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      Welcome!   03/05/2016

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Don Edwards

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Posts posted by Don Edwards

  1. Posted

    Picture caption from the article:

    The explosion of Italian supervolcano Campi Flegrei could be more deadly than the famed Mount Vesuvius

    When Mount Vesuvius had its most famous eruption, it had a couple towns  - Pompeii and Herculaneum - on its fringes.

    Now, it's completely surrounded by metropolitan Naples.

    (Campi Flegri is also mostly surrounded by metropolitan Naples. Its western edges are in the ocean, though.)

    (Anybody else think that moving to Naples is a bad idea?)

  2. Posted

    Last time I went to a walk-in clinic was on a Thursday. They were booked solid for the day, not open Friday thru Sunday, and booked solid for Monday.

    Somebody needs to study the definition of "walk-in clinic" a little more carefully.

    Gotta make some allowance, though, as this was in a county with EXTREMELY seasonal population numbers (peak = approximately 20 to 25 times minimum), and in the highest-population month of the year.

     

  4. Posted

    3 hours ago, mlooney said:

    I remember when hard drives varied in reliability, and there were utilities to scan the drive.  Not to mention defragmening the drive!

    The latter is a function of the filesystem, not the drive itself. To this day, Windows's NTFS driver automatically runs a defragment-and-repair process in the background. Dis-recommended for Linux because (a) those processes are actually needed and (b) the Linux NTFS driver doesn't have them.

    As well as (c) defragmenting by definition involves a LOT of writing to disk, which is bad for SSDs and thumb drives.

    Linux's filesystems don't need defragmenting. Their space-allocation algorithm is smarter than the defragmenter, and leaves files with room to grow. Defragmenting would be particularly pointless on BTRFS, and any other filesystem that does copy-on-write to prevent corruption.

    (It also doesn't hurt that our multi-terabyte SSDs are much larger and much faster than our 40-megabyte hard drives.)

  5. Posted

    Yeah, it's kind of astonishing. Particularly to those of use who have paid well over $100 per megabyte.

    (My first home hard drive was 40 megabytes and, if I recall correctly, cost about $800. Oh, and I had to split it into two partitions because the OS couldn't handle a partition that big. The computer I bought earlier this month has 40 gigabytes of RAM, and cost just under $800.)

  6. Posted

    11 hours ago, Darth Fluffy said:

    Our fireworks got rained out tonight.

     

    That's a good thing as it makes for a quieter night, but a bad thing as it means the noise just gets dragged out for several days (or maybe weeks).

  10. Posted

    And in case anyone wonders about a red wolf chasing a frisbee...

    Some years ago, our neighbors in the RV park had a lot of puppy toys strewn around outside their motorhome. One day I looked out the window and watched a red fox repeatedly throwing (not very well) and chasing one of those toys. That particular toy was never seen again.

    (I told the neighbors, and they laughed and said their dog could easily spare one toy.)

  11. Posted

    Solving the hydrogen storage problem would be nice, but I suspect it isn't solvable. (As opposed to soluble - that's actually the problem, molecular hydrogen is soluble in pretty much anything.)

    My long-term hope is for truly synthetic hydrocarbons - made from air, or some abundant and rapidly-renewable (thus not wood, coal, or oil) carbon source, and water.

  12. Posted

    14 hours ago, Darth Fluffy said:

    Re: Tesla, I think they should use the front portion of a donkey, with his head turned toward you, grinning, as their logo, and change their name to half-assed motors.

    For this particular vehicle, I think the other half of that animal is more appropriate.

    IMHO it is, for a number of reasons, a pickup you should consider only if you have absolutely no need for a pickup.

  13. Posted

    I don't know if I'd go so far as to call it ugly, but the design does have some significant practical issues.

    Several of which have already been mentioned in this thread.

    I'll add that I seriously doubt it can take a standard pickup-truck bed cap (that's the thing shaped sort of like an inverted pickup-truck bed, that protects stuff in the bed from the weather) let alone a camper (very small living quarters that sit in the bed of the truck).

    And I'm uncertain about a 5th-wheel hitch - it may be that the design would be significantly less capable of sharp turns, because the trailer would hit the side of the bed sooner than with the usual horizontal top edge.

  15. Posted

    8 hours ago, Pharaoh RutinTutin said:

     

    So many animals seem to enjoy the sensation and interaction when humans scratch them.

    But humans don't know where the other animals itch.

    How can we be more effective scratchers for our companions?

    Quite a few varieties of animals, and some special cases in many species (some _insert-species-here_ are smarter than others), will actively help you find the right spot, or at least let you know when you've hit it.

    I've had cats and dogs move under my hand so that I'd be scratching the right spot. A pony found it easier to shove my hand a few inches.

  16. Posted

    4 hours ago, mlooney said:

    She does seem a bit chesty to be a teen trans.  Now with magic, yeah, but with just HRT, I'm not so sure.

    Well, there's always the option of some sort of stuffing. And she'd have access to a few pairs of socks from an early age.

  17. Posted

    I would add:

    1) Banning cards is the less important of the two obvious forms of planned obsolescence in M:TG. The other is that standard tournament format requires only cards of the basic deck and a few specific (most recent) expansions. Bunches of cards routinely get dropped from those tournaments simply because they've been out a while, and the company wants the players to buy new cards.

    (Caveat: it's been more than 10 years since I've played a game or even owned a Magic card. So my info may be out of date.)

    1) The designers of these cards aren't perfect, and neither are the folks who choose which designs to approve. Occasionally they will produce a card that (probably in combination with some other card, or even any one or two of several other cards) works in a way they didn't anticipate and is obviously overpowered. Well, obvious once it's seen in action. Which tends to cut people who DON'T have it out of tournament, or more-serious "friendly", play - decreasing the market. Particularly if one or more of the combo cards are rare, so only a few will have it - and most of those will be folks willing to shell out significant amounts of cash to get it.

  19. Posted

    I have something similar that seems weird even to me. I don't care if I can't understand a word of the lyrics because they're in some language I don't know - as long as I can hear them clearly. But mumbled lyrics, or lyrics drowned out by the music - that song can go straight into the dumpster.

  20. Posted

    First, my smart watch broke. Just a tiny break - a puny little plastic crumb that happens to hold the watch band in place.

    Fortunately, I have a spare. I bought two, one for me and one for my lady, a couple months before she died.

    Then, it turns out that within the smartphone app that goes with it, there's only one way to make the app forget one phone and pick up another. That's to go into app management and just plain erase that app's storage. Causing it to forget EVERYTHING it knows. So I had to go through all the setup again.

    And it doesn't help that the people who wrote this app are fond of some rather unreadable lettering - a color that is a slightly grayer version of the background color, and a 2-point font. Among other places such lettering is used, is the calibration of the X axis on a number of graphs. (And even that's technically an improvement on the Y axes, most of which have no calibration at all.)

  24. Posted

    This motorhome has the heat-retention properties of a sieve. I can easily get a 10-degree temperature difference from one side of it to the other.

    The thermostat for the main room, controlling the propane furnace, is in the warmest spot in that room. The thermostat for the bedroom is nearly as poorly placed.

    With two little electric space heaters to supplement, I have yet to find a setting on either one's thermostat that will reliably turn it on when the temperature (read from a thermometer sitting on the floor beside and slightly behind the heater) is below 62, and also reliably leave it off when the temperature is over 72.

    And Montana is having an unusually cold spring. For Montana. The kind of cold that is measured in inches, or occasionally feet.