fubarx @ fubarx @lemmy.ml

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28

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774

Joined

2 yr. ago

That looks awesome!

A few tips, based on what has worked in our local libraries:

• A story-reading space where parents or caregivers can bring infants and toddlers to listen to books being read outloud. Librarians, parents, and volunteers take turns as book readers. Hugely popular. Absolutely packed them in. One branch even built a hand-painted replica of the "Goodnight Moon" set.
• A separate, private space for nursing mothers.
• If the budget allows it, a phone charging station.
• Space for common government forms. Applications for welfare, disability, voter, and tax forms. If you can get volunteers to help, even better.
• Was going to mention tools, but see you already have it. In ours, you can check out shovels, saws, wrench sets, gardening tools, etc, to take home for a few days. It got so popular they had to move into their own space.

We love our local libraries.

Not a WP dev. Just a (techie) user.

This whole thing seems so unnecessary. FOSS devs would love to get a fraction of the goodwill being squandered here.

And the one time the rocket goes kablooey on its way up, everyone down the flight path will get a shower of used hypodermic needles, disposable vapes, and old appliances.

• Any work or study done during an all-nighter is a waste.
• If you meet someone and all they do is talk about themselves, they won't be a good friend.
• Nobody really cares how you look or what you wear. And anyone who does has bigger issues they would rather not deal with.

"Given a list of strings, print the contents of the list to the screen."

    
print(stringlist)

  

or if you want to get fancy:

    
print(", ".join(stringlist))

  

When do I start? I feel like I nailed it.

/s

Interviewed at two big, well-known tech companies. Had done a lot of mobile dev work at the time, but really wanted to switch to connected hardware and told the recruiters.

Showed up for the first on-site interview. Guy walks in. Explains the actual first interviewer couldn't make it so he was a last-minute stand-in. Goes: "So, it says here you are intererested in mobile. That's good. My team is looking for someone like that."

I explained it was actually the other way round. What proceeded was an awkward hour of bullshit questions about train schedulers and sorting algorithms. Repeat five times that day. Every. Single. One.

Second company a few weeks later. Same thing. Except this time, 2/3 of the way through, a manager in HW group walks in. Grouses why he was asked to talk to someone, checks notes, about mobile. We had the greatest conversation after I set him straight. He wanted me to come back and do another loop just with his group. Except a week later, they announced a hiring freeze and I never heard back.

In retrospect, it was a good thing. I would not have been a good fit.

The archaeologists 1000 years from now are going to be so confused.

Many pumps come with built-in timers so you can turn them off when sleeping. You can also connect them to smarthome switches and set a routine to turn them on and off only when needed or via remote apps, wireless switches, or voice control (Alexa, turn pump on.)

We found the cost savings to be non-trivial. Main reason I put one in was because we had a teenager who started the shower running, then went away and got distracted. This solved the problem. And with a smarthome controller, it also reduced costs.

Also, those under-sink instant heaters do exist, but they're only good for a single faucet. They won't work with showers and baths.

That's why I put 'timed' in there. You can program when they shut off so it just goes back to the way it was before. Like when sleeping or out of the house.

A more fine-grain solution is to get a non-timer (cheaper) version of the pump, and one of those Alexa, Google, or Homekit compatible power switches, then not only can you set the time through a smart home routine, but can override them whenever walking out or coming back.

If using a traditional water heater, you're heating the whole tank all the time. And with a tankless but no pump, you're running gallons of clean water down the drain, waiting for it to get warm. It's all a tradeoff, but this, at least, only heats the water circulating inside your pipes and only during the hours you set.

If you have a tankless water heater, and have to run the tap for a really long while to get hot water, look into timed recirculating pumps. It'll save you a ton of money and make you kick yourself for not doing it sooner.

"Did I already shampoo? Can't remember."

(Apply a small dab of shampoo. Foams up instantly).

"Dammit, yes."

Day I got married.

Next would be the time the bartender offered me the half pint of beer for free while he went to change the keg.

All the deserved ribbing aside, if you had to design a removable, R/W, high-capacity, environmentally tolerant, secure, fault-tolerant, mission critical storage system that could last 25 years, starting NOW...

What would you pick?

That's a tough one, even if you design future hardware upgrades into the system.

• Do unto others, etc...
• Don't punch down. Ever.
• Hydration is key.

Friend of mine used to drink quadruple espressos at Starbucks every day, then go back to work. I was talking to him last week and told him about remembering the time he called me from the Starbucks and his name was called with the quadruple order. He laughed and said he actually bumped it up to quintuple at one point.

Then he sold his house and moved to another state, living out in the woods. Asked him how he managed without a Starbucks nearby. He said he now does Keurig espresso shots every morning. But it was getting expensive, since he had to press 10 pods in one sitting!

Moral of the story: he's perfectly functional and productive. Go nuts!

Apple and Google can fix the problem. Apps are required to ask for permission to access location information. Most of the time, it's for tracking and analytics, not anything related to the app's functionality. That's the data that is leaking to these data brokers.

In those cases, if asked, user can say no, but apps keep haranguing you until you capitulate.

Instead, the OS could add a button that says: "Yes, but randomize." After that, location data is returned as normal, but from totally random locations nearby. They could even spoof the data clustering algorithms and just pick some rando location and keep showing returns to them, or just trade the data from one random phone for another every N days.

You do this enough and the data will become polluted enough to become useless.

Only time there is because Google links to an answer there. Other than that, nope.

Yup. Techie, but with other interests. There are dozens of us.

Edit: gave up on Twitter and Reddit after being early adopter of both. Moved over to Fediverse and not regretting it one bit. All good.

I remember when self-reported online polls were considered dirty and useless.

Oh, how the times have changed.

It was the window seal.