armandhammer

Wasn't it a craze around 1992?

Why do you need +/- zoom buttons? You can just double-tap the screen but hold down the second tap, then slide your finger up or down to zoom in/out as an alternative to pinch-zooming.

Worse, Google makes it really difficult for government GIS admins to upload the correct data. Last time I looked, if you ever want to update the bike/ped paths (like when a new one is constructed) they want you to upload ONLY the new part. This is really time consuming to extract only the new data, especially if you have multiple paths to update at the same time which are not connected. The sensible thing would be to just upload the entire path network for a city anytime there is an update, but apparently Google does not want you to do this.

Apple Maps is even worse, I don't think they even offer a way to update incorrect data -- not that I've been able to find. And it's super frustrating to use, because Apple Maps does not have a "Bicycle" layer that you can turn on and off to find pathways. They only appear if you plan a route. Totally idiotic.

That's nothing compared to Tokyo and Osaka. The train arrives within 20 seconds of its scheduled time, the doors open for about 10 seconds, and 3 seconds after the doors close the train starts moving again.

It's the opposite, no? Cities / suburbs that were built after 1950 often don't have a grid system.

I take it you’ve never been to Portland and used Tri-Met? It’s the second best public transit system I’ve used in the US, NYC being #1. And I’ve used transit in Boston, Chicago, SF, Seattle, Philly, Denver, and a handful of other big cities.

It's better to go with something like a $150 Intel NUC running pfsense (free) to connect to the VPN because the vast majority of Wi-Fi routers don't have enough CPU to decipher 256bit AES encryption in real-time. Once you fire up the VPN on even a top-tier router, you're likely to see your overall connection speed drop to 15 mbit/sec or less. A cheap NUC has no problem doing 256bit AES at 200+ mbit/sec.

Weird, fully masked Face ID has worked fine for me since the iOS 13.5 update (more than 95% of the time). Before that it never worked with a mask on. And I wear the L size huge standard disposable white mask which covers nearly my entire face from the bottom of my eyelids, fully side to side, all the way over my chin.

A lot of "compostable" plastic isn't compostable, at least not under the circumstances that most people consider to be composting... e.g. you can't put it in your backyard scrap pile and expect it to be gone in a few months. It'll still be there years later. One industry rep told me that they estimate their products take 30 years to completely breakdown and that's under perfectly ideal conditions -- bury it in a landfill with no oxygen, who knows how long it'll take. I guess that's better than 1,000 years... but still, it's basically another industry lie.

I remember finding out 15 years ago that the moderately progressive well-known "university town" where I lived at the time (Southeastern U.S.) didn't actually recycle anything, they just buried the plastic stuff and the clear vs colored glass in different sections of the landfill, so that it'd be easier to dig it up one day when recycling was actually economically viable. The recycling lie isn't new.

Except no other animal harnesses the power of oil to make machines that can wipe out hundreds of thousands of square km of ecosystems (on land and sea) in a single day.

There's more than just food energy, though. Lots of things that we rely on for modern civilization and survival are finite -- the most obvious being petroleum / gas and various minerals + metals. Additionally, retrieving these resources is extremely environmentally destructive in ways which take centuries or millennia to recover from (we've already extracted the locations where getting at this stuff was easy and less destructive). It's a lose/lose situation.

Why don't you just turn the scrollbars on permanently in System Preferences? It's under General > Show scroll bars always.

But but... I thought Apple's excuse for their 30% tax was that their App Review process and locked down OS etc is supposed to prevent apps from doing such malicious things on iOS? To keep us and our data "safe"? Err... right?

Fleetwood Mac was definitely fueled by cocaine.

Are you serious? Last time I had my Macbook Pro repaired, they sent me a prepaid box, I mailed it to them the next morning, and I had it back in 3 days. Other than a tech personally coming to your house, what else do you expect?

I'd imagine it's sunlight / artificial light + growth to harvest time. It takes energy input to make food calories, there's really no getting around it with technology. The only way to increase the calories in the harvested food is intense direct light in a short time, or less intense (shaded) light over a longer time. In vertical farms, that's a higher cost of production.

Google didn't create Docs, they bought it.

A circle given the same height provides a smaller pointer target than a square.

To be fair, the click target of the traffic light circles isn't limited to the actual drawn pixels. You can click a fair few pixels outside of it and still get the same result (basically wherever the hover state activates).

So magazines, newspapers, books (written words) + databases and cloud storage are fine? But that sounds like the ingredients of EMAIL. So arbitrary.

That's how Apple supports and pays for its work on the platform.

Oh, really? Then what's the justification for not charging a single cent for free apps? It costs Apple just as much to host the Facebook app on the App Store as it does Hey (or any other paid app). This has always been such a disingenuous argument, and there's no justification for Apple's tax to be a percentage of the app price anyway. All this does is punish developers of high quality apps. Why should a developer of a $30 app pay $10 to Apple, but a 99 cent app pays only 30 cents, and a free app pays nothing? That's an insane pricing policy.

Interestingly, I remember this exact scenario was a noted problem for some sort of computer-controlled shock absorbers that I saw on the "Beyond 2000" TV show in the mid-90s. In many scenarios, the shock absorbers could detect bumps and holes in the road and compensate perfectly, resulting in a ride that was smooth as glass.

But they still hadn't figured out how to differentiate between a crumpled paper bag and a rock, or a pothole filled with water vs a smooth surface. Otherwise, it was really impressive.

Found it on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3KPYIaks1UY

I feel like Level 4 or 5 Autonomous Driving will be the same -- there are just some problems that will never be solved well enough to make it work acceptably.

You don't need a dongle to use regular old USB-A devices with a USB-C computer. All you need to do is replace the cable which is usually like $5. So if your MIDI keyboard or audio interface has a USB-B connector on the hardware side (like the Scarlett do), just buy a USB-B to USB-C cable. I don't know why the myth of needing a USB-C-to-A dongle has persisted for so long.

You do know that all you have to do is buy a USB-B to USB-C cable and you can connect your existing equipment to your Macbook, right? I mean it sucks that the new Macbooks have so few USB-C ports, but there's nothing preventing you from plugging in all of the older USB-A/B/micro/etc equipment directly into it as long as you buy the correct $5 cable with a USB-C connector on the other end. No dongles necessary.

"can actually drive it from the keyboard without tying my fingers in knots"

How is the Mac's ability to natively edit ANY Keyboard Shortcut in ANY app and across the entire system not years ahead of anything that Windows 10 can do?

BoA discontinued that service (ShopSafe) last year, and it had basically been abandoned for a few years before that since it required Flash and was never a part of their mobile app.

Yes it does, I'm using it right now. Safari 13.1; macOS 10.15.4; 2014 MBP. Nothing special here, it just works (though I normally use Brave).

LOL, what? You're clearly talking out of your ass if you think smoking a bowl will make you forget to feed a baby, or taking acid or shrooms will make you cry. Is this sarcasm?

What sucks is that it's now really, really, really hard to find the quality personal / enthusiast sites and blogs that are out there unless you already know what specific search terms will lead you to it. Searching using terms on Google that _should_ spit out a first-page result to those sites no longer does. Google now prioritizes results containing fake SEO-optimized pseudo blogs and paid-for "review" sites.

It's crazy how useless Google has become for discovering independent niche content -- it used to be so easy. And DDG and Bing aren't any better. So yeah there may be more out there than ever before, but if you can't find it... does it really exist?

Isn't that basically the "Outlet Store" model? New clothes made to lower standards but ostensibly sold under the illusion of being "last season's overstock" of the high quality normal version?