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jstanek

94 karma · joined June 15, 2014

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jstanek··on Massachusetts Right to Repair Initiative
We have a similar initiative here in Minnesota:

https://minnesota.repair.org/

I really like this idea and would like to see it come to fruition. It's a nice check on consumerism and planned obsolescence.

jstanek··on The Dorito Effect
It's marketed as "The Other White Meat".
jstanek··on The ultimate OpenBSD router
In my experience, everything from Jupiter Broadcasting [0] is extrememly top-notch and informative. I'd highly recommend all of their shows (including BSD Now!)

[0] http://jupiterbroadcasting.com

jstanek··on GNOME 3.16 on OpenBSD [video]
GNOME has had systemd as a hard dependency since 2012: it uses systemd-logind and a few other systemd services for its basic functionality. systemd is only available on Linux systems, therefore it's a pretty great achievement to get it running on OpenBSD.
jstanek··on An $89 remanufactured Ubuntu workstation
There's an organization in Minneapolis which does a similar thing. It's called Free Geek Twin Cities, and they recycle old PCs and put Ubuntu on them. It's about $40 for a computer, or one can earn one by volunteering for 24 hours. I used to volunteer there when I was less busy.
jstanek··on Leonard Nimoy, Spock of ‘Star Trek,’ Dies at 83
Fourthed. He was a great inspiration to me.
jstanek··on 1Password on Linux
KeePass works better is you set it up to use Auto-Type, which sends keystrokes to the window manager to type the passwords into the fields.
jstanek··on CoreCLR is now open source
Potentially Microsoft could use their significant market power to convince other companies to open source their code.
jstanek··on DirectX 11 vs. DirectX 12 oversimplified
Check out SDL, Allegro, or SFML. http://libsdl.org/ http://alleg.sourceforge.net/ http://sfml-dev.org/
jstanek··on To Be
What exactly is this? It looks to me like a multiplayer vaporwave-inspired shirt maker.
jstanek··on How J.K. Rowling Plotted Harry Potter with a Hand-Drawn Spreadsheet
Heller's outline for Catch-22 is especially notable due to the story's non-linear plotline. I found it extremely useful when reading it the first time trough, since the plot is so difficult to follow.
jstanek··on FuzzBeed – Randomly generated BuzzFeed
So did I. Makes me suspect it's not completely random...
jstanek··on Fasting triggers stem cell regeneration of damaged, old immune system (2014)
It's important to remember that anecdotal evidence is not scientific in any way. Just because there exists "peoples' wisdom" doesn't mean that this wisdom is correct. This is why science exists in the first place, to explore and explain natural phenomena.
jstanek··on Jenga Pistol
I especially love his marble machines. They're absolutely mesmerizing.
jstanek··on Before Google, Who Knew?
It's nice to see DuckDuckGo mentioned at the end as on-par with Google, Siri, and OnStar. I'm a little surprised they mentioned DDG in the first place, as it doesn't have nearly the name recognition as Bing or Yahoo search.
jstanek··on You can take down Pirate Bay, but you can’t kill the Internet it created
That's also partly due to Netflix' extreme web market share: They account for ~31% of all global aggregate internet usage, and combined with Youtube, the major video streamers account for ~43% of all global aggregate internet usage. That's probably because their business models necessitate a lot of traffic, since content needs to be re-downloaded on each viewing/listening.
jstanek··on The Saddest Thing I Know about the Integers
> she struggled to enjoy some concerts that I enjoyed, simply because the notes from the various players weren't aligned well enough...

Hmm, it depends from listener to listener. Obviously I can't comment for your partner, but I too have perfect pitch. Bad alignment of players isn't really a problem for me unless the players are dramatically out of tune. I'm not the greatest at determining tunings by ear either, as this kind of thing varies.

jstanek··on The Saddest Thing I Know about the Integers
In the 1960s, La Monte Young wrote a piece entitled The Well-Tuned Piano, a riff on J. S. Bach's The Well-Tempered Klavier. It features an equally-tuned piano, so each interval is mathematically correct, rather than being the standard "good-sounding" intervals. It really throws you off at first, but it's well worth a good listen. (It's six hours long though, so don't listen through it in one sitting.)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vzwgJq9vsDM

jstanek··on A Japanese-based multinational made a CD-based console once
Hey, I think it's pretty cool, and I'd like to see a write-up of how he did it.

Plus it's good advertising for their firm, assuming they don't get sued or anything.

jstanek··on Google search – “king of united states”
I don't think it's intentional in any respect, rather I'd wager it's more of a bug in Knowledge Graph or the search algorithm or something similar.

Even if it was intentional, Breitbart is a right-wing news outlet and so their headline would be expected to be tongue-in-cheek anyway.

jstanek··on The Thanksgiving Recipes Googled in Every State
I live in Minnesota, and I was glad to see that they didn't list grape salad as our top recipe again.
jstanek··on 1k minecraft
FF 33.1 on Windows 8.1 isn't working for me either.
jstanek··on Gravitricity
The depth requirement is 500m to 1500m. Though cliffs can be much taller than this, they usually are not totally vertical and cannot accomodate this much depth.

Disclaimer, not a geologist.

jstanek··on Harvard researchers build $10 robot to teach kids to code
At my high school, we have a fairly well-funded PLTW[0] program. We have some nice resources, like FPGA boards and Autodesk CAD software. Perhaps if these devices were somehow integrated into a PLTW or similar standardized curriculum, they could see more adoption.

[0] http://www.pltw.org

jstanek··on Harvard researchers build $10 robot to teach kids to code
Congrats to the researchers. Looks like it has some potential.

I think using visual programming languages for teaching concepts is a good idea. They're great for establishing the logical constructs of computer science, but they are lacking in talking about data structures and state storage in general. I think a more advanced visual teaching language should place a lot more emphasis on teaching how data structures work, which is arguably more important to learn about computer science in the long run. But perhaps that's a bit advanced for such a simple application.

Again, nice work!

jstanek··on KDE makes Qt
In your examples, you are comparing KDE apps with GNOME apps. Though the KDE ones are all Qt and the GNOME ones are all GTK, it's not really a fair comparison since GNOME and KDE have different design objectives (KDE strives to be more feature-complete and configurable while GNOME wants to be simple to use and have a clean UI). The design choices in your comparison aren't dictated by the toolkit, but rather the HIG of each desktop. There are a lot of clean and simple Qt apps, like the official implementation of Tox [0].

[0] https://tox.im/assets/ss.png

jstanek··on PSA: Don’t Open Random PowerPoint Presentations from Strangers
ODP and LaTeX beamers are both pretty good for presentations.
jstanek··on Greenpeace deluges Amazon Fire Phone with one-star protest reviews
I can't see how this makes Greenpeace look good and Amazon look bad. After reading this, Greenpeace looks like a bunch of ignorant thugs, and Amazon seems victimized. How could this possibly be more effective than a boycott?
jstanek··on Amazon releases new Kindle products
They probably have stupid regional licensing agreements with publishers. I guess that without the books to release for the Kindle, Amazon doesn't think releasing the Kindles to be worth it in these countries. I don't know, that's just my guess.
jstanek··on Navdy
It's odd that they promote their product by saying that phone use while driving is unsafe. I fail to see who this is significantly safer than using a phone, since to use the HUD one needs to necessarily remove their attention and focus from the road and redirect it to a small point much closer to their face. Granted, it is probably at least a little better than using a phone, but I'd be _very_ hesitant to say that it's safe.
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