Viewing profile — kibibyte

I empathize with this. I went to one of those “top tier” universities and had a handful of classes where I regretted being one of the few (fewer than 10) goody good students who at…

I only recently switched off the catch-all email configuration. Until then, I did what you did. But over the years, I got an increasingly annoying amount of misdirected email (poss…

I’m visiting Vietnam for Tet, and one cultural quirk of theirs that I’ve learned is that $2 bills are considered lucky money. So much so that kids there will hold onto those $2 bil…

I was one of the fools who installed the iOS 7 beta onto a phone that I depended on with Google Authenticator. The app had a compatibility issue with that beta release that caused …

1Password can show the whole URI with the seed, and I have used it in the past to tediously restore seeds to my other 2FA apps.

My solution to this attack is to generate random words (what 1Password calls a "memorable password") instead of something totally inscrutable. Most security question fields are lon…

I think you missed the Excel spreadsheet in the parent's link. Chase (under JPMORGAN CHASE BANK) and Wells Fargo are on that list. Interestingly, the other 2 big banks—Citigroup an…

This is something that I still consider to be black magic to me, so this is my best attempt at describing a number of the variables. Temperature is controlled in two ways: direct h…

You poke fun at it, but great irony is that a lot of knowledgeable coffee people started poking at all the techniques recently and we've learned that almost everything towards the …

Light roasts are great! But there are just a lot of straight-up bad renditions of them, as a result of lack of adequate training on either roasting or brewing, to the consternation…

I completely forgot that Vanguard also runs a brokerage operation in addition to their funds.

Ah, you're right! I'm now remembering that Vanguard mentions something like this for their default voting methodology, among the few choices they now allow investors to choose from…

Robinhood is a brokerage, and should be passing proxy ballots through to you for companies you hold shares in. It's arguable whether Vanguard should allow this, and whether it'd ma…

This is a bit tangential to the topic, but shareholder voting is interesting enough anyway. * Musk will vote, for obvious reasons. * Big institutional funds almost always vote with…

You seem to know thing or two about BART's rail infrastructure. I want to pick your brain on something. The new BART fleet is much nicer than the old fleet in many respects, except…

This wouldn't surprise me, given that Amex does have a consumer reputation for being very friendly for disputes. That factors in two ways: a successful dispute means that the merch…

Ah, I think we're talking about different things. I think you are talking about the overall affordability of the JR pass (and Japan tourism in general) to someone whose income is i…

Most credit cards can do foreign transactions, and a number of travelers have cards that can do those transactions with no fees at fairly competitive exchange rates. In the past, m…

For what it's worth, jrpass.com is a reseller. JR nowadays has an official online site to sell the pass, which prices in JPY. https://japanrailpass.net/en/ Others have pointed out …

You can do it online as long as you purchase your JR pass from the official JR-operated websites ( https://japanrailpass.net/en/ -> https://www.japanrailpass-reservation.net/ ), an…

> Let's hope the HSM supports secret backup well enough Secrets backup for HSMs from a certain vendor—that you may or may not have named in your comment—I've worked with is actuall…

I just started the Japanese course recently and was trying to figure out why a bunch of the criticism I read of Duolingo's course seemed irrelevant or inapplicable. I guess this pi…

Yep, this is "level 3 data". Merchants or payments services often get lower interchange rates for providing this extra data

I'll torture this DNA and C source code analogy a bit. Epigenetics is missing in this discussion about reproducing a human from just the DNA. These are superficial modifications (e…

There are surge protectors that can protect the coax cables used for cable internet. Here's one that I use: https://www.amazon.com/Tripp-Lite-Right-Angle-Protection-TLP... .