect on salivation levels in the oceans overall will be neutral since all the fresh water produced will likely end up back in the sea.

This is why I feel the high street is failing. It is assumed that a single store’s value is in the products it directly sells. And if it’s making a loss... shut it down!

A store itself should be an “experience”. You go in, play with products, be inspired and get an appetite for them.

Sure you may leave the store empty handed — just like 99% of people that walk into an Apple store. But if the store convinces you that you want... no _need_ their product, you can then buy later from their online store.

People and businesses really need to think of all sales and PR channels of a business as a whole, not a subset of each part. Only then will we see initiatives like this Pi store start to revive the high street.

Richard Dawkins’ The Ancestors Tale is a great layman introduction, on par with Bill Bryson’s as mentioned a few posts up. I’ve read both. Both cover similar subject matter, but approach it from opposite chronological orders.

Well there’s a simple response to that... don’t upgrade. No one is forcing you to.

There's only so much to listen to. On spans of weeks where I need to drive a daily commute for an hour each way, it eventually gets to the point where I prefer just listening to silence than the same old music or podcasts again.

It takes me back to times in my early 20's where I'd run out of things to do at work so would just get to "surf the internet" - eventually you just run out of stuff that will keep you entertained until the clock finally ticks round to 5pm.

I live in London and a few years ago I used to commute from east to west (Ealing to Liverpool Street). The trip is normally 45 minutes each way on the Central Line, however I would regularly miss out on a seat and be subjected to a cattle-class sweat box that just put me in a foul mood for the rest of the day.

However, being Ealing, I also had the option of taking the District Line to rougly the same place (Tower Bridge). My journery was now 1hr 15m, however with the DL's spacious air-conditioned carriages and guaranteed seat, it was well worth it. It put me in the best state of mind and allowed me to use my laptop to work on my own projects. In 6 months of 2hrs to myself each day, I wrote medistudents.com and still was able to relax at the end of the day and not let software development impact home life. Without the commute and this opportunity to work on my own things, I would have either never found the time for a side project, or p*ssed off my girlfriend for spending all night on the laptop.

Nowadays I either work from home or commute by car. It's just not the same - either from looking at the same 4 walls every day, or regarding time spent in traffic as a complete waste. And my time on my own projects has now essentially reduced to zero.

So if you commute by a comfortable bus or train, spend your time wisely. Definitely don't waste it playing Candy Crush. Take advantage of it for working on a side project, learning something new, or just self-reflection.

They maybe be expensive but will last a decade or longer, so price is negated. And when you replace in 10 years, price will be minuscule as to what it is now.

Surely your age will assist you here (I’m 35 too). Unlike software development which is typically a “young mans game” due to the constant need to learn the latest thing (I know, sweeping generalisation), Product Management requires significant past experience of products. As a developer, I’m sure you’ve worked on many successful and non-successful products, and have a good insight as to what went well and not. I think former developers can make the best product managers (it’s the move I made) as you have internal insight into what it takes to make the product (assuming it’s a software product).

You’re still providing excellent usability test data. You’ve proved that their client’s blatant user-unfriendliness advertising strategy doesn’t work on you. Unfortunately 90% of their other test subjects probably clicked the advert so they went with it anyway.

If they use mailchimp, unsubscribing gives you the opportunity to report there account as spam and get them banned from the service. Also no reason you can’t also mark it as spam in your email client too.

I’m now a contractor charging by the hour in a company I used to be an employee in (no OT). It’s amazing how few meetings I get invited to now compared to my previous employment. I just get left to get my stuff done and I’m kept up to date through my own efficient means of finding stuff out (i.e asking the correct people). I would say I’m at least 3x more productive now and no worse off.

This would be terrible for usability. Allow the user to see the date how they want, then you process the data that’s returned.

Technically, I believe that has always been the definition of a hacker, even back in the 80’s. Since then it’s been movies and popular culture that have got it wrong. I believe that what most people think of a hacker, i.e someone who digitally breaks into a system, is actually a ‘cracker’.