I needed something like this for my basement home office. But I was lazy, so rather than actually building anything, I just bought some color-changing light bulbs ($7 on Amazon including remote) and installed them on the basement stairs. If I have a do-not-disturb meeting, I make the light red.
Readit Newsdripton commented on Show HN: I built a "Do not disturb" Device for my home office apoorv.page/blogs/over-en... · Posted by u/quacky_batak
This is wrong. Exact weights vary with trim levels, but Model are around 4000 lbs. and Suburbans are around 6000 lbs.
dripton commented on The Pragmatic Programmer: 20th Anniversary Edition (2023) ahalbert.com/technology/2... · Posted by u/ahalbert2
A great book, but I read it too late, after I had already learned pretty much everything it says the hard way. So it was one of those books I enjoyed because it reinforced what I already thought, but didn't really get much from. Wish it had been written a decade earlier.
My experience is 30 years old so take this with a grain of salt.
I rushed goblin mines on every character. If I hit a bunch of food in town then the run was on. Store food you can’t carry every few levels. You only need to carry enough food to reach one of your stashes.
You learn good/bad food by watching pet. If your pet wants to eat it then you are good.
I have no idea how people manage vegetarian or foodless runs.
Minor spoilers. (I've ascended but that was a long time ago so some of my NetHack knowledge might be outdated.)
You can mostly trust your pet. But you can't totally trust your pet, because there are some foods that are good for pets but not for @.
One is tripe. I don't get tripe in my pho because NetHack told me it's dog food.
Another is whatever species you are. If you're a human and eat human, or an elf and eat elf, you might get smitten for cannibalism. It's fine for your dog or cat to eat human or elf though.
And there's also the edge case of almost-spoiled food. If your pet eats one of a group of corpses on turn n, and you eat another on turn n+1, it's possible that yours rotted in the meantime. Either because n was the exact limit, or because it was close and yours died a few turns before theirs.
dripton commented on The R47: A new physical RPN calculator swissmicros.com/product/m... · Posted by u/dm319
Cool. I used an HP48SX in college, and when it finally died about 20 years later, bought 2 HP48Gs so I'd have a Lifetime Supply. (1 is on my desk, 1 is still in the box.) But I confess that hardly ever use my real HP48G anymore, because I have the Droid48 Android app, and the 99% perfect calculator that's always at hand is better than the 100% perfect calculator that's on a shelf way over there, most of the time.
So I doubt I'll buy this one, even though I'm happy someone made it.
dripton commented on The seven second kernel compile es.tldp.org/Presentacione... · Posted by u/guerrilla
What are compile times like right now, with modern hardware?
It varies a lot depending on how much you have enabled. The distro kernels that are designed to support as much hardware as possible take a long time to build. If you make a custom kernel where you winnow down the config to only support the hardware that's actually in your computer, there's much less code to compile so it's much faster.
I recently built a 6.17 kernel using a full Debian config, and it took about an hour on a fast machine. (Sorry, I didn't save the exact time, but the exact time would only be relevant if you had the exact same hardware and config.) I was surprised how slow it still was. It appears the benefits of faster hardware have been canceled by the amount of new code added.
dripton commented on Smartphones and being present herman.bearblog.dev/being... · Posted by u/articsputnik
> The phone vendors should support not telling the websites you're on mobile.
The browser vendors already do. What do you want to change?
I'd like to see more effective anti-fingerprinting. I know it's just an arms race though.
dripton commented on Smartphones and being present herman.bearblog.dev/being... · Posted by u/articsputnik
I always felt that I'm spending too much time in front of a computer, but it was at least somewhat meaningful because I had opportunities to create: write code, blog, and so on.
When smartphones came out, I made a decision early on that I'm just not going to use them in a way that makes my internet footprint follow me everywhere I go. I set them up using a throwaway email account, turned off almost all notifications, and added just family and real-world friends. I think this served me well for nearly two decades. I really only use my phone for maps, photos, and maybe 2-5 messages a day. I honestly never found myself in a situation where I thought to myself, "gosh, I wish I could read my e-mail right now".
But in the past five years, there's been this mounting pressure from app vendors to make sure I can no longer enjoy that. Every other time a friend sends me a web link, I get a popup that detects I'm on mobile and demands I install an app. And they increasingly can't be dismissed, so if I want to view that URL, I need to mail it to myself and open it on a desktop.
If you work for a place that does that, I just hope you stub your toe every morning.
The phone vendors should support not telling the websites you're on mobile. I know they can guess based on resolution and such, but there should be a setting to lie and simulate a desktop. You can't rely on every single website not being run by jerks, but you should be able to buy a phone from a company that cares more about its customers than random jerks.
dripton commented on Jeep pushed software update that bricked all 2024 Wrangler 4xe models twitter.com/StephenGutows... · Posted by u/PKop
Like smart TVs, the only possible alternative is buying a 10 year old model on the secondhand market. Vehicles without these features have not been produced in a long time
Dumb TVs are still being made. I bought this Sharp commercial TV just last year: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0CCMXNRFH
Of course they're not mass-market and will be lacking on some other bullet point features, but if you really care about your TV not turning into an ad billboard in 2 years, they're the way to go.
dripton commented on Betty Crocker broke recipes by shrinking boxes cubbyathome.com/boxed-cak... · Posted by u/Avshalom
Do you have price per unit on the price tags in your grocery stores? They have to show that by law in my country, not sure if it makes a huge difference because not everyone knows to compare though.
We do have unit prices, but sometimes they vary the unit from product to product within the same product category, making them useless for comparison. This one is by weight, this one is by volume, this one is by count. At that point you have to do all the math yourself, which most people won't.
I don't know whether that's done intentionally. Hanlon's Razor says to assume not without proof.