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dantle

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https://dantler.us

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A dishwasher micro optimization: put the small forks/spoons face down in the basket, and the large ones face up. Helpful when unloading because these items are time consuming to visually distinguish, but we sort them.

Works best if you can somehow convince your spouse to do it, too. :)

Fasting always gets me into a high focus zone (but I don't have ADHD). Try doing a 48 hour zero-calorie/liquid-only fast. Black coffee and teas are fine. Get plenty of electrolytes, especially magnesium and potassium, or else you'll have a headache. Take an ibuprofen if you really need it. And reward yourself at the end. I always get an amazing amount of reading done in these periods.

Nice article. Saw a few things I wish I'd known about.

1. %n in printf would be handy when writing CLIs dealing w/ multiple lines or precise counts of backspaces.

2. Using enums as a form of static_assert() is a great idea (triggering a div by zero compiler error).

It's harder to imagine coming from the IBM of today, but historically the company has earned many laurels from its numerous important contributions to computing. As my computer architecture professor used to say, "everything that's worth inventing already has been at IBM." In addition to RISC, they created out-of-order, superscalar processing, relational databases, TCM, magnetic hard discs, DRAM, etc.

Although I'm not familiar with the specifics of (1) and (2), the characterization that Intel "took a while" or "were really slow" to enable features might be a bit unfair. (I am also a former employee)

Keep in mind that Intel's ability to properly light up new silicon features on your PC often relies upon your willingness to update your software. For instance, even if the SMT scheduler fix has been written and upstreamed, the next Ubuntu LTS to integrate the change may be 18 months away. The end user will believe that Intel is taking a long time to develop the fix.

I currently run my own mailserver. It's running on my home computer, which I leave on 24/7 anyway.

Administration is quite easy if you start with a well-maintained docker image ,and I found one I'm quite happy with.[0] It has been less than 30 minutes of work so far, but I already understand docker quite well. It was nice to learn some more docker stuff, too.

The major downside is that random email hosts seem to reject my mail (looking at you, comcast.net addresses) so I still use a gmail with some contacts.

[0] https://github.com/tomav/docker-mailserver

Am I Unique? 6 years ago

I'm using Brave and my useragent is not unique.

Version 1.2.43 Chromium: 79.0.3945.130 (Official Build) (64-bit)

Am I Unique? 6 years ago

Are you sure you're looking only the "User Agent"? The text at the top is describing your entire "browser fingerprint." It includes everything the server could gather from you. Including cookies, browser version, width/height of the window, etc.

In case it's not clear, uniqueness should be seen as bad in this case. It means you can be tracked.

Perhaps the "all at once" attack could work against today's hardware. This is because the mics (in devices I know of) are co-planar and the user may be speaking to Alexa (or whoever) from directly above or below the device. In this configuration, it is valid for all mics to be receiving the same audio signal simultaneously.

But in some future rev, one could imagine that if the mics in the array are non-coplanar (e.g. at least 4 mics) and sufficiently far from each other, then there is no possible way for the audio signal to reach them at once (unless it is actually light being measured).

I'm a bit surprised that this works. It appears that this attack targets a single microphone. However, internal to most of these home assistant devices (e.g. Echo or HomePod) there is an array of microphones. A real sound from a spoken word would probably show up on more than one microphone (with an appropriate time and phase offset), although it seems to not be currently required. It seems like it would be complex or impossible for an attacker to target more than one microphone with this attack.

There have been stories in the news which have raised awareness about how Canada exports their recycling/trash to the Philippines.[0] The Philippines seems to pollute heavily, based on this map. Given this data, it seems counterproductive to send waste to the highest polluting countries, since they are obviously not able to process their existing burden.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Canada%E2%80%93Philippines_was...

It's pretty easy. With CL.exe (Microsoft's Visual Studio compiler) just use the /SUBSYSTEM:EFI_APPLICATION flag. You may have to manually specify the entry point. Note that there's no default cstdlib, so if you want to use the EFI APIs (e.g. for a "printf" function or other things from the article), you'll need to tell the compiler about the header definitions (as you would any C API).

There isn't a guarantee, but there are incentives for phone/platform providers to avoid spying on you in a battery-powered device. Battery life is still a primary selling point, and these companies are fighting hard to maximize battery life on your device. Turning on the camera is among the most power-hungry tasks, as it activates the image signal processor block of your SoC (which is millions of gates and a high speed transfer interface). It would be difficult to produce a competitive device which spies on its users.

Great review as an embedded SW guy to nourish my EE background. Nicely peppered with practical tricks and techniques that are useful in the field. I enjoyed seeing the low-pass and high-pass filtered wave signatures along with the explanation of what the problem might be (long/close connections and broken traces, respectively).

It's not too difficult to build your own IR blaster that is controlled by an app. I wrote an Arduino library that lets you send device-specific IR commands based on a generic LIRC configuration file. I run it on an Arduino101 and send commands to it via Bluetooth LE. Currently using it with a Windows service for climate control in my rental apartment.[1]

I could share more source code if anybody is interested in doing the same thing.

[1] https://github.com/dantler/infrared-remote-sketch

I followed the same flow for learning Spanish as you, and your site looks excellent. I too have a bunch of infinitives memorized via Anki, but would like to practice all forms of conjugation, and manually creating more flashcards is simply too labor-intensive.

One thing I'd like to see is the flashcard interface translated to Spanish. I learned Spanish in Spanish, for the most part, and I get confused when I see "imperfect" and I have to remember that it's really what I learned as "pasado/preterito imperfecto." Built-in pronunciation via TTS would also rock! One could probably write a userscript to do this, but it's always nicer to be built in.