Recent submissions

Comment · 10 months ago
I needed something like this for my basement home office. But I was lazy, so rather than actually building anything, I just bought some color-changing light bulbs ($7 on Amazon including remote) and installed them on the basement stairs. If I have a do-not-disturb meeting, I make the light red.
Comment · 10 months ago
This is wrong. Exact weights vary with trim levels, but Model are around 4000 lbs. and Suburbans are around 6000 lbs.
Comment · 11 months ago
A great book, but I read it too late, after I had already learned pretty much everything it says the hard way. So it was one of those books I enjoyed because it reinforced what I already thought, but didn't really get much from. Wish it had been written a decade earlier.
Comment · 11 months ago
Minor spoilers. (I've ascended but that was a long time ago so some of my NetHack knowledge might be outdated.)

You can mostly trust your pet. But you can't totally trust your pet, because there are some foods that are good for pets but not for @.

One is tripe. I don't get tripe in my pho because NetHack told me it's dog food.

Another is whatever species you are. If you're a human and eat human, or an elf and eat elf, you might get smitten for cannibalism. It's fine for your dog or cat to eat human or elf though.

And there's also the edge case of almost-spoiled food. If your pet eats one of a group of corpses on turn n, and you eat another on turn n+1, it's possible that yours rotted in the meantime. Either because n was the exact limit, or because it was close and yours died a few turns before theirs.

Comment · 11 months ago
Cool. I used an HP48SX in college, and when it finally died about 20 years later, bought 2 HP48Gs so I'd have a Lifetime Supply. (1 is on my desk, 1 is still in the box.) But I confess that hardly ever use my real HP48G anymore, because I have the Droid48 Android app, and the 99% perfect calculator that's always at hand is better than the 100% perfect calculator that's on a shelf way over there, most of the time.

So I doubt I'll buy this one, even though I'm happy someone made it.

Comment · 1 year ago
It varies a lot depending on how much you have enabled. The distro kernels that are designed to support as much hardware as possible take a long time to build. If you make a custom kernel where you winnow down the config to only support the hardware that's actually in your computer, there's much less code to compile so it's much faster.

I recently built a 6.17 kernel using a full Debian config, and it took about an hour on a fast machine. (Sorry, I didn't save the exact time, but the exact time would only be relevant if you had the exact same hardware and config.) I was surprised how slow it still was. It appears the benefits of faster hardware have been canceled by the amount of new code added.

Comment · 1 year ago
I'd like to see more effective anti-fingerprinting. I know it's just an arms race though.
Comment · 1 year ago
The phone vendors should support not telling the websites you're on mobile. I know they can guess based on resolution and such, but there should be a setting to lie and simulate a desktop. You can't rely on every single website not being run by jerks, but you should be able to buy a phone from a company that cares more about its customers than random jerks.
Comment · 1 year ago
Dumb TVs are still being made. I bought this Sharp commercial TV just last year: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0CCMXNRFH

Of course they're not mass-market and will be lacking on some other bullet point features, but if you really care about your TV not turning into an ad billboard in 2 years, they're the way to go.

Comment · 1 year ago
We do have unit prices, but sometimes they vary the unit from product to product within the same product category, making them useless for comparison. This one is by weight, this one is by volume, this one is by count. At that point you have to do all the math yourself, which most people won't.

I don't know whether that's done intentionally. Hanlon's Razor says to assume not without proof.

Comment · 1 year ago
Istanbul's not Constantinople.
Comment · 1 year ago
Yes, the term you're looking for is "reverse debugging". It exists, and it's better.
Comment · 1 year ago
Check out LibreWolf and see if its defaults come closer to what you want. For me, it's better. I still have to modify a few settings, but not nearly as many as with vanilla Firefox.
Comment · 1 year ago
Yes, many people make many claims. You should think about which ones to believe.
Comment · 1 year ago
Consumer Reports buys all the items they review, anonymously.

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