anodyne33

> I still don't get the point of Chromebooks

Use case scenario that it fills perfectly for me: I'll spend a lot of evenings on my back porch streaming local sports or Youtube.

The short math on my last refurbished Chromebook would have been cents per hour of use I got out of it.

Battery life: Granted I'm using the screen at it's lowest possible (stock) brightness in my scenario, but I get at the very least 6 hours per charge on a 17" display.

If something catastrophic were to happen to it I'm more than happy to replace a ~$100 piece of hardware that's serving one dedicated function for me, and there's 0 data of consequence that I'd be losing. And it's sustained light amounts of rain with no side effects.

tl:dr - brains are weird man

There's a tremendous episode of Radiolab called Fault Line that talks about the effect of a total resection of the Amygdala. It worked out very poorly. I heard it weeks before I was scheduled for a right temporal lobe resection, including Amygdala and it scared the bejeesus out of me. A quick call to my neurosurgeon's coordinator assuaged my fears.

The bilateral resection caused Kluver-Busey syndrome in the patient that Fault Line discusses.

Former epileptic, I've had dozens of MRs and CTs. It's rote for me to see and I never had a visceral reaction and in fact I find it pretty fascinating. The one that I do have that's a standout and quite shocking is my first post-lobeectomy MRI. There's a very noticeable void where my right temporal lobe (+amygdala, cerebellum and hippocampus) were resected. Great conversation starter.

tl;dr my dealer had my car for a week to diagnose an intermittent electrical gremlin.

My maddening intermittent electrical gremlin was with my new to me Mazda3. Occasionally and randomly after in the first few months I had it the throttle would "go to sleep" during normal driving. By that I mean in the process of normal driving I'd suddenly have no throttle response, the car would go to idle, and the only way to get it back was to completely get off the gas pedal and it would respond again as usual. I'm appreciative that worked, but I couldn't shake the idea that if that were to happen during hard acceleration bad things could happen.

My first trip to the dealer yielded a recording in the event log of the throttle shutting off because it saw throttle and brake at the same time, an expected behavior I was told. I assured the mechanic and service manager that I was almost certain this wasn't the case, they had no other explanation, I continued to have the problem and made certain when it happened that I hadn't somehow been on both pedals.

After an email to Mazda's support line with some technical details hoping to get my situation into the right hands, I got a call from the dealer asking to hang onto it until they could replicate the problem.

The service manager or someone else in the shop drove it for the better part of a week, taking real time telemetry while they were in it while I was in a loaner.

Turned out that the problem was the second brake switch hanging on. I found out that there's one switch that talks too the ECU and another that talks to the brake lights, the former being the culprit.

Frustrating as could be, but like a good nerd I found the final diagnosis fascinating. I also wonder and would like to believe that my detailed and informed email to the mother ship made someone pass it up the line until it got into the right hands.

First time I've seen that sketch, but it looks like Popular Science lifted it directly for an article from the 80's that I remember distinctly about Project Aurora.

Having never seen the guts of one before I was surprised to see the difference in wire gauge between the high and low sides of the transformer. In my mind the only difference between the two sides was the number of turns. Huh.

There's A LOT more traffic across the Fern Hollow bridge than if the end destination were a couple of thousand homes. Average daily traffic ca. 2005 was 14.5k vehicles including transit bus routes with articulated buses that nominally carry 70+ at capacity. At rush hour I've been on those buses and they're regularly SRO.

Salto coffee? I visited several years ago in the dead of winter and a hot drink and a snack was nearly as memorable as the carousel.

Google Photos does it for you. Very handy a few years ago, I took a picture of the private wifi password backstage at a bar I used to work at, lost the saved login when I swapped phones. Searched my photos for "Thunderbird" and boom... a picture of text saying "Thunderbird private WIFI password".

Isn't that a bit apples v oranges? I've had a MEG and I'm floored by the technology but would a better analog be a PET? We're looking for two different things, metabolism v saturation but it seems like they're both in the physical or structural realm than the electrical.

As a Windows guy case still seems like a weird thing to worry about.

Reminds me of the time I watched a coworker's head explode when he tried to extract an archive (from a 'Nix environment) on his Windows machine and was indignant about getting duplicate filename errors.

In e-Discovery our metadata is exchanged in csv format almost exclusively with one caveat, the defacto delimiters are Pilcrow and Thorn. We've solved the quote/comma in data problem, but as soon as we start mixing character sets, someone writes a load file in ANSI all hell breaks loose.