someonehere

I remember reading that Disney was running XP on Toy Story Mania at Disneyland for the ride itself. When you stand in line near the loading point you can see the computer screen where the operator monitors everything. Not critical or DOS but comical it's doing a basic control of the ride.

Can't stand the UI. I've turned off transparency. I've zoomed in a bit. I heavily use the swipe down search on the Home Screen and it's obnoxious now.

I don't understand why Apple went towards unifying the UI around a failed product (Vision Pro).

The ACR stuff was turned on by default for mine. They are straight up lying.

Bad parenting wins again while everyone else suffers.

I liked my one and ride in Cruise however the problem I had was it took 10 minutes or so for my car to depart.

Car arrives. I get in. The car is sitting there getting ready to depart but not moving. After a few minutes I hit the button to call support. Someone tells me it's about ready to go. Ten minutes later it starts leaving.

I have no idea why it took so long to start but it wasn't a great experience.

If you (or anyone else from Cruise) can explain what was going on, that would settle the difference in experience to me.

The YT channel Space Weather News covered this and the cause. Worth knowing what’s really going on with our universe.

Part of me feels Intel was too high on the horse for years and the little ideas that were innovative were ignored. I knew Intel would be in this condition when Apple decided to move off of Intel. Apple’s switch was the canary in the coal mine. Intel wasn’t innovating and giving Apple what they wanted. So Apple, much like the little guys, found a way to innovate without them.

It’s bizarre, reading people here defending the artificial food dyes. Most of these are derived from petroleum. The stuff that comes out of the ground and powers your car and lubricates gears. It’s in your food and you’re OK with that?

One of the lesser known things about heavily processed dog food is kind of dark. People don’t realize that they use animals from shelters that have been put down in dog food. It’s been a while, but I had read a few years ago that they found three amounts of the medicine they used to put animals down in dog food. I also recall your before that reading that some shelters make money by selling the dead animals they put down to food processing companies.

I was in two different WF over the last few days in different parts of California. Their produce aisles and dairy were really low on inventory. I guess I know why.

I’m glad we’re starting to talk about the prostate because I feel like for a long time. Men have been reluctant to talk about this more and more in society. I feel like women have their fair share problems as they get older, but men have equal amount of problems too we just don’t like to talk about it.

I don’t trust Apple for this exact reason.

For those interested in the silver bullet to backup iCloud.

Get a Mac mini with enough space for your photo library and wire it into your network. Sign into iCloud.

For photos open the app and change the settings to store full res photos locally.

Enable iCloud desktop and documents sync.

Two options

1 - Sign up for Backblaze and ensure you map the folders from iCloud and photos that are being synced to the device. Let it run and do a full sync. I use this option.

2 - Buy an external drive with a lot of space and use Carbon Copy Cloner to mirror your drive. The caveat is your at the mercy of a local copy that a home fire or electrical incident can destroy.

I like Backblaze for the sheer constant syncing it does and they allow me to set up an encryption key so they don’t have access to my data.

If you haven’t been keeping up with Plex, self-hosters like myself and others are up in arms over the client rewrite. It feels like the Sonos update for us. Broken features. Useful functionality removed. UI that’s more streaming focused than self-hosting like it used to be.

If you haven’t gone down the Plex path yet, don’t right now as the community and developers sort out their roadmap. Plex seems to be open to feedback, but a lot of us feel betrayed. They had open user testing for the new apps but they didn’t implement or fix any of the reported issues.

I worked with the guy that created that. It wasn’t at TiVO but a gaming company. He said it was also how they updated the TiVO firmware. It’s been years but I recall him telling the story about how they updated the TiVO using channels that were encoded a specific way.

Before anyone asks, you can buy a TV that’s dumb. Look on Sony or Samsung or business kiosk TVs. I bought some Sony kiosk TVs for conference rooms when building out an office ones. They can be left on forever have the same great quality and cost a little bit more. But they’re dumb in the end and they turn on fast.

I bought an LG a few years ago and connected it to WiFi. I have no idea what I need to program for special wash cycles, but it’s nice getting a notification on my watch when a load is done or having issues.

Almost every Shell station in San Francisco, remodeled and added hydrogen refueling stations about two or three years ago. Now they sit idle or turned off.

If green energy were a money making business, the oil companies would get into it tomorrow.

I still remember the story of an IMAP bug Apple mail had for years and years. I forgot exactly what the bug was that was open with Apple, but Apple’s way of addressing the bug was turning off the feature in an update and closing out the ticket.

ChatGPT has replaced Google searches for me. 15 years ago I could ask Google a question and get a pretty accurate to what I wanted. From there I would rabbit hole into my search.

ChatGPT gives me the answer I need now. From there I can ask more questions and it rabbit holes for me.

Granola. Best meeting app I’ve used. I have a notepad that takes markup I can add myself and it intelligently fills in the notes I wrote.

eg. I put bullet points with something like “updates from Steve?” And do that for everyone during our check in. When the meeting ends it takes all their conversation in the transcript and fills in my markup with the notes.

I’ve attended meetings where I had zero participation and focus on doing something else during the meeting. When it’s over it gives me a detailed summary of the meeting. It felt like I had an assistant taking detailed, ordered notes for me. It’s almost like that scene from the movie Old School. Rodney Dangerfield sent his secretary to stenograph the lecture time so he didn’t have to attend and she gets called out by the professor. Felt just like that kind of transcribing.

I’m using Granola for macOS and it’s limited to that platform. Hoping this is a good windows alternative.

Wondering if anyone out there has an OSS macOS client similar to this one so I can ditch payware.

The show Landman makes good reasoning about green energy being a good investment by energy companies. If green energy made them money they’d get in on it tomorrow.

There’s proof from Federal agencies that they knew the algorithm was intentionally being weaponized to agitate and promote domestic protestors. Just look at the Chinese consulate shut down when 45 was in office last in Texas. It was rumored to be the base of operations for where the Chinese were weaponizing the algorithm against American interests.

Public schools in the US are dependent on federal and state money. Play ball or lose the money. Often the people making the decisions in congressional settings and DOE have personal agendas or money greasing their wheels. Remember the hubbub on Common Core? Teach common core or lose money.

Cruise. Around YouTube for older videos and connect the dots on how Common Core was a money grab that set us back a bit.

Go to local schools and see how school boards tie their ideology to how schools and classrooms are run to get that money. For years in San Francisco you enroll in the school lottery and hope you get to send your kid to the school close enough to you. Otherwise you spend 45 minutes each way to drop them off at school. On top of that classrooms cater to the lowest performing student. What parents with money wind up doing is sending their kids to Kumon like learning centers to fix the gap the classroom has in pushing their kid to be engaged with learning.

With everything else schools are also penalized for suspending or expelling students so teachers have to find creative ways to keep the bad apples away from everyone else.

For context I have family and friends working in public schools across differ states. There’s a reason people want to abolish the DOE and return curriculum back to the local school districts or the state.

I went to an ok school district and didn’t experience any of the problems today’s kids seem to face in school. People got suspended or expelled for being bad. Classrooms didn’t show political or biological ideology to the students.

I’m on a Ex-Facebook employee group on FB. The amount of upset former employees is beyond belief.

In summary, FB was pressured in 2016 to act on “foreign influence” the press hysterically parroted by politicians and leaders. FB bowed to the pressure. Now that the press lost all validity along with the X purchase, the press can no longer persuade Meta to “fact check.” FB is in a better spot to follow the X model of moderation. People arguing this is a bad move are ignoring the fact that FB was a censorship hotbed for the last four years.

Because of a similar post a few years back I learned you can buy kiosk TVs from commercial vendors. They strip the garbage apps and leave you with a dumb TV. It wasn’t really that much more either. Used them for new conference room TVs for an office build out. They work and last flawlessly.

For those thinking they’re off the shelf drones or some other type of consumer drone, they’ve been reported to be the size of an SUV.

Also I learned from the a recent JRE with Marc Andressen that the US really doesn’t make consumer drones domestically because of regulations but China is allowed to import them here. But still not to say someone isn’t making them at home on their own.

Cruise was garbage when I rode them. Sat in the car for ten minutes waiting for it to go. Someone over the car speakers said they were doing something to get my ride ready. I could have walked to my next destination but wanted to give them a chance.

Waymo has been a little less expensive than Uber/Lyft for me. I just saw a Zoox autonomous vehicle today. That weird looking box with no drivers seat.

For some reason when Apple moved to their own SOC I knew this would be one of the nails in the death of the company. A few other blunders on their part and here we are.