gxx's comments

Could it be that Facebook and social media in general are the cause?

https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2012/05/is-face...

"Likes" and reading narcissistic postings probably are not a good substitute for real human contact, and the more people become addicted to social media the less real human contact they are likely to seek. Of course companies like Facebook and Google (YouTube) purposely design their offerings to be addictive and as we know additions can be detrimental to one's mental and physical health.

The Macbook trackpad has by far the best horizontal scrolling of any pointing device. I could not live without it. (If anyone knows a better solution please tell me. I'm always looking for new options.)

It's great for spreadsheets. I even use the Macbook trackpad for 3D CAD. I used to use a spaceball and mouse, but the trackpad plus modifier keys is more convenient because it keeps the hands to the keyboard.

I wonder if this will help to refill some of the depleted aquifers.

A human may not be able to catch fish either on the first try. Even for humans it takes practise...

Developing the first completely new class of wind instrument mouthpiece introduced in recorded history. For wind instruments there are reed mouthpieces, double reed, jet reed, lip reed, etc. These have all existed in various forms for millenia. My design, based on over 15 years of research uses optical sensing to very precisely measure multiple dimensions of the embouchure.

It will be available in the form of a hands-free music controller supported on what we call the "neck unit" or on a variety of hand-held units of different fingering styles that we call "finger units".

USB C connectors are rated for a life of 10,000 cycles the same as USB micro. If your computer has only two USB C ports, especially if one is always used for charging leaving only one for general use, they will wear out faster than if you had a say a power jack and two or three USB ports plus maybe an HDMI port.

Soon after buying a 2016 Macbook Pro quicly I learned from personal experience how fragile thekeyboards were. Ater it was repaired under warranty I quickly sold it and bought two maxed out 2015 MacBook Pros hoping they would last until Apple got around to fixing the keyboard. It looks like my bet will be rewarded.

Also contributing to my decision is that the Touch Bar did not work for me at all. I have less than perfect eyesight. I need keys with tactile feedback and that don't move around to be sure I'm sure I'm accurately hitting the right key.

I do still have a non-touchbar 13 inch 2017 MacBook Pro that I use from time to time. I move around a lot and work in many locations. I've cursed Apple many times when suddenly needing to connect to an older USB or HDMI device but not having my dongle collection with me this time... The need to carry dongles seems like a kludge that detracts from the elegrant compactness the computer itself.

For years I've been buying "Snuglets" and using them on my magsafe connectors to make them more secure. http://www.snuglet.com/ They are a cool little product making the cable less easy to pull out but still able to come out if pulled a bit harder. On probably a total of eight or more Macbooks over the years I've never had the cable pull the jack too hard or have the cable break. Highly recommended...

The sharp edges are a crystal clear example of Ive's pursuit of form over function. It's insane to have sharp edges that users may touch with their wrists, especially the sharp points on each side of the cutout below the trackpad. Ever since Macbooks had that "feature" I've been rounding off the edges with fine sandpaper and then polishing them. It's a wonderful improvement.

Children, being shorter and in front of the air blast may be more likely to have whatever crap is on their wet hands blown back into their faces.

Small Parts used to be an indispensable source of well cataloged parts for my projects. They shipped quickly and reliably and had a nice parametric search system.

Sadly they were acquired by Amazon and effectively ruined. In theory Amazon sells the same parts but Amazon's search for specialized parts is dreadful, and when you find a part it's often out of stock or available with a long lead time from a dubious supplier.

To me Small Parts is the classic example of how Amazon is systematically stamping out smaller but better suppliers. I'm not sure why Amazon even needed to acquire them. They could have sold those types of parts anyway. I wonder if they simply wanted the smallparts.com url, which now leads to Amazon.

I should clarify why I liked Small Parts vs McMaster Carr: I'm in Canada and Small Parts would ship to Canada, but McMaster Carr would not ship here unless you had a business, but my work was for a hobby.

In my career I've found that knowning "enough" about a lot of fields (often self taught) has led me to invent valuable things that experts in any given field would have never discovered. Things with many millions in sales.

Also I've found that experts in some field will say something is impossible that I, not knowing it's "impossible", will try to do anyway and find a way to do it by applying techniques from outside the field.

I feel these are my "secrets of success", other than a lot of hard work and persistence. :)

I once had a new house with hydronic under floor heating - the worst heating setup I've every had - horribly slow to respond and expensive to operate. We turn down the heat to sleep and finally I just shut off the heat to the bedrooms and heated them a different way.

Our initial experience with the system was even worse than it might have been. The people who installed it including the thermostats were plumbers and did not realize there was a switch inside the thermostat to choose among three types of heating systems. They left all the thermostats at the default forced air heating setting. We suffered for two years with terrible overshooting and undershooting of temperatures before my own research revealed that the hidden setting existed and that it was set incorrectly. This helped but it was still not great.

We were glad to get back to a forced air heated house. I do believe however that hydronic heating with radiators is somewhat better than underfloor hydronic.

If it results in the elimination of oversized boxes it should save on cardboard, also reducing shipping volume. This would be financially and environmentally be a good thing. Maybe they could also include in the box sizing algorithm the optimization of shapes for efficient packing.

I agree with you that eventually governments are the only entitles that could implement solutions on a big enough scale. However it will be too late if this only happens when they are forced to act by social upheaval, mass starvation and economic collapse.

I challenge the ultra rich to put a substantial portion of their assets to work in funding large scale R&D on clean technologies, and simultaneously funding powerful lobbying of governments to act on climate change.

Another thought is that for better or worse we now have the tools for "social engineering" and campaigns might be funded to sway public opinion to support governments that support clean technologies.

For this reason there is no hope that collective action through government pave the way to the solutions we need. Governments will only be forced to act when things are so bad that it's too late. There is also no hope that individual action will make a meaningful difference. Not enough people will care until things are so bad it's too late. Public corporations will not lead the way to a solution because they are only driven by short term profit. Does anyone seriously believe any of the above will lead to solutions soon enough?

It seems to me that only the ultra rich have the resources, independence, and arguably intelligence to lead the way to solutions that could save humanity. They might devote their talents and resources to funding research into technologies we will need when when things get so bad that governments are forced to act. Also funding powerful lobbing groups to counteract the powerful lobbing efforts of corporations that benefit from delaying action on the climate.

My password manager and every other plugin disappeared this morning first on one of my Macs and a few hours later on the other. I could not log into anything so I switched immediately to Chrome because I don't have time to fuss with workarounds. I'll return to Firefox when I hear the problem is definitely fixed.

Thawing permafrost, faster even than climate models predicted, could release so much carbon that feasible reductions in human carbon output will never be enough. [1]

A similar worry is methane hydrates. [2]

It seems that the only remaining hopes are rapid progress on carbon sequestration on a vast scale, or risky geoengineering.

[1] https://www.pri.org/stories/2015-06-24/thawing-permafrost-co... [2] https://worldoceanreview.com/en/wor-1/energy/methane-hydrate...

The digital waveguide patents have now expired and a new group has just released a wind instrument software synthesizer based on this approach: https://www.imoxplus.com/site/

They are also developing a completely new type of multidimensional embouchure sensing mouthpiece with which to play the instruments. It should be easy to learn but offer deep potential for expressiveness.

Also note that the goal of these instruments is not to faithfully emulate the timbre of any existing instrument (for that use a sampler) but to emulate dynamic behavior with is where the true expressiveness of wind instruments comes from.

Disclosure: I am developing the mouthpiece.

It could be a matter of depth of field and viewing angle. I build tiny things - boards with parts down to 0406 and also 3D assemblies of small parts. I use a long range digital magnifier for PCBs but it's necessary to use a head mounted loupe for 3D assembly due to depth of field and the need to view from different directions.