randomstring

Thanks! In the close up it's much more clearly a dog.

Speaking of the artwork. To the right of the chicken is what looks like a horse. Or is it a dog? Maybe it's meant to be a cow? No mention of horse meat in the article, although they do mention beef.

I think I answered my own question with a few google searches. Seems that Romans had a taboo about eating hoursemeat. https://www.academia.edu/12021679/1999_Eating_horse_meat_the...

So I guess that picture is suppose to be a cow?

Pandora's suggestion algorithm is much better than Spotify's. What you describe is what I used to do with Pandora. I migrated to Spotify several years ago.

Spotify generates some decent genre based playlists based on my listening history. Not as good as Pandora was.

Lately with the pandemic, I've created a super-chill, ambient play list (I started with Moby's Long Ambients and expanded from there) to relax before bedtime. This has been really helpful for unwinding in these stressful times.

However, an unintended consequence is that Spotify now thinks I listen to soothing ambient more than 50% of the time. My year in music is all ambient and my suggested play lists are all wishy-washy now. Apparently there is no "ignore this playlist when tracking usage." You can only manually disable tracking under "Settings > Social" and it times out after every session.

I rode the majority of the route through Washington in 2018. Parts were clogged with mud and another section blocked with a wall of tumbleweed at the time. I had to cross the Columbia River on I-5 at 4:30am to avoid traffic as there is no shoulder on part of the bridge. Despite its incompleteness, the trail is amazing and is a treasure. Improvements keep coming and the Beverly Bridge over the Columbia is scheduled to be finished in 2021, as is are the bridges at Renslow and Takoa. Progress is being made.

We owe it to future generations to help make this happened. https://www.railstotrails.org/greatamericanrailtrail/ https://palousetocascadestrail.org/

Reminds me of this post comparing the CPU and RAM of the Apollo 11 flight computer with modern USB chargers. (spoiler alert: the USB charger wins)

https://forrestheller.com/Apollo-11-Computer-vs-USB-C-charge...

Hacker News comment link: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22254719

I see support for Debian and Ubuntu (https://support.1password.com/cs/getting-started-linux/), but I don't see anything about Raspbian or running on the Rasberry Pi. Hopefully Pi support isn't far behind.

What luck, I chose today to install a new piece of network gear. I thought I had managed to totally FUBAR my network. DNS was failing, "ping 1.1" (my current goto test "Am I connected to the internet?" as it requires the fewest keystrokes and hits the Cloudflare DNS 1.0.0.1) failed and I just assumed it was my fault. Backed out my changes, and discover in fact, the internet was down.

Uhg. Site is down at the moment. Even these suggested searches are returning an error page.

Top Tip to future search engine builders: cache, cache, cache. Especially the canned searches on you press releases and HackerNews posts.

Cuil did that, just in a surrealist way.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cuil

http://cuiltheory.wikidot.com/what-is-cuil-theory

My last company had something like that and included response time percentiles (50th, 90th, 95th, 99th) and we had these values graphed and displayed on a big screen in our office. Along with a ton of other performance stats: queries per second, various measures of system load, etc.

Averages can lie, especially when something like an empty query can take close to zero time compared to a non-trivial transaction. If some robot or other artifact of your site is generating a some amount of null queries that will make your average response time look better than it actually is. Percentiles, particularly on the tail of 90th or above, tell a better story of how well and consistently you're responding to traffic under load.

Yahoo isn't a search engine and hasn't been for years. Just check the "Powered by Bing™" at the bottom of every search result. That leaves just two search engines, Google and Bing. Not counting non-US search engines that may have significant market share in their respective countries.

Owntracks is my backup plan. Integration with Home Assistant is a must.

There's a little backstory to choosing Life360. The clock was a surprise for my wife and I needed to get her to willingly install and run a tracking app on her phone. A "Family Safety" app was an easier sell than a more abstract home automation integration. :)

Cool!

I have a collection of related projects here: https://github.com/randomstring/WeasleyClock#related-project...

I hadn't seen yours, I'll add it to the list.

I purchased the artwork from Minalima, https://minalima.com/product/the-weasley-family-clock/ and used that. It's officially licensed artwork.

I consider the background a feature as it is intended to also be a Harry Potter "artifact."

Others have done custom artwork or made copies of official images (there are two variants that appear in the Harry Potter movies). I really liked this artwork, so that's what I did.

You might not like that the clock shows you to be in "Mortal Peril" when you travel over 75mph. :)

As mentioned in other comments here and I discuss in my build log. There's Apple's Find My Phone service, but this is iOS only. The authentication API for Find My Phone changed while I was working on the project and Life360 has really good support in Home Assistant.

There's OwnTracks (https://owntracks.org/) and Google location services. I didn't try those.

I opted for Life360 because it's supported on iPhone and Android and I just wanted the location data to "just work." I had enough technical hurdles, I didn't want to add debugging why someone's phone stopped sending location updates.

I understand where you're coming from on this. I do not think the the service itself is a source of emotional abuse, it's how it's used. Can it be used to abuse privacy? Absolutely. I've seen other parents who have harassed their kid about where they are or how fast they are driving. I don't want to use it that way, I'm not going to use it that way.

Modeling appropriate use of technology and privileges is an important lesson that needs be taught (and practiced). Lessons that translate to being an admin on a minecraft server or having root access on a system.

When I first installed Life360 my son was using it to track me. He made some comment one day about how he saw where I'd gone for lunch. He'd been checking up on me. Since then, he's become bored stalking his family. With shelter-in-place in effect no one goes anywhere anyway.

It was a year from idea to finished, installed clock. 1000 hours? Maybe. Yes, if you include time spent worrying about how to make the clock hands look good and stay on.

Project creator here.. AMA.

The hands don't just show the person's state. When "In Transit" the hand position in the sector shows their distance from home. At a glance you can tell if they are close to home, in town, or across the country. Using a logarithmic scale to give more resolution for points closer to home.

Depending on where your hand is in the "Home" sector indicates what part of the house you're in.

This provides location information on people, without feeling like a violation of their privacy.

I'm a long time Strava user, I have a four digit user id. Except for the year I won a free subscription for a year, I've always paid for the service. I'm a data nerd and cyclist.

This change in Strava's policy makes me very sad because it's clear they are managing it poorly and Strava might die as a result.

Who could step in to fill the void? Garmin? No, they're just terrible at anything other than collecting raw GPS data and it's clear they don't have athletes in mind when creating features. Even when they have winning products they find ways to sabotage them. Garmin Connect is full of potential, yet fails to engage users or become a social platform.

I kinda hope Veloviewer.com steps up to fill the void. It's all about data.

I loved Salinger's books when I was a teenager in the 80s. I just don't think his work is relevant today. The major themes are about how everyone else is a conformist and a phony. Both ideas have been turned inside out since Salinger wrote his books. What does being a "phony" mean if you're a YouTube star or say the President of the United States?

Check out _The Eden Express_ by Mark Vonnegut (son of Kurt Vonnegut). It is a memoir documenting the author's own psychotic breakdown. Reading this gave me insight into the human mind and what it's like when it goes off the rails.

You say "anything that transforms me into a smarter, wiser person" so I'll add Eliezer Yudkowsky's fanfic _Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality_ (http://www.hpmor.com/) The whole HP universe is re-imagined, except Harry is smart, a scientist, and empowered with rationality. It is both entertaining and an introduction to the art of rationality.

Emacs elisp hooks for controlling your sex toys? Yep. The examples are priceless. For instance tying completion of Org-Mode tasks to various vibration settings to "provide reward for task completion or motivation to get it done."

I worked at Sun in the late 90s. I Never used pizza tool, but I did order burritos with the command line burrito tool. It would fax your order to Burrito Real in Mountain View. By the time you arrived at Burrito Real, your burrito would be waiting and you could skip the line, get your burrito and pay.

I recommend the meta-cognition course: Learning how to Learn.

https://www.coursera.org/learn/learning-how-to-learn

The primary instructor, Dr. Barbara Oakley, wrote the book, _A Mind for Numbers: How to Excel at Math and Science (Even If You Flunked Algebra)_ that isn't just about learning math.

To be fair, my HS exposure was in honors Math, and it was very limited exposure: matrixes, determinants, and how to represent systems of equations.

I wish I had this when I was learning Linear Algebra. When it was taught to me, both in HS and College, there was not a word of motivation about why we were juggling numbers around in boxes. It was tedious and had seemed to have no connection to anything.

I developed a strong dislike for LA, if not outright fear and hatred. This from someone who majored in math at university. I later learned from reading Dr Oakley's book, _A Mind For Numbers_, that this is a perfect recipe for not mastering a subject. I was sabotaging my own learning by approaching it from the point of view of something to be despised. It was many years later after reading Oakley's book that I challenged myself to learn Linear Algebra.

I found the Coursera course Coding the Matrix https://codingthematrix.com/ perfect. Not only did Professor Philip Klein explain the subject well, but it was also a programming course in python. Coding the algorithms helped make them that much more concrete. I'm happy to say I finished the online course with 100% grade.

Unfortunately Coding the Matrix is no longer available on Coursera.

I know this thread is more about Strang being a teaching god, and he is. I wanted to add something on alternative ways to learn linear algebra.

This is very close to what I do, with a few modifications. Biggest difference is that I use Emacs Org-mode (https://orgmode.org/) which automates things like date strings, building a daily agenda, adding due dates, and the monotony of getting your itemized lists properly indented. (and a whole lot more)

Everything lives in my TODO.org file that's mirrored via dropbox between all my devices and on my phone where I use the Beorg app on the iphone (https://beorgapp.com/).

I archive my finished TODO items at the end of the year. Taking the opportunity to delete (mark CANCELED) things that no longer need doing and carrying over any TODO items that still need getting done.

Back in the 1990s UIUC had a virtual Archaeology lab running on PLATO. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PLATO_(computer_system)

You had to pick where to dig test pits and how deep to dig in order to find artifacts. If you found nothing, you had to decide to either dig deeper or open a new test pit. A great lesson in how to do sampling.

If you love Sun keyboards AND want a compact keyboard, try and find a Sun Voyager keyboard. It's a Sun keyboard, but without the (pointless) numeric keypad on the right. When I worked at Sun I managed to source a couple and still have one in my "I might need that again" bin of parts.

I didn't find any on ebay, but I did find a whole Sun Voyager system https://www.ebay.com/itm/WORKING-Rare-SUN-Voyager-SPARCstati... $700 just to get a keyboard is kinda pricy.

Like the author of the article, I like the Happy Hacker keyboard. It's compact, well built, the control key is in the correct place, has well placed arrow keys, and isn't overly expensive. I have (I hope) a lifetime supply of them. So long as I can get ps2 adaptors for whatever comes after USB.