bigjimmyk3's comments

bigjimmyk3 | 3 months ago | on: How Quake.exe got its TCP/IP stack

Someone tried running that in one of the campus computer labs when I was a student, and the (probably misconfigured) IPX routers amplified it into... a campus-wide outage. Seems weird to me, but that's what the big sign on the door said the next day.

The perpetrator was never caught.

bigjimmyk3 | 7 months ago | on: How Higher education failed America's poor

I believe my situation was similar to GP's: family on the lower end of middle class, and enough younger siblings to make it a stretch.

I was accepted to a reasonably prestigious university, but ran out of money after the first semester, so I wound up coming home and finishing my degree at a state school.

It's also important to note that the student loan system back then was very different: different guarantors, and non-infinite money.

bigjimmyk3 | 9 months ago | on: Asking about firearm safety during ER admissions: positive results

The post title says "Asking about firearm safety" but the article says that they are _telling_ about safety, after asking about access:

> In the study, researchers introduced standardized firearm safety questions into the electronic medical record (EMR) system, ensuring that healthcare providers consistently inquired about firearm access during behavioral health assessments.

bigjimmyk3 | 9 months ago | on: How to live on $432 a month in America

I grew up in a 1300sf wood heated house, so I have relevant experience here. It does take time to buck, split, load, unload, and stack the wood. It goes faster if you have a small child (me) to help!

We cut wood for our own use and also sold it, so it didn't require 100% of our time to keep the heat on.

bigjimmyk3 | 10 months ago | on: WikiTree: The Free Family Tree

WT's process for living persons attempts to head this off. It's not perfect, but I think it's a pretty good method.

When you enter data about a living person, you are required to include an email which "invites" that person to WikiTree. If they don't respond within 30 days, their record (which was already private) is anonymized to last name and decade of birth.

Each record's privacy is configurable by its maintainer, or by those to whom the maintainer has granted access.

Obviously there are ways to goof this up or act maliciously, but I don't think the site makes intentional doxxing any easier than it already was.

bigjimmyk3 | 10 months ago | on: WikiTree: The Free Family Tree

I agree that familysearch.org is a goldmine for primary sources, I'm very grateful for their digitization initiatives. I'm also glad that there are multiple non-dark-patterned options for people who want to preserve their family history.

bigjimmyk3 | 10 months ago | on: WikiTree: The Free Family Tree

I recently started doing some genealogy work for my family, and I was not excited at the prospect of using most of the paid family tree sites -- dark patterns, etc. I recently ran across this site and it seems much more agreeable. I like the wiki-style collaboration, and the emphasis on primary sources is also a big plus vs "this is what I was told."

bigjimmyk3 | 1 year ago | on: Can hunters' donations help deliver high-quality meat to Colorado food pantries?

I have recent experience with this -- I picked up my son's processed deer yesterday morning. There was a chest freezer at the checkout area advertising Hunters Feeding The Hungry (a similar org that moves donated game meat to local food pantries) and I donated a package of ground venison almost without thinking. I don't think anyone has grand notions of meeting 100% of families' protein needs via wild game.

I grew up eating a substantial amount of venison, along with fish and squirrel.

bigjimmyk3 | 1 year ago | on: Taking a Radio Camping

I did something similar last month; I took my FT-817 with me to scout camp. I wanted to work some FT8 but didn't bring the required doodads with me to hook the radio's audio interface to my Surface Pro X. No problem, I'll just use the mic and speaker on the laptop. To my surprise (and much to the annoyance of my fellow leaders) it worked! wsjt-x is an amazing piece of software.

bigjimmyk3 | 1 year ago | on: Dear Roku, you ruined my TV

Earlier this year my roku-enabled TV started showing some new Terms Of Service, and it wouldn't let me watch anything unless I agreed to them.

...or unplugged it from the network.

Now, it sounds like they may have done me a favor.

bigjimmyk3 | 1 year ago | on: The Last Days of Zork

This seems like something that would fit well into a tablet-sized display with a voice interface -- sort of like a conversational adventure.

bigjimmyk3 | 1 year ago | on: The man who killed Google Search?

> stepped up from working 100 hours a week to working 120 hours

That's 17 hours a day, which seems unlikely (for an extended period of time) without some kind of performance enhancing substance. Also, I'm not sure I'd want to use the end product of that kind of death march for anything important.

bigjimmyk3 | 1 year ago | on: The man who bought Pine Bluff, Arkansas (2022)

I am a lifelong Arkansan, and I hope he is able to pull off some kind of win. I visited that area often as a teen, and Pine Bluff was the main entertainment destination for the region. I haven't been in awhile, but it sounds like the years have not been kind.

I really hope that his analogy to 1980s NYC works out. It's easy to give up when there's so much cultural and institutional inertia, but this guy seems to have a pretty deep well of motivation. I hope he hangs in there.

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