bxparks

I was mostly objecting to the "perfectly" part. And I couldn't resist making a Princess Bride reference for amusement.

From the link: "Note: The inbuilt WiFi chip is not natively supported by FreeBSD, so you will need to (temporarily) use a USB WiFi or Ethernet dongle, or (as I will explain) copy some files from a different system to the Macbook. You could also just transplant a different chip into the system."

You say "works perfectly". I do not think it means what you think it means.

To be fair, Linux also has trouble with the Broadcom chip, the driver needs to be installed as a separate step on most distros.

It is significant if you remain healthy and employed with income.

But it is basically nothing if you get laid off at age 56, and you can't find another job due to age discrimination, your COBRA runs out after 18 months, but you are not 65 years old yet for Medicare . Obamacare may be completely neutered by then, so private health insurance may cost $30k/year for a 57 year-old. You still have a mortgage, you can't afford health insurance, so you take a risk and decide to skip it, because you are healthy. Then you get pancreatic cancer, and without health insurance, your chemotherapy completely depletes your 401k in one year. Then you die of cancer at age 59, because you cannot pay for the treatments anymore.

I felt this pain yesterday.

I use Open Core Legacy Patcher (OCLP) to run modern macOS on old Intel macs. The first time the computer boots after an upgrade (e.g. Sequoia 15.7.3 to 15.7.4), it is slow as a dog. Because the macOS upgrade clobbers all the OCLP driver patches.

By "slow", I mean each keystroke on the login screen takes about 20-30 seconds for the corresponding bullet to appear in the password box.

The login screen displays 13 bullets. My password is 18 characters long. (Scammers, don't get excited, it's a unique password that's not used anywhere else on the Internet...) So after 13 characters, I had no idea if the computer was actually working.

It seemed like there is a 6-8 character keyboard buffer limit. Or maybe I typed in my 18-character password wrong multiple times. I don't know. I would type 2 characters, then walk away, come back, then type 2-3 more characters. It took me about 4-5 attempts over 30 minutes to log in. Then I applied the OCLP patches and everything worked perfectly after that.

Yup. The MBA11 is probably my favorite laptop of all time. It's my daily driver. I have 4 of those now, running MacOS and Linux Mint.

I was really hoping for the Neo to be more like the MBA11.

The solution to turn off "load images" in the web email clients.

One side effect is that Capital One thinks that it has the wrong email address for me:

  "You haven’t opened an email from us lately, 
  so we’re checking in to make sure your contact
  information is up to date."

It keeps sending me that every month or two, which is kinda annoying.

How does nixos solve Firefox configuration on MacOS and Windows? :-) I use all 3 OSes daily.

I guess personal preference?

Image preview is slightly slower and has noticeable latency, compared to the text popup that is almost instantaneous.

And it is more visually distracting. I hate UI features that interfere with my workflow. I hate most UI animations. I turned animations off on my Android phone, and now the thing just flies.

Did not know about 'user.js', thanks! I guess creating a document that lists all my overrides was the first step. Now I have to figure out how to create a user.js that works on Linux, Macos, Windows, and maybe Android?

No kidding. I had to create a Google Doc document to remember all the little things that I have to clobber in Firefox to make it behave reasonably. Here is an excerpt of how I clobber the defaults:

  - Enable pixel-perfect smooth scrolling (Linux): MOZ_USE_XINPUT2=1 (why do we still have to do this??)
  - Enable: Ctrl-Tab cycles through recent used order
  - Disable: "Show an image preview when you hover on a tab"
  - Disable: "Use AI to suggest tabs and a name for tab group"
  - Disable: "Enable Picture-in-Picture video controls"
  - Disable: "Control media via keyboard, headset, or virtual interface"
  - Disable: "Recommend extensions as you browse"
  - Disable: "Recommend features as you browse"
  - Disable: "Enable link previews"
  - Homepage and new windows: Blank page
  - New tabs: Blank page
  - Disable: Web Search
  - Disable: Weather
  - Disable: Shortcuts
  - Disable: Recommended stories
  - Disable: Support Firefox
  - Disable: "Save and autofill payment info"
  - Disable: "Save and autofill addresses"
  - Disable: "Ask to save passwords"
  - Locations: Select "Block new requests asking to access your location"
  - Notification: Select "Block new requests asking to allow notifications"
  - Autoplay: Select "Block Audio and Video"
  - Virtual Reality: Select "Block new requests asking to access your virtual reality devices"
  - Default Search engine: DuckDuckGo
  - Disable "Suggest search engines to use"
  - Disable "Quick actions"
  - Disable "Suggestions from Firefox"
  - Disable: "Title Bar"
  - Default Zoom: 110%, 120%, depending on the laptop

I probably forgot a few things.

And I install the following extensions:

  - uBlock Origin
  - Privacy Badger
  - Facebook Container
  - Firefox Multi-account Container

I don't know what to tell you. I'm older than you. I've seen it happen 20-30 times in my life. I've seen batteries leak in flashlights, clock radios (the backup battery), wall clocks, calculators, cameras, remote controls, thermostats, wireless mouse, and so on.

A few years ago, I had an unopened pack of 8xAA Duracell alkalines. They had expiration dates on them, and had 2-3 years left. Two of the batteries were leaking in the pack.

Over the past 15 years, I have gradually migrated almost everything to NiMH. I don't see leaking batteries anymore in my house. But go to a thrift store, e.g. Goodwill, and open up the battery compartments of things. Many of them will have been destroyed by the leaking batteries.

Great in theory.

In practice, the Duracell alkaline battery will leak caustic fluids inside the remote control and destroy it, and you will have to mortgage your house to buy a replacement on eBay, if it's even available. (I pick on Duracell because they are the worst. They leak if you look at them wrong, when they are brand new, inside the original packaging, before their "expiration date". But all alkalines are bad.)

All my remotes get NiMH batteries, no matter what. I don't care if one charge cycle lasts 10 years. It's cheaper than having the battery destroy the remote.

Yeah, most of the devices using 9V are smoke/CO detectors which only accept alkalines. I don't use the few remaining 9V devices enough to justify buying a new charger.

Three things prevent me from eliminating all alkalines:

* smoke and CO detectors with low-battery voltage sensors calibrated to alkaline

* some older electronics (e.g. multimeters) using 9V batteries

* my non-contact voltage tester refuses to turn on using NiMH, for safety reasons presumably

Any chance you can prevent the left hand navigation floating widget of 10 bubbles (no idea what it's called) from rendering on top of the actual content? It obscures the text that I want to read, very irritating. [Edit: I see, it works at 100%. But my default zoom is 110% or 120%. Zooming seems to break your layout.]

Haha, so a trackpoint is the best thing ever, better than any trackpad, if you are stuck in the year 1992.

Pinch zooming is not the same as keyboard zooming though. With pinch zooming, the entire webpage is magnified, including images. With keyboard zooming, the images become smaller (to my great annoyance) while the rest of the web page becomes larger.

Palm rejection on all laptops that I have used has sucked, except for Apple. I don't know how they do it, but palm rejection is almost perfect on MacBooks.

How can that work? Middle click is the "paste" function in X11. If I'm in a terminal emulator, how can I two-finger scroll over the output history buffer?

What if I am hovering over an edit box of a form on a web page. Doesn't that paste some random text into the edit box if I try to middle-click+trackpoint?

Also, isn't the middle button much smaller than than the left and right buttons on a laptop? I recall constantly missing the middle button when trying to paste on laptops that had the middle button.

Pinch-zooming: I assume that it's impossible to pinch zoom with a trackpoint.

I don't know.. Trackpoint seems much less ergonomic and less useful than a trackpad to me.

What is the trackpoint equivalent of the two-finger scroll? I cannot imagine browsing the web without the two-finger scroll. Or pinch-zooming, how do you do that with a trackpoint?

Did not know that, thanks for the info. But Apple lost me as a customer 10 years ago with their hostile actions. Even if they added back USB-A, I wouldn't go back.

Not all reverted. Still waiting for my USB-A ports and the SD card reader, on laptops described as "Pro". It's as if Apple forgot that "Pro" is a shorthand for "professional" instead of a meaningless marketing term.

Same. I buy Motorola phones because they have 3.5mm headphone jacks, real SIM cards, and microSD cards.

I agree that the article is a bit unfocused about the supporting material. But the primary topic is clear: it's about the memory consumption of the Go map implementation.

This is an article written by a real human person, who's going to meander a bit. I prefer that over an LLM article which is 100% focused, 100% confident, and 100% wrong. Let's give the human person a little bit of slack.

Off topic: Something on that web page causes Firefox on my MBA2020 to use 133% of CPU, 30% of GPU Helper, the fan goes to full speed, and scrolling is slow and janky. I can barely read the article.

When I go to Reader mode, the CPU goes down to less than 20%, scrolling works great, and the fan goes off.

Did they implement scrolling using JavaScript?

Sounds awful. Luckily we still have other options. I hope I never have to use GNOME again.

If you want a pristine desktop, don't put icons there. If I want to put icons on my desktop, it's none of your f'ing business.

I'm not familiar with the Gnome terminologies. Is Overview the one where they removed all the desktop icons, breaking 40 years of GUI conventions going back to the 1970s? (It's impossible to do a search on a product called "Overview".) I blew away Gnome after that, installed Mint MATE (now Cinnamon), and vowed to never touch Gnome again.

Thanks for the reference to in-place merge sort. GitHub is having a lot problems right now, I cannot see your code. I will look at it when I get a chance.

I think I ignored Heap sort because it uses O(N) extra RAM, which is precious on a resource-constrained microcontroller.

Different strokes for different folks I guess.

Selection sort was the first sorting algorithm that I ever created: Find the smallest element for slot #1. Find the next smallest for slot #2. And so on. I've recreated it from scratch many times. The double for-loop means that it is guaranteed to finish, and it is obviously O(N^2).

I did not learn about Bubble sort until my university class, where I thought, this is a terrible algorithm: It's not completely obvious that it will finish, and it's not obvious what the runtime complexity is. For example, if the inner loop used ">=" instead of ">", it would work for test data sets with unique elements, then hang forever with a real data set that contained duplicates.

Shell sort is sooo much faster than Bubble sort for tiny microcontrollers, for only a little bit more flash memory, like 40-100 bytes. If that's too much, then Insertion sort is 6X faster than Bubble sort, for only 10-20 bytes of extra flash.