Kozmik1's comments

Making CarPlay for boats would not be so hard, but making Waze for recreational boats might be. But if you have ideas on that and are sure you can avoid directing people into deadly obstacles, considering all sea and weather conditions, in all kinds of boats, give it a go!

In the US Commercial Tug & Barge market, Rose Point Navigation (out of Redmond, WA) has a near 100% saturation of the navigation software market. Why does nobody disrupt them? The overlap between experts in software and experts in vessel navigation is pretty low. Take a look at the technical specifications of their platform here and see if you can crack that out in a weekend: https://www.rosepoint.com/rose-point-ecs/

In recreational vessels, our needs are more basic, but even us geeks may be more prone to shell out $500 - $2000 to Garmin or Raymarine for a hardened chart plotter MFD that "just works", is waterproof, and robust at least in the nav function. I got a "deal" on a Raymarine Axiom Pro which has both touchscreen and a keypad mode for when the rain interferes with the display, has nav, ais, radar, sonar display, engine gauges, and tons of other features, it is running some version of Android. It's really good honestly. When the wind is howling and the waves are high, it's not necessarily a good time to do some hacking and bug hunting on the nav platform. I do plenty hacking on my boat in the sensor integration world, but that's another story...

If you want to reduce risk, I don't suggest spending more time at sea, or buying boats.

Does Slack actually open on Plasma 6?

I was in Cape Town, South Africa last week working from my mobile hotspot during one of the rolling power blackouts and Gmail and Slack on the web browser were both so slow they were effectively dead. I was hunting around (with poor connectivity) and for the life of me could not find the link to the HTML version of gmail from my laptop. I supposedly had "5G" from my T-Mobile International Data Pass.

Also sometimes phone calls and very frequently SMS messages would not go through in many parts of South Africa including Cape Town. I still received mail through my IMAP connections and we switched to Whatsapp for work communications, which appears to be stable for most any low bandwidth or intermittent connectivity situation. Through my 1 week in Africa I didn't miss any messages at all on Whatsapp and was able to send messages any time I had signal. Whatsapp voice calls worked pretty well. Slack on my mobile seemed to work but I was not sure if it was synching in real time. Slack voice calls I was told were pretty bad from my side.

We've seen a huge rise in Whatsapp use recently when working in our colleagues in less developed areas.

I initially loathed dealing with "yet another messaging app" when people started using Whatsapp, but it's great to see a tool that's robust enough to work in non-optimal connectivity.

Try one of the following on your Macbook: - replace a battery - upgrade the memory or SSD/NVME - get your data off a Macbook whose motherboard has died

In other words, do any of the common repairs. To spend top dollar for a laptop and not be able to do repairs is rubbish: intentional planned obsolescence and vendor lock-in IMO.

Salvador Dali would love this.

Check out those prices! That Atari 800 at $699 would be $2,150 today adjusted for inflation. I guess it was pretty capable but today you could have a hell of a computer for that price!

The sewing machine at $300 is $920 today and looks basic as heck. I bought a computerized sewing machine last year for $400 which sews 40 stitches and is basically automated. You could get a basic Singer today for 85 bucks.

Those microwaves would come in at about $1,200 in today’s dollars. Most of us spend about $50 on one today, granted the quality is probably crap.

How did people afford to buy anything back then? I recall my parents getting the Beta Max player, big 30” TV and satellite dish back in the early 1980s (we lived in the country). Throw in a stereo and a few kitchen appliances and I think it would rival what they paid for our house!

My small town carnival in Wachapreague, Virginia, had a ride in the 1980s called (most likely from research and my fading memory) the Fly-o-Plane in which you climbed inside a similar metal can on arms and rotate around an axis while having the ability to tilt the 'wings' to mostly change the roll of the plane. If you were pretty aggressive you could fly basically upside down the whole ride. I LOVED it! There were certainly quite a few of the planes that ended up dripping vomit. I was quite sad to visit that fairground this year with my kids to see the planes no longer exist.

Here is a video of a similar ride in Georgia. Is it still there? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lWZwda9_8pc&ab_channel=rtrav...

Atlas Obscura talks about several of these type rides over the years in amusement parks: https://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/classic-carnival-rides...

"Ok team, today we're going to learn how to close all those pop-up windows that appear when you turn your Mac on. Remember, just hit 'Remind me tomorrow'."

It's amazing that Microsoft works so hard on this bs, but does zero to have Excel support copying newline separated (or comma separated, otherwise clearly dilineated) text pop into Excel properly on paste, something that would actually be useful!

What is the annual maintenance cost on a Mercedes?

I prefer to use AmScope objectives in my 3D printed microscope, but my kids find all kind of wonders using the cheap PiCam setup. I think it’s about equivalent to 20x objective magnification.

Actually the magnification is shockingly good, enough to find tardigrades and microorganisms. The Raspberry Pi Cam is the default low cost sensor option of the OpenFlexure 3D printed microscope which for less cost than this Lego kit competes with extremely expensive lab grade microscopes.

In OpenFlexure PiCam mode, the lens from the PiCam is removed and inverted and spaced at a distance, giving a higher magnification than the digital camera in default configuration.

https://opg.optica.org/DirectPDFAccess/445C5C67-0A08-4C06-8A...

I was beginning to have back pain this summer after working very long hours sitting and with a lot of stress, and I thought my general weakness and lack of exercise was to blame.

I started an 8-week push-up challenge in which I found my max amount of push-ups without stopping (30) and then did 4 times that many (120) in a row, however long it took, gradually reducing the rest time between the sets. I did this 4 days per week. After that process I gained a lot of strength in 8 weeks and ability to do 40 push-ups without stopping. I've now switched to doing my maximum once or twice per day and increasing by 5 every couple weeks. I'm currently at 70, having a hard time going higher, but really feel incredible level of upper body strength from neck to back to abdomen, and am being more careful with my food choices as well. I think I'm now ready to do some more varied exercises, including cardiovascular and other things that challenged me earlier.

I find as I'm getting older it's really not worth sacrificing your body for engineering gains, I have too many tech friends who have chronic and sometimes debilitating pain and injuries as a result of the career. What's the point of great accomplishments in technology, career, and wealth if you can't enjoy them because of a broken body?

I encourage everyone to find an exercise routine that fits your lifestyle. Push-ups were great for me because I needed no equipment and could fit it easily into my work from home day, and target the areas of my body that were feeling weak.

US Dad of 2. We had a doula for our first child, she was hugely helpful, even in a hospital birth. Highly recommend!

I think the best learning experience is seeing you can still build and repair a computer yourself, so I had my 8yr old kid build his own gaming PC from scratch (with me standing by for guidance). We were about $1200 in with parts: motherboard, cpu, ram, nvme, chassis, dvd-rom, etc.

Then he got to help as we installed dual-boot Ubuntu and Windows, with Ubuntu being default :)

In windows I installed some games I felt ok about. Microsoft Flight Simulator, Kerbal Space Program, Pokemon TCG, his school office apps. But I only let him run Minecraft on the Linux side, so he will have to boot there and sort it out from time to time, with the bonus of a Minecraft server environment we've hacked a bit.

We're no longer in the 80s, that's for sure! But I think focusing on learning the components of hardware/software in computing are better done on a desktop than a laptop or tablet. There's really nothing to be learned in today's repair-hostile walled gardens.

Can anyone moving from the US to Europe speak to the non-white experience? I’m interested in the UK specifically. We understand that the UK has some pretty harsh anti-hate crime and anti-hate speech laws on the books, but what is life like as a professional American person of color making a change from the US to the UK?

Is anyplace outside London considered inclusive?

Try the Surgeon's Knot instead: https://www.fieggen.com/shoelace/surgeonknot.htm

As others have mentioned, Ian's knots has great reccommendations, but overlooked is the "surgeon's knot".

This one has two twists instead of the normal one, and comes out like a square knot if done right. It won't come untied by itself, ever. But you can untie it by tugging on the tails of the laces. You can do this one with a thumb on the initial bend, unlike the "bunny ears" style knots.

It's a hell of a lot better than the "double knot" your kids' teachers will do if they go to school with any kind of single knot, square or not. Double knotting just results in big jams when one tries to untie it later.

Check out the surgeon's knot: https://www.fieggen.com/shoelace/surgeonknot.htm