romdev

I have chrome updates restricted by my organization and can't use this feature. Instead I'll occasionally use this bookmarklet to invert colors on very bright pages:

javascript:(function() { var tag = document.createElement('style'); tag.type = 'text/css'; document.getElementsByTagName('head')[0].appendChild(tag); tag[ (typeof document.body.style.WebkitAppearance=='string') ? 'innerText' : 'innerHTML'] = '* { background-color: white !important; color: #444 !important; } html { filter: invert(100%) grayscale(100%); }'; })();

I loved my Sansa e200 and installed Rockbox. Just pulled it out of a drawer and remembered what a great piece of hardware it was - hadn't been used in years and the battery still had a charge. The hardware wheel selector is a lost piece of tech that needs to be recovered, perhaps for use in car stereos and TV remotes. Rockbox was a great idea, well executed. However I'm baffled why it's still seeing so much recent activity considering how few MP3 players are still in use.

I frankly prefer a chat(bot or not) because I have a transcript of what has been discussed. Also, it's kinda fun to guess if it's a bot without offending. This is a real excerpt at the end of a helpful chat with Comcast: guest_ > You seem really nice. I've read about computer programs that can simulate nice people. Are you really a person? Cecilia > yes, i am guest_ > Who won the superbowl? Cecilia > i'm not familiar with it , im sorry

Shop around - it's a competitive market. Many checking accounts with an initial deposit of less than $1000 or confirmed direct deposit are free and have no minimum balance. Some (TD for example) will even pay $150 - $300 to open an account after a few direct deposits.

'I may be a sorry case, but I don't write jokes in base 13.' - Douglas Adams

Those aren't bevel gears in the video. Sheldon is talking about an older design that had cone-shaped gears which would suffer from the design flaws he mentions.

In my Toyota, a wired connection from a phone's headphone out to the car stereo aux-in sounds terrible. The amplifier in the phone just can't send a loud enough signal to compete with the noise. Even a lossy Bluetooth connection from the phone to the car stereo sounds better in this case because it's not dependent on the phone's tiny amplifier to drive 6 speakers. The Bluetooth audio quality is almost indistinguishable from the high bit-rate MP3s stored on a USB drive.

Bookmark https://mbasic.facebook.com to get the messenger features in a readable format on smaller screens.

I used to work in the main office at the college I was attending. For my senior project I wrote a contact manager application that would also help with transcript analysis - allowing transcript data entry, prerequisite mapping, and schedule planning. Most of the students were working adults who had attended classes at other institutions but were unaware which credits could be transferred. In college administration, an 'Articulation Agreement' is a covenant between two colleges that says Calculus 101 at PSU is the same as Calculus 101 at UofO, and they should apply towards a degree at either school without much administrative effort -- that easy transcript analysis. It's more complicated when there isn't an agreement, or when the attended school has trimesters and the degree school has semesters, or when the names of the courses don't match but the content does. My application (and some personal guidance) helped a few students shave a year or more off their schedule by prepping them for meetings with the department head to get transfer credits for courses they'd already taken, or to test out of subjects they already knew from work or personal experience. If you're in college and aren't sure about how to schedule your term, the hour you spend with a department head or guidance counselor can be worth a full term saved. Do it early and often. If there's a class you'll be in that looks too easy, switch out as early as possible to save your time and your instructor's, and maybe get into that cool elective class that didn't fit your schedule.

I'm less concerned about Alexa saying nonsense than understanding nonsense, like commands hidden in a popular song or TV commercial with unintelligible background noise: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16255680

Depends on the attacker, but it's probably accounted for at least partially. In some passwords where I don't care much about security I'll use this technique and some personal, site-specific mnemonic - if their logo reminded me of a gerbil, I might start with the name of a pet gerbil I once had and obfuscate it with character replacement or keyboard proximity replacement (same characters, one row up or down). These passwords are always unique to the site, which doesn't get any financial info.

When I need a secure password that's easy to remember I'll obfuscate the initials of a memorable passphrase from a joke, poem, song or book. My password manager is offline (remember the LastPass hack?) so I need to read from it once and type it in.

Update: I remembered this old article that describes some of the techniques that have been used to crack passwords, including 133t-character replacement: https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2013/05/how-c...

Can't be found, but you can enter them by hand by holding down alt while entering the ASCII code on the numeric keypad. I wonder if they'll survive posting a comment: 28∟ 29↔ 30▲ 31▼ Edit: looks like they do survive. Hmmm... Now I wonder about extended ASCII. └┐│└└╚╦╝

Many of our larger clients use https://www.splunk.com for enterprise-level monitoring, alerting, and log analysis. It's proven effective to debug issues in environments where I don't have direct log access.

Also (mostly) unrelated to the story, but the first thing I thought of when hearing about kinetic energy storage was a story I heard several years ago about a data center that protected itself from catastrophic power surges by using a massive spinning flywheel to store energy from the grid and harvest its rotation to run a generator that powered the servers.

What about a bad guy that turns on your camera to watch your keyboard while you're on a shopping or financial site? It seems like a more valuable target to capture banking and email passwords than knowing the specific shape of your body - a shape that's probably not very different from most people in your demographic. Krebs has details about the value of a hacked email account: https://krebsonsecurity.com/2013/06/the-value-of-a-hacked-em...

Yep - electrical tape prevents the latest version of webex putting my +10 casual image into a formal business meeting when it automatically starts the video feed. The fact that I never seen any other crusty visages on the webex face list tells me I'm not alone in my 'paranoia'.

Slightly off-topic: I wish they'd started the merge from Office 2010 instead of current versions where they've removed essential features like a real dark mode and slimmer to-do bar. Every Outlook release since 2010 has been worse than the last for power users and those with low-res screens or light sensitivity. Outlook 2010 was as good as it needed to be.

It's hard to imagine using a stripped down browser-based feed reader after using an excellent dedicated application like NewsBlur. Did FireFox synchronize your read stories across devices?

Changing the width or zooming in and out changes the number of columns (nice!), but the max seems to be 4. Is that a hard limit? Seems like a responsive UI should respect wider screens in landscape. Nice work, btw.

This is a similar conversation with the same confusion about checklists versus ToDo lists: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15799539 For ToDo lists, Google tasks has everything I need. There is a good app and very simple web interface: https://mail.google.com/tasks/ig?pli=1 Adding a date will make a reminder show in Android notification bar and show in Google calendar. I have it organized into lists: Today (should be cleared out daily), Queue (pull from this list when bored), Projects (collections of tasks for long-term), and subject-specific lists like Music, Home, etc.

The Sets feature linked in the article sounds more interesting. https://www.theverge.com/2018/6/27/17510344/microsoft-window...

Interesting that it's spelled as a single word. There's another place in NZ with a long name that's fun to visit: Te Whakarewarewatanga O Te Ope Taua A Wahiao which shortens to Whakarewarewa.

The locals there live on an active volcano with steam vents they use for cooking. There are colorful acidic pools all around, and reckless children who will jump off a bridge for thrown coins. The guided tour is charming and fascinating. You'll eventually get used to the smell of brimstone.

What they should really bring back is the TrackBall Explorer. I have two and have been using them exclusively at work and home for 15+ years. They're showing age, but still going strong. Try to find one today and you'll spend $700.

Sexual reproduction selects either the fittest available mate or the most compatible with the group, to create offspring that is likely to be either more independent or more compatible with group living.

Natural Selection favors throttling the reproductive pace of individual members of a species for the overall diversity and health of the group, and to prevent overpopulation that could be ruinous to a group. Some species are reproductive for the majority of their lives, and have shorter lifespans or less abundant reproduction. Humans' relatively long lifespan and relatively short reproductive period allow us to use less energy concerning ourselves with survival and reproduction than other species.

Baldness, menopause and homosexuality are examples of nature telling us to slow down our mating activities and ideally to find other ways to contribute to the collective- like supporting the young (teach), creating persistent works (write a book), sharing resources (buy a family house), or conserving resources (die).

"Time is an illusion. Lunchtime doubly so" - Douglas Adams

Geez, that thing is as big as a whale! I'd say it seats about 20.

Third recommendation for Pluralsight. My company also pays for it. I've watched 4 classes and they were all information-dense and easy to follow, although I found myself hitting pause and rewind a lot to take notes. At the end of each I felt at least competent enough to get started and look up other details when necessary.

I'm assuming you mean podcasting apps. I would also use one if it exists. There's no way I'm switching from Newsblur, but curious: does Feedly store your last listened position, so you can switch from phone to desktop like you can with Audible?

+1 vote for Newsblur. I was using Google Reader start to finish and also tried several others before settling on Newsblur. It's perfect in almost every way, but has a curious/arbitrary number of stories preserved per feed, sometimes 200, sometimes 500. I haven't figured out if it's an option, or an algorithm.

I've been experimenting with this chart that claims good results in reversing presbyopia: http://www.robert-silverman.net/presbeninst.htm I've only tried it a few times, but there were temporary noticeable results. Unfortunately there are no quick fixes for my floaters that have gotten worse over the years.