walton_simons

6 ms·

1.
by walton_simons 3y ago
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 companies here felt almost mythical at the time. Plus lots o
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by walton_simons 4y ago
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. Obviously that's impossible for a lot of things, but I t
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by walton_simons 4y ago
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, melodies, stylistic aspects, variations, and so on, and a lot of th
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by walton_simons 4y ago
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 worried me a bit at the time, although in retrospect I'm con
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by walton_simons 4y ago
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. I'm aware that sorting and maze generation al
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by walton_simons 5y ago
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 a very creative interpretation of the rules! https:/&#
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by walton_simons 5y ago
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've ever tried has made it better. Left to my
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by walton_simons 5y ago
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 can't make myself trust an online service for this
9.
by walton_simons 5y ago
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 close a tab. Tab stacks are amazing — five minutes aft
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by walton_simons 5y ago
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?
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by walton_simons 5y ago
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 its resources? I will — naturally — have a human-centric
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by walton_simons 5y ago
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 out, and the process of persevering through the mistakes and
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by walton_simons 5y ago
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 the Windows installation process will give you a nice,
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by walton_simons 5y ago
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 all common formats. The results on the Standard Ebo
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by walton_simons 6y ago
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 query their own hardcoded DNS servers, ignoring
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by walton_simons 6y ago
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 since then, no network connectivity at all, and zero probl
17.
by walton_simons 6y ago
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 feel as though I need to throw out a lot of what I thi
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by walton_simons 6y ago
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. I get all the concerns about CGNAT and so on, but tha
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by walton_simons 6y ago
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 be persuaded of its benefits for home users. I admit th
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by walton_simons 8y ago
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. It's not even the monetary amounts,
21.
by walton_simons 8y ago
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 it never goes anywhere near the internet. In addition to that