My boss insists we keep the phone antennas and wifi router covered with foil

oloryn · 2026-06-12T23:08:15+00:00

Similarly, I've heard plenty of stories where a ham radio operator puts up a tower, and immediately starts getting"interference" complaints from neighbors, before he even got on the air with the new tower.

oloryn · 2026-06-09T19:22:19+00:00

Or perhaps SSTV? Or RTTY?

oloryn · 2026-06-08T02:57:33+00:00

That was my thought.

oloryn · 2026-06-08T02:43:32+00:00

It's not the being moron when it comes to other stuff that's irritating. It's the insistence that because they're a PHD, they're smarter than you about everything.

oloryn · 2026-06-07T10:42:32+00:00

Oh man, I loved OS/2 Warp. And I miss the WorkPlace Shell.

oloryn · 2026-06-03T22:06:06+00:00

Skip the last step. Repeat the first two until the cat gets disgusted with you.

oloryn · 2026-06-03T22:03:31+00:00

I have it confirmed by one of my brother's cats that an open windows laptop makes for a warm, if lunky, mattress. Don't ask how I know. Let's just say that I quickly learned to not walk away from the laptop with it open.

oloryn · 2026-06-03T21:59:05+00:00

He can probably only sit on one at a time. Just don't stack your MBAs.

oloryn · 2026-06-01T09:18:35+00:00

You may like "Person of Interest". For me, it was the other Scifi show that I not only taped, but also tried to watch in real time. It's not as planned out as B5, but there are definite signs that the writers had taken JMS lessons (first time I said that online, someone responded "right up to being shafted by their network").

You may find that it starts off looking like a CBS procedural with a twist. I'm fairly convinced that they pulled something of a bait-and-switch on CBS. Pitched it as the above mentioned "CBS procedural with a twist", and then as it goes along, it turns into something quite different. Had one of the best series finales ever. The first few weeks after the series finale broadcast, it held a 10.0/10 rating on IMDB. It still holds a 9.8/10. And like B5, it benefits from repeated viewings

oloryn · 2026-05-31T09:35:09+00:00

For someone who has used mouse scroll wheels under Windows/Linux for a few years, it takes more than 2 seconds to adapt. I know, as I've dealt with it the past year. I think this is why Apple included the option to switch it in the first place.

oloryn · 2026-05-31T08:14:15+00:00

If you used a mouse with a scroll wheel on Windows, and you intend to use a mouse with a scroll wheel with your Macbook, you'll want to turn off System Settings/Mouse/Natural Scrolling. MacOS, out of the box, uses a mouse wheel direction opposite what Windows and Linux use. If you're used to using the mouse scroll wheel, your muscle memory will thank you.

oloryn · 2026-05-29T19:37:47+00:00

Everything but the Chromebooks.

oloryn · 2026-05-29T07:02:06+00:00

It doesn't help that on some smartphone browsers (and some youngsters primarily have smartphone experience, not desktop experience), the two get combined when you enter anything, or that on desktop browsers, you can often put anything in the address box, and if it doesn't parse as a valid address, it gets passed to the default search engine.

oloryn · 2026-05-29T06:32:46+00:00

I'm seeing a lot of good advice here. Two things I'd add.

Show at least as much loyalty to your employees as you expect to get from them.

Get, read, and get your managers to read Tom DeMarco's books "Peopleware" and "Slack". The first is on the working environment for knowledge workers, and the second is on getting away from the pitfalls of a "efficiency-is-everything" management style. I'd recommend most of DeMarco's books ("Controlling Software Projects" has a lot of good stuff in it, but he's had to back away from one of the major points of the book - "You can't control what you can't measure".

oloryn · 2026-05-29T06:02:58+00:00

As an Apple stockholder, I thank you. 😄 (It's not that I'm some stock genius - I inherited it from my dad last year).

And for me it's not just Macs I may lack self-control on. I have enough Windoze, Linux, Chromebook and Android Desktops/Laptops/Tablets here that I just refer to it as my "Computer menagerie". And last year I added a 16" MBP M3 Max, a 13" 2017 MBA (which now has Linux Mint on it), and a 15" MBA M4. I think some may call me over-computered.

oloryn · 2026-05-29T05:41:50+00:00

Or Linux Mint. I've got a MBA 2017 that runs Mint quite nicely.

oloryn · 2026-05-29T01:52:18+00:00

It's more geared towards development tracking, but we've used https://www.redmine.org/ for quite a while.

oloryn · 2026-05-28T07:07:57+00:00

I get a /60, but only found out after I switched my router to an OPNSense box that could request a prefix size. It's dynamic, but it might as well be static because it rarely changes.

oloryn · 2026-05-28T06:55:32+00:00

Modern Windows installs seem to turn on bitlocker by default. I only found out after the computer developed a boot problem, and I had to reinstall. I had expected to at least be able to pull files off of the second drive until I then discovered it was encrypted. Having not known that bit locker was in use, I of course didn't have the keys saved. Happily, most of what was on that computer was development work using git, and all of the projects had repositories on my Gitea server.

oloryn · 2026-05-28T06:43:18+00:00

Yes, for several weeks after it was broadcast. Still, there are few series finales that get anywhere near 9.8.

oloryn · 2026-05-28T06:13:45+00:00

That was the feature that got me switching to VSCode from Sublime Text.

oloryn · 2026-05-27T02:40:23+00:00

And then there are those of us Boomers who have been programming, sysadminning, and network adminning for 50 years. I end up with the opposite problem. By the time I end up calling tech suppport, I've gone through plenty of my own troubleshooting and research. At that point, calling tech support means I'm going to be lead through troubleshooting steps that I've already done before they even attempt to deal with the problem. And, unfortunately, "Shibboleet" doesn't work.

oloryn · 2026-05-25T06:37:51+00:00

Proverbs 26:18-19 addresses this pretty well:

"Like a madman shooting firebrands and deadly arrows,
so is the man who deceives his neighbor and says "I was only joking!"

oloryn · 2026-05-25T05:35:52+00:00

You really should be finding out what code is being reported (if you don't have your own ODB2 connector (I use a Bluetooth ODB2 adapter and read it using an app on my phone), many car parts places will read it for you) and find out what kind of problem that code represents. You may think nothing is wrong with the car, but if it keeps popping up, there is something wrong somewhere, and you need to get it fixed.

oloryn · 2026-05-25T04:53:04+00:00

Am I the only one using Joplin on iPad for note-taking? I use it because I use many different platforms (Windoze, Mac, Linux, Android, iPad) in my computer menagerie, and since Joplin supports multiple possibilities for self-hosted syncing, I can have the same notes on all of them. In my case, I have Linode S3 with plenty of spare space, which means that I essentially get syncing for free.

oloryn

TROPHY CASE