rfreiberger

I'm older now but been playing games since I was younger. In the years of playing games, I can't place why certain games gave me motion sickness while others didn't. One of the worst games I played was Silent Hill on the PS, the fog or something in the game was so bad, I couldn't get past the intro level. Another game was Half-Life 2 and the boat levels, again, it felt like the rest of the game but that level was awful.

Recently as I'm up in age, I have noticed I do better with third person games and having the monitor further away with a high refresh rate. Certain games like Counter Strike 2, since it plays so quickly and feels fast, doesn't have that feeling, and Fallout4, isn't bad but I couldn't play it for hours.

I recall Flickr before was free up to a certain resolution, at the time it was something very low like 800 pixels or less than 2mb. During Marissa's CEO days, they pushed Flickr and introduced the unlimited storage for all users. I believe after it was sold to Smugmug, the storage was back down to being limited again.

I honestly see the company as a startup in idea. They couldn't afford to build a proper deep sea sub so they used the idea of new tech in the form of carbon fiber (which I'm assuming is way cheaper to form vs a titanium hull) and billed this as next gen. Everything that I read almost fits in the idea of "fail fast".

The sad part to ponder is most likely the team on the ship knew the sub was gone right when the communications was lost but kept the information to themselves.

I believe this is the way many companies are going, even if they don't need to reduce the headcount, they can scoop up hungry workers cycling them out for average performers.

I keep sharing that many companies have not defined the remote policy. It's up in the air and they simply haven't said anything about not working remote. My fear is it will all end in two weeks, asking all non-dedicated full time remote workers to be in the office.

I'm not sure if this is the same as the DJ apps that remove vocals and other instruments but there seems to be a surge of apps that have this feature. It's impressive how well some of these work and I believe they are mostly based on an open source project (I can't recall the name).

I used to be a huge fan of Evernote, but a few things made me look at other solutions. One issue is the capturing of code was automatically formatted and I was burned a few times keeping my code snippets for reference.

Been using Notion for a few years but I prefer the tree view and there's not many note apps that work well with this method.

I learned a bit of Perl from authors who focused only in Perl, great videos and books that allowed me to understand Perl how it worked differently from Python (at the time was taking over learning media).

But using Perl in the real world was much more difficult. Posting to Perl Mongers about a simple question of some block was often met with equally difficult answers. Many Perl scripts used at my past work places were written by very well versed Perl developers, using every possible shortcut to make the code smaller (and more confusing).

I personally cannot tell, if I was mixing vinyl I honestly would never have known about this. But using a digital vinyl system like Serato which displayed the bpm as 100.0, it's very apparent the tracks will fluctuate. The other issue is since your turntable is keeping time, two of them playing the same BPM, say 100BPM can drift 1BPM in theory. That's a large number when playing slower songs like hip-hop, and easily cause drift within 15~30 seconds. It's not a big deal, most dj's ride the pitch fader but it's worthy of a mention that the Technics 1200's are just over engineered.

I can speak on this owning a pair of Technics 1200 mk2 I bought new in 1995 and a pair of Reloop RP8000mk2 I bought two years ago. What might be confusing is many DJ turntables are made by the same company now, and are reffered to as "super oem", so the small things are changed, like logos, but they come from the same factory. My Reloops weight close to the same amount as the Technics but the base allows for more rumble through the feet. If you tap the body, you can clearly hear this compared to the Technics.

The tonearm on the Reloop has bearing that have a small amount of play, on my Technics, they are extremely solid after 100's hours of play time. But the biggest issue is the Reloop has the flutter at 0.5%, while the Technics at 0.05%. Doesn't sound like a huge issue, but when playing a song on Reloop, the beats per minute will fluctuate from 100 to 100.5 to 99.5, non-stop. The Technics has the same flutter but at a much lower tolerance, so you don't see this appear. Performance, they both do well on startup and stop, and of course improved RCA jacks.

Wasn't most of the Amazon issue on fake items related to the UPC barcode issue they ran into with books? I recall they only stored the UPC code of items and pulled from their own stock or resellers (who had fake copies with the same code).

One of the big wake up calls I had during that time was a friend telling me about Webvan. At the time I was younger and not investing so the conservation was mostly around how great the food was, cheaper than up scale stores and they delivered. The echo that reflected much of the dot com era was as he mentioned "how do they make money doing this". The wild part is the wages they paid was higher than other delivery drivers, I worked in a warehouse at the time and frequently heard of seasoned UPS and FedEx drivers leaving to drive for the company.

Given the amount modern GPU's are requiring that doesn't seem such a rare occurrence. During some game sessions, my 3080 will max out the capacity of my consumer UPS and ponder if a loose pin on the power connectors could cause a spark enough to jump the connectors. I guess my only saving fate is I let my computer sleep when not in use.

Just speculating but I would guess that's a reason for asking people back in the office. If you're getting paid the same amount as an engineer in the Bay Area but living South Dakota, I'm sure this causes some alarm for the company. We can't force a pay cut but what if we require physical presence a few times a week.

I'm still living in the Bay Area due to family but that's one of the reasons why we haven't looked seriously about moving. I felt like the WFH train was going to stop eventually.

Negative Reaction is a great episode!

I rediscovered Columbo a number of years back and playing the original series is my way of having background noise while working. But every time I watch the same episode, I deepen my understanding of asking questions and how they lead to the next. Much of this is how I moved my thoughts into work postmortems, not just asking how this broke, but why did it break, how was it possible.

For added thoughts on Columbo, here's a short breakdown if the tactics used to find the guilty party was legal in court.

https://columbophile.com/2017/05/17/what-happens-when-columb...

I agree, I never seen the first fret displayed to the right. You can rotate the fretboard at the bottom right.

LinkedIn is my guess, the social media platform with the most reshares and least amount of new content. Everything I see is just a reshare of the same CEO message, or "hustle life" post. I would expect to find posts about career questions and what's a solution to my business issue but it's really just a rebadged Facebook.

I have to have a LinkedIn profile but I try to keep my profile very close to my reality, which means I look like an underachiever compared to my connections.

Having dabbled in film photography during high school and college, I'm amazed at the quality of these images and also being in color. The processing for color was much more difficult (last I checked) since you couldn't prep the paper like you can with black and white using a red filter.

The name needs to change but also the attitude that as engineers, we build complex systems and assume everyone has the knowledge how to use it. A few world wide outages I've been a part of was caused by a task runner which didn't lint the command and allowed a broken bash one-liner to be executed across every system in parallel.

Yes, it's a simple mistake but how was a system allowed access to our global environment that this edge case was never calculated? In many of the meetings, the common issue is communication even between co-workers on the same team, and between internal platform providers. One case was an outage on the storage backend and realized after a long meeting that the internal SLA was much greater than we expected (and which the systems would timeout). It only worked for so long as storage utilization was extremely low.

Thank you, I wasn't aware it's that easy. I have gotten around the saving issue with the desktop clients, they work decently well. I also love the tree view which many note apps seem to move away from.

I've been using Tiddlywiki for my technical notes. Before I was using Evernote and Notion, both would format my code blocks and it was just easier to use Tiddlywiki with a desktop app for saving.

But my concern with Tiddlywiki is extracting the data if needed, there was a time when my wiki had some file issues and lucky that I was able to recover without sorting the files manually.

The biggest reason why I held off on the camera was missing the fisheye lens, once that became a common feature, I was pretty much sold going with the phone over a camera.

I started with SLR's in high school photography and loved how you could see just what the camera was doing. Using the Pentax K1000 with a 50mm 2.0 lens (at the time was a super cheap combo kit) just inspired me to really learn more about photography. When I moved to DSLR's later, it was even better, I could now see the images and taken nearly endless amount photos.

But I started to get bogged down trying to take a full bag of lenses and large DSLR to social events or traveling. I found that I was spending more time behind the lens with the technical side vs spending time capturing the moment. Sold off my kit and went with a Fuji X100T, fixed length compact camera. It's not great for action but worked wonderfully capturing the kids and with the fully silent mode, very well for weddings.

Once my phone camera quality started to approach my camera, I stopped using the Fuji as much and followed the rule of "the best camera you have is the one you carry". While I love having that dedicated camera, just having the live cloud backup, apps to edit, made my next decision to be an upgraded phone over a camera. It's hard to hear the news about Canon especially, the 70-200mm F/2.8 IS lens is simply amazing and I rented a 85mm f/1.2 which is the lens for portraits.

I love the idea of alternative reality and what if the vacuum tubes were never invented, the same with the transistor. Would we have huge steam engines running building sized mechanical computers to calculate simple programs. Each time I visit the Computer History Museum I think of what if the path was disrupted somehow.

The best joke was the Robot Hell.

"10 SIN" "20 GOTO HELL"

So I'm a mostly self trained low level programmer and found Project Euler is great but there is a level of math knowledge that left me more puzzled on the formulas than actual coding. Is this something I should focus on as someone learning to code, or the other coding puzzle sites with "linked list" type of challenges are just as good.

Not sure if this is the same but a few universities will offer certificates and degrees in various subjects off campus. I think these are mostly sold as "business development" but I always wondered if they were simply fly by night education with the stamp of "prestige college".

My father works in Taiwan and he was aware something bad was coming down well before it hit US news. This was late January 2020, and by then most all of the masks at the stores were sold out, followed shortly by the cleaning supplies. I would say the majority of buyers were shipping these back to family in Asia or they were prepairing for the peak that hit a few weeks later.

Being someone in their 40's, it's hard to watch so many people of my younger years have resulting physical injuries. Like many others my age, all those crashes and endless skating has a toll on our knees plus other joints. I hope Knoxville stays active, I've been enjoying Steve-O's short Youtube stories even if he's slowing down in terms of crazy stunts.