vertnerd

10 ms·

1.
by vertnerd 7d ago
"After trying Kagi/Duck Duck Go, I have gone back to Google for search and I freely grant that I find the “AI Overview” to be useful." I feel compelled to point out that Kagi does offer AI-backed answers if you want it to
2.
by vertnerd 1mo ago
It's not a matter of "letting" her do anything. She can choose to use whatever service and hardware vendors she wants, as long as she can take care of her own tech support.
3.
by vertnerd 1mo ago
We (wife and I) de-googled ourselves about a year and a half ago, moving half a TB of photos to Ente and canceling our paid Google subscription (while still keeping our gmail addresses). We set up our (Android) phones to back up photos to E
4.
by vertnerd 3mo ago
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 2
5.
by vertnerd 3mo ago
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...
6.
by vertnerd 5mo ago
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 ga
7.
by vertnerd 6mo ago
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.
8.
by vertnerd 6mo ago
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
9.
by vertnerd 6mo ago
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 me
10.
by vertnerd 7mo ago
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 spreadsh
11.
by vertnerd 8mo ago
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 un
12.
by vertnerd 9mo ago
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 ele
13.
by vertnerd 9mo ago
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
14.
by vertnerd 9mo ago
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 Wind
15.
by vertnerd 10mo ago
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 wou
16.
by vertnerd 10mo ago
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 an
17.
by vertnerd 10mo ago
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.
18.
by vertnerd 10mo ago
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 p
19.
by vertnerd 10mo ago
My Camroc produced exactly one usable photograph. It was hell to load it with a single disk of unexposed film.
20.
by vertnerd 11mo ago
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
21.
by vertnerd 1y ago
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, an
22.
by vertnerd 1y ago
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.
23.
by vertnerd 1y ago
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 &#x
24.
by vertnerd 1y ago
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&#
25.
by vertnerd 1y ago
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://ame
26.
by vertnerd 1y ago
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
27.
by vertnerd 1y ago
Where, exactly, is this deep-ocean vent south of Antarctica. I checked my map but couldn't find anything south of Antarctica at all.
28.
by vertnerd 1y ago
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 c
29.
by vertnerd 1y ago
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.
30.
by vertnerd 1y ago
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.

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