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Small Parts used to be an indispensable source of well cataloged parts for my projects. They shipped quickly and reliably and had a nice parametric search system.

Sadly they were acquired by Amazon and effectively ruined. In theory Amazon sells the same parts but Amazon's search for specialized parts is dreadful, and when you find a part it's often out of stock or available with a long lead time from a dubious supplier.

To me Small Parts is the classic example of how Amazon is systematically stamping out smaller but better suppliers. I'm not sure why Amazon even needed to acquire them. They could have sold those types of parts anyway. I wonder if they simply wanted the smallparts.com url, which now leads to Amazon.

I should clarify why I liked Small Parts vs McMaster Carr: I'm in Canada and Small Parts would ship to Canada, but McMaster Carr would not ship here unless you had a business, but my work was for a hobby.

In my career I've found that knowning "enough" about a lot of fields (often self taught) has led me to invent valuable things that experts in any given field would have never discovered. Things with many millions in sales.

Also I've found that experts in some field will say something is impossible that I, not knowing it's "impossible", will try to do anyway and find a way to do it by applying techniques from outside the field.

I feel these are my "secrets of success", other than a lot of hard work and persistence. :)

I once had a new house with hydronic under floor heating - the worst heating setup I've every had - horribly slow to respond and expensive to operate. We turn down the heat to sleep and finally I just shut off the heat to the bedrooms and heated them a different way.

Our initial experience with the system was even worse than it might have been. The people who installed it including the thermostats were plumbers and did not realize there was a switch inside the thermostat to choose among three types of heating systems. They left all the thermostats at the default forced air heating setting. We suffered for two years with terrible overshooting and undershooting of temperatures before my own research revealed that the hidden setting existed and that it was set incorrectly. This helped but it was still not great.

We were glad to get back to a forced air heated house. I do believe however that hydronic heating with radiators is somewhat better than underfloor hydronic.

If it results in the elimination of oversized boxes it should save on cardboard, also reducing shipping volume. This would be financially and environmentally be a good thing. Maybe they could also include in the box sizing algorithm the optimization of shapes for efficient packing.

I agree with you that eventually governments are the only entitles that could implement solutions on a big enough scale. However it will be too late if this only happens when they are forced to act by social upheaval, mass starvation and economic collapse.

I challenge the ultra rich to put a substantial portion of their assets to work in funding large scale R&D on clean technologies, and simultaneously funding powerful lobbying of governments to act on climate change.

Another thought is that for better or worse we now have the tools for "social engineering" and campaigns might be funded to sway public opinion to support governments that support clean technologies.

For this reason there is no hope that collective action through government pave the way to the solutions we need. Governments will only be forced to act when things are so bad that it's too late. There is also no hope that individual action will make a meaningful difference. Not enough people will care until things are so bad it's too late. Public corporations will not lead the way to a solution because they are only driven by short term profit. Does anyone seriously believe any of the above will lead to solutions soon enough?

It seems to me that only the ultra rich have the resources, independence, and arguably intelligence to lead the way to solutions that could save humanity. They might devote their talents and resources to funding research into technologies we will need when when things get so bad that governments are forced to act. Also funding powerful lobbing groups to counteract the powerful lobbing efforts of corporations that benefit from delaying action on the climate.

My password manager and every other plugin disappeared this morning first on one of my Macs and a few hours later on the other. I could not log into anything so I switched immediately to Chrome because I don't have time to fuss with workarounds. I'll return to Firefox when I hear the problem is definitely fixed.

Thawing permafrost, faster even than climate models predicted, could release so much carbon that feasible reductions in human carbon output will never be enough. [1]

A similar worry is methane hydrates. [2]

It seems that the only remaining hopes are rapid progress on carbon sequestration on a vast scale, or risky geoengineering.

[1] https://www.pri.org/stories/2015-06-24/thawing-permafrost-co... [2] https://worldoceanreview.com/en/wor-1/energy/methane-hydrate...

The digital waveguide patents have now expired and a new group has just released a wind instrument software synthesizer based on this approach: https://www.imoxplus.com/site/

They are also developing a completely new type of multidimensional embouchure sensing mouthpiece with which to play the instruments. It should be easy to learn but offer deep potential for expressiveness.

Also note that the goal of these instruments is not to faithfully emulate the timbre of any existing instrument (for that use a sampler) but to emulate dynamic behavior with is where the true expressiveness of wind instruments comes from.

Disclosure: I am developing the mouthpiece.

It could be a matter of depth of field and viewing angle. I build tiny things - boards with parts down to 0406 and also 3D assemblies of small parts. I use a long range digital magnifier for PCBs but it's necessary to use a head mounted loupe for 3D assembly due to depth of field and the need to view from different directions.

If you need progressive lenses and spend a lot of time in front of a screen do yourself a favor and invest in some "office lenses", preferably "premium" office lenses: https://www.verywellhealth.com/progressive-lenses-3421915

When I first needed progressives I quickly developed severe shoulder pain. I was unconsciously tilting my head up to view the top of the screen through the middle of the lenses. It took two or three years to realize that my shoulder pain was caused my head tilt pinching a nerve in my neck.

"Office" progressive lenses have the middle of the lens focus at screen distance and the bottom of the lens focus at reading distance. Premium lenses are even better in that their region of sharpness is larger. When ordering glasses I also specify how far up on the lens I want the screen distance to be set so it's at my preferred screen distance.

Since I started using office progressives my shoulder pain has vanished.

I was in a senior position at Microsoft back at the time early versions of Office, Windows 95 and 98 were being developed. In fact a number of groups including the Visual Interface Design group reported to me. That's the group that designed the general visual appearance and also icons in the UI for both Office and Windows. (They were not designing the actual user interaction, just the visual appearance.)

At that time the visual designers were strongly urging that all icons be greyscale because they said color was "distracting". I overruled them and insisted the icons have color because it was better for overall usability.

Now the whole industry seems to have come under the influence of the visual designers favoring visual appearance over usability. Much less attention seems to being given to real overall usability.

The article says that apes can't talk because of limitations in the part of the brain that controls the muscles of the mouth. Their ability to sign shows they do have the mental capacity to learn to communicate but with their hands. This may not extend to speech specifically for the reasons discussed in the article.

I have limited eyesight - good enough to work on a bright magnified computer screen. When I bought a new Macbook Pro I couldn't read the Touchbar and of course there's no tactile feedback. It's even worse that the keys can change with context. Due to my eyesight I also often tweak the screen brightness for best readability with the up/down function keys. The slider doesn't work well for incremental adjustments especially when you can't see it clearly.

I returned the Macbook within a week and had to buy a lower model with real function keys.

I tried configuring fixed locations for the most important keys but could not work without the tactile feedback of being centered on a given key. I guess there's some sort of voiceover but it would be annoying and slow. I didn't need voiceover before so why would I want to use it now to accommodate Apples latest gimmick?

Actually I wonder if it would work to add tactile feedback by 3D printing a thin overlay that adds frames around keys configured for fixed location. Or maybe someone could offer a product that is a Touchbar overlay made of clingy silicone?

Edit: Something else I wanted to add: I've tried switching to Windows (several times) but I can't work without Apple's Ctrl + two-finger up/down full screen magnification. Window's magnifier is a poor substitute because it's not full screen. The magnifier can be made the size of the screen but then it's clunky to move the focus of magnifier, and update is jittery. If anyone from Microsoft is reading this, please look at Apple's screen zoom and give your magnifier a mode like that - a full screen infinitely variable zoom that continually centers the focus on the mouse pointer.

You can append !gvb to a DDG search to directly perform a Google verbatim search. It's the fastest way to do a Google verbatim search - faster than Google's own UI.

Not only does appending !gvb to a DDG search perform a Google verbatim search, it also directly reveals the Google UI for searching a date range.

The combination of normal DDG plus easy access to Google verbatim and date range seaches gives a pretty nice search experience.

Every Macbook I buy I use some sandpaper (medium coarse and then fine) to round the sharp corners between the sides and the surface containing the keyboard & trackpad. I especially round the sharp points on the corners of finger-cutout to open the lid.

I also slightly round the edges where the sides meet the top and bottom surface of the case.

The result is that those sharp unpleasant feeling corners are now silky smooth, around a 1 mm radii. I'm surprised Apple didn't design it this way in the first place.

Note: It's important to be cautious not get any aluminum dust in any of the ports or electronics.