An orange in an apple orchard
Things that defy explanation: reading about rationing various countries experienced in WWII, and finding yourself in tears for a moment.
The diary of Tanya Savicheva, a girl of 11, her notes about starvation and deaths of her sister, then grandmother, then brother, then uncle, then another uncle, then mother. The last three notes say “Savichevs died”, “Everyone died” and “Only Tanya is left.” She died of progressive dystrophy shortly after the siege.
As usual: Bill Gates, and Reddit, generates something worth reading.
Think I’m proclaiming it a new rule around here: no skipping the coffee unless you want to take an afternoon nap.
Apple News Spotlight; Special Coverage: Coronavirus
I’ll give the fruit company this much, nice job putting together such a spotlight in their news aggregator.
I don’t really remember the 2010 Census, but I do find it a touch amusing that in 2020: we basically get a web link, and a UUID.
Somehow that seems like great progress, but still amounts to several sheets of paper in the mail just to serve notification.
Sometime after getting a smart phone in 2010, I eventually changed from having my 90 decibel alarm clock to having one of my always on devices handle the job. Today that equates to my tablet and a triple alarm system: one to make sure the other two wake me up, one to wake me up, and one to make sure I don’t go back to sleep. As a consequence for a very long time now: I’ve been down to just having to change my stove top clock, and the clock on my car head unit.
At the last time change I decided to skip updating the clock on top of the stove, and let it keep until today’s time change. Because I’m frakkin’ tired of setting clocks twice a year, even if I’m down to so few clocks.
The real question is whether or not my brain will quickly adjust to reading stove time as actual observed time, or continue to automatically subtract an hour. Yeah, fun.
When I think about how much I dislike calendaring / pim software on *nix systems, and I see http://calcurse.org/ that looks handy, and that it has a code base that doesn’t suck, I kind of wonder what should bother me more. That I’m tempted to try using it, or just how much I dislike using Thunderbird compared to my tablet.
I basically maintain an array of calendars. Most in a certain popular cloud service, segregated for various purposes; and one on my employer’s service for dealing with “Damn it, people send me meetings as ics files!”.
In practice: I often prefer to reach for my tablet whenever the words Calendar, Contacts, or save when Outlook is involved, Email.
Apple should steal this iPad multitasking concept right now
https://flip.it/n-Y17J
My first thought at the wording here, is, “Because that’s too close to how Android used to do it!”
In fact, one of my irks with newer Android releases hitting my Samsungs is the move to tap happy what the frakkwittery instead of popping up a launcher like page on the split.
And across this nice old read: My First BillG Review — by JOEL SPOLSKY, and found it worth noting.
It’s full of good stuff, but this part kinda sticks out the strongest:
Later I had it explained to me. “Bill doesn’t really want to review your spec, he just wants to make sure you’ve got it under control. His standard M.O. is to ask harder and harder questions until you admit that you don’t know, and then he can yell at you for being unprepared. Nobody was really sure what happens if you answer the hardest question he can come up with because it’s never happened before.”
Which I find rather telling. Because that’s exactly what such a person should want to know, IMHO.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shishi-odoshi?wprov=sfti1
One upside for translators’ notes: I always wondered what these were called but figured googling it would probably be pointless, and finally I encountered the term.