fredleblanc

After hearing complaints for years from my mom about how slow her laptops were (with Windows), we bought her a NUC and I put elementary on it. That was about 4 years ago. Since then: not one single complaint.

She’s not a power user. She uses a web browser for Facebook, her bank stuff, and to play silly word games and puzzles. She checks email. But even those two tasks were enough to land her into trouble on seemingly any Windows machine we put in front of her.

I assume she was clicking on questionable ads, accidentally visiting who knows what websites from weird Facebook clicks, etc. but since she’s not on Windows, she’s less of a haphazard target.

Whenever I’m a good son and visit her, I’ll make sure everything’s updated and it usually is. She knows to click the update button when it asks.

I’m sure this could have been ANY Linux that would have fixed this, but Elementary looks the most simple, and that’s what it’s a great fit for her. It’s easy to use, easy to keep updated, and won’t virus itself up when your mom clicks on weird banner ads. All in a cheap little package. (Which I get could have been even cheaper.)

Agreed. My note on times wasn’t to brag, but to say that I never thought I’d run that far or that fast. Before this whole ordeal, my fastest mile was in fourth grade and it was 9:12.

And my favorite part of running is waving to other runners running the opposite way. I assume it’s the same way motorcycle people feel when they wave to each other.

I did one sub-20 5k and know I will never get back to that again. It was pushing it then, and I’m happy I did it, but it crushed me for a week or two. Also, that was treadmill time. I’ve come to learn that outdoor running is much more challenging for me. My best 5k outdoors is 22:46, and that’s good enough for me. :)

A few years ago I decided I was sick of being overweight and decided to make a change. My approach was two-pronged: 1) eat better, 2) exercise.

For eating, I cut out as much sugar as I reasonably could. For exercise, I made sure I "moved vigorously" for 30 minutes per day, every day.

I was never a runner. And in my early shape, that 30 minutes was just me walking. Eventually, though, I stopped sweating and being out of breath, so I started walking more briskly. Then eventually I moved to a treadmill and started jogging for bits of it.

And then I could jog the whole time. And then I could run while taking jog breaks. About 7 months in, I was able to run 5 miles in about 35 minutes. I did it every day.

The point was that I went every day. It wasn't about how much I did, but that I was sweating and moving for 30 minutes. Lost 75 pounds in about 9 months.

I took the winter off last year and fell into sugar again, so I restarted this past summer. A 5k every day, as many days as I can. I have to run outside instead of at the gym, so weather controls a lot.

All of this is to say I agree, mostly. 30 minutes per day every day can fix a lot of problems. It did for me. :)

My therapist addressed the stigma of therapy in session one: when your arm is broken, you go to a doctor. So why wouldn’t you go to one when your mind is broken? Makes sense to me.

Therapy was the best $20 co-pay I paid every week for quite a while. I only stopped because I moved to a state where mental health wasn’t covered well by insurance and couldn’t justify the hourly rate in cash. But it really helped me find perspective in the minutia that is my life.

I’d highly recommend it to anyone that can access it. Find a good therapist and give it a go.

Also, I second your call for blackmailers to rot. :)

I've got 3 dumb TVs in my house from the mini-stock up I did a few years ago when it looked like they were going away. They're all Samsungs, oddly enough. A 50", a 55", and a 60". My only hope is that they last long enough to come out the other side of the only-Smart-TVs tunnel.

Yeah, they're "only" 1080p, but then again, my movie collection is mostly standard definition anyway. I realized that I don't need higher than that if I'm enjoying a movie/TV show: I stop noticing the picture quality once the story quality surpasses it.

Really wanted to second the idea of a “this weekend” and “next weekend.” Having very full weeks, that’s sorta how things get broken down for me. Stuff I can sneak in during the week, but really, stuff I’ll spent time on Saturday doing. And with the US’s normal “Saturday is this week, Sunday is next week,” I’m not sure where I should put things.

Even if it was a thing I could turn on for me as a bonus timeframe. Or not. I like software with opinions. :) Nice work!

Since we're pitching ideas, I'll pitch comments be any line that starts with "OFF THE RECORD..."

Well, I like them a lot. It’s fine for people to ask why, but sometimes a project is just a project. Or maybe you wanted them for yourself and decided to be kind and open them up for everyone. In the good days of the Internet, the response would be: “that’s so cool! Great job!” I think that’s warranted here.

If I had to be nit-picky, my feedback would be: the lock and unlock icons are a bit too samey at small sizes on my non-high-res screen. Perhaps make unlock a bit more obvious? Shorten the open loop area a little more?

I think the heart might need a bit more dip at the top, too. Up close it’s a heart, but from further away the top part gets a little lost.

Finally, the laptop icon feels slightly off to me. I think maybe if the bottom “keyboard” part extended a little past the screen on the left and right it would feel better? Not sure.

I’m no expert on licensing, so double check that’s right. And I agree that you could probably crush them down more with an optimizer, but so can I. That’s easy enough. Overall: I like’em a lot! Great work. :)

They break it into categories. 100%, Any%, glitched, glitchless, etc. To set a record with glitches doesn’t put you against people that run without them.

I agree! I work on a marketing team and it’s interesting to hear the conversations about what is and isn’t decorative. Are brand elements decorative? Generally yes, but on a marketing site, aren’t those half the point? At which point does that make them informative?

It can be frustrating to sit in meetings where people go back and forth about this stuff. But at the end of it all, any meeting where people are constructively discussing accessibility is a win for me.

In my experience, aria-hidden will effectively accomplish the same ends for accessibility purposes. That article mentions using role="presentation" but with the caveat that not all screen readers and such understand that well enough to then not try to start reading the filename.

I guess the question is if SEO crawlers still read alt text for images marked as aria-hidden="true" or not. I have no idea on this one, but I'm very curious about it.

I've been pushing the folks I work with to consider SEO as a second-class citizen within alt text. If you can reasonably use a keyword in a natural, useful way, definitely use it. Otherwise, from what I can tell, an image's alt text doesn't seem to have any greater SEO value than the rest of the content on the page. Write better on-page content with better keyword use, with alt text being informative extra content.

And clarification on when alt text is needed: 1) if the image contains informative content that adds to the surrounding content, but also 2) a linked image where the image is the ONLY thing within the link, in which case the alt text should describe the destination of the link, not the contents of the image. I just recently learned this, but it makes sense when you think about it.

Having no alt and having alt="" do not produce the same results to the audiences relying on those attributes to perceive images. The W3C's tutorial on decorative images (found at https://www.w3.org/WAI/tutorials/images/decorative/) says to use alt="" to mark an image decorative, as some (prominent) screen readers will read the image's file name when no alt attribute is set.

But hey, that Svelte is providing these warning is great for accessibility!

I still see Siri in the “maybe someday” category. I don’t have Siri turned on, but my wife does. I hear her talking to it to mostly look up measurement conversions and such.

An anecdote of my favorite Siri incident. One night a couple weeks ago, we had an abundance of dragonflies in our yard. I said that they were there because they are bugs and it was the right time of day for that. She thought dragonflies ate something else, so she asked Siri, “what do dragonflies eat?”

Siri told us that we should consult a local zoologist before attempting to care for wild animals.

I knew what that was before clicking.

It was either the pinball one or the ladybug picnic one.

> I just don't seem to be in Apple's target market anymore.

I say this more and more each day. I'm in the same boat with the SE, and it's also the same with the MacBook Pros for me. I bought a refurbished MacBook Pro last October, the one from 2015, the last one with a great keyboard.

It seems that April 2016 was the peak of where Apple and I aligned.

This is really all I want. I don't want a smaller form factor. I don't want a bigger form factor. I want this form factor, and since everything keeps getting smaller, that's more room for a battery or whatever.

Alright, for a countering point of view, I bought a 6 the day it was released. Used it for a year. Battery issues aside, I found the form factor too thin, too rounded, and too slippery.

I had to buy a case just to not to feel like I was going to drop it.

I went back to the SE, and it reaffirmed to me that this design was peak iPhone. The squared edges let me stand the phone up on the side. There’s no silly camera bump. I’ve used this phone, the 5, and the 5s for over 3 combined years with no case needed.

I’ve dropped these phones a couple times and it’s survived them all. I can use it one handed without the reach, then cancel what my palm hit, then reach, then cancel, then remember the “reachability” home double tap. It has a headphone jack. The volume up button isn’t opposite the power button.

And you know what? It’s still plenty fast. All this for a cheaper price and more pocketable form factor.

The SE is a great phone, easily my favorite of the iPhone lineage. It’s too bad it seems to be going the way of the dodo.

You might want to look at Matias — http://matias.ca — they’re pretty Mac focused.

I had their Laptop Pro keyboard for a bit, but found the Bluetooth a bit shaky. Turned me off to Bluetooth keyboards. BUT, the keyboard felt great.

(I ended up moving to an ES-87 with Cherry Browns, and then a HHKB, but that’s not a normal progression.)

Teams have a list of standby players like this in the list. Some teams equipment managers are in the list, and have training if it comes to it. To have to go four levels deep is pretty rare.

From the times I've seen this level of standby dressing for the game, usually the first stringer is already injured and the back-up gets hurt in warmups. Then the third-stringer is playing and the fourth-stringer (equipment manager, extreme backup, whoever) is dressed but doesn't play.

It just so happens in this game, it got to that.

Also in NH here. I’m going to try this out this summer. Luckily we “only” get about 5-10 per day in the hotter months so far.

The most disappointing news in these rumors is a 6.1 inch iPhone SE. I have the current iPhone SE and it's the perfect phone for me — scaled down to it after trying the iPhone 6 a couple years ago. There's something about this form factor that makes it the best phone I've ever used.

I believe it's the first in Wal-Mart's exclusive board game line (so you can _only_ buy it there, for now at least).

Since the update, I have no idea how to find people. I even type in their username on their and they're not found. I don't know how it works anymore.

But it's chicken and egg, right? They don't have that particular business because they made the choice of privacy long ago? Even if they're not in the ads business because of a series of lucky decisions that just happened to steer them this way, there's nothing wrong with touting a selling point.

On timing — absolutely. It puts the old time-estimation adage of "take a developer's estimate and triple it" to shame.

Having done some work for a school that's jumped through these hoops, I believe that it's a different definition of "approved." It's not "choose one of these curricula we made up and do that," it's "show us your complete curriculum and defend how this makes a complete program."

But what if this was just… entertainment? Check out the about page of her blog — http://www.everywhereist.com/about/ — this isn't a foodie's journal cataloguing the world of all things edible, this is a copywriter that took up blogging while traveling. She found something to write about, and wrote about it. (In a style that was funny while not being cringe-inducing, which I find rare these days.)

Side note, though — awesome to hear that Soylent works for you. Because, as you said, this _is_ the story I've heard most of the time. I don't like in an area where I'd ever stumble into someone that even knows what Soylent is, so a flip side to these stories is always good to know.

Perhaps the most appropriate use of multiple consecutive stuff coming out of tube GIFs the internet has ever seen.

And then she went back for more!

In addition to many of the games listed here, also consider:

* Deep Sea Adventure — A tiny push-your-luck game that blends theme and mechanics perfectly, is easy to explain, and is a ton of fun without being too thinky. It also scales perfectly from 2 to 6 people. Expensive if you're just counting components, but the value of the game and the fun it brings makes it worthwhile.

* Celestia — Also push-your-luck style, but with a bit more production (and, oddly, cheaper than Deep Sea Adventure).

* Patchwork — A great little two-player game where you're making a quilt. That sounds silly, but it's like Tetris that's powering a small economical engine. Really fun.

* For Sale — Good for 3-6 players, a really simple little card game where you get properties in the first round and auction them off in the second. Plays in 15 minutes, fits in a small box. (I think they even make a travel version.)

* Santorini — the retail version is a big production, but if you get it, you could easily make a smaller version of it. Takes 30 seconds to learn and is hard to really master. Comes with a ton of God power cards that make a bunch of replayability.

* Smash Up — the base set comes with 8 factions. Each player takes two factions (of their choice, at random, etc.) and smashed them into a deck. You then compete against others to topple bases and score points. A lot of fun with the right crowd. I think they've released about 50 factions total so far, with 8 new ones released each year currently. All totally optional.

* Star Realms — great little two-player deck builder. It's space themed, if you want another theme, they have other versions that work similarly. It's just one deck of cards, plus expansions if you like it.

* Dixit — I love Dixit. I've never played it with anyone that didn't have fun. The box really spreads things out, and is mostly holding the scoring track, but you could replace that with something smaller easily. A deck of amazing art cards, a couple of voting tokens, and a way to keep score. Could fit into a sandwich bag if you create a smaller scoring system.