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jboles | 6 years ago | on: American Phrase Book

“Not bad” - something is pretty good, or at least better than expected. Had to laugh when I saw that phrase on the linked page.

“Not bad at all” - something is really good

“Munted” - trashed or unserviceable

jboles | 6 years ago | on: USB4 Specification

Windows 7 did for USB2 devices plugged into a USB1 port: https://www.makeuseof.com/tag/usb-speederror/

If the computer can identify the device’s capabilities (using some kind of bus command, I’m not very familiar with the USB protocol) separately from speed testing the cable+device combination, no reason why it couldn’t work for USB 2/3/4.

Of course, this approach relies on the device accurately reporting its capabilities, which may not be the case for the more cheap-and-cheerful gadgets.

jboles | 6 years ago | on: Stop Paying for Gas with Your Debit Card

Another reason: pre-auth will deduct up to $125 from your available balance, no matter how small the actual purchase is, which you won’t get back for a couple of days.

jboles | 6 years ago | on: A Map That Made Los Angeles Make Sense

I think it’s one of those things you learn from your parents by riding in the car with them, and the relative age one starts driving vs moving far from their childhood home.

I did both - learning names of roads, landmarks and routes from the back seat, then later studying their Gregory’s (Sydney street directory), more than my parents ever did, and navigating for them from the back seat.

To this day some of my friends think I’m some crazy human GPS for being able to remember how to get somewhere after traveling there only once, sometimes 10+ years earlier.

jboles | 6 years ago | on: How much equity should I get as the first employee?

10-30% doesn't even seem excessive if there is no product today.

There are so many startups that post on this board with an open-ended title similar to "Looking for an engineer to build our product", then you go to their website and they're offering 0.5% equity. It's almost insulting.

jboles | 6 years ago | on: Australia's high-speed rail dream leaves a bitter taste

It's not so much the trains that are terrible as the 1800s-era track geometry that is terrible. There are mountains all the way down the east coast; any high-speed line is going to be (a) necessarily built inland and separate from any existing line and (b) phenomenally expensive.

jboles | 6 years ago | on: Host Protected Area

Even before SSDs it was also used to short-stroke spinning HDDs for better random seek performance.

jboles | 6 years ago | on: A Raspberry Pi-powered live train station sign

Once did a project like this that grabbed Seattle's realtime data for some bus stops around my place. It was an old Windows CE PocketPC thingy, so the tools were primitive (.NET compact framework 1.0, basically).

Maybe a bit too primitive. It worked pretty well for about a year, until I found that the CompactFlash WiFi adapter was only 802.11b and there was nothing newer available that was compatibility with the PocketPC. It ended up being a choice between keeping the gadget running, or being able to run my WiFi network at 802.11g speeds with modern (WPA) security, so the latter won out.

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