Dave.

I have a Samsung A71. It permanently lives in its protective case which gives it good bumpers around the easily-breakable edge-to-edge screen. It’s now 4 years old and has survived numerous tumbles and drops over the years.

Occasionally I have to swap the SD card in it and I am always astonished at how thin and light and fragile it is when not in the case.

I would quite happily have an actual similar size phone to what “I have now” if the battery size was bumped up another 50 percent.

McAfee wrote a program that used the Sqlite library for database storage.

When going about its data storage business for McAfee’s program, the Sqlite library was storing files in C:\temp with prefixes like sqlite_3726371.

Users see that and get angry, and bug the Sqlite developers.

Now probably when initialising the Sqlite library McAfee could have given it the location of a directory to keep it’s temp files. Then they could have been tucked away somewhere along with the rest of the McAfee code base and be more easily recognised as belonging to them, but they didn’t.

So because of a bit of careless programming on McAfee’s part, Sqlite developers were getting the heat because the files were easily recognisable as belonging to them.

Because the Sqlite developers don’t have control of what McAfee was doing, the most expedient way to solve the problem was to obfuscate the name a bit.

It did have a pretty catchy chorus.

Turns out it’s about an actual school shooting and not just disliking Mondays.

Back when a school shooting was actually something to write a song about.

Especially after all the spam on Facebook like:

“RANDOM_FRIEND wants to get in touch with you on Threads™!”

“RANDOM_FRIEND just posted something on Threads™! Check it out!”

Etc etc

And then the interleaving of Threads™ teaser posts amongst Facebook posts with half a sentence and then “…” and any interaction with it prompts you to join threads so you can read the rest of that sentence that hooked you in…

Or the “easy and fun™” way that every Instagram account has a Threads™ account just waiting to be activated by you.

I wonder how much of a user base they would have without all the jamming it down user’s throats.

Pretty much.

Capable employees don’t raise a huge stink.

They quietly put the word out to a few people they know and play along until something interesting appears on the horizon.

Then when they’re good and ready they just “suddenly” fuck off to somewhere nicer for them.

And how if you share a file in Teams and then six months later you want to share a file with the same name to ANYONE else via teams, well that’s a big no-can-do. Teams just went ahead and uploaded that file to your “stuff to share” folder in OneDrive and didn’t put it in a subfolder unique to the chat, or add a unique prefix or suffix or anything because hey, you’ll only ever share a file with a particular name once in your life, right?

And nobody would ever want to share a file with the same name, but different data, right? So Teams can just give the end user the choice between replacing the current file with the new one, or sharing the same one again to these new guys, because there’s no possible use case for actually having two files named the same with different information in the file, right?

Nobody would want to share a README.TXT, or Photo001.jpg, or contact.ics, or a zip file of a folder they just downloaded from Teams’ SharePoint interface, the file that’s automatically called “OneDrive.zip” without the option to change it before saving, more than once, right? Right??

Fuck teams. And fuck Teams(New) too, just for the shitty name.

Eh…Windows 3.1, 95, 98SE, XP, and 7 were all pretty great.

From a user interface perspective, they were okay, perhaps because by the time people got to XP they’d had a decade of a consistent interface and were just used to its quirks.

From a security context they were not ok. Not ok at all.

Assumption:

Someone crams a 300 watt solar panel onto the roof of their EV and manages to integrate it into the charging system so that it’s pretty efficient to use that power.

Numbers:

One hour of good sunshine on the 300 watt panel = 300 watt-hours (Wh).

Average EV energy usage : 200Wh per kilometre these days. Maybe a little more, maybe a little less, depends on how and where you’re driving.

Result:

One hour of perfect sunshine hitting the roof of your car equals 1.5 kilometres of extra range, or you can drive your car in a steady-state fashion at a 3-5 kilometres per hour because an EV is more efficient than the average usage at lower speeds.

Conclusion:

Probably better off increasing the storage capacity of the battery as a full day’s sunshine will get you about 10 kilometres of range.

You need silicon.

The earth’s crust is about 25 percent silicon. Sand made out of quartz like desert sand is about 50 percent silicon. Beach sand is usually mainly calcium carbonate from shells and it doesn’t contain much silicon at all. Volcanic beach sand is more likely the same as the earth’s crust so 25-50 percent.

So as long as you refine your sand/gravel/rocks/lava so that you’re left with pretty much pure silicon, you’re good to go.

Digg was Reddit, before Reddit came along. And then they tried to monetise it all and pushed out a site layout update that “enhanced” that monetisation aspect (sound familiar?)

Basically they fucked it up right there.

I left Digg in 2010 and never went back, and now the domain and it’s remnants are owned by some advertising company.

I would like to hear your opinion on crumbed, deep fried, pineapple rings. 🤔

For example : https://www.redrooster.com.au/menu/sides-kids-meals/pineapple-fritter/

Also, things not designed for food use or human consumption don’t have to follow strict rules regarding their composition, and they’re not monitored.

Nobody is checking PVA glue for heavy metals or melamine or pesticides or any other number of things that will give your insides a bad day.

Nobody is issuing a recall if your bottle of glue ends up with ground up glass in it.

Because it’s not food, and it doesn’t matter, until you put half a cup of it in your pizza because Google told you it was a good idea.

Mmm I’d take Common Sense Skeptic’s spaceX videos with about a ton of salt. They’ve got a real big bug up their ass about spaceX for some reason.

I don’t know about you, but I just swiped my way through the first sentence off this reply with Google’s keyboard and all I had to do was select swiped instead of the suggested settled.

They do remember common words that you use, so if you have accidentally “approved” a few misspellings they’ll be suggested/given to you more often so a drastic solution to that is to clear your personalised data from the keyboard.

LIVE BLACKBIRDS???

Sing a song of sixpence a pocket full of rye,

Four and twenty blackbirds baked in a pie.

When the pie was opened the birds began to sing,

Oh wasn’t that a dainty dish to set before the king?

The king was in his counting house counting out his money,

The queen was in the parlour eating bread and honey

The maid was in the garden hanging out the clothes,

When down came a blackbird and pecked off her nose!

Moral of the story, don’t be a minor character in an 18th century nursery rhyme.

I can’t speak for the popularity of TurboVPN, or the probable ease in which companies can manipulate download numbers, but note the “+” on the end of each number.

NordVPN could have 99,999,995 downloads, TurboVPN can have 100,000,002 downloads, but one would be 50M+ and the other would be 100M+.

Flash chip cells are basically tiny electron traps, they consist of a tiny stored charge surrounded on all sides by an insulator. When writing to the cell you fill it with some electrons via (much handwaving here) a method of quantum tunneling. You can then read the cell by sensing the internal charge without disturbing it.

When not in use eventually enough charge tunnels out of the cell via random quantum tunneling events for it to read nothing. This is worsened when things are hotter, so maybe keeping your flash chips in the freezer would help.

Consumer flash memory, I probably wouldn’t expect more than 20 or 30 years of offline storage out of it. The older chips would last longer, because their cells are bigger, and you’re not trying to read multiple charge levels per cell like the newer stuff.

Added edit:

Magnetic media probably has a higher chance of surviving longer. Floppies from the 80s can still be read, for example, but they are low density media. You’d want something that separates the drive system from the actual magnetic media to stop bearing or motor failure from being an issue , so tape would be a good idea.

The problem is, of course, that you could end up with media you can’t read as nobody makes the hardware for it. Tape drives have gone through a dozen revisions in the last 30 years as capacity has increased, but as long as you have the same physical tape cartridge you should be ok.

M-Disc is a blueray compatible media that doesn’t use dye and should have a life of hundreds of years. But who will have a blueray reader on hand in the 24th century? I’ve got a USB M-Disc compatible writer for my backups, but in 30 years will I be able to pull it out of a drawer and plug it into a USB Gen 15 port and have it work with whatever software I have then?

I think we’re going to have to do the manual duplication process for a while yet, until we finally settle on some universal petabyte storage crystals or something.

He was a tough nut to crack.

“Computers are useless, they can only give you answers.” - also Picasso.

But he was an artist. Technology was just a tool for him to make art, nothing more. I’m sure if you’d shown him an iPad with a modern sketching program on it hooked up to a dye-sub printer, he would have been at least a little intrigued. He might have disregarded it as a toy, but he also might have worked with a new medium to see what he could do.

Australian here. Last time I wrote a cheque, Michael Jackson was still black.

They are supposed to be the glue that binds the internal team together as well as bonding to external groups.

The project manager organises external requirements and steers the project in the direction needed for the business. That direction might change depending on the status of other projects, it’s their job to be on top of that.

They also report progress and roadblocks upstream so that those who manage groups of related projects can work on keeping everything running.

Whether they’re actually competent, well that’s something else entirely.