romdev

A chicken?

I love that Newsblur correctly removed the SCRIPT tag and everything following it. The Company's name is "> in my feed. Respect!

1080P resolution (per eye) for a virtual 100" display? I can't work on a 1080P laptop now without swapping and resizing windows constantly. It would be frustrating to have all that screen real estate and not be able to use it. I also wonder what "per eye" means. Are there wholly different pictures in each (yikes) or just enough to simulate 3D?

Finding and eliminating duplicates is a very common software problem that is rarely solved in a reusable, user-friendly way that preserves history while eliminating redundant data. In fact, in 40 years of working with computers I can't think of a single UI that I'd want to emulate.

I'm meticulous about tagging and backing up MP3s for different mixes in car stereos and other devices. One problem is that I have so many MP3s and different copies I don't know which are tagged and when they were ripped. I prefer to retain the file's modified date when I just update tags so I'll know how old the rip is - bit rates have increased a bit since last century.

I wrote a Powershell script that sets the date a minute newer when it updates ID3 V1 tags so I can compare files and know that one came from 2005 and has had metadata updated since then. I haven't found a bulk tagger that does this.

From Tim Ferris' 'The 4-hour Body', an even more important tool for toning and weight loss is to stay cold. Olympic swimmers consume more calories than the average athlete even though their exertion is less. A pool is kept well below body temperature and your body uses those calories to keep itself warm. His advice was to sleep with a sheet instead of a blanket, unless you're swimming 5 hours a day.

Clicked because I thought at first this was a retro computing post about a Commodore cassette tape drive. Thanks for the intro to this useful tool.

I've got mixed feedback on this. I had a house fire a few years back where all my paper literature was soaked, and stayed in water for days to weeks. Books, and especially my comic book collection consisting of Sandman and other very collectible treasures, were transmuted to a soupy, unreadable mess. It was a very emotional time salvaging what little I could of these gifts from friends and family. Interestingly the 5.25" and 3.5" floppies from 1990 and prior were in water tight containers, but I knew from previous attempts to recover data from them that I'd be wasting my time trying to get ancient BBS text files from them. Digital media will expire, but I've got IDE hard drives from 30 years ago that have fared pretty well, and thankfully I had the foresight to duplicate the magnetic media that has a known shelf life to media that might survive a bit longer. And data grows in size and scale, so a 20MB hard drive from the 80s is pretty easy to preserve as long as you're organized, and plan, and don't procrastinate too long. But thinking about it - like life, isn't data meant to expire? Maybe your descendants will appreciate a few pictures of you, and some journal entries or your great novel draft. But I have no interest even in my mom's or Hemingway's kindergarten buddies. And especially if there are published books on a shelf, they're almost always replaceable. Think of who will be cleaning out your house when you die while you curate your data, and try to preserve what's of greatest worth to you and that audience.

And finally, last time I visited my father he showed me a 6" thick bible that had been in the family since the early 1800s, with beautiful fonts, colored illustrations, and the first few blank pages filled with marriage and birth records. There are some books that can't be replaced or duplicated, and should be cherished like a child.

That used to be called a 'seagull manager' - one who flies in, sh*ts on everything and flies away.

This works on HN and most other sites:

javascript:(function() { var tag = document.createElement('style'); tag.type = 'text/css'; document.getElementsByTagName('head')[0].appendChild(tag); tag[ (typeof document.body.style.WebkitAppearance=='string') ? 'innerText' : 'innerHTML'] = '* { background-color: white !important; color: #444 !important; } html { filter: invert(100%) grayscale(100%); }'; })();

Maybe it's the fact that we all realize our mortality, and the benefit that it has on a species. Nature has built into us a few limiters to over-flourishing, like it has for many other species: a short life-span with expendable body components - we've overcome that with medicine and other life-extending tech. A disinterest in procreation - we're trending in that direction but the procreators are probably gonna win that battle. Limited resources - science is finding ways to exploit new resources while diminishing the quality of life for all.

I'm a drinker and proud of the contributions I still make to society, but also that I won't hang on for too long past my invitation to stay on this rock. There are people better than me who should occupy it.

I used to work at a company that had dozens of SQL tables for similar data - if there was a selection box in their app there was a table to represent it. I had a very productive meeting with the young (CSLA-trained) programmers on my way out, saying that we could have a single table for all lookup values. The schema went from a giant, whiteboard-covering diagram to a neat 8.5x11 single sheet diagram, resulting in a lot of reused code and data. Maybe there's more than Things and Data in real life, but there is a pretty good medium between "new table for each thing" and "each thing is just another thing row"