madphilosopher

General purpose computers, copyright, a free society. Pick two.

I typically use ninite to install this, and my favourite thing is when it says "Downloading Everything" followed by "Installing Everything". I always get a kick out of that!

More evidence that Windows 11 is a hate crime.

I read a comment on a forum recently that I'll just leave here:

"Windows 11 is a hate crime."

What would happen if a person tried to enter the United States at the border but were not carrying a phone or a laptop? Do they frown on this?

I always update in place. And I follow all the upgrade procedure advice in the release notes.

Maybe some college degrees could have an endorsement at the bottom: "Earned without AI."

Vulnerabilities like this lead to car thefts. Some models of cars are more susceptible than others, and the manufacturers seem unwilling to fix the problem. The insurance companies know which models are more trouble for them, and so they set higher rates for these, which punishes the driver/owner for something outside of their control.

My solution? Require the manufacturers of vulnerable models to pay the insurance on behalf of the driver/owner as long as the vulnerabilities go unfixed.

Not the OP, but I have a Postfix mail server running on my home media box that receives YouTube URLs sent to its special email address. Postfix passes the message to a Python script that parses out the URL and places it into a Redis queue. A second Python program, running as a daemon, watches the queue and then downloads the video using yt-dlp. I can also enqueue video URLs from the command line.

This is the command that the daemon runs to request 720p, for example:

    command = 'yt-dlp --write-info-json -f "bv*[height<=720]+ba" --output "out.%%(ext)s" --merge-output-format mp4 "%s"' % url

Local noon (when the sun crosses the local meridian) orients us in time and in space. In time, because it marks the day being half-over. In space, because you can use solar alignment to lay out buildings and other structures in a north-south direction, or simply to navigate your locale.

It signifies a good time to eat lunch and the proper direction to orient your belly for an afternoon nap in the sun. :)

One of my screens at work is a full-screen UTC clock with seconds. But I added the solar altitude (in degrees) to the bottom of the display, just so I could easily track how close I am to sunrise or sunset. Solar azimuth would be more clock-like and make it obvious when the sun was culminating, but there's lots you can do when you program your own dashboards.

Back when I worked an office IT job, one year I asked my boss if I could come in an hour earlier in the winter (and leave an hour earlier after work). I had evening chores to do with my animals on the farm, and I needed the daylight after work.

What no one knew was that I just kept my watch on Daylight Savings Time and lived happily ever after. It was glorious. I saw my coworkers struggle with "jetlag" when the switch to Standard Time occurred, and when it went forward again. But I never switched. I kept that up for three years, and I highly recommend it. (I also got a tonne of work done in the hour before everyone else arrived to work.)

Install the transmission-daemon and transmission-cli packages, and control the daemon with the transmission-remote command (from the latter package).

Ivan Illich argued that we should open the doors to the schools and let those that wanted to leave leave, and those that wanted to stay stay. And he meant this even for the teachers as for the students. Then, he said, true education would begin to be possible.

Just curious, is this a corporate network restriction, or something you've configured your web browser to block? This is the first time I've seen this as a problem for Hacker News folks.

A flywheel has a lot of angular momentum. Of course, that's the point. On buses, the axis of the flywheel is oriented in the vertical axis so that the bus can turn corners or change horizontal directions without causing gyroscopic precession. But on a ship that pitches and rolls, the external force on the flywheel will cause a torque that changes the direction of the angular momentum of the flywheel. A roll would do something like pitch the ship forward or backward (depending on the direction that the flywheel spins), which would really mess up the ship's motion, I imagine. The preceding is just my thought experiment on what would happen to such a ship. Let's build one!

Things I absolutely won't order from Amazon: products you put in your body, products you put on your body, and electronics. Their business model and fraud are pretty much indistinguishable at this point.

Look for kitchen printers. They're dot-matrix / ink ribbon receipt printers for use in restaurant kitchens, where the plate warmers and other sources of heat will turn thermal paper completely black. So, instead, they use rolls of ordinary bond paper.

The fact that they make a loud noise every time an order comes through is useful for a restaurant kitchen, too.

The Epson TM-U220 is one model to consider.

A compressor is the right answer. If you lean toward more old-school audio engineering, I would recommend one of these compressors:

* Alesis 3630

* DBX 166 or 266

* FMR Audio Really Nice Compressor

Explore the various demos on YouTube to see what these are about. The compressor goes between your audio source and your amplifier. I personally use the Alesis 3630 for normalizing the audio in my ham radio transceiver setup.

My wish is that those of us sick of the hype would start calling it ChadGPT, to give it the respect that it deserves!

Someone else did this, then built 20 more next to it. Now it's a business where they sell telescope time to researchers and hobbyists. I imagine it's profitable for them.

The main principle of celestial navigation is pretty easy to visualize.

Pick a celestial body that's in your sky right now, like the Sun. At any given time, the Sun is directly over a single point on the globe (the GP, or Geographic Position). So if you measure the Sun as being directly over your head, you know where you are exactly on the globe, after consulting your clock and almanac.

But, if you measure the Sun at a non-overhead angle, then you and everyone else with that same measurement must be on a circle whose centre is the Sun's GP. (Visualize the circle as the edge of a flashlight beam being pointed directly downward at the GP.) The rest of celestial navigation is refinements to figure out where you are on that circle.

Are turn signals supposed to be red? Or orange? Or let's place them below the level of the back bumper... for reasons. Some standardization would be nice.

The secret about speed bumps is that with most vehicles you can drive over them at speed without slowing down.

Auto makers will decide that putting 6 headlights on pickup trucks is no longer competitive. Consequently, they will innovate that the world needs pickup trucks with 8 headlights, starting in 2025. FML.

I was doing this. But then I started noticing that some emails I had read were not being stored locally in the Thunderbird IMAP folder structure on my computer, even though Thunderbird had fetched them and shown them to me. I couldn't figure out any rhyme or reason to this, so I started using mbsync on the commandline to properly mirror my IMAP account to a local store that then gets backed up with my home directory.

All the print books on my bookshelf use fully justified text. In contrast, my preference for ebooks are to render them as left-justified. So I think I intuitively arrived at a practice that matches your conclusion about justified text in browsers.

Oh, yes. A real hoot, this one!

https://www.hundredsofbeavers.com/

I don't know what era a 6th gen Honda Civic comes from, but I just bought a 2011 Honda CR-Z hybrid sports car this year, and I love it. I bought it to supplement my 2012 Toyota Prius-C, which is a pretty awesome hybrid. The Toyota gets way better gas mileage and can cruise in all-electric mode in the city, but the Honda has way more zooms. And the Honda Integrated Motor Assist (IMA) system allows the transmission to be a 6-speed manual (more fun).

On the CR-Z forums and CR-Z subreddit, every prospective buyer worries about the hybrid batteries, but virtually no owner has ever had to replace them. The older NiMH batteries are more reliable than the newer LiON, and the former are that much cheaper to refurbish.

A plugin hybrid seems to be the best way to go for someone who lives in northern Canada and is not a city person. But I don't want to pay the new-car premium price, nor do I want an Internet-connected vehicle sending all that personal data back to the mothership, which they all seem to do.

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.