Likely this. Temperature and humidity also affect your sense of taste and smell, plus they can affect a hot drink’s evaporation rate.

Neither of those can stream video in real time AFAIK. They will back up the video file on some unpredictable schedule after you’re done recording. So not ideal for a situation where your phone might be seized or destroyed.

But if that works for you, there are lots of open-source options that work similarly. SyncThing can sync to any server, and all you’d need to do is make sure your sync destination is network-accessible somehow (VPN, internet-facing server, whatever). Lots of cloud drive apps can auto-upload photos and videos, and some of those are open-source.

A better off-the-shelf proprietary workflow might be a Zoom call with cloud recording enabled. Then you’d be protected against a sudden (and perhaps permanent) loss of network connectivity.

Buy a dozen and you could fit a good chunk of LibGen.

Is it more for situations that need to be compatible with most *nix systems and you might not necessarily have access to a higher level scripting language?

Yes, and also because integrating Python one-liners into shell pipelines is awkward in general. I’m more likely to write my entire script in Python than to use it just for text processing, and a lot of the time that’s just a pain. Python isn’t really designed for one-liners or for use as a shell. You can twist it into working in those use cases, but then I’d ask the reverse question: why would you do that when you could “just” use awk?

On macOS, Python is not installed by default. So if you are writing scripts that you want to be portable across platforms, or for general Mac administration, using Python is a burden.

This is also true when working with some embedded devices. IIRC I can ssh into my router and use awk (thanks to it being included in Busybox), but I’m definitely not going to install an entire Python environment there. I’m not sure there’d even be enough storage space for that.

After working for many years in a “fast pace environment” I can’t help but notice that I have increasing difficulties to do simple tasks.

How many years are we talking?

A lot of what you describe sounds like you’re starting to have “senior moments”. If you’re past 50, that’s pretty normal. Which is not to say it’s good. “Normal” does not mean good. It just means common. I don’t think you should look for anything exotic if the mundane explanation fits your observations.

Low-tech suggestion: Keep a notepad in your pocket. Make to-do lists. Cross items off it when you’re done. Maybe put the time in when you cross it off.

• Put water on stove
• Turn off stove
• Make tea
• Drink tea

The Hyperlegible web site makes no mention of dyslexia, only visual impairment. Those are two totally different issues.

How’s navigation with Pebbles? If I start bike navigation in Google Maps on my phone, can I get turn-by-turn directions on the watch, and does it not suck?

I think they reached a point where their user base was predominantly mainstream, not tech-savvy enough to know the difference.

I mean, how else can any site survive on advertising when the ads are so obnoxious and it’s so easy to block them? Either the site is great and the ads are non-intrusive enough that I’ll make an exception in uBlock, or I’m never seeing the ads in the first place.

Gemini might be good at something, but I’ll never know because it is bad at all the things I have ever used the assistant for. If it’s good at anything at all, it’s something I don’t need or want.

Looking forward to 2027 when Google Gemini is replaced by Google Assistant (not to be confused with today’s Google Assistant, totally different product).

Louis Rossman did a video about this the other day: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-8bTquKjzos

The gist is: They had a $100M of revenue outside of Google in 2023. 40M of that was passive income from their >$1B investment portfolio.

I wonder what it would cost to simply develop a web browser instead of all the other bullshit Mozilla is focused on nowadays.

In theory, the only difference between an electric heater and your computer, as far as actual heat goes, is the dispersal pattern. They will generate exactly the same heat: 1W of heat per 1W of electricity used. That’s thermodynamics for you!

You said:

The flat was kept not quite as warm as previous years

So I don’t think it makes sense to assign any of the savings to using your PC vs your usual electric heaters. It’s because you kept your place a little cooler, which makes an absolutely huge difference. When heating in winter, every additional degree of air temperature is more costly than the last, since heat loss is relative to the temperature differential between indoors and outdoors (i.e. a warmer room will lose more heat to the outdoors than a cooler room, so you need to generate more heat to maintain it).

This sounds to me a lot like dieting. Most of the time, the success of a diet has less to do with the actual diet and more to do with the fact that dieting has made you more mindful and changed your behavior in other ways.

The two biggest things you can do to save money on heating in winter are:

1. Keep your place cooler. Wear warm socks, long sleeves, etc. instead.
2. Improve insulation. Plastic window insulation kits are cheap and easy to install/remove. For doorways, you can get adhesive insulating foam to fill side gaps and a slide-on door sweep to cover any bottom gaps.

Google as an organization is simply dysfunctional. Everything they make is either some cowboy bullshit with no direction, or else it’s death by committee à la Microsoft.

Google has always had a problem with incentives internally, where the only way to get promoted or get any recognition was to make something new. So their most talented devs would make some cool new thing, and then it would immediately stagnate and eventually die of neglect as they either got their promotion or moved on to another flashy new thing. If you’ve ever wondered why Google kills so many products (even well-loved ones), this is why. There’s no glory in maintaining someone else’s work.

But now I think Google has entered a new phase, and they are simply the new Microsoft – too successful for their own good, and bloated as a result, with too many levels of management trying to justify their existence. I keep thinking of this article by a Microsoft engineer around the time Vista came out, about how something like 40 people were involved in redesigning the power options in the start menu, how it took over a year, and how it was an absolute shitshow. It’s an eye-opening read: https://moishelettvin.blogspot.com/2006/11/windows-shutdown-crapfest.html

IPFS content IDs (CID) are a hash of the tree of chunks. Changes to chunk size can also change the hash!

I don’t understand why this is a deal-breaker. It seems like you could accomplish what you describe within IPFS simply by committing to a fixed chunk size. That’s valid within IPFS, right?

Is it important to use any specific hashing algorithm(s)? If not, then isn’t an IPFS CID (with a fixed, predetermined chunk size) a stable hash algorithm in and of itself?

Disgusting and unsurprising.

Most web admins do not care. I’ve lost count of how many sites make me jump through CAPTCHAS or outright block me in private browsing or on VPN. Most of these sites have no sensitive information, or already know exactly who I am because I am already authenticating with my username and password. It’s not something the actual site admins even think about. They click the button, say “it works on my machine!” and will happily blame any user whose client is not dead-center average.

Enter username, but first pass this CAPTCHA.

Enter password, but first pass this second CAPTCHA.

Here’s another CAPTCHA because lol why not?

Some sites even have their RSS feed behind Cloudflare. And guess what that means? It means you can’t fucking load it in a typical RSS reader. Good job!

The web is broken. JavaScript was a mistake. Return to monke gopher.

Fuck Cloudflare.

In practice, Python is not easy to learn programming with. Not at all. I see beginners wrestling with Anaconda and Jupyter notebooks and I weep.

The fact that pip is intentionally broken on macOS and some modern Linux distros sure doesn’t help. Everything about environment management is insane.

Give it time. This is Microsoft we’re talking about. Look at GitHub or Skype.

Monocultures are bad. Popularity very rarely tracks quality. And once something is overwhelmingly popular, it usually goes to shit, because the momentum is enough to keep it successful.

See: Windows. Outlook. Reddit. CrowdStrike.

everyone and their mother uses VS Code

This is usually a good reason to avoid something. Especially if that something comes from Microsoft.