Yeah, one of my roommates did something like this at Cornell U... took all of the core courses while enrolled in the Math & Applied Physics program (in the land-grant Arts & Sciences College), and then transferred to CS in the Engineering College which had much higher tuition. I think this kind of scheme could work well enough even at most other "high end" universities. Plus, the guy ended up with almost twice as many friends/connections (compared to most people... probably 100x compared to me:P )
OneBusAway works great for that kind of thing in the Seattle / Puget Sound region. Though I still use Google Maps to provide the best transfer schedule, OBA is then good for tracking if the busses are running on time.
Unfortunately, I found that there are some dead ones where the busses aren't able to check in for a while... So the system might start to assume that a bus is running 15 minutes late, but then the bus will suddenly check in as on time just a few minutes before reaching the stop down the road from me. So. Mrrr
We had a lot of good apps back in the PalmOS days. I used to use JPluckX / Sunrise to download a compressed image of the day's Slashdot using the AvantSlash filter. I could even download the front page of any URLs provided as links, so I could even RTFA or see the AC's goatse links if I wanted to. Plucker for palmos was instantaneous on navigating and loading links from compressed data, much faster than using Avantgo at going back and forth between links, which was in turn much faster than downloading crap from 3g networks at the time over a mobile browser, which was in turn so much faster than trying to use the Slashdot beta AJAX / reactive / adaptive / redaptive interface we have now that doesn't even let you use the "open in new tab" feature that modern mobile browsers have.
I could get virtually all of/. on my device each day, ready to entertain me while I was on the subway or even out camping without cell service. And I couldn't make any comments, so everyone wins.
Yeah, I feel badly for you young'uns, we had things so great back in the day.
Doesn't exactly have to be Old-skool... the best games (or franchises, even) will change the way you look at the world. Some of the essentials:
Simcity (4 is probably the "best" one, if you were to play no others) Civilization (II is the classic version, though it seems like they got a lot right with V) Ultima VII (runs well under the modern exult engine) Sims (III, no expansions necessary. You can pretend it's an architecture program instead of a dollhouse, that was originally how it was intended) EVE Online (do the free month, that's enough to get your fill of pretty graphics, frustrating controls, and spreadsheet/economy engineering) Any top-rated FPS (if you've played one FPS, you've played them all, though some have better single-player stories, and others have better team play) Portal (I, and then II) Grand Theft Auto (III:SA is the best, though I've heard good things about V. All of them are nice little satirical time capsules, though) Starcraft (II BW , and maybe III, just so you know what a nice RTS is like)
I had been using an HTC myTouch Slide 4G (doubleshot) , and the MTS3G (espresso) before that.
It was great, I would always win at the little online "pictionary" games since I could type out the answer faster than practically anyone else. Also, it was good for reading in a supine or other odd positions, because I could set it to only switch to landscape mode if the keyboard was slid out... it's a constant annoyance to me when other phones switch orientations because the accelerometer is giving readings it doesn't cope with well.
Gradually, all of the apps on it got slower and less responsive, and I would gradually get rid of widgets and apps that would run into the background until I just had the bare essentials... Chrome, Maps, and Hangouts. But what finally did it in was that the SD card would get corrupted every time I let the batteries run all the way down.
Finally broke down and picked up a Nexus 5. The screen is big enough, esp. in landscape mode, to hunt and peck out the keys with reasonable accuracy. Unfortunately, Google hasn't made every app work in landscape mode, and some critical things (like the launcher and the frickin' Google search widget) force you to enter stuff on the tiny portrait mode keyboard. I think CyanogenMOD's Trebuchet launcher app was better with this, and I'm eagerly awaiting it to go stable on the Nexus 5 so I can switch over.
I've also been looking for a good Bluetooth keyboard case, but haven't found one yet. There are several good-looking ones for the Nexus 7, though. That would certainly scratch the itch for me. Of course, not many Android apps have good keyboard support, but they're out there... Jota+ , VXConnectBot, etc.
As an aside, after the last update to 4.4.4, my wife's Nexus 4 started getting noticeably less responsive too. Hoping it's just a matter of going through and clearing some of the Dalvik cache, and not because Google is (intentionally?) making older devices obsolete faster by adding in too many bloated features in their core apps:P
Was that perhaps the day you got a bigger monitor? Motion sickness is primarily influenced by what goes on in your peripheral vision. I've only ever gotten motion sickness on sims with wraparound displays on the sides, and it's quite awesome. Still saving up for extra screens for my gaming rig at home so I can have those side panels.
The God of Thunder is at a particularly successful orgy and sees a good-looking woman wandering around in her toga. He puffs up his chest and proclaims to her, "Hi, I am Thor!"
The woman looks back and says, "Ugh, yeth, I'm thor too, I'm thor all over."
Yeah, the Lenovo T420s has an array of mics up top around the webcam, and in theory they can be used to filter out noise from typing and be tuned to pick up the voice of the talker and not the speakers. But I went through all that calibration and it still sucks... it does filter out a lot of the keyboard noise but it also attacks the voice as well. Maybe someday Lenovo/Conexant will release better, more tunable drivers, but I haven't seen anything positive on any of the Lenovo support message boards yet.
In Lenovo's defense, I bought a z710 for my wife, and it appears to work great with Skype and stuff out of the box (though I've never sampled the audio quality on the far end of the call). It's a nice little desktop replacement box, at the time probably the cheapest laptop I could find with a 1920x1080 LCD and a half-decent NVidia GPU. Of course, it still has an Intel 4000 integrated GPU as well for "hybrid power savings"... you can't disable the iGPU, and the thing would BSOD with any 3D applications using the Nvidia GPU until I installed the right combination of driver updates relatively recently.
My work laptop (Lenovo T420s) is useless for microphone audio (some Conexant chip). The company keeps wanting us to use Skype and Lync and SoftVTC to do meetings, but all the people who try to use the onboard audio are inaudible (because the built-in noise cancellation keeps ducking their voice), or if they manage to dig 5 dialogs deep to disable the noise cancellation (with an option that gets reset every reboot), they have lots of system noise over their voices (even if they're using an external mic. ). So everyone dials in via phone for group VTCs and mutes their PCs.
I have an expensive Jabra headset with a USB dongle. That gives me pretty clean audio. Should be able to use bluetooth too, but that takes more driver updates and even then it's still a pain.
My gaming PC has somewhat nicer onboard audio, but even with a S/PDIF link to my Logitech Z-560 speakers, I still get a hiss whenever the OS turns on and "opens" the audio device. Would be nice to be able to input digital audio somehow for Skype, but I ended up just plugging in a cheap USB webcam with a digital mic instead.
Still, it's kinda sad that any cheap mobile phone has a better microphone with AEC (for speakerphone use) and NC than you can get on most computers.
eh, there's ArsTechnica for that kind of thing. Or of course, you know, the/. comment filters that can also make the ACs invisible to you.
That said, I haven't really figured out what to use my Pi for yet. I have enough old smartphones to throw at random little projects that could use cameras/audio/touchscreens/wifi, and an Arduino Uno that does a better job at little ADC/DAC projects. Critically, I have only one monitor with an HDMI port, and my my PC is connected to that. Best I could come up with so far is just a device I could use to throw the BSOD screensaver up on LCDs at work or in public.
This is not joking matter! Next up on the agenda is Oxygen sequestration, a noxious, highly reactive, corrosive gas that instantly kills most cells it comes into contact with and, in high enough concentrations, can set just about anything on fire!
And don't even get us started on dihydrogen monoxide!
If it's someone else's, then usually vi since I'm probably in a hurry.
IDEs I play with every once in a while, but invariably I hit some silly brick wall where it's better/faster/dareIsayeasier to bring it up in emacs.
I have been using notepad++ on Windows a lot lately, and just wondering what the closest thing to that there is on Linux. It's the only thing I've seen that combines the feature set of emacs with the snappiness of vi while still having a pretty consistent GUI. I have to admint I learned a lot about what emacs can do by discovering features and plugins in notepad++ and Googling how to do that in emacs:-P (speedbar, whitespace-mode)
Sublime Text editor was a lot of fun to play with if only for the multi cursor mode, but there's a great howto on doing the same thing in emacs.
I think the mistake was just in making it a heavy-handed ban. Bringing out the ban hammer just turned it into a joke.
I'm sure they will successfully reintroduce the behavior-modification measure by creating a higher sales tax on large drinks. Which will probably have an as good or better impact as a silly ban that people would gladly find ways to circumvent just to "stick it to the man".
We have these luxury taxes on alcohol that corresponds to the proof (one tax bracket for wine and beer, another for hard liquor). It could certainly work like that, and not come across as freedom-limiting nanny-statism.
Heh, I lived on a steep hill where I usually had to parallel park and they had even/odd parking days. That was fun to keep up with, especially in the snow and ice. At least I had a front wheel drive manual.
Heh, cool:D I guess that explains why they both have better caricatures of american culture than the Americans could pull off:P
How was it that the main character had such terrible Russian voice acting, whereas all the other Russians and even the Thai prostitute had more authentic accents? That was another thing that sort of drove us up the wall about GTA4:P
OK, I'll say something nice about GTA4... I did get a chuckle out of the achievement tracking for flying things under bridges... that was something missing from most flying games:P
Yes, the way I see it, it will be impossible to convince AGW deniers to accept the science observations, not because they are stupid, but because they don't want to be held accountable for any wrongdoing. It's like taking the 5th, or "don't talk to the police"... anything you say can and will be used against you. No one wants to admit to being stupid or making mistakes. Viewed through this lens, their policies on other things like abortions and gun control make more sense... "Well abortion is wrong, if you got pregnant you made a mistake, and we don't make mistakes"... "Well guns only shoot bad guys. Why would I accidentally shoot a good guy? I don't make mistakes".
We need to find more effective ways to communicate with these people so they can live responsibly. But trying to shove their faces in the facts just makes them belligerent and more likely to rebel and go the other way, like buying the biggest SUV they can afford, because F*(K society and their maths.
I don't know why I don't see more of this... is it not obvious that TrueCrypt is most likely made by whitehats at the NSA? And that the blackhats at the NSA probably finally strongarmed them into abandoning their hobby project?
This seems consistent with the TrueCrypt End-of-Life announcement.
Slashdot Mirror
Yeah, one of my roommates did something like this at Cornell U... took all of the core courses while enrolled in the Math & Applied Physics program (in the land-grant Arts & Sciences College), and then transferred to CS in the Engineering College which had much higher tuition. I think this kind of scheme could work well enough even at most other "high end" universities. Plus, the guy ended up with almost twice as many friends/connections (compared to most people... probably 100x compared to me :P )
OneBusAway works great for that kind of thing in the Seattle / Puget Sound region. Though I still use Google Maps to provide the best transfer schedule, OBA is then good for tracking if the busses are running on time.
Unfortunately, I found that there are some dead ones where the busses aren't able to check in for a while... So the system might start to assume that a bus is running 15 minutes late, but then the bus will suddenly check in as on time just a few minutes before reaching the stop down the road from me. So. Mrrr
We had a lot of good apps back in the PalmOS days. I used to use JPluckX / Sunrise to download a compressed image of the day's Slashdot using the AvantSlash filter. I could even download the front page of any URLs provided as links, so I could even RTFA or see the AC's goatse links if I wanted to. Plucker for palmos was instantaneous on navigating and loading links from compressed data, much faster than using Avantgo at going back and forth between links, which was in turn much faster than downloading crap from 3g networks at the time over a mobile browser, which was in turn so much faster than trying to use the Slashdot beta AJAX / reactive / adaptive / redaptive interface we have now that doesn't even let you use the "open in new tab" feature that modern mobile browsers have.
I could get virtually all of /. on my device each day, ready to entertain me while I was on the subway or even out camping without cell service. And I couldn't make any comments, so everyone wins.
Yeah, I feel badly for you young'uns, we had things so great back in the day.
Doesn't exactly have to be Old-skool... the best games (or franchises, even) will change the way you look at the world. Some of the essentials:
Simcity (4 is probably the "best" one, if you were to play no others)
Civilization (II is the classic version, though it seems like they got a lot right with V)
Ultima VII (runs well under the modern exult engine)
Sims (III, no expansions necessary. You can pretend it's an architecture program instead of a dollhouse, that was originally how it was intended)
EVE Online (do the free month, that's enough to get your fill of pretty graphics, frustrating controls, and spreadsheet/economy engineering)
Any top-rated FPS (if you've played one FPS, you've played them all, though some have better single-player stories, and others have better team play)
Portal (I, and then II)
Grand Theft Auto (III:SA is the best, though I've heard good things about V. All of them are nice little satirical time capsules, though)
Starcraft (II BW , and maybe III, just so you know what a nice RTS is like)
Here's my running list of games I want to introduce my kids to:
http://trumblings.blogspot.com...
Obviously the only thing to do is to actually write a book about Amelia Bedelia's antics. Then all would be well with the world.
/ off to write a wiki article about how humanoid sexbots will free humanity from its chains
I had been using an HTC myTouch Slide 4G (doubleshot) , and the MTS3G (espresso) before that.
It was great, I would always win at the little online "pictionary" games since I could type out the answer faster than practically anyone else. Also, it was good for reading in a supine or other odd positions, because I could set it to only switch to landscape mode if the keyboard was slid out... it's a constant annoyance to me when other phones switch orientations because the accelerometer is giving readings it doesn't cope with well.
The MTS4G was not supposed to run Android 4, but thanks to CyanogenMOD... http://trumblings.blogspot.com...
Gradually, all of the apps on it got slower and less responsive, and I would gradually get rid of widgets and apps that would run into the background until I just had the bare essentials... Chrome, Maps, and Hangouts. But what finally did it in was that the SD card would get corrupted every time I let the batteries run all the way down.
Finally broke down and picked up a Nexus 5. The screen is big enough, esp. in landscape mode, to hunt and peck out the keys with reasonable accuracy. Unfortunately, Google hasn't made every app work in landscape mode, and some critical things (like the launcher and the frickin' Google search widget) force you to enter stuff on the tiny portrait mode keyboard. I think CyanogenMOD's Trebuchet launcher app was better with this, and I'm eagerly awaiting it to go stable on the Nexus 5 so I can switch over.
I've also been looking for a good Bluetooth keyboard case, but haven't found one yet. There are several good-looking ones for the Nexus 7, though. That would certainly scratch the itch for me. Of course, not many Android apps have good keyboard support, but they're out there... Jota+ , VXConnectBot, etc.
As an aside, after the last update to 4.4.4, my wife's Nexus 4 started getting noticeably less responsive too. Hoping it's just a matter of going through and clearing some of the Dalvik cache, and not because Google is (intentionally?) making older devices obsolete faster by adding in too many bloated features in their core apps :P
some guy was gushing about irccloud.
I don't really have that muchtrouble keeping track of IRC on irssi on my 24x7 server though. That makes me a dinosaur I guess.
Was that perhaps the day you got a bigger monitor? Motion sickness is primarily influenced by what goes on in your peripheral vision. I've only ever gotten motion sickness on sims with wraparound displays on the sides, and it's quite awesome. Still saving up for extra screens for my gaming rig at home so I can have those side panels.
Heh, thanks! My old man will appreciate the correction ;)
The God of Thunder is at a particularly successful orgy and sees a good-looking woman wandering around in her toga. He puffs up his chest and proclaims to her, "Hi, I am Thor!"
The woman looks back and says, "Ugh, yeth, I'm thor too, I'm thor all over."
Yeah, the Lenovo T420s has an array of mics up top around the webcam, and in theory they can be used to filter out noise from typing and be tuned to pick up the voice of the talker and not the speakers. But I went through all that calibration and it still sucks... it does filter out a lot of the keyboard noise but it also attacks the voice as well. Maybe someday Lenovo/Conexant will release better, more tunable drivers, but I haven't seen anything positive on any of the Lenovo support message boards yet.
In Lenovo's defense, I bought a z710 for my wife, and it appears to work great with Skype and stuff out of the box (though I've never sampled the audio quality on the far end of the call). It's a nice little desktop replacement box, at the time probably the cheapest laptop I could find with a 1920x1080 LCD and a half-decent NVidia GPU. Of course, it still has an Intel 4000 integrated GPU as well for "hybrid power savings"... you can't disable the iGPU, and the thing would BSOD with any 3D applications using the Nvidia GPU until I installed the right combination of driver updates relatively recently.
Onboard sound sucks.
My work laptop (Lenovo T420s) is useless for microphone audio (some Conexant chip). The company keeps wanting us to use Skype and Lync and SoftVTC to do meetings, but all the people who try to use the onboard audio are inaudible (because the built-in noise cancellation keeps ducking their voice), or if they manage to dig 5 dialogs deep to disable the noise cancellation (with an option that gets reset every reboot), they have lots of system noise over their voices (even if they're using an external mic. ). So everyone dials in via phone for group VTCs and mutes their PCs.
I have an expensive Jabra headset with a USB dongle. That gives me pretty clean audio. Should be able to use bluetooth too, but that takes more driver updates and even then it's still a pain.
My gaming PC has somewhat nicer onboard audio, but even with a S/PDIF link to my Logitech Z-560 speakers, I still get a hiss whenever the OS turns on and "opens" the audio device. Would be nice to be able to input digital audio somehow for Skype, but I ended up just plugging in a cheap USB webcam with a digital mic instead.
Still, it's kinda sad that any cheap mobile phone has a better microphone with AEC (for speakerphone use) and NC than you can get on most computers.
Ha, and don't forget the "I'm a talking parrot! Say something to me!" thing with the shrill voice too!
Is climate change human caused? Hell if I know. But I know it's been pushed on the public about as unscientifically as Eugenics and Phrenology.
Null hypothesis: Does human activity have no impact on the environment?
eh, there's ArsTechnica for that kind of thing. Or of course, you know, the /. comment filters that can also make the ACs invisible to you.
That said, I haven't really figured out what to use my Pi for yet. I have enough old smartphones to throw at random little projects that could use cameras/audio/touchscreens/wifi, and an Arduino Uno that does a better job at little ADC/DAC projects. Critically, I have only one monitor with an HDMI port, and my my PC is connected to that. Best I could come up with so far is just a device I could use to throw the BSOD screensaver up on LCDs at work or in public.
This is not joking matter! Next up on the agenda is Oxygen sequestration, a noxious, highly reactive, corrosive gas that instantly kills most cells it comes into contact with and, in high enough concentrations, can set just about anything on fire!
And don't even get us started on dihydrogen monoxide!
Depends on whose code I'm editing.
If it's my own, then emacs.
If it's someone else's, then usually vi since I'm probably in a hurry.
IDEs I play with every once in a while, but invariably I hit some silly brick wall where it's better/faster/dareIsayeasier to bring it up in emacs.
I have been using notepad++ on Windows a lot lately, and just wondering what the closest thing to that there is on Linux. It's the only thing I've seen that combines the feature set of emacs with the snappiness of vi while still having a pretty consistent GUI. I have to admint I learned a lot about what emacs can do by discovering features and plugins in notepad++ and Googling how to do that in emacs :-P (speedbar, whitespace-mode)
Sublime Text editor was a lot of fun to play with if only for the multi cursor mode, but there's a great howto on doing the same thing in emacs.
Why would you run any editor but GNU Emacs on a GNU/Linux system? Vi is not GNU.
Have you tried gvim?
(ducks before he gets yelled at for making people launch that abomination in X)
Eh, all good points.
I think the mistake was just in making it a heavy-handed ban. Bringing out the ban hammer just turned it into a joke.
I'm sure they will successfully reintroduce the behavior-modification measure by creating a higher sales tax on large drinks. Which will probably have an as good or better impact as a silly ban that people would gladly find ways to circumvent just to "stick it to the man".
We have these luxury taxes on alcohol that corresponds to the proof (one tax bracket for wine and beer, another for hard liquor). It could certainly work like that, and not come across as freedom-limiting nanny-statism.
I'll just leave this here:
http://www.despair.com/mistake...
Sad, though, I remember when I used to hit freshmeat.net as much as slashdot.
I am glad, though, that I got a good chunk of my life back when I learned to just rely on aptitude to keep stuff on my system updated for me.
Still, I ought to go and compile a kernel for the heck of it though, for old time's sake.
Heh, I lived on a steep hill where I usually had to parallel park and they had even/odd parking days. That was fun to keep up with, especially in the snow and ice. At least I had a front wheel drive manual.
Heh, cool :D I guess that explains why they both have better caricatures of american culture than the Americans could pull off :P
How was it that the main character had such terrible Russian voice acting, whereas all the other Russians and even the Thai prostitute had more authentic accents? That was another thing that sort of drove us up the wall about GTA4 :P
OK, I'll say something nice about GTA4... I did get a chuckle out of the achievement tracking for flying things under bridges... that was something missing from most flying games :P
Yes, the way I see it, it will be impossible to convince AGW deniers to accept the science observations, not because they are stupid, but because they don't want to be held accountable for any wrongdoing. It's like taking the 5th, or "don't talk to the police"... anything you say can and will be used against you. No one wants to admit to being stupid or making mistakes. Viewed through this lens, their policies on other things like abortions and gun control make more sense... "Well abortion is wrong, if you got pregnant you made a mistake, and we don't make mistakes"... "Well guns only shoot bad guys. Why would I accidentally shoot a good guy? I don't make mistakes".
We need to find more effective ways to communicate with these people so they can live responsibly. But trying to shove their faces in the facts just makes them belligerent and more likely to rebel and go the other way, like buying the biggest SUV they can afford, because F*(K society and their maths.
I don't know why I don't see more of this... is it not obvious that TrueCrypt is most likely made by whitehats at the NSA? And that the blackhats at the NSA probably finally strongarmed them into abandoning their hobby project?
This seems consistent with the TrueCrypt End-of-Life announcement.