madphilosopher

For a forced-air furnace, I put a hinged piece of cardboard over a room vent with a paperclip switch. When the furnace blew, the cardboard would rise and the switch would open. Simple and effective. It doesn't measure the burn cycle of the furnace exactly, but it was close enough for me.

I rotate two 8 TB USB hard drives between home and my locker at work, every month or two. Full-disk encrypted, of course. This covers my entire system and media files.

For /etc and my source code repositories, I use restic and cloud storage, because this data is small (< 1 GB). (Also, I'm on rural internet, which is metered and slow. So I can't use cloud backup for the big stuff.)

The whole system is not quite 3/2/1, but it's close enough for me.

Unrelatedly, I use Chrome for websites where I need to be logged into a Google account (gmail, youtube, google docs, google maps, etc.) and Firefox for everything else. I like keeping the two activities separate.

First, they phase out the service part of "customer service." Then, the customer part falls away naturally. Or, at least, that's what we would hope for.

Search for ephemeris software.

For all my projects, I use the Swiss Ephemeris[0]. Their commandline swetest will give you the data you're after.

[0] https://www.astro.com/swisseph/swephinfo_e.htm

Why would a fuse box / circuit breaker panel on its own stop radio frequencies from traveling down the wires in all directions? Filters would be required for that.

Ex-Twitter, in other words.

When I was in high school (1990s), my friend Mark removed the top sheet-metal ceiling from his locker and discovered a phone line going past. So he tapped into it and, to my knowledge, became the only kid in school with a phone in his locker. It was used for prank calls, of course.

When I worked an office IT job, for a few years, I asked my boss if I could come in an hour early in the winter. In actual practice, I kept my watch on DST and woke up and commuted to work at the same time relative to the Sun. I watched my co-workers struggle for a week adjusting their bodies to their time change. I had no time change to deal with. I got to study (skills upgrade) in the quiet before anyone else came to work, and I got to leave an hour early every day compared to the others. I drove home in the daylight. Truly, there were no downsides for me.

Permanent daylight savings time---I recommend practicing it even when the society around you does not.

Possibly close to what you describe, gqrx (a GUI SDR Linux app) has a remote control protocol that can be typed by hand or scripted over telnet. And it has the option to stream the audio over UDP to a remote host.

For a demo of the remote control protocol, see this video: "Ham Radio - Network sockets and remote control of GQRX SDR with telnet and python"[1]

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7Rd7Sd9hRBo

I'm really hoping a wiki will arise that will show how to disable network (radio) communications on all modern car models.

Conditional grace is not grace. The human experience of grace is so much larger than what you describe.

I would love to run TAI on my devices. But where can I find a public NTP server that offers TAI, or a GPS module that gives the same? Do these exist? Or is this the wrong approach?

They left me alone in the exam room before the doctor came in to do the eye exam, and I just read my PD off the computer screen that was showing my patient record. :)

I wish the back button would bring back the rendered view of a page from a cache so that it would be (a) instant, and (b) not make any network requests.

It seemed to me that older versions of the Opera browser did this, and the text-based "links" browser seems to do this today.

Canada does not have a housing supply problem. That is the big lie told by governments to make themselves look good. It's mostly a cost of money problem. When the cost of money was near zero for so long, especially during the pandemic, people loaded up on debt, increasing the demand for houses, driving prices to insane levels. Now that the cost of money has increased to the (historically low) level of 5%, the demand for housing has decreased, listings are flooding the market, and prices are falling.

The 220k is the value of the mortgage and not the original purchase price; there was most likely a downpayment at time of purchase. Or, they recently renewed their mortgage and the remaining amount owing is 220k.

If you ran a carpentry shop, you wouldn't retain employees who lacked a basic understanding of their woodworking tools and how to use them. Yet we tolerate this of "information workers" the world over. Why is that? Is it because the image got to you after all, so it doesn't really matter how inefficient the process was?

I am genuinely curious. But then again, I ask the question as a computer enthusiast using a computer to talk to other computer enthusiasts about computers.

I've run amateur dream groups, where people get together and tell each other their dreams, and then each participant interprets the dream back to the dream-teller. One method was to start one's interpretation by saying, "If this were my dream..." This helps the interpreter relate what they are hearing to their own life, and anything they might say to the dream-teller is really about the interpreter and their own psyche. So you might try such a self-reflective stance if you ever get stuck having to listen to someone else's dream.

With that said, if I ever choose to tell a trusted friend about a compelling dream (in a non-dream-group context), I try to relate the story in about 20 seconds, just hitting the highlights, cause I know how you feel about having to listen to someone else's unsolicited dream story!

There's the Roland GO:KEYS with regular-sized keys, or the much smaller Yamaha reface CP with mini keys. Both have on-board speakers and can be battery-powered. The reface would be the perfect size to play in an airplane seat, for example.

I use the Yamaha reface YC as I'm into organs, and I really like it.

Further to this, I also put the following snippet in front of my web-scraping cron jobs so they start at a random time between the minute boundaries:

    perl -le 'sleep rand 60';

It's the most compact code I could find to do the job.

And keep them in groups of 4 so I can easily and deftly land on F5 and F8, which are to the extremities of the group.

You can remap the key combination "jk" to ESC in order to switch effortlessly from editing mode to normal mode.

    inoremap jk <esc>

("jk" doesn't normally appear in English and is easy to type)

In my entire computing career, I have never locked my Caps or unlocked my Num! That's how I roll.

The Bitcoin whitepaper is one of my cherished reads. The other is the BitTorrent whitepaper. Both technologies changed the technical and non-technical worlds, and the fundamental protocols are clearly explained in their respective papers.

Illegal but not immoral.

I often compose fun little melodies while noodling around on the electric piano. So I always have my Sony MiniDisc deck hooked into my mixer, ready to record. It just takes two button presses to begin recording---convenient and reliable. And with subsequent playback, I can also play along with what I just recorded.

For ham radio, all my radios are connected through a line mixer and play through an Onkyo MiniDisc bookshelf system to amplify the audio. Again, it's two button presses to record anything I'm listening to.

I really love MiniDisc. It's a wonderful format.

Indeed! Dumping this recovery.jsonlz4 file on the command line is how I inspect and archive all my tabs and windows. You can do this on remote systems, too, and Firefox does not need to be running.

The scripts I use to do this can be found here:

https://github.com/madphilosopher/dump_firefox_session

I started using Forth because I wanted a Reverse Polish Notation calculator at the command line. It turned out to be very practical and extensible.

For example, I created many words to perform unit conversion, such as temperature:

    : 2fahrenheit 9 * 5 / 32 + ;
    : 2celsius    32 - 5 * 9 / ;

Furthermore, I can even pull in live currency conversion rates from Yahoo Finance to go between USD and CAD.

Since my underlying Forth interpreter runs on Python[0], I get the full large integer and floating-point support that Python has.

[0] http://openbookproject.net/py4fun/forth/forth.html

If you focus multiple mirrors on a single spot, you can set things on fire. Depending on one's application, this is a feature, not a bug!