Viewing profile — skipkey

So the DFW metroplex is an example of why it's difficult to build decent public transportation - it has a population of about half that of Greater London, covering over 24k square …

Fully automatic weapons are very difficult to buy in the US - it's restricted to 40+ year old weapons, requires a bunch of paperwork, and the local county sheriff can refuse permis…

I played around a bunch on the discworld MUD around thirty years back, for a few years. I’m not sure I even remember my username I had. I know I don’t remember the password. I shou…

So for many years I only paid cash for everything, but I hit a point at which I wanted to start establishing credit. What I did was to open a secured credit card at my bank. They a…

Absolutely this. I had installed wekan for a home chores kanban board on a $5 vps and had spent several hours trying to get the proxy working to make it externally reachable, and t…

So I've now shot 4 weddings. The first one happened because a friend of my wife had their photographer bail on them 4 days before the wedding, so they were in a bind. I didn't know…

I would imagine that in the future AI will be doing proofs in Lean or whatever the successor to it, which gives you a pretty good confidence it’s correct.

In 1970 minimum wage was $1.60/hour, equating to about $3.3k a year. A typical mortgage was about $126/month. Car payment, around $100. You weren't raising a family and saving on m…

So in the 2010s I was working in game development for a company that mostly did Facebook and mobile games. I'm an early bird, I would usually be in the office at 6-6:30am. The next…

The Barnes and Noble bookstore I occasionally shop at has a second floor that is about half full of nothing but games, legos, puzzles. I honestly think they sell more of that than …

So the West still does have a fish sauce in common use, although one that's not nearly as strong as the eastern variants. Worcestershire sauce was an attempt to recreate an Indian …

Back in the 90s and the early aughts Simmons was on my “automatically buy everything he writes” list. But it seemed like he had stopped writing. But then I happened to browse Barne…

Eh, not really? If it's a legit company who provides services to various governments, they're going to pay you, they're going to report the income to the government, you'll get a 1…

In 1993 I paid a shade under $10k for a new Chevy S10 where the only options were AC (not actually optional in Texas) and CD player in the radio. It was manual transmission, V6. In…

It’s not just you. I’ve known several people who lost their desire to drink beer specifically on these drugs. I didn’t personally experience it, but then I am more of a whiskey guy…

I can give you an example of when I am glad I rebased. There have been many times I have been working on a feature that was going to take some time to finish. In that case my gener…

For years, Ultima VII was the buggiest RPG I ever finished the main quest on. Then I played Daggerfall.

But that’s just it-as a design aid it can really go off the rails, but as a testing strategy it’s really useful in one domain. Defect fixing. If I can convince a junior engineer th…

I resemble this remark. My wife and I run a feral/stray cat rescue, and anecdotally, this seems to be true, with a few caveats. In particular, the ferals tend to sleep with their b…

As I recall, one problem was you got silent corruption if you ran out of disk space during certain operations, and there were things that took significantly more disk space while i…

In my neighborhood in the East Valley in Phoenix, I’ve seen Cooper’s hawks, kestrels, peregrine falcons, zone tailed hawks, merlins, and one immature bald eagle. Along with the num…

But see, to the politicians this is a feature, not a bug. It’s the same reason that it’s incredibly expensive in terms of permitting and such to start a brick and mortar business i…

Both HP and Brother offer this - it goes to a server that then sends to an email you have configured. I’d guess the vast majority of people who use the scanner do this rather than …

It took me like two weeks to figure out the babel fish puzzle. I almost gave up, but I could only afford one game at a time then.

You used to be able to get uncleaned late Roman bronze coins from the Balkans for about a buck apiece in the early 2000s, so I’d guess they’d be maybe $3-5 each now. Then you get t…