anodyne33

> I still don't get the point of Chromebooks

Use case scenario that it fills perfectly for me: I'll spend a lot of evenings on my back porch streaming local sports or Youtube.

The short math on my last refurbished Chromebook would have been cents per hour of use I got out of it.

Battery life: Granted I'm using the screen at it's lowest possible (stock) brightness in my scenario, but I get at the very least 6 hours per charge on a 17" display.

If something catastrophic were to happen to it I'm more than happy to replace a ~$100 piece of hardware that's serving one dedicated function for me, and there's 0 data of consequence that I'd be losing. And it's sustained light amounts of rain with no side effects.

tl:dr - brains are weird man

There's a tremendous episode of Radiolab called Fault Line that talks about the effect of a total resection of the Amygdala. It worked out very poorly. I heard it weeks before I was scheduled for a right temporal lobe resection, including Amygdala and it scared the bejeesus out of me. A quick call to my neurosurgeon's coordinator assuaged my fears.

The bilateral resection caused Kluver-Busey syndrome in the patient that Fault Line discusses.

Former epileptic, I've had dozens of MRs and CTs. It's rote for me to see and I never had a visceral reaction and in fact I find it pretty fascinating. The one that I do have that's a standout and quite shocking is my first post-lobeectomy MRI. There's a very noticeable void where my right temporal lobe (+amygdala, cerebellum and hippocampus) were resected. Great conversation starter.

tl;dr my dealer had my car for a week to diagnose an intermittent electrical gremlin.

My maddening intermittent electrical gremlin was with my new to me Mazda3. Occasionally and randomly after in the first few months I had it the throttle would "go to sleep" during normal driving. By that I mean in the process of normal driving I'd suddenly have no throttle response, the car would go to idle, and the only way to get it back was to completely get off the gas pedal and it would respond again as usual. I'm appreciative that worked, but I couldn't shake the idea that if that were to happen during hard acceleration bad things could happen.

My first trip to the dealer yielded a recording in the event log of the throttle shutting off because it saw throttle and brake at the same time, an expected behavior I was told. I assured the mechanic and service manager that I was almost certain this wasn't the case, they had no other explanation, I continued to have the problem and made certain when it happened that I hadn't somehow been on both pedals.

After an email to Mazda's support line with some technical details hoping to get my situation into the right hands, I got a call from the dealer asking to hang onto it until they could replicate the problem.

The service manager or someone else in the shop drove it for the better part of a week, taking real time telemetry while they were in it while I was in a loaner.

Turned out that the problem was the second brake switch hanging on. I found out that there's one switch that talks too the ECU and another that talks to the brake lights, the former being the culprit.

Frustrating as could be, but like a good nerd I found the final diagnosis fascinating. I also wonder and would like to believe that my detailed and informed email to the mother ship made someone pass it up the line until it got into the right hands.

First time I've seen that sketch, but it looks like Popular Science lifted it directly for an article from the 80's that I remember distinctly about Project Aurora.

Having never seen the guts of one before I was surprised to see the difference in wire gauge between the high and low sides of the transformer. In my mind the only difference between the two sides was the number of turns. Huh.

For more info on the city stairs that are mapped as streets, Laura Zurowski walked all 739+ and documented with Polaroids and wrote a vignette inspired by each. Lovely writing style and she did a great job of capturing pictures that you'd see if you're on foot, off the beaten path, and deliberately surveying your surroundings.

https://mis-steps.com/

Her Instagram I think is the best way to browse the project.

There's A LOT more traffic across the Fern Hollow bridge than if the end destination were a couple of thousand homes. Average daily traffic ca. 2005 was 14.5k vehicles including transit bus routes with articulated buses that nominally carry 70+ at capacity. At rush hour I've been on those buses and they're regularly SRO.

Salto coffee? I visited several years ago in the dead of winter and a hot drink and a snack was nearly as memorable as the carousel.

Google Photos does it for you. Very handy a few years ago, I took a picture of the private wifi password backstage at a bar I used to work at, lost the saved login when I swapped phones. Searched my photos for "Thunderbird" and boom... a picture of text saying "Thunderbird private WIFI password".

Isn't that a bit apples v oranges? I've had a MEG and I'm floored by the technology but would a better analog be a PET? We're looking for two different things, metabolism v saturation but it seems like they're both in the physical or structural realm than the electrical.

739 officially documented. Laura Zurowski is on a project to visit them all and pairs lovely prose with her trips on IG.

https://mis-steps.com/

As a Windows guy case still seems like a weird thing to worry about.

Reminds me of the time I watched a coworker's head explode when he tried to extract an archive (from a 'Nix environment) on his Windows machine and was indignant about getting duplicate filename errors.

In e-Discovery our metadata is exchanged in csv format almost exclusively with one caveat, the defacto delimiters are Pilcrow and Thorn. We've solved the quote/comma in data problem, but as soon as we start mixing character sets, someone writes a load file in ANSI all hell breaks loose.

I had a great one today. I got a load file in (e-discovery world) that had my sent/rev'd/sort dates in "mm.dd.yyyy hh:mm" while my created and modified dates were "dd.mm.yyyy hh:mm". I can't fathom what piece of software sent that to me, and it wasn't rocket science to fix in Excel. I'm all for standardizing date format but with the # of applications that will only spit out data in one particular format I don't see it ever happening.

This takes me back to working in a few (slowly going to way of the buffalo) "professional" or "big" studios. Both of the A studios I worked in had a big set of Genelecs in the bulkhead and two or three more mid and near field monitors just above or behind the console meter bridge.

Each served it's own purpose and all the mixing guys I saw wound swap between them fairly regularly. In that situation it was about emulating different scenarios, from the 4" block speakers to get a feel for what someone would hear on an old car stereo to mid field Dynaudios that were more flat than hyped to get a feel for what the home audiophile might experience.

That's not a practical approach for a small studio (either in size or budget) but having been out of that world for a long time it makes me wonder if someone would be better served with two or three pairs of reasonably priced pair of speakers rather than trying to perfect the sound of one pair that aren't going to reflect (no pun intended) other playback environments that aren't acoustically optimized.

At the time I was a sound guy and was regularly out 'till 2:00am+, drinking the whole time and back up for work at ~8:00. You clearly know how that changed. I still went out, both of my local spots had good N/A beers (try Kaliber if you have the desire) but that was another complete lifestyle change for me. I wasn't photostrobic sensitive so I lucked out there.

This came up for me a few years ago when I was filling out a job application. At the voluntary self disclosure stage it listed epilepsy among the list and it stopped me in my tracks. A few brain surgeries later and I'm no longer epileptic, but it did make me ask this exact question.

For several years, my onset with in 2012 at age 36, I considered it more of a bummer and inconvenience and never thought about it any other way.

Personally I was fortunate that I was only having partial complex seizures which meant that I'd basically space out and stare into the distance completely unattached from my environment for 30 seconds to a few minutes according to my ex-girlfriend and other people I interacted with regularly.

Rarely did I have any indication that I'd had a seizure aside from the occasional, unexpected incontinence. One instance that sticks out was walking back from lunch with co-workers when one walked up to me and said "did you lose something". I dropped my sandwich while I was having a seizure and was walking all the while.

What allowed me to say "yeah... this is a legit disability" was examining how much had changed in my life without the ability to drive. Luckily I'd just basically moved in with said girlfriend who lived 10 minutes by bus from my job downtown, this was well before I worked from home and there's little chance I could have gotten to work from my rural home an hour away with essentially no transit.

I was really living a normal day to day life, I just had to make some adaptations to how I got around and had to stop using power tools without dead man switches.

Slightly hyperbolic maybe, but I can make a good case for how epilepsy cost me that house, relationship and severely impinged upon my job search.

Hindsight... it's a hell of thing. I don't know that I'd have felt any different being labeled or self-identifying as disabled but it goes a long way to describing the impact it had on my 30s. I'm also a guy that occasionally drove 50k miles in a year to travel for shows and work and various other road trips.

This spring, unsurprisingly, I started spending a larger than normal portion of my time in the woods. I brought an uncomfortable number of (deer) ticks home in the spring and again in recent weeks. This is every bit or more frightening personally than Covid is. At this point I know every skin tag and mole on my body from doing thorough check downs every time I get home from hiking. In Pa. we have the East Stroudsberg U Tick Research Laboratory who will take a specimen of any tick found embedded or not and run a basic pathogen panel free. The few I've sent in have been clean but being familiar with my bestie's dad's experience with Lyme there's no chance I'm not being as proactive as possible.

I've heard several second hand stories of people dumpster diving and after some investment of time and money winding up with at worst, serviceable instruments. Any experience with that? I went in for the first time in years last week for rack screws and was surprised to see they no longer had an associate checking orders on the way out. Guitar tech I wound up bothering said, and it makes sense, that putting someone at the door was more expensive than the shrink.

Have you had any eDiscovery experience in the past? I was an analyst for 15 years and AI is really coming on strong now. I've seen, in my job search, a few places where a JD coupled with a little CS knowledge could be useful. A buddy of mine is a patent attorney and quit his firm job to start his own shop doing natural language processing against the US and foreign patent databases. He didn't get his hands into writing the software but he's had to develop a reasonable understanding to guide his process and sell it.

My stomach dropped when I saw the thread and checked in with my pal at ATG. She's safe but half of her department (mapping) is gone.

In a similar vein, I worked (eg: interned) at a few recording studios in my 20s. Most tracking in both was done to a 2" 24tk analog tape deck and the majority of post and mixing was all done digitally. I don't know what progress has been made in plug-ins in 20 years, I suspect a lot, but at that point there was nothing digitally that came close to the sound of electric guitars overdriven into the tape deck and saturating the tape to an extreme. Now I'm curious if anybody has gotten it right, but there are fewer and fewer studios with 2" tape decks to do a true A/B.

Does anybody regularly use Acrobat's text extraction engine? I've had fine results as far as accuracy goes when compared to other OCR engines but one sticking point drives me nuts. My problem is, and I'm typically doing this in batches of thousands of files, if a PDF has a footer applied Acrobat sees that as renderable text and blows off the rest of the rest of the page. I've tried all manner of sanitizing, removing hidden information, saving as another PDF protocol and still can't get around the plain text footers/headers. In a perfect world I'd have unlimited Tesseract or ABBYY access but we're trying to do this on the cheap and I'm working with client data that I don't want to bang through Google. I'll have to poke at some of the open source tools mentioned so far, too.

With the knowledge that A&P mechanics (air frame and powerplant) are required to shadow their tools in their boxes (filling the drawers with foam and plucking a distinct home for every tool to make confirmation that all are returned easy and fast) I find it staggering that tools are left behind on a regular basis at the assembly phase.

We've done that for special case scenarios. The last review tool we used was in a mixed Linux/Windows environment and we had a client in jail awaiting trial so we built a laptop to run everything and our PM visited him weekly to update his copy of the DB locally (no internet access in the pen). The biggest sticking point is that it's not uncommon to get to 4-6 TB on one of our databases and it takes a bunch of processors and memory to run the software, but I smell a development opportunity now that you mention it.

No, and of course, that's the rub.

I'm in eDiscovery, we host trial databases in a really stout and intuitive review platform. My clients can, after they've done their searching and culled for relevance and privilege, browse through the document viewer and look at either the text with highlighted search hits or the native rendering of all their documents. All of their coding and tagging of documents is right there in the side panel of the doc viewer. There's hardly a week that goes by that an attorney or paralegal DOESN'T call and ask us for PDFs of their documents. Until a few years ago it wasn't unusual for someone to call and ask paper copies of hundreds of pages at a time to review.

The legal world is outstandingly slow to embrace better solutions in technology.

> It being hard to track is no excuse.

Indeed. I have a good buddy who is inside council for a really visible guitar company. One of his main functions is tracking the provenance of any endangered hardwoods that go through the factory. From what I've been told there's a pretty big paper trail to document the date and place where "x" piece of Brazilian Rosewood or Ebony was harvested, but the penalty if they were to be caught building guitars from restricted or endangered wood is steep.

Maybe it wouldn't do much to dissuade the primary purchasers of cobalt, but a federal regulation popping them for a few million bucks for buying what essentially amounts to "blood diamonds" certainly wouldn't hurt the cause.