zizzer's comments

Thanks for the article link.

I think the evolution of English through new word use is generally an excellent and exciting thing. It can just be a little disconcerting adjusting to new usage (at least new for me personally, in this case).

The use of "foreground" as a verb in that article really bothers me for some reason.

Look on the bright side, if you wouldn't be interested in it in another 3 months then you just saved yourself $200 by not buying it immediately.

Anyone else notice that in the Tyco contactor picture it's labelled "Coil 3.14 Ohms"? It makes me think they only needed it to be 3 Ohms, but an engineer somewhere couldn't resist making it πΩ

The reminders are only printed once a week on Saturday mornings and use maybe 5-10cm of paper. It's just nice to have a physical reminder to do things sometimes, something you can't ignore. Plus I get enough alerts on my phone already.

Like people have said about the Berg printer, it's really a solution looking for a problem. I just wanted to make a little networked printer and build a nice case for it (I'm doing it in the style of a piece of equipment from one of the Alien films). There's no real reason to have it, but I do, so I'm making use of it.

I wondered when this might happen. You can't really rely on any of these devices with a 'cloud' based backend to work a couple of years after you've bought them (As anyone with a Nabaztag gathering dust in a corner will tell you).

I made my own version of the little printer based on the open source plans here: https://github.com/exciting-io/printer/wiki/Making-your-own-...

It's really easy to get up and running and interfacing with it is simple. I have mine print out reminders for when to plant seeds for the garden and it also notifies me when automated downloads via FlexGet have finished.

The thing I find most surprising is that she went from being a protesting vegan hippy-type, to a Daily Mail reader who says "I don’t read the Guardian—nobody I know reads the Guardian". That's some shift to the right.

You might want to edit your login page (http://snowinseconds.com/account/login) it still has some Lorem ipsum on it!

From the few details [1] I've been able to find it seems like it's unusable in the UK anyway as it uses 151-154 MHz, which is a licensed band. If they moved it up into the 433ishMHz unlicensed band their range claims would all have to be revised.

[1] http://gigaom.com/2014/07/17/no-signal-gotenna-has-a-messagi...

On my Moto G (which is listed as being 'Partially compatible'), it's nearly impossible to get any of the demos in the app version to respond to the phone's movement. I'm assuming that's down to the lack of gyroscope, which is a bit disappointing.

There's a strange sense of morality in being able to execute someone but not show their full last words due to swearing. The US media seems to view the world in a similar way.

Just a note - It's not GPS satellites taking the pictures. It seems to be the RapidEye [1] satellites, which are much closer to earth at 630km.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RapidEye

I only recently discovered that there's another player lurking over at http://www.bbc.co.uk/tv/ that has the schedule overlaid onto the live stream with the ability to easily switch back to an earlier show and a channel selection overlay in fullscreen.

I'm hoping this is going to be incorporated into the new iPlayer when watching live, because it seems mad to have this functionality missing depending on which part of the site you're watching live from.

Also, I'm hoping the keyboard controls will be improved. It'd be nice for the spacebar to function as pause/play and the left right arrows to skip in much smaller increments so they're actually useful.

The skipping increment being too large also affects my Humax HDR-1000S, where you can only jump in 1 minute blocks, which is far too big to be useful when seeking to the start of something. 10 seconds would be far better.

edit: The site's just offered me a go on the trial and it looks like most of the things I wanted have actually been implemented. Excellent stuff!

Check out some of the bitcoin/dogecoin 'faucet' list sites and you'll see they've been reincarnated, right down to the terrible GeoCities web design.

I went back to part 1 and looked at his conclusion...it's painful to read. Here's an excerpt:

"Beats me why music files differ, but they do! The only explanation I can come up with is that the zero and one values represent a lower and higher voltage in the cable and in the sender or receiver. This is actually an analogue signal when we look at it on a scope. We audiophiles agree that cables sound different with analogue signals, so why not with Ethernet data? Next, any interface for Ethernet has a correction circuit for errors. With many errors this interface has to work hard, that will result in a greater need for current from the power supply and the processor heating up. A bad cable, or one that easily picks up interference, introduces a lot of errors so that might be the cause of a change in sound quality. "

An audiophile and his money are soon parted it seems.

The restriction on antibiotics is for the protection of everyone, it's not just to screw you out of $50.

If people are allowed to throw antibiotics at any problem they think might be cured with them, then they eventually lose their effectiveness (as is becoming the case already). It doesn't matter that they were for your dog either, the same antibiotics are often used to treat human and animals, so misuse in one group can still cause problems for the other.

>Plus pepper sprays and pocket knives are common place

Pepper spray is illegal in the UK.

Pocket knives with folding, non-locking blades under 3 inches are legal to carry around. Larger blades are legal to carry around if you've got a good reason to have them and aren't doing anything the Police consider dodgy (UK knife law is quite complex).

I was talking about adding the sensors to the bluetooth sticker device, that's why it'd add cost.

The sensors in your phone won't help to work out where the sticker is. The bluetooth receiver in it is built to detect signals from any direction, so even if you rotate your phone, that doesn't help to work out which direction the signals are arriving from.

Getting an exact location would be very tricky as the received signal strength can be affected by so many things (Thick walls, reflections, interference...).

I'd imagine you could get a rough location, but you'd need to go through some kind of calibration process first that involved going into different rooms/zones and telling the software where you were.

You might need extra reference sensors too. Ones that are in known locations that the system can use to scale the signal strength readings. That might help to combat some of the issues I mentioned above.

For simple dead reckoning you'd need to add a magnetometer into the mix as well, otherwise there's no way to know which direction the sensors are facing relative to anything else.

This would at least give you a compass heading that you could use when integrating the accelerometer data to give some kind of course over time.

It'd be pretty unreliable though and add a lot of cost.