Posts by Gene Cash

Forums

I got lucky when Zuck decided this wasn't my real name and denied me a Faecebook account unless I sent him my driver's license.

I only do forums like this one, The Whiteboard, and a few others. Nobody ever seems to remember they exist.

We all actually mostly know each other and post intelligent, considered comments. Much better than the rest of the crap.

User agents

I've been using a Windows user-agent string for almost a decade, despite the fact I can't even dual-boot Windows.

A lot of sites absolutely lose their shit when they see a non-Windows/non-Apple UA, including my credit union and a couple of my credit cards. I MUST USE AN APPROVED BROWSER even if I'm already using Firefox/Chrome. I've even seen them assume I'm using a mobile browser.

At least I closed my account at the bank (Chase) that was setting .ru and .cn cookies.

I even have to keep updating the version number, as they also tell me to fuck right off if I'm not using the browser release that came out that morning.

Most annoying.

"Big Blue doesn't get it and doesn't care"

Honestly... how clueless is IBM these days?

They were the biggest leaders of the hottest tech in the world and they flushed all that down the drain.

They couldn't arrange a piss up in a brewery. I certainly don't expect them to understand open source or the nuances of a third-party developer community around a product.

It does not look to be hollow

So it's not actually a handbag.

lyrics.ch

Remember when lyrics.ch was shut down in 1999 for just hosting song lyrics?

How come this is legal at all?

"there weren't whooping sirens"

Perhaps there should have been... now janitorial staff aren't usually hired for their ability to reach conclusions, but it might have given him a slight blurred reason why his polisher died and deterred him from plugging it in again.

Nah, who am I kidding.

Heck, even my 3D printer gives an ear-piercing shriek when it detects "thermal anomalies" such as a runaway heatblock or failed thermistor/fan, then it shuts everything off in an attempt to not burn the house down. Obviously it's not a Chinese model.

"Why does my credit card have a hole in it?"

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XH_st471JEU

He keeps his cards in one of those "wallets" attached to the back of the phone, so he disabled the antenna in his cards so it wouldn't interfere with the NFC reader in his phone.

He specifically mentions that he asked his bank for a non-NFC card and they told him to go piss up a rope.

"The chances of this making any discernible difference in performance are minimal"

Actually no... it does keep the system from randomly crashing due to bad microcode.

When I built my current machine, it wouldn't go more than a day and a half without hanging/crashing so I suspected a faulty CPU or motherboard. It's an i7-3770 which should tell you how old my machine is...

I installed the intel-microcode package (which is what this APT change mostly does) and it stopped crashing. (so I guess it actually is a faulty not-working-as-designed CPU, but that's another rant)

And yes, pipewire is crap.

Won't someone please think of the fatties!

"I think making weighing voluntary is the ethical thing to do here."

No, it is not. You'll get just the light people weighing themselves, so they won't have an accurate idea of the plane's weight & balance.

As an Official Fat American Bastard[1], I think aviation safety trumps snowflake feelings.

Besides, they don't give a crap who is fat and who is thin, they're mostly interested in the lump (heh) sum.

1 (255lbs as I have only an 8-bit scale...)

Xbox game consoles, proving wildly successful

Wait, what? Xbox was the 3rd leg for years, and only survived in the beginning by lots of Microsoft money... and HALO.

However, Microsoft hardware has been rock solid in my house. I have a MS folding Bluetooth keyboard where:

* It works with Windows, Android, and iPad/iPhone. All the shortcuts such as home, volume up/down, next/prev app, search, and lock work on all 3 OSes. It switches OS at the press of a button.

* It's survived Logitech and Apple folding Bluetooth keyboards bought at the same time, where the batteries have died and they no longer even turn on.

* The Logitech keyboard broke where it folded.

* It's not a complete PITA to pair.

* The keys are relatively nice, despite having almost zero travel. It doesn't feel like you're tapping on a granite slab like the Logitech and Apple keyboards do.

And all my Microsoft mice have been almost unkillable.

Some of us know how to use do-not-disturb

I have a hard enough time sleeping, so I set do-not-disturb from 10pm until my morning alarm. It rings for anyone in my contacts, but it's otherwise silent, including texts and alerts.

Finally... a feature in Android that's actually useful and actually works.

Another interesting thing is after I saw the alert, the phone asked if I wanted to continue seeing these alerts or not. I wonder how many people said "no"?

Firmware in my MONITOR

So I was stupid enough to buy a Samsung product, a 49" Odyssey monitor. It's flaky as hell, where when it comes back from sleep mode, it randomly flickers hand-size portions of the screen and you have to power-cycle it.

I did a firmware update and now it sporadically just doesn't come back from sleep mode and doesn't respond to the power button or anything except yanking the power cord.

How much of an idiot are you when you can't make a monitor work properly?

"perpetually pinging pager"

Removable batteries were a thing back then. I had a box of dead AAs that could be slotted in for plausible deniability.

5.7 trillion pixels

My 128x48 TRS-80 is going to struggle with that!

Seriously though, I heard about this earlier and it ate up 3 or 4 hours flying around looking at stuff. It really is high resolution, though with my shitty network connection I have to wait for stuff to load.

There are already a couple papers out on stuff that's been noticed in this, where they've been pointed back to the raw data and actually discovered new features.

Mariner IV flew by Mars the day I was born, and the story took up the front page of my hometown paper, so I always have a bit of an affinity for Mars. Plus 80% of the SF stories I read growing up were on Mars or about Martians.

And there's a valley on Duna in KSP in honor of Valles Marineris.

"accounts that have been subject to mass blocking"

You mean like spammers? Gee, that's a shame...

Supposedly they burned through over a billion dollars

April 3 SEC filing: "accumulated deficit over the company’s history of $1.01 billion"

Ouch.

No, it doesn't look like the Shuttle or Buran

But it does look like an X-37.

Also, those landing gear are obviously from the parts bin, just there for the drop test.

It's good to see DBS getting a beating from the authorities. At least on this side of the pond, banks get a pat on the head a "we'll do better next time, right?"

Also there's a metric assload of typos and spelling errors, and still no corrections link.