Viewing profile — MarkusWandel

Mostly true but not quite. You can't do email the "old way" because you'll be buried in spam, and even if you can handle that, others who don't do it the old way may never get your…

Wonderful but it irritates me that so many descriptions of internal combustion engines refer to "explosions" of the fuel. You don't want that. It causes knocking and pinging and en…

To an oldster like me, this is already post classic internet, where the "golden" era was that of Usenet, and the web was just one interesting new use of the internet. Which begs th…

I did test it with various known weights. It was a good scale.

I used to have a bathroom scale with a single strain gauge that was accurate. Accurate, as in weigh yourself, pick up a 1lb object, weigh yourself again and see an extra pound. Tha…

You have to view all cloud storage - all free cloud storage anyway - as ephemeral. If you want your childhood pictures to survive, store them someplace you have control over.

Somewhat recently, tried to activate a SIM for a guest here in Canada, and while you could fill in anything you want for personal info, the only way to hook up (prepaid) billing wa…

Maybe this isn't proper, but, what I do is wet them, rub them with a tiny amount of dish soap, then rinse them under the hot water tap. Then blow the droplets off both sides and le…

Does systemd ship with something to upgrade your cron jobs for you? That would be the friendly way. Write your old school cron jobs, and then a script that converts them to do thin…

The damaged social fabric - for me - didn't consist of spendy stuff. Just backyard BBQ's, pool parties, (hosted) brunch or dinner invitations, that sort of thing. You keep doing it…

A lot of friendships aren't that deep. I've had work colleagues I really liked and even socialized with outside the workplace, and yet, if they left the company or retired... faded…

Being "Costco people" is easy. The quality of the product is good, the prices are good, there's little "choice paralysis" and it's all under one roof. But socially, it's like havin…

The part he didn't mention is interpolation at the low end "specs are mere suggestions" end of things. I have a backup Android phone - a true "brand X" type of thing, vanilla andro…

The internet was places. Plural. Places like watmath, ucbvax and the like. Real physical computers in places you'd heard of, and the amazing thing was that you could access them fr…

I grew up on a farm in Germany. Our "little" tractor was the MF135 (3 cylinder engine!). I started driving it for real work at 12 for the simple reason that my grandpa, who was the…

Dunno, the store looks cool in just the way you'd expect an AI to do it (sort of a synthetic average of cool stores). But is this amount of merch really going to make a sustainable…

Back when I was younger and challenges were mostly mental, I did participate in a group hike to the bottom of the Grand Canyon (via the Hermit trail). Yes, the hike back up was tou…

People use their ears to navigate traffic (as non-car-users) much more than they realize. There's a reason kids need to be drilled in "look both ways before crossing the street" - …

A smartphone doesn't have to rule your life. If you don't install social media apps on it, sure, you get text message and email pings but that's it. You pull it out because you wan…

When I see numbers like that ($38 billion) thrown around I always wonder: Where did that money go? In the best case, it stayed in the economy in the form of salaries and such. In t…

Steamrollered by PC compatibles obviously. At the time it wasn't clear yet that for 8086/8 you needed register level hardware compatibility, not just BIOS call compatibility (as in…

In general, a good strategy is just staying a little bit behind. Let the new fads play themselves out. Some have staying power. Bitcoin never did turn into a usable currency, just …

The way I see it, there is very little creativity in big business. Fund an interesting new concept, or fund a formulaic sequel? Same thing every time. So the makers of tired old PC…

Just a crazy idea, but could it be that they don't dogfood their own stuff? I have Ublock Origin Lite on by default (RIP full Ublock Origin) and a lot of sites look clean . I'm oft…

My Honda family car has a CVT and electric parking brakes. "Driver's Car" mattered more when the low-price option was a stickshift and cars weren't so heavy.