MarkusWandel

6 ms·

1.
by MarkusWandel 14d ago
On average, obviously. Any given day ranges from zero, to a couple hundred for especially interesting days. Also a huge blip when the kids were young. Runs of "zero" days end up being dark ages in long term memory. Sure, went
2.
by MarkusWandel 14d ago
Well, call it "Monetization" then. Most platforms start optimistically, free to use, lots of features, burn VC money. Users love them. Then you want to make $$, and inevitably this causes the platform to be less good. Even my f
3.
by MarkusWandel 14d ago
This of course applies to my (sarcastic) description of women's memory too. A given conversation is compressed to a small amount of memory, a significant part of which is the "feel" of the conversation rather than the actual
4.
by MarkusWandel 14d ago
I think that's because memories really are highly compressed, with the average complex memory (of a grand day out, for example) being compressed into at most a paragraph of text's worth of information. Everything else is made up
5.
by MarkusWandel 15d ago
When my mom was still alive and relatively new to a smartphone (at age 80) I decided to send her some sort of relevant picture every day via Whatsapp, to get her used to communicating that way. Sometimes it was a real stretch to come up
6.
by MarkusWandel 15d ago
Being an "aging brain" myself I can totally relate to this. I've been a relatively obsessive photographer (i.e. visual diary) since digital cameras were practical, i.e. over 25 years now. 238K photos in the collection so fa
7.
by MarkusWandel 20d ago
I don't like paying $1K for a phone. My current one was CAD$140 at Costco three years ago. It has 32GB of built-in storage which is always 90% full regardless how diligent I am at moving stuff to the SD card, and it has 3GB RAM which
8.
by MarkusWandel 1mo ago
The article mentions several times that early sugar exposure affects sugar craving for a lifetime. Did they correct for that? I.e. people born during sugar rationing who later developed normal sugar consumption patterns compared to people
9.
by MarkusWandel 1mo ago
Yep. Precisely because of our efficient manufacturing, throw-away culture a lot of gadgets that used to be serious luxuries are now nearly free. For example basic espresso machines. In my area you can get one for $25 off FBM any day. Or
10.
by MarkusWandel 1mo ago
How do you actually do that? I ran mine for years with a single, borderless full screen CLI window but that hardly disabled the windowing system, you could still run GUI apps.
11.
by MarkusWandel 2mo ago
Mostly true but not quite. You can't do email the "old way" because you'll be buried in spam, and even if you can handle that, others who don't do it the old way may never get your mail. You can't put a server
12.
by MarkusWandel 3mo ago
Wonderful but it irritates me that so many descriptions of internal combustion engines refer to "explosions" of the fuel. You don't want that. It causes knocking and pinging and engine damage. You want a controlled burn th
13.
by MarkusWandel 3mo ago
To an oldster like me, this is already post classic internet, where the "golden" era was that of Usenet, and the web was just one interesting new use of the internet. Which begs the obvious question - to those whose internet value
14.
by MarkusWandel 3mo ago
I did test it with various known weights. It was a good scale.
15.
by MarkusWandel 3mo ago
I used to have a bathroom scale with a single strain gauge that was accurate. Accurate, as in weigh yourself, pick up a 1lb object, weigh yourself again and see an extra pound. That scale had a "lifetime" nonreplaceable battery
16.
by MarkusWandel 3mo ago
You have to view all cloud storage - all free cloud storage anyway - as ephemeral. If you want your childhood pictures to survive, store them someplace you have control over.
17.
by MarkusWandel 3mo ago
Somewhat recently, tried to activate a SIM for a guest here in Canada, and while you could fill in anything you want for personal info, the only way to hook up (prepaid) billing was with a Canadian credit card number. Whoops. This was o
18.
by MarkusWandel 4mo ago
Maybe this isn't proper, but, what I do is wet them, rub them with a tiny amount of dish soap, then rinse them under the hot water tap. Then blow the droplets off both sides and let the rest air dry. We have soft water here, so no wat
19.
by MarkusWandel 4mo ago
Does systemd ship with something to upgrade your cron jobs for you? That would be the friendly way. Write your old school cron jobs, and then a script that converts them to do things the systemd way, documenting its steps, i.e. I created
20.
by MarkusWandel 4mo ago
The damaged social fabric - for me - didn't consist of spendy stuff. Just backyard BBQ's, pool parties, (hosted) brunch or dinner invitations, that sort of thing. You keep doing it because habit. But then a 2 year interruption b
21.
by MarkusWandel 4mo ago
A lot of friendships aren't that deep. I've had work colleagues I really liked and even socialized with outside the workplace, and yet, if they left the company or retired... faded away. If it takes real effort to keep up contac
22.
by MarkusWandel 4mo ago
Being "Costco people" is easy. The quality of the product is good, the prices are good, there's little "choice paralysis" and it's all under one roof. But socially, it's like having IKEA art on your wall
23.
by MarkusWandel 4mo ago
The part he didn't mention is interpolation at the low end "specs are mere suggestions" end of things. I have a backup Android phone - a true "brand X" type of thing, vanilla android, bought at a garage sale. Nice
24.
by MarkusWandel 5mo ago
The internet was places. Plural. Places like watmath, ucbvax and the like. Real physical computers in places you'd heard of, and the amazing thing was that you could access them from elsewhere. Maybe I was a special case even then,
25.
by MarkusWandel 5mo ago
I grew up on a farm in Germany. Our "little" tractor was the MF135 (3 cylinder engine!). I started driving it for real work at 12 for the simple reason that my grandpa, who was the third driver when the hay was being brought in,
26.
by MarkusWandel 5mo ago
Dunno, the store looks cool in just the way you'd expect an AI to do it (sort of a synthetic average of cool stores). But is this amount of merch really going to make a sustainable profit (after the buzz wears off) in such expensive
27.
by MarkusWandel 5mo ago
Back when I was younger and challenges were mostly mental, I did participate in a group hike to the bottom of the Grand Canyon (via the Hermit trail). Yes, the hike back up was tough, but we had two nights' camp out at the bottom, rig
28.
by MarkusWandel 5mo ago
People use their ears to navigate traffic (as non-car-users) much more than they realize. There's a reason kids need to be drilled in "look both ways before crossing the street" - you can hear that there's no car coming
29.
by MarkusWandel 5mo ago
A smartphone doesn't have to rule your life. If you don't install social media apps on it, sure, you get text message and email pings but that's it. You pull it out because you want to do something, not because it wants
30.
by MarkusWandel 6mo ago
When I see numbers like that ($38 billion) thrown around I always wonder: Where did that money go? In the best case, it stayed in the economy in the form of salaries and such. In the worst case, it goes directly into an offshore pile of

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