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CWuestefeld

12,333 karma · joined February 26, 2009

To email, send to the domain TheWuestefelds.com, using the mailbox "Chris".
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CWuestefeld··on Samsung accidentally freezes its smart fridges with a software update
My non-Samsung fridge lets me change the temperature settings from my phone. That’s why the compressor answers to software. How else would I change the temperature remotely if it didn‘t?

I can't tell if you're serious or sarcastic, so I'll bite: why on Earth would you ever want to change the temperature settings of your fridge?

CWuestefeld··on Nike exits the S&P 100 after 18 years and a $200B market-cap wipeout
This is what I'm wearing now, for this reason. But they keep messing with the products. They revised the 608 so the toe box isn't as big. The nylon 877 V1 seems to be my last choice.
CWuestefeld··on Lawmakers added $1 to car insurance policies. That money paid for Flock cameras
> in Texas, where, from what I understand, if you catch someone in the night stealing you could just kill them even if they never threatend you.

It's worth pointing out that night is doing some of the work in this statement. Texas is unusual, as far as I know, that darkness makes a big difference in how self-defense and danger are viewed. It kinda makes sense, because in the dark, the would-be victim is less able to fully and accurately assess the situation. So Texans need to be aware that their actions may be interpreted more harshly in the dark.

CWuestefeld··on Lawmakers added $1 to car insurance policies. That money paid for Flock cameras
At least in New Jersey, the duty to flee is the law.
CWuestefeld··on Where did all the public bathrooms go?
Sure, but why is it that government-run institutions are (we're being told in this thread) uniquely vulnerable to the problem? Why isn't it happening at Buc-ee's or at McDonald's in the same degree?
CWuestefeld··on Where did all the public bathrooms go?
I used Buc-ee's as an example because they're famous for their clean bathrooms. But there certainly exist clean bathrooms in urban areas. I'd venture to say that those aren't all in high-end establishments that exclude any "riff-raff". It's possible to find clean toilets in urban McDonald's or Wal-Mart; maybe not all of them, but certainly not none either.

And regarding expense on public bathrooms:

* San Francisco spent $1.7M on a single toilet

* Seattle spend $5 installing 5 toilets.

* NYC's public restrooms routinely cost $2M-$4M

Now, those are building projects rather than ongoing operations. But it shows that governments are willing to spend absurd amounts on toilets.

I don't know exactly what the problem is, but there's something about government (mis)management in the issue.

CWuestefeld··on Where did all the public bathrooms go?
As I asked elsewhere, why is it infeasible for government to do this, but Buc-ee's can have sparklingly clean facilities while still turning a profit?

This might tell us something about the nature of government management or employment.

CWuestefeld··on Where did all the public bathrooms go?
Why is it so infeasible for government to keep their facilities clean, while Buc-ee's can have sparkling clean facilities and still turn a profit?
CWuestefeld··on The Maxwell Conjecture Is False (GPT 5.6 Sol)
A large proportion of degrees awarded today are not useful for any practical application.

But having a degree of some kind still serves as a signaling mechanism, demonstrating lots of things including the ability to "play the game". to follow instructions, and so forth.

CWuestefeld··on KOReader
Heads-up for BookOrbit users:

Last week they released a change that put the header Strict-Transport-Security into all responses (yes, even non-HTTPS ones!). This broke not just BookOrbit, but every other app I had running on that server, because suddenly everything being served by that host refused to work without HTTPS.

I probably should have done it sooner, but I spent a big chunk of the afternoon setting up new DNS entries so I can access each app through a different hostname. That was easy enough for me, running OPNsense with my own internal DNS, but you may not have that much flexibility in your home.

I submitted an issue (see https://github.com/bookorbit/bookorbit/issues/760) and a few days later, they created a semi-fix such that the header is only sent out in secure responses. But this still has the effect of forcing every app on that server to require HTTPS.

CWuestefeld··on KOReader
If you want pedantic ridiculousness, well, notice that I never said that the e-ink emits light. It does, however reflect light back from the device's frontlight. The device taken as a system most certainly emits light, but less so when in dark mode.
CWuestefeld··on KOReader
Another cool thing is you can use custom fonts and dictionaries.

To be fair, it is now possible to load your favorite fonts onto baseline Kindle.

CWuestefeld··on KOReader
Ability to use things like BookOrbit (or alternatives) to manage your books and sync your progress/stats

I discovered BookOrbit about two months ago. I think that it, together with the KOReader plugin that exposes the remote BO UI, may turn out to be a game changer in how I organize and access my ebook repository.

CWuestefeld··on KOReader
I jailbroke my Kindle and moved to KOReader last year, primarily to get away from the Amazon jail. Just the bare KOReader UX was pretty utilitarian. It lacked polish for sure. I'll have to agree that, as noted elsewhere, the KOReader menus can be difficult to get a grip on.

If you're working at just the most basic level of functionality, I don't think KOReader is necessarily worse than native Kindle. The latter is hampered by being very opinionated about how you should experience it, and that includes pushing their store above the user's own library, and this is a real annoyance.

As you start to demand more capabilities they diverge more. Organizing when you've got many books on the device is clunky on both platforms, but in different ways. The native Kindle options for grouping are simple, but not necessarily easy. They're very generic, and very cumbersome to work with. Bare KOReader's support for folders makes more sense to me, and it's easier to deal with bulk books than is Kindle's.

Getting books onto Kindle is super-easy if you get them from Amazon, but complexity ramps up for other sources. Your best bet is plugging it into USB and transferring via the file system. Native KOReader add to this an OPDS capability (if your book repository supports it), which works but is less than pleasant. If you use BookOrbit as your repository, there's a plugin that gives you the remote BookOrbit UI from the Kindle, which makes things a LOT better.

I experimented with Simply UI for a bit but could never get it to work quite right. About a month ago I found Bookshelf, and this makes the UX pretty wonderful. It has a very attractive and intuitive UI. And it simplifies the interactions needed for group management a bit.

Bottom line is that KOReader + Bookshelf are, for at least a power user, a potentially far superior experience compared to baseline Kindle.

CWuestefeld··on KOReader
Because most of the page is dark, with light only coming from the text, the total light emitted is much less. That makes it less annoying to my wife, when I'm reading before going to sleep.
CWuestefeld··on US citizen charged after GrapheneOS phone wipes during airport search
Americans, too. My understanding is that there are a couple of hundred Americans being detained in China now. Some of these people are expatriates who gave up their PRC citizenship for American but China still claims to have dominion over (for what that's worth), but at least some have no colorable argument at all.

I'm surprised that we don't hear more about this from the American government and media.

CWuestefeld··on US citizen charged after GrapheneOS phone wipes during airport search
In the past I've felt the same way in China. At a macro level there may be a lot more restrictions there. But when it comes to day-to-day life, it seemed like people had much fewer regulations bearing down on them.

For example, you'll see farmers on the Shanghai streets come in from the countryside to sell their produce - and doing so with impunity. In, say, NYC there are vendors still, but they've got their wares on a blanket that they can quickly scoop up and get away when the police come by.

There seemed to be a tacit agreement between the people and the Chinese oligarchy: if you let those in power just keep doing what they want, they'll just ignore you.

However, China is a pendulum. It was very much the opposite at the time of Tienanmen Square; from the late 90s into the 10s there was quite a lot of freedom; but now with Xi's power having been consolidated, it's swinging back toward authoritarianism again. I've seen people describing more recent conditions there as the start of Cultural Revolution 2.0.

CWuestefeld··on Gemini 3.6 Flash
In the bigger picture, people were starting to catch on to the fact that Google's search product was becoming increasingly useless.

Around here we'd come to that conclusion at least a couple of years ago, due to abusive SEO and so forth. And that understanding was becoming even more widespread.

I don't know if Google's got the later parts of the game figured out yet, but I have to think that they'd realized that Search was dying. While there's still some value there, may as well use it as a hook to pull people into what they expect to be the next era.

CWuestefeld··on Gemini 3.6 Flash
I'm not at all an industry pundit. But I suspect there's a reason we're not seeing leading models from Google recently.

Judging from my own frustrating attempts to use Gemini for vibe-coding, it seems like Google is badly over-sold (i.e., under-provisioned).

From all those promos giving away their pro-level subscription with phones; spinning up a mid-level subscription to undercut other providers and (probably most significantly) putting AI queries into ever search response because their flagship search product had become useless; they're promising a lot more processing to customers than they can reliably deliver.

The recent iterations seem to be intended not to push the capabilities forward, but to deliver capabilities at the current level while consuming less resources. That will allow them to maintain their trajectory until (I'm expecting) they get the huge infusion of extra compute resources from Space X later this year.

If I'm right, then I expect we should see Google start pushing forward again (rather than more of this lateral stuff) by the end of the year.

CWuestefeld··on Texas Police Spent $4.5M on Four Chevy Tahoes
I'm pretty sure you're misunderstanding the definition of "targeted". It has nothing to do with the total capacity of the system, it's about the ability differentiate a specific target from everything else.

The design of these systems is the opposite of that: they're intended to intercept everything within their reach. The fact that with only four devices, their reach isn't (yet) so great has no bearing.

CWuestefeld··on Is this the end of the once-mighty GoPro?
My Instinct 3 Solar shows 34 days remaining in the battery. I charged it sometime last week, so we're talking about upper 30s at least.

That's with running activity tracking including GPS for about an hour a day, and continuous heart rate monitoring.

At least on my device (and my body) the spo2 sensor is very finicky, requiring absolution stillness, and even at that I don't think it's accurate. So I don't use that.

I also discovered recently that simply using a custom watchface - even one built with an eye toward efficiency - lowers my battery life to about 2 weeks. The native faces enjoy privileged operations and are thus highly efficient. But custom-coded stuff apparently runs in a sandbox that has the effect of costing much more power. That's unfortunate, because my custom face used custom high-legibility fonts (derived from what's on interstate signage), making it noticeably easier on my aging eyes. The built-in fonts aren't great for this.

CWuestefeld··on Is this the end of the once-mighty GoPro?
> Garmin watches that have mapping support have an introduction price of >600 Euro. Even at that price point, zooming or panning maps is excruciatingly slow

I just got a Garmin Instinct 3 Solar. It does mapping, and cost me about $300 US.

You're right that it's slow due to a wimpy processor. But the processor isn't because they're too lazy to innovate, but because they have something sipping tiny amounts of power so that I can get a battery life of several weeks.

CWuestefeld··on If you're a button, you have one job
I want to support the "what about debouncing" argument mentioned elsewhere; the author shouldn't just ignore this.

But I also hate the "you had one job" meme and want to argue against its mindless usage. Most of the time, when people do the "you had one job" thing, it's false. And that's true most of the time in the case of buttons, too. In a typical user interface, a given button has some combination of these jobs:

* Communicate what action will occur should the button be pushed.

* (Sometimes) communicate the current status of some aspect of the system (e.g., often a button is used to enable/disable a mode, and the button itself visually conveys what the current mode is).

* Execute the intended action upon clicking.

* (Sometimes) communicate that the command has been received and is being executed (e.g., in the OP, the button might disable itself while animating the rotation in order to avoid the confusion the OP complains of).

CWuestefeld··on Exapunks (2018)
I haven't played this, but just reading the description...

> Learn to hack from TRASH WORLD NEWS, the underground computer magazine.

It seems like a missed opportunity not to name-drop 2600. But I guess they wouldn't be allowed to do that anyway.

CWuestefeld··on Marfa Public Radio Puts You to Sleep
There are no cars - or roads - where the lights can be seen.

I'm aware that there's widespread support for the idea that there's some odd atmospheric effect with refraction or something, that displaces the apparent location of real headlights. But even granting that, it doesn't change that it's a pretty weird thing.

CWuestefeld··on Ultrasound imaging of the brain
The scarcity comes from there only being a finite number of the devices.

But I was really speaking more broadly, about healthcare in general. There are only so many doctors, so many MRIs, so many heart surgeons, so many this or that. Giving everyone a bunch of extra money so they could pay the current prices doesn't do anything to address the scarcity, so everyone flush with those subsidies will just bid up the prices - which is exactly what happened.

CWuestefeld··on Marfa Public Radio Puts You to Sleep
We went there a few years ago, while we were in Fort Davis, to see the Marfa Lights. We did see the lights - it's a real thing! But at the same time, we also saw a Space X launch, including seeing the flash of the 1st stage separation. It was an amazingly cool experience.

While waiting for sunset, we also took a drive out of town to the southwest toward Mexico. It started as a nice paved road, but after an hour or so the pavement disappeared. A bit later, we started meandering down the side of a mountain, on loose shale, only one lane wide and nowhere to turn around. The views were amazing, but it seemed that was a clear sign that it was time to turn back.

CWuestefeld··on Ultrasound imaging of the brain
Scarcity demands some means of rationing out the product. Setting higher prices is one means of doing this, so only those with some means of paying can get it. Another approach is via wait times, where only those who can wait and afford the time penalty can get it. There are other variations, but there's no such thing as a free lunch.
CWuestefeld··on 22-year-old Mozart's handwritten notebook unearthed in 'major discovery'
One of my pet peeves is what seems to be an overwhelming desire in writers to always put an adjective in front of every noun. You can never just let it be a "notebook", it has to be some kind of notebook.

It's even worse in product naming and advertising. Nothing can be just "vanilla", you have to even put an adjective in front of your adjectives, like "Mexican vanilla".

EDIT: s/verb/noun/

CWuestefeld··on LastPass notifies users of yet another data breach
I was just making the change from LP to BW yesterday, completely by coincidence. My first reaction is that the out-of-box experience is poor.

The first step was easy. The account creation and import of legacy data all went pretty well. But after that it wasn't so pretty.

The first hurdle was trying to understand their model for sharing data (so my wife and I can share important credentials). The model that LastPass uses is pretty intuitive to me: it's just a matter of sharing a folder, so relatively transparent. But Bitwarden has a whole separate concept of "organization", and the items being managed don't go in "folders" here, but in "collections". So there are two separate, and subtly different, models in play, and this is confusing. The good news is that the client aggregates the data so when you're using it day-to-day to fill login forms, you don't have to worry about the differences.

Once I'd gotten the data in place, I had to get the clients set up on the various platforms (browser extensions; desktop native, which is actually required for the browser extension's security to work right; phone). The OoB settings were entirely paranoid, and had me re-entering the complex master password over and over, really annoying me. Figuring out how to get to a reasonable balance required figuring out some settings whose labels are misleading. For example, "Unlock with PIN" sounded to me like it was going to add an extra layer of security, but it turns out that it really means "allow unlock using PIN in lieu of master password".

Also, note that while most of the settings default to paranoia-level (like the "require master password every time I inhale", that I mentioned above), you will probably want to change the default crypto cypher. It defaults to PBKDF2, but a better modern approach is the other choice, Argon2id.

...which also reminds me that there's a distinct lack of parity between client platforms. Although you need the desktop native app to manage browser extension security, there's a bunch it can't do. For example, after importing my legacy data, I needed to select all the contents of my LP shared folders and move them to the BW organization collection, but the native app (which seems to be an Electron app, btw) doesn't have a multi-select feature; you need to do that in the online web app.

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