(Mon Jul 15 2019 00:00:00 GMT+0300 (Eastern European Summer Time)) The attached video should hit home for anyone who's worked a corporate job for a significant time. It sure hit home for me, having been laid off several times and my passion crushed into nothingness by the corporate needs. What is the sound of one man standing up to take his power into his hands?
(Sat Jul 13 2019 00:00:00 GMT+0300 (Eastern European Summer Time)) Out of the box Apple has used proprietary SSD's in its MacBook, MacBook Air and MacBook Pro models for several years. As a proprietary SSD it meant any upgrade meant paying Apple's price for SSD's rather than the market price. This probably served Apple's bottom line, and who cares if the customers are screwed. This one adapter gives owners of such machines access to normal M.2 form factor SSD's.
(Fri Jul 12 2019 00:00:00 GMT+0300 (Eastern European Summer Time)) Apple recently released updates to the MacBook Pro, and as expected repairability took a back seat. The team at iFixit did a teardown and found a bunch of repairability problems, awarding the machine with a 2 out of 10 repairability score. Yes it's possible to take the machine apart, but most of the parts are soldered on and basically non-replaceable except by uber-experts.
(Fri Jul 12 2019 00:00:00 GMT+0300 (Eastern European Summer Time)) Can you make free electricity out of thin wire just by wrapping a couple spark plugs with wire, then passing a magnet nearby? Probably not. I can't for the life of me see why this would do anything. But it would be simple enough to replicate this effect if it is real.
(Thu Jul 11 2019 00:00:00 GMT+0300 (Eastern European Summer Time)) Scanning film negatives using a DSLR does not require using a tripod. It's possible to repurpose some items from Home Depot to build a stand along with a macro lens on a regular DSLR. The process also does not require special software, just a preset in Lightroom.
(Wed Jul 10 2019 00:00:00 GMT+0300 (Eastern European Summer Time)) YouTube's algorithm to select content you're likely to watch is amazing, and very useful. It's easy to just head to the YouTube home page, and voila there's a bunch of recommended content some of which is surely of interest. Google is investing a lot of money in AI algorithms to drive content recommendation on YouTube, and YouTube's popularity is largely driven by those recommendations. But it's possible to rabbit-hole into specific content areas, and then suddenly the entire body of information you see is within that topic bubble, and it tends to affect ones thinking.
(Wed Jul 10 2019 00:00:00 GMT+0300 (Eastern European Summer Time)) Some of us still shoot with film, and lots of us have old film lying around that we want to scan to digital. There are labs who will scan film to digital files, and there are bulky scanners that do the same. But neither work well in the field. This method requires a regular tripod, a film holder, and some software.
(Mon Jul 08 2019 00:00:00 GMT+0300 (Eastern European Summer Time)) It seems that Google is hijacking organic search results, and instead preferencing its own properties. While we can wail and moan and wave our hands about how the design of the Google search result page is preferencing Google's properties, there's nothing like real data. Like some graphs collected by Sparktoro showing clearly a slow trend to squeeze out organic search results in preference to Google's properties.
(Thu Jul 04 2019 00:00:00 GMT+0300 (Eastern European Summer Time)) Apple has a long history of laptop design mistakes, for example the display cable that breaks necessitating an expensive repair job. The Butterfly keyboard was one of those mistakes, that Apple fans have long complained about. News is that Apple is introducing a new keyboard design, and clues point to a wildly different sort of keyboard involving flexible glass. Think Different!
(Wed Jul 03 2019 00:00:00 GMT+0300 (Eastern European Summer Time)) Alexa is a nice service from Amazon, being a box where you can ask questions and request that Amazon (or partners) perform services. That's a nice application of voice recognition and artificial intelligence. We get a voice activatable information robot that can perform our bidding. You might not remember asking Alexa to start the charging station on your car, but it turns out that Alexa records every query or command it services.
(Wed Jul 03 2019 00:00:00 GMT+0300 (Eastern European Summer Time)) Feeling angry about something and letting off steam on Twitter? According to US Federal Prosecutors, twitter posts and presumably facebook et al are interstate communications. If that posting can be interpreted as a threat or other illegal communication, you have therefore used interstate communications to transmit a threat - which is a federal felony.
(Tue Jul 02 2019 00:00:00 GMT+0300 (Eastern European Summer Time)) Since 2015 it seems that Apple has careened from one major hardware flaw to another major hardware flaw in the MacBook Pro line. Either it's a horrible keyboard design, or a ribbon cable that breaks rendering the display useless and requiring an expensive repair, or various other hardware flaws. The attached video is from a prominent expert at repairing broken Apple hardware, and gives more details than you want to know about Apple's failure at designing reliable laptop computers. I think he goes overboard in this video, but the information is spot on with technically deep explanation of why one should avoid the newer MacBook machines.
(Tue Jul 02 2019 00:00:00 GMT+0300 (Eastern European Summer Time)) The Dell XPS 15 9570 laptop makes a good Hackintosh, according to the attached video. It even supports touch screen on Mac OS X - a feature I've wanted since the mid 2000's. We do know that Dell computers tend to be big and heavy, and this is a 15" Dell, so it's probably the opposite of the thin sleekness we covet from Apple. But hey the video makes it look like a good choice.
(Tue Jul 02 2019 00:00:00 GMT+0300 (Eastern European Summer Time)) Google has a history of failure in social networking. Google+ was killed recently, and before that Google killed Orkut and Buzz. Instead Google is very good at developing tools and utilities. Should Google refocus on social networks? Or should Google continue down its path?
(Mon Jul 01 2019 00:00:00 GMT+0300 (Eastern European Summer Time)) In April I noticed a sudden drop-off in traffic to one of my sites which was coupled with a Google notification that the site in question had mobile responsiveness issues. After a couple months of work the mobile responsiveness issues have been fixed to Google's satisfaction, but traffic to the site has not rebounded. The site is full of very important content that I believe could make a positive difference in the world, and my goal is getting the traffic to return.
(Mon Jul 01 2019 00:00:00 GMT+0300 (Eastern European Summer Time)) The web has long been a place where anyone can launch a website, and thereby have their own soapbox from which to speak the message singing from their heart. But it has become harder and harder over the years for the small scale website to continue reaching an audience. The major gatekeepers on spreading our message have become Facebook, Google, and similar sites, and those gatekeepers are increasingly favoring major outlets owned by the major media conglomerates.
