I remember when I visited Paris and Germany I tried really hard to use the rudimentary language skills I had. The French always seemed too frustrated to slow down to the speed I could manage, and the Germans were just excited to have a chance to practice their English, and chide me (in English) about our invasion of Iraq. (admittedly this was almost 20 years ago, so things might be different now.)
I tried and tried to get co-workers to use S/MIME. I was reliably able to get one other person on board, but no one else wanted the go through the hassle (and its not that much hassle!). So the two of us eventually abandoned it.
I have a really hard time with motion--my brain is unable to block it. I've become very frustrated with, for example, news sites that instad of text and still images, have started showing animated clips or short videos. I've tried a firefox extension that is supposed to stop everything, but it doesn't work terribly well. I use "reader view" extensively, but it doesn't always work.
(Incidentally, I have the same issue in real life when I go to a restaurant with a TV, so I intentially sit with my back to the TV.)
I may be the only person, but when I need to focus, and drown out the outside world, the best stuff for me is early Philip Glass--essentially anything up to the Koyaanisqatsi soundtrack. Einstein on the Beach, Music in 12 Parts, Northstar, etc., but as with another poste, nothing with intelligible language--so parts of Einstein don't work, but most of it is perfect.
There is something about the apparent velocity of the music that creates a bubble that the world, or even the non-focused parts of my brain can't penetrate.
Usually, a year in parentheses on a HN post indicates the publiction date of the article--specifically when the article isn't current--not the dates of the events recounted. In this case the article is from 2016 as the date suggests.
I can’t count how many times I’m typing something (and since I don’t touch type, I’m looking at the keyboard, not the screen) and when I look up half of my text has gone into another app. I actually wish I could enable this one everything, not just secure text fields.
I haven't bookmarked anything in over 20 years. I just use my memory + search. Obviously bookmarking can retain far more than my memory, but my use of the web is deep, not wide (i.e. small number of sites, used heavily) so is easily handled by local site search engines.
> I don't see us repeating the IE6 era however. The Internet is core to Google's business in a way that it never was to Microsoft.
Depends on what your takeaway from the IE6 era was--if its that MS abandoned development and the web stagnated, then I think you're correct. However if you takeaway was that too much power was concentrated in a single private entity who has the defacto ability to control development and standards and channel them towards their best interests, not the users, then I think it would be the IE6 era all over again.
My favorite is a fun little time thing--Arizona, somewhat famously does not recognise DST, unlike surrounding states, so in the summer it is no longer mountain time. inside AZ, is the Navajo Nation (which is also in the three other sourrounding states.) The Navajo Nation does recognise DST, so in the summer, if you're driving through AZ, and head northeast, you'll have to change your watch befroe you leave the state. Then, completely surrounded by the navajo nation is the Hopi Nation. the Hopi do not recognize DST like Arizona.
> I found Finnegans Wake utterly baffling. Some people love the humor they find in it, but it requires effort to understand the basic language the Joyce is inventing.
Most people do. I have an english prof who did his dissertation on it because, as he told me, he was pretty sure no one on his committee would be able to challenge anything because no one had actually read it.
the first "chapter" in Finnagan's Wake is the densest, hardest to read part of the book (not that the rest is easy..) so it stops most people in their tracks. One think I discovered is it makes a little more sense when you hear it spoken, because (as was somewhat common at the time) much of the book is phonetic so what is incomprehensible on the page sounds almost like real speach when you hear it.
Its also fun to read the commented version (there is a work for that type of edition that escapes me at themoment.) Basically a version where the text of the book only occupies the center of the page, then outside the text is all sorts of references and footnotes with lines pointing to blocks of text in the body. 90% of all the references go over my head. I remember seeing a phrase highlighted and note pointed out that the same phrase was a play on words (or pun, I forget) in two different languages at the same time.
Not really a book to read, but a fascinating thing to study.
if a physics/acoustics class the professor set up a pair of speakers 30ft apart each playing a simple sine wave. The students then marched in front of the speakers, probably 50ft away, and as you walked you could clearly hear where the constructive and destructive interference was happening.
I never thought of usenet as tech focused. There were many areas that were non-tech topics. Sure there was comp.sys., but all the alt. boards and others. Web forums were kind of the spirtual successor, and many of them have subject subforums, but within that most web forums segregate discussion by thread. I find that much more useful since usenet felt like a mailing list of post after post after post. Threads allow me to ignore discussion that aren't relevant to me.
I haven't migrated from web foums to reddit or facebook groups though I'm sure there is much information in those places. I prefer that independent web forums introduce some friction to participating. You have to create an account, and some forums have limits for new members until they reach a certain post count. While the friction is small that does seem to discourage bad behavior a little.
I have easily found forums for subjects I'm interested in, but none of them are tech, so I don't know whether you'll find web forums on current tech subjects.
this is exactly what I do for most apps-install to use, remove after use. For Uber its easy since I only use Uber when I'm traveling in a country where I don't speak the language (Uber makes hailing rides in a foriegn country easy, though we used Yandex in Russia since Uber wasn't as common.) In some cases, I keep the app, but completely silence it.
I don't know how well iTunes tracks with music available on other streaming platforms, but when I imported my library of ~700 CDs to iTunes Match about 40% of my tracks matched, and 60% had to be uploaded, so I suspect that for me there is a lot that isn't on any platform (but is on iTunes match.) Which is why I don't subscribe to any streaming service.
its good to see you here--I've read your posts on other music forums. Many of us who work in tech, play in electronic music. While I know the P5 and being part of the analog renaissance are what most will remember him for, to me his most important contribution is the work he did on MIDI as the universal language of synthesizer control. I also highly appreciate that while the DSI synths never had a polyAT keyboard, most, if not all of them would still respond properly, so a Kurzweil midiboard driving a Prophet 12 module was one of the greatest performance instruments out there (not being an analog snob, the P12 was, to me, Dave's greatest instrument.)
it does come off as a bit one sided becuase the implication is that when you say "progressives do this" you are also implying that non-progressives don't--even if its not explicit. As someone who sits squarely in the middle, I see this heavily on both sides. A better formulation would be "partisans aren't known for wanting to be neutral or muted about their causes." If they had hired more conservative journalists they'd have the exact ssame issue but in the opposite direction.
(full disclosure--I haven't watched CNN or any other new channel since the Iraq war, i.e. 19 years ago. The all burned their bridges with me then, and I've never been back, so I'm assuming its true that CNN has a tilt left. I've never seen it myself.)
some of these criticisms are probably fair. I only speak english so can't comment on non-english results, but it wouldn't suprise me if the Kagi creators were primarily or only english speaking and step one is optimizing for english.
I'll also say that Google maps, while it has made some missteps in my eyes is the one good feature of Google (well, google translate is pretty good too.) and while I haven't kept up, last I heard, Google had over 1000 staff on the maps division, so, yes, I expect any mapping service is going to be worse than Google.
Personally, I’d prefer not to have a generator nearby. Storing fuel, noise, exhaust—all things I’d prefer to avoid. And as I said, this is not the vehicle that will solve the problem for me, since nobody yet makes an EV that would work for my usage, but when they do make he EV I want, this will be the primary feature I want. I was planning to setup solar at the location to charge a small battery for an hour or so of power a day if I spend a week at the location, I can plug the truck into the solar to trickle charge during the day.
while I don't see me buying one of these, its the most interesting auto feature I've seen in a very long time. I don't want backup power for when the grid fails, I want primary power for a small cabin I'm building far from available grid power. (I can get grid power run to my land, but it would cost me way more than this Ford to run the lines.)
I remember when a simiar thing was done with aluminum soda cans. Old soda cans the top pulled all the way off and people frequently threw them on the ground. To this day I still see old can tops on the ground. This isn't nearly as big a change since bottle tops are resealable so don't get tossed on the ground nearly as much.
Some commenters are suggesting a better option is reusable glass bottles, which I wouldn't object to, but are there resealable glass bottles? (honest question, I haven't seen them. Most of my experience with glass bottles are beer bottles with pop off or twist off caps, but cant be resealed.)
My comment exactly. We've really defined "small" up! I'm still running my 1st get iPhone SE, because I've yet to see a phone that can replace it. With a 4 inch screen, I can just barely use it one-handed.
Somewhat famously, Mad Max was dubbed into “American” for distribution in the USA. I have an old DVD that has both soundtracks and it can be fun to switch back and forth.
Actually, I HATE youtube search. Any search engine that changes and reorders responses when I click back to it drives me up a wall.
I infrequently use youtube (maybe 2-3 videos a month) and because the search sucks so badly, I never search using youtube, but rather with Kagi or DDG video search.
same. I did in the past, but work has basically made me hate computers, so I've done everything I can to remove computers from my life outside work hours.
10.6.8 was the absolute pinnacle for OSX for me, but I can't resonably use it daily anymore, so now Mojave is my stopping point. Too many of my necessary applications don't run on Catalina. I worry about the security of staying behind, but none of the new features are relevant to me.
I like that--sell it for a dollar to someone you trust, with a written contract to the sale, have them press the ok button, then have them sell it back to you with a written contract for a dollar.
before the OS vendors started ignoring their human interface guidelines, we had Kai's Power Tools, which some people loved--but I hated. I dont know if that was the beginning of custom UIs for every applications, or if it was just an outlier.