rbobby

Usually isn't addiction also defined in terms of some harm to the person? Damaging relationships, getting fired, going broke, and so forth.

And having some guidance that Bob spending too much time on the internet is something serious and should follow an addiction recovery treatment plan is a net good thing (by a lot).

> £700 set

That's a shocking price.

There can be only one: The Elements of Programming Style

> heard on a ~weekly

Could be a function of media. US media loves to scare its audiences.

For my 1 man shop... Crash, High, Low, Cosmetic.

Crash means fix right away. High means top of the list, if there are no crash bugs. Low and cosmetic are whenever (as interest or opportunity affords).

> spacer.gif

Guilty

>     

Guilty (habitual offender)

> it will probably double in size in a week and reach 1×1 cm in a month

TIL it takes a long time to grow a perfect salt crystal of any size.

There should be an SMS option on phones that does an automatic reply "Your message to rbobby could not be delivered because rbobby is not working right now. If you'd like your message delivered anyway a charge of $9.95 will apply. Reply to send your message and be charged $9.95"

I did my "corporate" picture and it came out looking like I had been badly beaten and with really bad teeth (100 years of coffee and cigarettes). Bit of a blow to the self-esteem.

Just not anime material I guess.

Bill Gates comes out looking a bit like Ellen DeGeneres.

The naming for .NET got tough when it was decided that open source and cross platform was the way forward. If that had not happened it would all be called .NET framework to this day.

HODL Umbrella?

If the pandemic has taught me anything, it's that the strangest thing about a zombie outbreak will be the zombie supporters.

And it appears to be FREE!

Wait... electron isn't cross-platform?

PDP11's were pretty great machines. Using RSTS/E (resource sharing time sharing... Eeeee!) you could really stretch things out.

The process memory was limited to 32kb (maybe 64kb... can't recall) and the OS's executable system supported seamless overlays. Basically as needed the OS would swap in different code segments (min 4k?). With careful planning you could build some pretty big applications... so long as you could get descent separation. You *could* swap overlays over and over and over... but this would kill any sort of performance... best to swap in a "AR" overlay, and when the user switches to "GL" swap that overlay in.

The machine language was also pretty nice. Several addressing modes were program counter relative which was amazing (eg. JMP to 1500 words from current PC) . When I first learned that that windows loads an executable and then goes through and fixes up memory addresses so JMP instructions (et al) would work I could hardly believe it. If only the x86's had decent support for a PC relative addressing mode :)

And the Digital Equipment Corp documentation! Glorious. A wall of shelves, 10 feet long, 7 feet tall, filled with 3 inch binders explaining everything in detail! Shivers!!

Microsoft's online documentation is the closest thing in quality to the old DEC stuff.

> So it was still my job to sit on the floor and in the middle of the room to be the “wireless” portion of the remote

Those were the days

(the archie bunker theme)

:)

... and more channels.

In the dawn of time, also known as my childhood, there were 2 channels. Then 3. TV's had dials and it was my job, like so many other youngest children, to turn them. Then cable came and there were a lot of channels. So many channels you needed the newspaper's TV schedule to figure out what to watch. No more flipping between 2 or 3 channels hoping for something better. Planned viewing had arrived. No more sitting by the TV, spinning through channels, and getting clouted for spinning to fast because you'll break it! And finally, freeing children everywhere from the tyranny of the dial, remote control! No longer chained to the TV, children could return to lounging on the comfy family room chesterfields.

Never forget that cable, and the TV remotes it spawned, freed millions of children from spinning TV dials!

My fax line, which I need because my bank can't email me a wire payment notification, still gets spam.

> spare coiled sex bed.

Not what I'm used to reading on HN.

> the mattress weighs about 300 lbs

That's ridiculous.

and now it's mine

And thinking on this... a timeout is the right answer if facebook's dns servers are missing in action.

If I do:

    nslookup
    > server 8.8.8.8
    Default Server:  dns.google
    Address:  8.8.8.8
    > facebook.com
    Server:  dns.google
    Address:  8.8.8.8

    DNS request timed out.
        timeout was 2 seconds.
    DNS request timed out.
        timeout was 2 seconds.
    *** Request to dns.google timed-out    

Weird.

No body/bury = good

> safe for the another month

Not so fast there buddy. Best check what autocompletes for "how to dispose of a b..." and "best place to b...".

It wants me to download some app to change my desktop background?!? What is MS teaching people about safe internet browsing.

I quite like that the omni box will do math and unit conversions. So handy, so simple.

Buy a cheap hand held battery operated wireless barcode scanner (cheap on AliExpress). These work really well for scanning stacks of books... pick the book up, zap, put the book down. You have to config the scanner to operate in "keyboard" mode or some such... basically what you scan gets typed as if from a keyboard.

I used a simple Excel macro for data capture and lookup. Basically when a cell changed (book was scanned) it would request the book data from outpan.com. If outpan didn't know the upc beep and return to the cell, otherwise decode the response (json) and populate the spreadsheet row.

Here's the excel macro (why I used the B column instead of the A column is a longer story):

    Private Sub Worksheet_Change(ByVal Target As Range)
        If Target.Cells.Count <> 1 Then
            Exit Sub
        End If
        
        If Application.Intersect(Range("B2:B99999"), Range(Target.Address)) Is Nothing Then
            Exit Sub
        End If
        
        Dim Ean
        Ean = CStr(Target.value)
        
        Dim Url
        Url = "https://api.outpan.com/v2/products/" + Ean + "?apikey=[haha get your own key haha]"
    
        Dim HttpRequest
        Set HttpRequest = CreateObject("MSXML2.XMLHTTP")
        HttpRequest.Open "GET", Url, False
        HttpRequest.Send
            
        Set json = New VbsJson
        Set o = json.Decode(HttpRequest.ResponseText)
        If Not IsEmpty(o("error")) Then
            Beep
            ActiveCell.Offset(-1, 0).Select
        Else
            booktitle = o("name")
            If IsNull(booktitle) Then
                Beep
                ActiveCell.Offset(-1, 0).Select
            Else
                If IsVarArrayEmpty(o("attributes")) Then
                    Author = ""
                    PublishedOn = ""
                Else
                    If IsEmpty(o("attributes")("Author(s)")) Then
                        Author = ""
                    Else
                        Author = o("attributes")("Author(s)")
                    End If
                    If IsEmpty(o("attributes")("Publication Date")) Then
                        PublishedOn = ""
                    Else
                        PublishedOn = o("attributes")("Publication Date")
                    End If
                End If
                
                Cells(Target.Row, Target.Column - 1).value = Cells(Target.Row - 1, Target.Column - 1).value
                Cells(Target.Row, Target.Column + 1).value = booktitle
                Cells(Target.Row, Target.Column + 2).value = Author
                Cells(Target.Row, Target.Column + 3).value = PublishedOn
            End If
        End If
    End Sub
    
    
    Function IsVarArrayEmpty(anArray As Variant)
        Dim i As Integer
        If IsObject(anArray) Then
            IsVarArrayEmpty = False
        Else
            On Error Resume Next
            i = UBound(anArray, 1)
            If Err.Number = 0 Then
                If i < 0 Then
                    IsVarArrayEmpty = True
                Else
                    IsVarArrayEmpty = False
                End If
            Else
                IsVarArrayEmpty = True
            End If
        End If
    End Function

edit: you will need VbsJson from http://demon.tw/my-work/vbs-json.html (why that's a chinese page I don't know all I know was it was a single file json parser that was easy to work with for this).

edit2: I used this solution to scan and log 750 books in a couple of hours? Maybe 3? It went pretty quick.

> Shockingly, Pinky was the one who ultimately answered the question correctly, and it's also shown that Pinky can read, whereas the Brain can barely write his own name.

Pinky doesn't answer the final question:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Bgt1X6qXTKs

And I think the way Brain wrote his name was a parody of how Jeopardy guests can get extravagant with their signatures.