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:) For anyone else who doesn't recognize this: https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0138704/

Drop oil on lava.

The effect is worth it.

This was a nice reminder to delete my account.

I have mostly stopped using Google Gmail because they still can't do something simple like... I don't know... sort by sender? They keep changing the interface, but they never seem to improve the utility.

I have heard that the HQ2 is supposed to be a kind of "domed city." If it is Crystal City, Amazon HQ2 has started a infrastructure formation using a subscription with a DCaaS.

This story comes out every fall for every major-ish November election period. The resolution is always the same: WONTFIX.

Additionally: Digging trenches and planting at the appropriate time have long been known to be useful in these arid places.

https://permaculturenews.org/2008/11/19/desert-ways/

How do you blacklist the site? Because I'm thinking that would be an interesting extension or browser feature of an anti-bookmark.

America is developing in exactly the way the systems we like to use dictate they should grow.

Here it is a transportation issue--in the opposite way you might think. Older towns in the mid-west are spaced apart roughly 6-miles because you would only be able to travel by horse about 20-miles in a day. Naturally, you would want to be able to do "things" in the next town so you don't travel the entire day just to turn around and go back home. So, towns spread out about 6-miles and slowly grow. Bigger towns grew faster and smaller towns stayed the way they are. Bring in interstates and railroads and suddenly some towns, if they had nothing "going for them" never grow again or shrink--they're completely bypassed.

People leave town for the opportunities, so opportunities have little need for these towns except for the occasional externality: e.g. a massive chicken processing or pet-food rendering plant no one wants to live near.

Dollar General has found a dirt-easy strategy and picks up this easy money because this is essentially a structural problem with people who have tied themselves too closely to the land and governments that can't solve their problems.

Just walked through a Dollar General store today while waiting for lunch. They make Big Lots stores feel like Nordstrom.

If you are struggling I can see the appeal of the "low prices" but the value of what you can get there isn't so great.

I think it's because government and electrical utility systems have a weird regulatory setup. Many utility systems have to petition to alter their prices with these governments. No one ever asks to "reduce" prices voluntarily in most systems like this. So this must have the long-term effect of propping up prices where it is hard to compete for business where everyone is supposed to charge the same "approved" rate for energy in a given market.

They are down to nine system calls, perhaps they can "pledge" the rest away after the container bootstraps? I am thinking of what OpenBSD has been designing:

https://man.openbsd.org/pledge.2

This would make a lot of sense, they essentially get a "game day" with actual sales, make a lot of money and a few months to prepare for the next wave of seasonal mob-shopping.

I don't think they're using Perl anymore however.

This made me smile. :) This is very close to to Poe's law as well, because after all, who can tell for sure if something that simply just went-wrong was intentional or not?

After reading Ryan Holiday's "Trust Me I'm Lying" and knowing how well AWS usually handles surges of traffic, I am not so sure that this isn't a marketing stunt that gets them an amazing amount of press. Cynical?

The website doesn't demonstrate it on the "front" page. But the effect is so subtle I didn't even notice it on the "individual"'s page, probably due to a color display limitation of a laptop screen.

I would have put a "side-by-side" comparison of the same text on pages like this to make it more prominent--one with the beeline effect and one without.

Is there an explanation of what a "beelinereader" is? Their website is heavy on the selling and lacking on the details and I'm not installing something blindly.

WRT emptying the inbox as completely as you can: Unsubscribing everything you can that you receive e-mail is a big deal. I don't even care if you're a fan of the product or blog, unsubscribe from the mailing lists. Just do it. You won't appreciate it initially, but give it about two weeks. It's like the TiVo effect: you don't realize how nice it is until you have let the process incubate for a period of time.

Combined with how well anti-spam has been working for e-mail I am amazed at how useful e-mail has become again. There was a time when I would have received 30-50 "extra" e-mails a week that I would have to spend micro-calories ignoring until I decided to clean the inbox. If you can keep them out of the inbox to begin with, do it.

This is the "homework" that is often given out by organizations looking to hire people that filters out those who "can" and those who "cannot."

Firefox Quantum is almost perfect except occasionally something pegs it to 100% CPU making it unresponsive on a lower power laptop. I'm disappointed when Google Hangouts reminds me that they have not made it work with anything not-Chrome and I have to start it up.

ABC. Always be closing. Closing on skills, demos, phone calls, e-mails.

Just finished a Node.js "assessment" for a job opportunity and uploaded it to my Github. I may never touch it again, but there it is.

I have an old tablet that doesn't seem to "catch" new updates from Samsung anymore. Perhaps it would be worth rooting or something just to get it current? I would "upgrade" the software if it was available. Buying new hardware isn't something I will do in most situations--the device has to become non-functional before I consider it.

I've been using the developer edition of Firefox and have been finding it to be a joy. It is very odd how Chrome stopped having the "knack" of being extremely fast.

Edge on Windows 10 claimed to be fast, but I think that it was doing more "cheating" with the UX than actually being fast.

Would be interesting to see how this would translate into a memristor-based CPU in the future.

Paper is fantastic for auditing and archival. You can't sanitize your dirty deeds if you can't prevent your sins from appearing on the souls of dead trees locked in their fire-proof chambers. Until we start using content-hashing for everything you cannot trust the "permanence" of bits because you cannot detect their tampering. Faxing is 90% dead as far as I can tell. I've got a fax machine, I think the last time I plugged it in was 2008.

Most of the lack of innovation in printers (and scanners) comes from the problem that, once you've bought their hardware, there is no incentive to make the software that ships-by-default with it great. The innovation isn't the hardware, the innovation is waiting, stuck between the hardware and the operating system (e.g. why does my Brother mysteriously screw up my right margins on Windows?) and stuck between the application and the user. The operating-system printing dialogs are way too complicated for mere users and the printer-manufacturer's printing-dialogs are mostly rebranded operating-system printing dialogs. Users just want their bits to burn onto their paper, appropriately and reliably.

You know, it might not be such a bad idea to make a printer-bot ala a RepRap that allowed you to put any writing instrument you wanted into the cross-hairs and slowly draw out your documents like a plotter. The ink might be "cheaper" that way and it would be kind of fun to watch 8 of them on your wall draw your documents concurrently.

The east side of Kansas surrounding Kansas City is hardly flat. It's no Utah, but flat? Kansas City most certainly is not that.

The drive down to Witchita from Topeka certainly has its own class of wonderful views akin to what you would experience between Heber and Orem in Utah. These are just different scales of horizon, and both are enjoyable.

What would be really nice though, in the Kansas City area, if there was more light-pollution discipline to maybe bring back the experience of seeing the Milky Way again, without a long-ish drive.

Don't have Github account so I can't place an issue there, but PDF export appears to fail with source-code listings in the Gaia theme.

Otherwise, this application is simple and to the point for making quick slide sets. I wonder if someone will invest the time to make a Go-lang style slide theme.

Indeed.

When I launched the replay of the live stream at whatever point it was, when I heard the wild cheering I knew they had finally landed a first-stage at sea before I even saw the footage of that supersonic toothpick landing.

Bloomberg's headline leaves out the condition "in April and May."

At least it states the reason why in the first paragraph: hydro-generation is at risk because of a prolonged drought.

Aim an EMP beam at the enemy's anti-drone EMP's... then unleash hell.