Viewing profile — walton_simons

I really love this. It makes me feel weirdly nostalgic, even though I've never been to California, or indeed the US. As a tech-obsessed teenager in the 90s, some of the older compa…

One of my personal rules for life is that wherever possible I avoid businesses which are big enough to have call centres, especially if those call centres are in another country. O…

I do music production as a hobby, and I definitely see this. You can get a lot of plugins these days that will do all sorts of auto generation for you — chord progressions, melodie…

I experienced something very similar to this when I had a kid. As you say, minor, but still noticeable. Like I was having to make constant small corrections to my balance. It worri…

Speaking as a self-taught "programmer" who never got far beyond the rudiments (basic scripting and automation is about as far as I go), I find stuff like this utterly mindblowing. …

My favourite instance of this is the Brabham BT46B, which used fans to suck the car down onto the track. Not cheating by any means — they never tried to hide it — but nevertheless …

I don't jump start my brain. I drink a lot of coffee and feel grumpy. I have a toddler, so this happens every day. I've always hated getting up early in the morning, and nothing I'…

For what little it's worth from a random internet person, I agree with you 100%. I do it the same way as you, with the database stored on Dropbox, and an offline key file. I just c…

Mine too. I think it's great. So many quality of life improvements. For starters, all the tab handling options. Being able to specify where new tabs open, and where you go when you…

Does he care about anyone but himself? Does he have children or grandchildren? Nephews or nieces? Does he care about their safety and welfare, and want them to have good lives?

This has been my pet theory for a while. What if the actual great filter for an intelligent species is the difficulty of escaping your home planet _before_ you've consumed all of i…

This brings back some great memories. I learned so much from the HOWTOs, and I think they played a big part in getting me my first proper tech job. I just had to sit and figure it …

Also consider this script if you're reinstalling Windows. The fact that it needs to exist in the first place is itself a bit of an indictment of Windows 10, but running this during…

Shoutout to some excellent software for ebook wrangling. The first is the "Standard Ebooks"[1] toolset, which is a suite of Python scripts to create, process, and build ebooks in a…

My thoughts exactly. And even this seems to be getting harder. I keep reading about "smart" TVs which barely function if they're not allowed to phone home, and IOT devices which qu…

I've done this. Mine has been in aeroplane mode since the day I got it. I seem to remember having to allow it to connect to Amazon once when I first took it out of the box, but sin…

Honestly it's reassuring to read this. I do want to understand IPv6 better and I think I am slowly getting to grips with how it all fits together, but the details regularly make me…

Yeah, this is exactly the sort of thing I'm talking about. Lots of additional overhead and work, and — again, speaking as a home user — no apparent benefits for dealing with it all…

My ISP supports IPv6, and while I can understand why a large organisation would want to use it (especially given the increasing cost and scarcity of IPv4 blocks), I'm still yet to …

I've also become completely overwhelmed by the amount of "set and forget" auto-recurring subscriptions that exist now, and it's simply led to me opting out of almost all of them. I…

I worry about this too. I store the database itself in Dropbox, and I also use a keyfile alongside the password to open it. I can easily recreate the keyfile on any computer, but i…