- Original link: "Study claims to provide first direct evidence of dark matter"
Suggestion:
A tape measure, a metal detector and a spirit level: 25 surprisingly useful things you can do with your phone [0]
Did someone stay up late watching the Bears and Packers? "-)
[0] https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2025/dec/21/a-tape-me...
- Friends don't return my emails.
They won't be showing up for my annual Christmas Dinner.
Instead of the ritzy "Bracebridge Dinner" at Yosemite, expensive and hard to book, I plan my annual "Backbrace Dinner" for email respondents.
"Have you checked your emails lately?"
- And I was rebooting my router last night and this morning ....
Cloudflare IS the internet. Take that seriously.
- I went through countless change control meetings, my part being a change to the DNS primary file. Being a smart-ass, I used a curses based editor (nedit) instead of vi for this special occasion. I missed a semicolon.
DNS was down for the company for a while. Being a trading company, I don't know if I cost them or saved them money in bad trades, but traders are bookies. They make money on every bet. A buddy just fixed it for me once it was found out.
NOTE: This is what we should have done and spared those countless change control meetings.
Problem is that some genius before me (no kidding!) set up zone transfers by copying (rcp/scp) the primary file to the secondaries, defeating their ability to take over for the primary. They broke as well. I left before that issue was addressed (or not addressed)
In another job, I did run the find command with rm, and of course, the path ended up being /. Yes, it did try to delete /vmunix, but it was running. In any event, there was a Makefile or a copy lying about. No need to BART home for the backup tape. This was on the department file server and mail server. No downtime.
- > In 2026, people will be forced to add a disclaimer with every content that they create, like: "Disclaimer: This content is human-generated" to highlight authenticity. It will be fun to watch this.
Oh, so the author anticipates that we humans will be forced to label our work, and that machines won't? That's acquiescence in advance, in my opinion.
- When one eludes my ban ... (see other posts how to ban it inside the phone, but it exists outside (people send me messages)) [0] samples to play with.
On the desktop, Preview app (and lots of others) will open and export as ...
On the phone (Apple, sometimes you bewilder me), You can convert in Files, not Photos. 1. Save a photo to FILES from camera roll or web (This works with webp, as well) 2. click and hold the THUMBNAIL, do not open the image. 3. Quick Actions -- Convert image. 4. You can now "save" the image (open, do not click and hold) to your camera roll.
This is BONKERS
As others have noted, "There's an app to do it".
Worst for me in daily life, when you get info on an image (in the camera roll, pull up on the image) WEBP does not even show as a file type. HEIC does.
ios 18, not 26.
[0] https://toolsfairy.com/tools/image-test/sample-heic-files
- Damn stuff won't die. One ipod touch has zero battery capacity. One ipad Air2 grew a bulge,but still runs, so I wiped it for recycling.
Imac screen quit. Needs repair.
Of course stuff gets obsoleted in software conpatibility, but the ipad1 still holds books and music scores, all I asked of it.
I suggest simplifying life. Write! Decent text editors ran on CP/M. YMMV, of course.
Jerry Pournelle used to just plain write but got dragged into hardware and software reviews and wars.
Agree on Apple's low memory entry ststems. At least you can tape an external drive to the case. Not so with menory.
Then again MS is going "subscription everything" and Apple s/w is mostly free. Open source runs great excrpt that GIMP file dialogs do not grab the keyboard. They used to. Ob well.
- Many believe that "the federal health care system has become unwieldy and unaffordable since the passage of Obamacare (ACA)"
Well,it's unaffordable if the wealthy don't pay their fair share of taxes and what we call "health care" is merely subsidizes private medical corporations.
> “The truth is, Republicans have always said they have a plan, but they never had a plan,” Representative Jim McGovern of Massachusetts, the senior Democrat on the Rules Committee, said on Wednesday.
Well, they do, and it's called complete privatization of medical care, but won't admit it, due to political consequences. The overhead of the U.S. medical industry is staggering, the highest in the world. [2]
As the V.A. emailed today: [0]
> WASHINGTON —The U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs today released a request for proposals (RFP) for new community care contracts that will improve health care choice and quality for Veterans over the next decade.
> View the RFP here. [1]
> VA’s community care program enables Veterans to access health care from non-VA medical providers at the department’s expense. Community care has been an integral part of caring for Veterans since the World War II era. In 2018, President Trump enshrined this right for Veterans by signing the bipartisan MISSION Act. Today, about 40% of all VA care is provided through community care.
I call "community care" a euphemism for privatization. They are privatizing the entire V.A. one step at a time. Subsidizing private providers.
[0] https://news.va.gov/press-room/va-to-improve-health-care-cho...
[1] https://sam.gov/workspace/contract/opp/7b2734002e4048bfa2ac4...
[2] https://cepr.net/publications/paying-more-for-less-the-us-he...
- Save your money.
- It's really funny. I had a department chairman in a department where the staff used macs (I supported the macs and Sun workstations for the academics) and bemoaned that "Students should be using Windows because that's what they will use when they leave".
My counter argument was that by the time they leave, Microsoft will have copied the Apple stuff they are using, so they are well-prepared in any case.
But Apple has its quirks a'plenty. I am using a Logitech keyboard on this mac, because unless you buy a laptop, there's no other way to get a lighted keyboard.
And the "forward delete" key is so useful.
The first thing I do with a new installation is remap keys anyway. Caps Lock first!
- IIRC, hooking a two button mouse to an Apple (I can't say which or when) gave you right click/control click, when Apple was selling only one-button mice.
Correct me if you know more or better.
- Every Accusation is a Confession. He's always projecting.
- Takeover artists and hatchetmen destroyed many thousands of jobs. Were they taxed or punished? Hell no, movies were made of them.
Just saying ....
- > The humanoid form factor consistently proves inferior to specialized alternatives across every proposed application domain. I persists because it generates the kind of media attention and investor enthusiasm that Tesla requires for its business model. Effective robotics emerges from careful analysis of specific problems and optimisation for particular environments, not from attempts to recreate human form and movement. Until the technology sector abandons its anthropomorphic fantasies in favour of functional engineering, robotic development will remain trapped between impressive demonstrations and practical irrelevance.
The Humanoid Hoax: Unmasking the Human Puppets Behind Tesla and Nvidia’s Robot Demos, August 2025 [0]
Company busted showing off humanoid robots with humans inside of them, Sept 2024 [1]
The Optimus robots at Tesla’s Cybercab event were humans in disguise, Oct 2024 [2]
Why Humanoid Robots Still Can’t Survive in the Real World, Dec 2025 [3]
Advanced AI ‘robots’ at Iranian Tech Expo were actually humans in disguise, Dec 2025 [4]
[0]https://techstartups.com/2025/08/19/the-humanoid-hoax-unmask...
[1] https://www.tweaktown.com/news/100280/company-busted-showing...
[2] https://www.theverge.com/2024/10/13/24269131/tesla-optimus-r...
[3] https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/why-humanoid-robo...
[4] https://www.dexerto.com/entertainment/advanced-ai-robots-at-...
- My clearest recollection (don't know the episode) is when he attends an event, probably in place of Alan Brady, that turns out to be a big fund-raiser. The Hostess addresses him as Mister Petrov. When asked for a donation, he is stupefied, and can only say "I have this blank check" ... no spoiler ...
The comedy show within a comedy show is a cool dramatic and operatic trick.
Magnificent delivery.
- "Social" media have gone from being abusive to actively user-hostile.
They have none of the benefits of ancient, dinosaur email.
- The article is specifically about surgical masks, built to a different standard and fit than N95 masks, which in my observation far outnumber surgical masks in grocery and other stores.
Being retired, I can't speak for work environments, nor indoor social group activities, since I live in the boondocks.
- Oh, you jogged my memory. Coastie here again. Soon after moving to the west coast, 1980-ish, I lost my wallet around Easter, on or about University Ave in Palo Alto, and a kind stranger found it and dropped it off with police, IIRC. He wouldn't take any more than a lunch or dinner at the Good Earth. This was B.C. Before cellphones.
On the other side of the coin, I was leaving a thrift store in San Leandro and saw some black thing on the road. I was stopped at an intersection and picked it up. It was a wallet with $500 in it and a woman's out of state personal and business ID., but no local address or phone number. I took a real chance and left it with the thrift store staff, hoping they could find her. Perhaps she was just there? Well, they said later that they found her through her bank, and returned it to her. I forgot if it was before or after, but I did purchase two Klipsch Heresy Speakers there for $50 total.
Politics? We don't need no stinking politics because there are already US troops deployed in this country, and do you for one minute think that immigrants and non-white citizens are going to go through checkpoints at voting lines without harrassment or detention or arrest on Trumped up charges? Few states have vote by mail.
Courts have not taken action to defend the constitution. In one particular case, quite the opposite.