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philwebster

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philwebster@fastmail.com

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That site is worth visiting just for the wavy scrolling marquee text that's actually selectable. Very satisfying!

This is a fairly common procedure for children with different length legs to fix a limping gait. My sister had it done back in 5th grade. She has additional health issues, but once the lengthening process was over, I don't recall her complaining about pain from it.

I do a lot of Mac/iOS UI development and use ImageMagick to make before and after GIFs from screenshots. It's incredibly useful. This is my one-line makegif bash script that I use by dragging images from the desktop to Terminal after the command:

convert -delay 80 -loop 0 +dither "$1" "$2" ~/Desktop/"`date +"%b %d, %Y, %H.%M.%S %p"`.gif"

I'm excited to be the first comment to recommend The Broom of the System. I picked it off the library shelf because I knew of David Foster Wallace, but didn't think I had the stamina to go for Infinite Jest at the time. It's much, much shorter than Infinite Jest, and is a single story rather than a collection of essays (don't get me wrong, Consider the Lobster is also great). The humor is absurd, different than anything I'd read before, and it completely clicked with me, paving the way to the rest of his work. You should start here.

I don't feel like the AirPods are that secure when I run with them, so I use some medical tape [1] to secure them to my ears. This is kind of weird, but I've done it since March and really like not worrying about them falling out. I cut off a small 5mm strip of tape, make a loop, and stick it right below the black sensors on each AirPod. They stay firmly attached even when my ears are sweaty and I'm shaking my head.

[1] http://www.amzn.com/B000C4RRQE

Another example of SO managing to alienate a user (in this case, me): Posting my very first answer to a question, finding a very similar post and adding my solution there as well, then getting an email that I had posted the same thing and that the second post would be removed. This was unfortunate because the second question had a more lively discussion and seemed like a better place for the answer. I deleted the first answer, tried re-posting on the second question and wasn't allowed. After that, I gave up.

There are some sites that try to disable the ability to save passwords and 3rd party password managers usually override this. Another thing that's really nice is having the LastPass extension on Firefox, Chrome, and Safari on the same computer and not having to worry about if they are using the system keychain or not. In my experience, form filling with credit card information has been less error prone with LastPass as well. I thought at one point Safari was requiring the CVV number to be manually entered too. I could be mistaken.

It would be nice if there was just a little more branding to show that this is a Dropbox-created product. "from Dropbox" isn't as clear as "by Dropbox". (Are photos being served "from" my Dropbox?) I didn't scroll all the way to the bottom the first time on the page to see the copyright.

Media keys are actually really nice to have. I use Rdio's desktop app which has similar functionality and it is really handy not to have to sort through browser windows to find controls.

I like it. Almost all the Candy Crush players I know set their clocks forward to instantly get more lives though.

They should really use a banner that blocks out the page, similar to what Wikipedia did during the SOPA/PIPA protests [1]. This would still make the point that government shutdowns are disruptive to the services that people depend on, without incurring the extra costs of an actual shutdown. Maybe the point is better made by letting people stew in actual frustration though...

[1] http://www.macworld.com/article/1164871/how_to_access_wikipe...

Here are just a few. (Disclaimer: I use and love LastPass, but am familiar with 1Password).

Sync- it's possible with Keychain Access + Dropbox, but not seamless

Easy password generation- no switching to Keychain Access, copying, etc.

iOS access- up until iCloud sync, passwords were not easily transferred to devices

Support for Windows browsers

Form filling- Keychain will do addresses, but not credit cards

It would be great if public libraries offered this service (or one like it) to their patrons. My local library offers Overdrive Media Console [1], but the selection always seems to be lacking and the apps are subpar. An electronic rental service with books that people actually want to read would be killer and could save libraries money. My library system has cut back on inter-library requests because of shrinking funding, and an electronic delivery system could help cut costs.

[1] http://omc.overdrive.com

With regards to FileVault for Mac, some friends who used to work as Geniuses at the Apple Store have mentioned having to request special software from corporate that would fix or recover FileVault in some way - they weren't clear and said it was not something they were supposed to talk about. Obviously I'd take the info with a grain of salt, but based on the news lately...