Troy Dowling

It’s a beautiful bird until the horny little pricks find your chimney’s metal flashing at 5:00!

Wow, that’s so cool!

I prefer my accolades in the form of bonus cheques. I’ve got a git history for anyone else that matters

Strangely topical for me. I wasted yesterday telling myself I was smart enough to make SwayWM on Wayland work well with my 1070. Should have trusted the warnings in the documentation; hubris cost me a weekend day!

If you don’t mind me polling your opinion: do you recommend Graphene for someone previously used to Cyanogen / Lineage? I recently upgraded to a Pixel 8 from quite an old handset and I’m not particularly fond of the stock ROM. Much has changed since the last time I had to think about this stuff! I primarily care about privacy, and use my cell for little more than phone calls, messaging, and its camera.

I had the same experience.

I was with you up until the climate controls.

Any control you can find in a 1997 Hyundai Accent should be physical.

Anything else can be hidden behind a touchscreen because I’m not going to use it while driving anyway.

My big request would be to drop the USB cable. I don’t know why I need to connect both USB and Bluetooth. I’d love to just leave my cell in my bag where it belongs instead of advertising yet another reason why someone should smash my windows in!

I bought a popcorn bowl that turned out to be terrible. It came with a leaflet coupon saying if I left a 5-star review, they would send me another bowl for free.

The comment I tried to leave was a short, fair, polite statement along the lines of 'this bowl doesn’t meet the claims X and Y on the description, and came with an offer to trade a good review for another bowl for free." That review got flagged by the automod and was ultimately rejected. If I recall, the rejection message wasn’t even specific on what rule my review broke.

I have heard it front to back, back to front, up or down, but never have I heard of a left-right wiper.

Root access should be available from the moment my purchase payment clears. I paid, it’s my device.

The dietary illuminati hid their food pyramid atop the unfinished pyramid of the one dollar bill! It’s pyramids all the way down!

The perpetual year of the Linux desktop.

The very last thing the Internet needs is more ads.

You need a touchscreen to open the glovebox?

The only reason I know what webp is, is because its “that dumb format” that doesn’t play like a GIF in Signal.

Oh, of course. That explains the coefficient output in the terminal. Thanks.

Is that about 20 degrees of swing on the hotend? Might need to recalibrate that loop!

I have no idea how these work, but one hack idea off the cuff:

You get the light for free. At least when your lids are open; that’s how vision works. A cheap digital watch lasts ages on a tiny coin cell because the polarisation of the LCD, which passes or blocks polarised light, takes minimal energy. Stack up a passive polariser, and the active LCD-like layer, (and maybe a second passive layer?) and you can cast selective shadows on the retina.

This gives you monochrome “smart vision” in the same sense as a monochrome Casio wristwatch. No idea how to tackle issues of focus at such a short focal length, or achieving any sort of active display let alone colour.

Maybe the whole thing is a pipe dream crackpot idea.

I have a whole desk full of calculators. The two I use most are:

Sharp EL-W516X A very capable little dot-matrix device, with some limited programming / macro ability. Performs all of the calculus, stats, matrix, and combinatorics functions I use regularly. This was my go-to calculator until I started using the…

Casio fx-115ES PLUS At some point, I had to write some exams which only allowed a few calculators off an approved list. This was the one I picked from the list. It is a very competent little device which can do anything the Sharp unit above can. After getting over the novelty of having to learn a new keypad, I found it nearly identical to the Sharp in usage.

I think that both calculators are effectively identical in terms of function, but the Sharp may have a slight advantage in terms of its interface. I would wager it takes slightly fewer keystrokes for the same operation on average as compared to the Casio. I also didn’t really take advantage of the programmable aspect, instead using the four keys for the common multipliers I use in my work: kilo, milli, micro, nano. I liked how the display would read in “natural” terms like “2 * pi * 10k * 100μ” instead of having a tonne of “10^n” terms in the line.

The Casio has the advantage that it is typically on just about any approved calculator list; if you’re taking exams down the line, consider getting used to an approved calculator now so you’re not wasting time searching for buttons later. It’s also the more popular choice, I think. I saw plenty of students, TAs, and instructors using this calculator which could make it easier to give and receive help on it.

One of the frustrating things about Signal is its extreme compression. I hope WhatsApp laxing up a bit will be the final push to the Signal devs to allow me to send a 30 MiB photo if I want to. Just give me a damn opt-in option buried in a settings menu for Pete’s sake.

Annoys me to no end that I’m forced to crunch image quality down. The reasons I heard in discussion were to save disk space and network bandwidth. I have no sympathy for either of these points. Have a modicum of digital hygiene and delete old files, and pressure your ridiculous governments to invest and regulate ISPs, then join the rest of the world in the 21st century.