vertnerd

As a high school teacher, I first noticed this effect when I started using a CO2 monitor in my classroom as a proxy for air freshness during COVID. The CO2 levels in our supposedly "no problem with the air" classrooms shot up to 2000 ppm within minutes of the start of school and stayed there all day. Kids weren't checked out ONLY because I teach mathematics. They were breathing bad air, too.

Worse, when I brought the monitor home, I found the levels there were elevated even with no one home and surpassed 2000 with just two or three of us in a room.

The good news is that I stopped worrying about making my house "tight" for the sake of energy efficiency. I keep some windows cracked all year and don't worry about how tight the door seals are.

If this article intrigues, see the chapter on Egyptian mathematics in The Crest of the Peacock: https://www.ms.uky.edu/~sohum/ma330/files/Crest_of_the_peaco...

I didn't realize how much I had come to rely on Unicode until I created my own VT-100 emulator as part of the Forth language engine (https://github.com/Eccentric-Anomalies/AMC-Forth) in the spacecraft simulator game I'm building. The display is implemented as a shader with the original VT-100 display character set embedded in code, and there is absolutely no support for anything else. Things were going along swimmingly until I realized I just shot myself in the foot when it comes to translating the game to other languages. Sometimes the old ways really did suck. At least that part of the period "feel" is guaranteed to be correct!

As far as I can tell, the video itself is 100% fake. A bad fake. I particularly love the part where the worker levitates a large coil of steel with his hands. The narration sounds OK, so just turn off your monitor.

Used Chromebooks are plentiful and cheap on eBay and many of them are easy to convert to Linux using the tools and instructions at https://docs.mrchromebox.tech/. I used to have a house full of Chromebooks, but now all but one of them are Linux laptops. My favorite is the Acer CP713 because it comes in flavors with lots of RAM and drive space. I also prefer the convertible touchscreen models because they can go on a shelf and make cheap and attractive Home Assistant dashboards.

If you are using a password manager, start by searching for every record with your gmail address. Make a list. Every day, go to the next entry on the list and change your email with that app or service.

Of course, set up gmail to forward messages to your new address and filter them into a folder. Once you have changed all the services you know about, watch for emails coming to the gmail folder, looking for more services that need to be updated. Eventually the only thing arriving in the folder is spam and you can just route it all into the garbage.

I am not an MS Office user, but I have seen the effect of format lock-in with Google Sheets. A few months back I began a project to de-Google my life, which went pretty smoothly until I tried to download my spouse's accounting spreadsheet from Google Sheets to Excel format. Both LibreOffice and Excel could open it, but nothing worked correctly. So for several months, I kept that one Google Sheet live until I could come up with an alternative. When I created the original file in Sheets, I was blindly using all sorts of features and capabilities (including Google Forms) that simply have no direct analog in other products.

A couple of days ago I bit the bullet and dug into the Excel file and figured out how to redesign everything and get it going again. Yay me. I'll admit I don't like the UI in LibreOffice, but I didn't like it very much when I first tried using it (as Star Office) back in the 90s either. Yet I keep coming back to it.

If I'm going to be locked into a format or app, I'd rather it be something like LibreOffice.

I was a 14 year old digital electronics hobbyist at that time. At $666 it could just as well have been $1 million. The most I could possibly afford at the time was about $50. For me, personal computing didn't become truly affordable until the Commodore 64 came along in the 80s, and by that point the Apple II was about 4x more expensive. The Apple computers were revolutionary, but to me they have never been affordable.

Yes, most likely. Steam is dominant, and it's not hard to make a Windows release that works under Proton.

Though in my case, I currently offer demo/beta releases for both Windows and Linux directly from Github. If I ultimately elect to release my game under a GPL license, then supporting both Linux and Windows directly would make sense.

As someone who grew up with only vinyl in the 60s and 70s, I would never choose it over a CD for audio quality.

BUT I would enjoy recreating the rituals that go with playing vinyl: obsessive cleaning of the disks, the gentle manipulation of a delicate tone arm, and the soft thud when the turntable cover drops. Playing a record was a minor event to be savored. I doubt the younger generations are getting all of that right.

I'm solo developing a spaceflight simulator on Linux (using the Godot engine), exporting binaries in both Linux and Windows. It turns out that I really didn't need to bother with the Linux export anyway because Steam runs the Windows version on Linux without any problems.

The ONLY thing I'm still having trouble with under Linux is Steam VR on the HTC Vive. It works. Barely.

I used to be an educator, and many of my students had an autism diagnosis. I would get to know them and often eventually decide that they were "just like" me, except that whatever their problems were, I had it worse.

So then I would look at these autism checklists and say, "yep, that's me," but when I actually looked at the strict diagnostic criteria, it wasn't that clear.

Looking at this article, I get it. There are other, more focused criteria that can be more appropriate. But those diagnoses don't trigger the special services, so they don't get used often enough.

What is my takeaway? People often don't conform to a model of average human behavior. Being unusual isn't necessarily a grave character flaw (which is what my mother had me believe) but merely an expression of the great variety of human intellect and behavior. It gives me license, without official diagnosis, to enjoy being who I am without shame or embarrassment.

I've also been working on half a dozen crates of old family letters. ChatGPT does well with them and is especially good at summarizing the letters. Unfortunately, all the output still has to be verified because it hallucinates words and phrases and drops lines here and there. So at this point, I still transcribe them by hand, because the verification process is actually more tiresome than just typing them up in the first place. Maybe I should just have ChatGPT verify MY transcriptions instead.

Just the other evening, as my family argued about whether some fact was or was not fake, I detached from the conversation and began fantasizing about whether it was still possible to buy a paper encyclopedia.

I admit I didn't even know I was using RCS on Android until I switched to a cheap flip-phone and I could no longer post to a Wordle group chat that I had been in for years. What is the possible advantage to the user for a messaging platform that ONLY works on an Android or iOS device with an active number? Don't want.

My Camroc produced exactly one usable photograph. It was hell to load it with a single disk of unexposed film.

I was captivated by the August 1980 issue of Byte magazine, which had a cover dedicated to Forth. It was supposed to be easy to implement, and I imagined I might do that with my new KIM-1 6502 board. Alas, the KIM-1 was lost when I went to college, and life forced me down different pathways for the next 45 years.

About a year ago I finally began to work on my dream of a Forth implementation by building a Forth-based flight management computer into a spaceflight simulation game that I am working on. Now, instead of writing mostly C# or GDscript code in Godot, I am trying to figure out ways to create a useful device using this awkwardly elegant language. I'm having fun with it.

One of the interesting bits is that I have been able to make the Forth code an entirely separate project on Github (https://github.com/Eccentric-Anomalies/Sky-Dart-FMS), with a permissive open-source license. If anyone actually built a real spacecraft like the one in my game, they could use the FMS code in a real computer to run it.

There is one part of the linked article that really speaks to me: "Implement a Forth to understand how it works" and "But be aware of what this will not teach you". Figuring out the implementation just from reading books was a fascinating puzzle. Once I got it running, I realized I had zero experience actually writing Forth code. I am enjoying it, but it is a lot like writing in some weird, abstract assembly language.

I am convinced that someday, device manufacturers will realize that complicated, small touchscreen UIs are a horrible idea. They're even worse for seniors, because our fingers are losing dexterity, may be slightly swollen and stiff, and are prone to tremors. So, at a point in our lives when merely holding the phone can be a challenge, navigating some ambiguous UI while our fingers are obscuring the very thing we're trying to use is insanity.

But Apple is the worst because of its Apple ID requirement. I tried to resurrect an old iPhone of mine only to get stuck in a week-long perpetual ID recovery loop with Apple. Enter the new password wrong too many times, and you have to wait another week to try again. Want to create a new Apple ID? Nope. No duplicate IDs attached to the same phone number. I finally just recycled the phone. I'm old. I don't have time to waste on an iPhone.

Fun link. I never wrote GPU drivers, but it does remind me of writing my first Ethernet card driver back in the day. I felt like I had decoded the Rosetta Stone, and there was absolutely no one to talk to who understood how that felt.

This is a familiar concept from reading about WW2 spy stuff (Between Silk and Cyanide, for example, which I highly recommend). But what REALLY intrigues me is the typeface of the letter with its upper-case 'E' used in place of 'e'. What's up with that?

I've found nowhere that any price is mentioned, so I have to assume that it's one of those "if you have to ask..." sort of things.

Edit: https://www.amtrak.com/content/dam/projects/dotcom/english/p...

Slightly less than $5 a mile with a minimum of $2296. The rate to park your car is around $4000 a month. Fun thing to do if you have the money.

The canonical Bell Biker helmet that I remember was an ugly and expensive white bowl-thing for serious road cyclists that started becoming popular in the late 70s as ten-speed bicycles became more popular with adults.

https://americanhistory.si.edu/collections/object/nmah_11831...

I think I bought my Bell Biker helmet around 1980. The stylish kid-sized helmets that became widely available during the 80s did not exist in the 70s.

This statement in the article is a real head-scratcher:

Until now, the Southern Ocean region was virtually inaccessible to satellites due to its low temperatures and the complex, ever-changing dynamics of sea ice.

I hate to cast doubt on the veracity of such an interesting story, but this really makes me wonder whether the entire article is just AI garbage.

Where, exactly, is this deep-ocean vent south of Antarctica. I checked my map but couldn't find anything south of Antarctica at all.

I left the software engineering field about 17 years ago to become a high school teacher. One of the things I taught was computer science (to high schoolers) and I recall sitting in many meetings of HS CS educators discussing the upcoming critical shortage of workers with CS degrees. I would tell them I left the field because there wasn't much work, and they would look at me like I was crazy. "Something wrong with that guy... He can't find work when there's a CRITICAL SHORTAGE of workers!!"

I discovered this site about 20 years ago, and it appears to be as good as ever. The volume of detailed documentation here is all you need to dispel fantasies about a moon landing hoax.

I figured that one out years before chat gpt existed but it generated a tsunami of pushback from everyone. Americans, at least, believe that study time is to grades as work is to salary. Learning be damned.

I've had the same Miele HEPA vacuum cleaner for 35 years. I've replaced various pieces on it over the years. The bags are still available. It refuses to become obsolete.

Comic relief from the real dystopia. From my local paper (in New Hampshire) today:

"There are ... bills tied to energy production that Republicans hope will boost crypto here. One would define “off-grid electricity providers” as entities that generate, transmit or sell electricity but remain unconnected to any existing generation or transmission system.

If built, such providers would be exempted from most state utility regulations.

Another bill would permit electric utilities to own and operate “advanced nuclear resources” which can be used to power crypto-mining enterprises. The potential development timeline for any modular nuclear generators here remains entirely speculative, but projects in other states are expected by 2030."

I'm trying to imagine the future where our government promotes the development of private nuclear power plants for the sole purpose of doing pointless math in pursuit of money.

Maybe we'll be able to pay for our browser again? I used to pay for Opera, and I'd be happy to pay for a good browser like Firefox, too. Just like I pay for my Kagi search engine. If the browser is worth something to you, then it's worth paying for.