Snitch-Thursday

i wish i could buy a perpetual license of Adobe Animate, any version that can take actionscript and such and compile it to an HTML5 video. I don't know if those HTML5 things still count as Rich internet applications (interactive? idk), but there is definitely a void left behind in terms of ease of content creation that lives on the web, at least not without 5 billion npm packages and JS frameworks.

That's the difference between software and hardware however, hardware is 'hard' to change, easy to swap out and replace.

I totally agree with you about how the details on changing or upgrading truck components are not mutable as the example below shows, that parts conversion is compatible from 1196-2002 series cars, you can't say 19xx to 20xx computers, nowhere close.

Example link: https://www.toyota-4runner.org/3rd-gen-t4rs/275451-resources...

Having my grandfather's diary entries from 1963 through 1995 sure helped jog his memory as we work on his memoirs.

If, God forbid, he were to pass, those journals would remain, echoing some of his memories, experiences, feelings, and conclusions.

I think about that when I'm feeling down on journalling that day.

I enjoyed this app.

Features that occurred to me that I'd want if I were to create an account:

can I mark which clothing options I own vs don't?

For items I don't own, could my account hold my measurements to give appropriate Amazon shopping links (with affiliates to this site probably) so if I want an outfit I just hit 'buy'?

Can I get 5 outfits generated for a workweek, with each of the 5 ensuring they are not reusing tops/bottoms back to back on same day?

This article makes no mention of k3s or k3os, which is odd to me.

K3os and k0s seem to be very similar competitors, while k3s is great for serving the 'I have a VM, and I want kubernetes with no fuss' needs.

If k0s makes it to 1.x, then it will be very interesting to see who gets the marketshare for the niche of 'diet k8s'

WSDL, JSON-WSP[1], now protobuf, and many more formats abound on the web.

In the spirit of 'choose the boring technology', which of these[2] is common enough / flexible enough to be worth learning to use and use well for non-fad web development / homestyle programming?

I'd default to WSDL since I happened to grow up learning that in school, but I'm sure that's my baby duck syndrome since CORBA etc came before that.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/JSON-WSP

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interface_description_language

I still use way too many DVDs and CDs for my write-once cold storage anti-ransomware needs. Good quality brands have sold their names out (TDK, Phillips, Taiyo Yuden AKA CMC), but MediaPro still seems to carry a few good brands left for now. Verbatim seems to be among the last brands standing that have a line of good-quality DVDs, if you go for their AZO or medical archive DVDs and HTL Blu-Rays.

If I could print text or images (or Paperbak[1] backups?) to hardback books, I would do that instead. There are machines that can take PDFs or postscript data and print a book, softback or hardback in small quantities, which I'd love to do for small files backup via Paperbak (scan that image, reconstruct the file in your computer), as well as my personal journalling (workflow: dictate to wireless headset, phone stores audio recording, syncthing syncs that folder to a folder watched by Dragon Folder Watcher Transcribe Agent, transcribed file is written to a directory which is either batch printed to a hardback book or incrementally written to a single page in an existing blank book, turning pages as needed).

While paper may not be amazing at storing large quantities of data in tiny physical space like microfiche or microSD cards, it has a staying power that the latter lacks for both physical-medium, analog-vs-digital-degredation, and binary format obsolescence reasons.

So either I grow rich enough to spend the $$$$$ to get a Book Printer[2], or I keep settling for 'good enough' solutions like M-DISC DVDs, Verbatim Blu-Rays, and the online,offline dance of several different personally owned devices that sync up via syncthing, providing eventually consistent redundant copies.

[1] http://www.ollydbg.de/Paperbak/

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Espresso_Book_Machine

> CB radios

Boy would I love to get ahold of some handheld radios designed for 'prepper' use.

1. use cognitive radio techniques to find and frequency-hop to whitespace radio frequencies that are conducive to best propagation over the 0-10 mile range on unlicensed radio bands

2. use ad hoc mesh networking to support sending datagrams like text messages (preferably E2EE via say Signal Protocol) or GPS coordinates up to, say, 7 hops away

3. support a 'emergency mode' where the radio power limits are relaxed and the frequencies for use by point A are relaxed to cover any radio band not actively reserved by law enforcement / military / first responders. In theory the cognitive radio techniques of frequency hopping and waiting to transmit until confirming radio dead air would prevent radio interference with whatever commercial TF / broadcast radio / CB radio / MURS/FRS/Business band radio signal, but to keep the FCC and HAMs hearts from stopping, things like the military bands could be blocked off just to provide that last 0.00001% guarantee of safety against interference.

All of the 3 _seem_ possible to productize using SBCs and SDRs, but I don't know where to start, I think I gotta finish my 8-bit breadboard computer YT series by Ben Eater before I even tried to tinker with this.

For the 'I take pictures on my phone, poof its on my computer' needs, I replaced Onedrive Camera Upload with a Syncthing folder and haven't had to look back.

Onedrive is of course a different product than Google Photos, and the last time I used Google Photos, Google Now was still a left-swipe sidebar, so YMMV.

Pedantry ahead: Big Stick diplomacy was Teddy, not Franklin, Roosevelt https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Big_Stick_ideology

> Overall his projects are fascinating for anyone with interest in retro computing or learning how computers work at the lowest level

I'm on the RAM-building portion of the 8-bit breadboard computer for exactly this reason. I wanted to bridge the gap between (this is an electric circuit that lights an LED) and (this is how you can take a simple inverter and a logic gate to build a D flip flop, which can power registers, SRAM, and more) and (this is an 8-bit example of a Von Neumann Architecture computer).

His videos are perfect for that. Very well made and I don't have to take classes in circuit design or digital logic control & design at a college to learn the high level of how this works.

I'm watching Gleam[1] for my 'I want to learn Erlang but dont want to deal with having to do runtime type checks so I wish there was a Statically-Typed Erlang' dreams.

[1] https://gleam.run/news/gleam-v0.12-and-gleam-otp-v0.1-releas...

I settled on Noodler's Heart of Darkness (the onyx black that is also bulletproof) and Roller Eel (which is Heart of Darkness but lubricated for refillable rollerball use) for my black ink needs. Noodlers BP Black was more like Noodler's Bulletproof charcoaly gray for me.

Shaking them before use is a habit I have, not sure if that helps or is just a placebo tho.

> That said, if given the choice between a tiny FOSS language and a tiny proprietary one (that might be profitable), I'll always choose the latter.

(Not to put words in parent poster's mouth, just for reader clarity)

F# is no more proprietary than Rust. F# was started by Microsoft Research but is now an open source language 'owned' by the F# Foundation and licensed under the MIT license (https://github.com/fsharp/fsharp).

(The historical Visual F# compiler was developed by Microsoft per http://research.microsoft.com/en-us/um/cambridge/projects/fs...) but AFAIK today Microsoft's small full-time F# devtools team work on contributions to the open-source compiler in addition to their work on VS tooling.

> You write what you want on a piece of paper, and hold it up to the camera and the computer tries to figure out what you wrote. Just as silly.

Ironically I used to love me some graffiti on PalmOS and Google Handwriting Input on my Droid 2, but I agree with the spirit of your comment.

I have two major tools for my writing habit.

1) writingstreak.io which is great for daily word dumps.

2 ) writing.com which is a writer's community and very much reminiscent of the web 1.0 days. It may not be a nostalgia trip in terms of blinking marquees, but it has simple links, a website-specific markup, forums, and probably a LAMP stack based on its unsophisticated styling. You can post your writings there, and review other's writings for in-site currency, which you can spend on getting others to review what you've written for said currency. The community there is friendly and also has other groups for journal passing, mailed handwriting practice, poetry/story contests and more.

Edit Bonus: doing NANOWRIMO each year really helps the writing habit since you are trying to get to 50,000+ words written in a month.

I've been wanting something like Talon for years. Easily customized voice recognition for commands (you hear me say 'blah', you type/start a program/click a button labelled 'blah') is something I've not had since I was very young and tried to trick out LCARS x32 using only Windows XPs speech recognition software using the crappy stick mics that lived on top of every single beige CRT monitor at school.

when I was writing my last novel draft using nuance dragon 15, it had the 'read that' command which would read the last phrase I inputted, but that wasnt enough since I had a wireless headset that let me wander the house talking to the computer, but still needed to see the screen to know if it got the dictation correctly.

I ended up fishing out a cheap $120 portable walmart windows laptop 2 in 1 and VNCing it into the desktop so i could see the screen, carrying that around with me worked.

I think GP is saying that there would be a sea change IFF

1. there was legal unlicensed radio bandwidth for any radio services that had cognitive radio capabilities (constant frequency hopping, coordinating frequencies with other nodes after negotiating what frequencies, ensuring the radio bandwidth used is only using whitespace or can be empirically proven to not interfere with other radio transmissions)

2. HAM radio bands aren't touched. Some HAMers are grumpy enough about radio licensing dogma / vigilante radio spectrum law enforcement duty, no need to kick the hornets nest of telling them that not only are radio licensing rules changing from the paradigm introduced in the 30s (see point 1) but that it would remove some of their own dwindling radio bands as well.

I wish there was a 1-step process for white-listing known good emails, for a single address, or a single domain, or a list of either.

I also wish there was a process for exporting/importing these lists.

With SPF/DKIM/DMARC (whichever of those verifies that the email header was actually set by someone who has access to that email sending address) on and open-relay on STMP turned off, I envision a web-of-trust-lite world (which is probably the wheel I'm reinventing) where I and everyone I exchange email-address-trust-cards like business cards help to crowdsource what is and is not spam based on shared whitelists and degree-of-separation weighting. If I think something is spam, my 1st degree of separation (who has handshaked with me to verify that yes we've met) also probably does, but his colleague, maybe not.

MUAs and online email service providers would check the compiled whitelist for each account before running their own spam filtering.

We have good online adblock lists, can we do the same for email spamlists without 27 clicks to whitelist or blacklist emails?

Servers would have to not blackhole spam-tripping emails and reply with 'you spam = bad', that is another problem entirely.

Update on the above case: upon appeal, they won their case, according to http://5kids1condo.com/we-won-common-sense-prevails-in-bus-d...

> A good amount of people buy a certain car and maintain it, intending to run the vehicle into the ground completely.

See my 4runner that's older than I am. I am happy to give it its $400 per year in oil changes and amortized tires, along with $1500 repairs every other year because I know its repair ROI is extremely high (vs. whatever car make the reader believes is unreliable); every repair I make to it represents another XX,000 miles on the road.

(The 4WD and e-locker helps too)

TLDR: Computer program UX design has to settle for boring consistency and stop reinventing the UX wheel. Learn the best UX practices for your platform based on ACTUAL USER STUDIES and apply them.

UX design is like yeast in bread. Too much, the bread overflows the pan and burns everywhere. Not enough, the bread does nothing. Maybe the 90s UX designers didn't use enough and thus we had boring UIs. But today we have 99% yeast and 1% flour and oh it is ugly.

Hang the fads, no more gesture-first uninuitive magic PLEASE! Styling is not evil, contrary to the 'unstyled HTML only' crowd, but consistency first and foremost makes for good UX. Consistent (accessible, localizable) look & (undo-able, default cancelling data-destructive) behavior above all, then look at 'intuitiveness' etc.

My parents were on the cutting edge of technology. My dad had self-taught and setup auto-dialling dial-up WiFi accessed over PCMCIA cards that he and my mother used for desktop emails, eBay when it was brand new, 320x240 video messages, even some skype. There was nothing they couldn't do on the computer with a little bit of googling and poking around the Control Panel or registry.

Today, not so much. And little wonder. User-hostile OS, application design abounds.

All of the geniuses at these companies have cargo culted stupid stuff to a grotesque degree:

- flat button icons instead of 3d buttons with text (it saves localization costs!!!! at the cost of user confusion)

- hamburger menus instead of "scary toolbars" (A menu bar with options? eww! we are too cool for that. smush all the options into one triple dot or even better, toolbar icons with no tooltips)

- "clean" workspaces with plenty of whitespace because reasons (good design means an empty plate where if you swipe from the right, food appears! why would you be so drab as to add a button that says 'summon food'?)

- all of this running in not-quite-responsive client side JS over native widgets (because it's better with Javascript! https://www.commitstrip.com/en/2019/04/19/its-better-with-ja...)

Yes, someone moved the cheese and all users no matter their age should keep finding it, not ceasing to learn and stagnating. "I'm not good with computers therefore I refuse to learn" is no longer an excuse.

On the other hand, if the cheese never stops for even a moment, all of the mice will die because they exhaust themselves seeking cheese they never actually get to take a bite of.

If more developers, UX designers, anyone who actually made UIs in some capacity were to read cover-to-cover and subsequently apply the principles (or if relevant, the Windows/MacOS platform specific norms) the Microsoft Windows User Experience Guidelines & Apple Human Interface Guidelines rather than uxdesign.trendy blog, we'd be much better off.

TL;DR: someone could make bank selling < 150USD a pop receiver-in-canal wireless bluetooth headphones.

This is semi OT. I use a hearing aid every day. the hearing aid features are turned off, i just use it for bluetooth streaming and phone conversations. it is a receiver in canal hearing aid, and I've put a non-occluding ear dome on it so I can hear normally with it in, but when I play music, the music just arrives in my ear. its also very discrete, people dont notice it unless i tell them its there.

Why someone doesn't take a cheap android/iphone bluetooth-compatible receiver in canal hearing aid and sell it not as a certified hearing device (heck, disable the hearing aid part in sw) but as a discrete wireless headphone set is a mystery to me.

Wireless headphones give me earaches with pressure on my ear canal, over the ear headphones give me headaches with pressure on my ears, then glasses, then skull. Custom in-ear monitors conform to my ears just fine but block out most other sound and have wires to deal with.

These? I put them in, forget about them for a long time, and have sound just floating into my ears when I turn on music.

It's my go-to startup idea.

So...if I naively parameterize the inputs for my queries (select blah, blah, blah FROM customers WHERE id LIKE @id) and have the incoming request just check for an id parameter and make a SQL parameter named @id, with value = whatever the input is, am I 90% there?

Or are there still vulns/exploits for that kind of usage?

Thank you! I will definitely give this a try.

What a helpful online community.

Thanks for this, I was hoping to get a sketch of how I should orient my big-picture roadmap to understand digital electronics from the old 'electric light circuit kit' i used to have. While I can't claim that I'll complete this stuff quickly as the sibling reply mentions, I will certainly look into it.

This is exactly what I was looking for, thanks. I will order that book and check out that YT channel as well, I prefer books to videos, but sometimes a video is worth 1 million words.

Okay guys, this may be off-topic, not sure as I've not finished the article yet.

What (wiki?)books can I purchase that would help me bridge my mental understanding of computer circuitry from 'this is a circuit with a resistor and a power source and a lightbulb, while this is a CPU that has wires to memory and magic happens to make em talk' to 'I know the difference between TTL logic and a microprocessor and can fuzzily trace where the electrical signals go'?

I don't own but am aware of things called logic analyzers, 'progammers', and the difference between a microcontroler and a microprocessor (ish, the former is vaguely a system on a chip?), but I'm not sure where to start to fill in the many gaps in the bits of knowledge I have so far.

Wikipedia feeds me articles about logic gates, programmable logic, and Algorithmic Logical Units used in things like the Xerox Alto, but I don't know if this means I should try for electrical engineering courses or something simpler?

> Visual Studio 2019 will still install the necessary toolchain if you ask nicely

Could I get a link to how to do this and/or web search terms? Is this just something targeting visual C runtime 20xx or older?