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figital

361 karma · joined July 8, 2009

http://figital.com
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figital··on I'm Peter Roberts, immigration attorney who does work for YC and startups. AMA
How will the US midterms and Brazil elections in October / November affect current immigration and visa issues between these 2 (large) countries.
figital··on The Art of Atari (2016)
I have this book. It’s fantastic.
figital··on What went wrong for Yahoo
del.icio.us was my favorite tool on the internet for a few years (perhaps even still in retrospect). And not far off from the same functionality as Facebook (today). Why purchase such a thing to shut it down?

Money which needed to be burned I guess (for accounting tricks).

figital··on Questions censored by DeepSeek
Translate your “taboo” question into Chinese first. You will get a completely different answer ;).
figital··on Tinnitus linked to undetected auditory nerve damage
Some may be able to calibrate their hearing in this regard with something called Auditory Integration Training. I have done it. It worked. You might also want to read more about CAPD (Central Auditory Processing Disorder).
figital··on Turbo Pascal Turns 40
Still have the manuals at home on my bookshelf. Great examples of technical writing and explaining how the world is changing.
figital··on Why Japan has blue traffic lights instead of green
I sell traffic lights. What you consider a “green” light in the USA is actually called “blue green”. I believe the reason for this is increased visibility for older drivers.
figital··on I'm fed up with it, so I'm writing a browser
Am so tired of Windows 11 I’ve just started writing my own desktop / toolbars / windows / struts using X11. It’s more than good enough and not much more difficult than writing webapps (in fact half of this project is various web apps. Then Python / c / lua / whatever.

It’s still a little buggy and I have to reboot now and again … but not much more than usual.

At least I control much of the experience now and for the rest of my life. And I’m learning a lot of fun stuff. It’s been a huge time waster but in a very good way. And it’s very snappy. And all of the configs/settings/code synchs with git (eventually lol).

figital··on Young people are flocking to astrology
I was not being as specific as latitude/longitude, exact time of the day, or “planetary alignments” … only the season or birth month (or perhaps week if you want to get loco). Much of the natural world runs on such a schedule (even considering lunar phases). This would be more scientific than the concept of Groundhog Day, but less “scientific” than a farmer’s almanac.
figital··on Young people are flocking to astrology
There are epigenetic markers which can identify the season or perhaps even month you were born. If you might think there is a link between personality and birth order and that perhaps metaphor is useful in storytelling or group dynamics … then one could loosely link these concepts together and consider it more than something like a party trick.
figital··on How to generate SQL statements with ChatGPT
Anyone can do something like this now by searching Google or asking Clippy. The act of double-checking what the interface suggests is the same as doing the thinking and work manually. Perhaps more intelligent error messages would be helpful, or performance improvement suggestions.
figital··on The World Wide Web (1994)
WinGopher "Complete" ... $129.00 ...

https://librarytechnology.org/document/7548

figital··on Why did Mozilla remove XUL add-ons? (2020)
Being able to script buttons in my browser's toolbars is a feature I miss (circa the Jetpack era of Firefox). It greatly increased my productivity.

Doing some of this now on my Linux desktop using jgmenu ... it's not a browser though ... it's a floating data-driven start menu. Very fun.

figital··on History of Video Games (1940's – 2010's) – list of firsts
Sinistar had a number of industry firsts … for the stereo/surround sound and the joystick at least … however it was released just before this market tanked in the early 80’s. Chilling and addictive at the time.

(And hungry!)

figital··on AI will replace middle management before robots replace hourly workers
chess jokes. grow arugula.
figital··on Using the Free Pascal IDE for a Week
First learned programming in Turbo Pascal and have fond memories of that IDE. Thanks for posting this. Would love to learn of a framework for reconfiguring this UX to do whatever I want (menus, scripting, etc).
figital··on Moreutils: A collection of Unix tools that nobody thought to write long ago
here's a little wrapper around i made around "find" which i always have to install on every new box i manage ....

https://github.com/figital/fstring

(just shows you more useful details about what is found)

figital··on An intro to finding things in Linux
here’s a version of ‘find’ I use quite often …… I usually download it to run as “fstring”. it outputs the file name and the string match:

https://github.com/figital/fstring

figital··on UPS sells trucking unit
UPS Freight has never really been “UPS” even though they sort of share the same computer systems and branding. Their quality of service has also always been much lower (at least in our region).
figital··on Show HN: Visual SQL
I typed in a basic text query to "count reps per account". Then I clicked the visualize button ... no re-visualization. This is an extremely basic feature in every visual query tool the past 20 years (at least the ones worth paying for). You would be limiting yourself to their canned charts and "demo magic".
figital··on How to Build a Pyramid
It's a large ram pump ...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6koHqPM_zxg

figital··on I Bought a House with Solar Panels
I'd rather give excess power to my neighbors for free or just waste it on a giant spinning pinwheel than "sell" it back to the power company. No mention of local battery storage by the reporter or the "reported/reportee".
figital··on Review of Comic Books Teaching Statistics
Gonick & Smith remarkably make statistics fun and even easy to explain to other people. So glad I stumbled into it at a garage sale a few years ago. I should pick up their other books ASAP.
figital··on Muse: the brain sensing headband
To the best of my basic knowledge (and as mentioned here already) EEG isn't going to be super-useful for a consumer device like this ... HEG (infrared detection of oxygen levels) is a better option in terms of the ratio of easy hookups to meaningful (mass market) results.
figital··on Google to Acquire Nest
There's been a product on the market for several years called "TED" ... something seemed fishy when Google killed the data monitoring service ... http://www.google.com/powermeter/. Still ... you have the power (so to speak) to meter your own appliances. Yes you.

Mine is still in the box :(.

figital··on Lego Calendar syncs with Google Calendar
would be handy to just have a webcam pointed at a wipeboard ... then save any snap different from the previous one (sans people standing in the way). and detect certain shapes to auto-link with a URL. also, i would like a pony!
figital··on Mozilla’s Firefox OS Gives The Open Web Top Billing On Mobile
I just bought the ZTE phone for cheap dev thrills when I have time .... I think the built-in FM radio tuner will be going with me to the ballpark though. :)
figital··on A Proposal: Renaming Backend/Frontend to Application/UI Developers
Learn them both ... otherwise you're either tasting electrons with C or you're a graphic designer.

{{ http://i.imgur.com/pG3q7.jpg }}

figital··on Brain Computer Interfaces Inch Closer to Mainstream
Wish I hadn't ran out of time for this ... https://vimeo.com/mindhead. You can easily get to "on/off" with equipment like this. The rest depends on training protocols and the software design needed to implement them.
figital··on QT 5 launched by new owner, Digia
I've really wanted to dive into this for a side project. On the limited time I've had, I notice the Creator IDE UI and tutorials take an extra step I'm not used which is probably from translating the experience from Finnish to my own language (American English). Just a random guess but the commercial version could increase uptake by doing a round or two of "visual/workflow qa" for a wider-range of global users (especially the folks looking to speed through to working QML/JS demos). Will keep digging ... the "deploy local windowing" to Lin/Win/Mac looks truthy. (I think I should just start simple with a text editor and the compiler next go round)
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