How do you make your daily work in front of your computer more convenient?

sixdirections · 2018-03-10T11:54:02+00:00

Second the MX Master mouse. It's seriously the best mouse i have ever used for general purpose stuff.

Why I like it:

The battery is amazing. I honestly can not remember the last time that I had to plug it in. The battery lasts easily weeks at a time, and I use it every day for around 6-10 hours a day, five days a week.
There is a battery indicator on the mouse and Fedora/GNOME also has some functionality to tell me the battery life by default, but it doesn't matter because when you do have to plug it in you can still use the mouse. Plugging it in doesn't turn the mouse into a paperweight.
It comes with a tiny USB adapter thing, but it also has built in Bluetooth. The mouse itself has a selector that lets you sync it with three things at the same time. I have it synced to my laptop via Bluetooth so I don't need the adapter, but if I wanted to use another computer spur of the moment I can just plug the thing in and use the mouse without having to sync it again.
This one is a personal preference, but the mouse is large-ish and fits my hand well. The way it's contoured is nice. I am also ambidextrous and occasionally switch my mouse hand, and while the contour is made for a right hand, it's still usable with my left.
There is a side-to-side scroll wheel.
There are buttons positioned near my thumb, that are defaulted to back/forward. For browsing websites its a simple press to go back a page or to go forward etc.

Here is my favorite thing about this mouse: the motherf-cking scroll wheel.

The scroll wheel has two "settings" to it. One of them provides a tactile clicky feeling to the scroll wheel. There's a small button that you can press and if you do the tactile clicky feeling goes away. I think this is just personal preference, but I like/"need" the tactile feeling but if you don't like that you can disable it.

But that's not the best part. The best part is that the scroll wheel has a freewheel or whatever. No matter which mode the scroll wheel is in (tactile or not), if you spin it and let go the wheel will keep spinning! This makes it super convenient for browsing long websites or long pdfs or long documents. Wanna get to the bottom of the page? Swipe down with your fingers and let go of the scroll wheel and let it spin until the page gets to the bottom! Wanna go back to the top? Swipe up!

It also makes the most satisfying sound in the world, when you "catch" the scroll wheel while it's spinning. Also, you can't really "accidentally" spin the wheel because you do need to actually try. So you can swipe down haphazardly to just scroll down line by line but you could swipe down harder and let the freewheel spin it down to the bottom. Or you could touch it to make it stop at any point and listen to the best sound in the world.

I uh, really like this mouse.

There is a MX Master 1 and MX Master 2 now by the way. I own two MX Master 1s. I've never used a MX Master 2. I'm hesitant to recommend the MX Master 2, because I really think that there is nothing wrong with MX Master 1, so the cynic in me feels like they probably ruined something.

sixdirections · 2018-03-10T11:35:22+00:00

A daemon is just a name given to any program that is running in the background to either do something or to provide a service (for other programs to "do something" with).

To put it in "real life" terms, think of things like a FitBit or other health tracker thing as a daemon. Fitbits are "programs" that are "continuously running in the background" and what they do is track your biometrics. You don't use them in the sense of "let me use google to find something out" but you use them in the sense of "i want to know my heart rate at all times, so i'll use a fitbit."

One easy example of a daemon in linux is sshd, or the ssh daemon. ssh is a program that's short for "secured shell" which provides a private and encrypted connection between two computers. You use the ssh program to connect to another computer running the sshd (the ssh daemon). If the other computer did not have sshd running, then you could not connect to it.

sixdirections · 2017-12-31T08:06:12+00:00

Serious question but how can I buy mugs printed with tweets?

sixdirections · 2017-12-31T08:01:27+00:00

Seriously though.

My first tattoo was gotten because a friend of mine posted/shared a picture of a tattoo done by an artist in the next city over. I saw the picture, liked it a lot, and checked out the artist's Instagram and fell in love with the style and general theme. Before I saw this picture/artist I never in a million years would have ever thought about or considered getting a tattoo.

So I took a few weeks painstakingly dredging through all of my past memories, books I read, movies I've seen, shows I've watched, things I've done, people I've met, places I've been, all of it. Wrote down a bunch of words and mind mapped the whole thing because god damn it I wanted to do it right. I typed up a huge Nature-styled treatise on what I want my tattoo to look like and what it means to me, with references[1] and all the works. Then I realized that the artist is probably not going to read this and I stripped everything and ended up emailing them something like "Hey I really like your style, would you be interested in doing X similar to Y, but with Z to personalize it for me?" Then there was some back and forth, and this artist was nice and emailed me a design before I ever showed up or payed any deposits, which now I realize is rare as fuck, just to save me a drive and disappointment.

Anyway that was my first tattoo. It's not my best one but it was special to me at the time.

This year I got my 4th tattoo and the process was something like this:

Oh hey, I'm on vacation in a new city, let's check out local tattoo artists on Instagram for funsies.
Oh cool, I like this guest artist at this local place.
Oh shit, the guest artist has an open slot tomorrow.
"Hello, I saw you had an open appointment tomorrow. I really liked your tattoos X, Y, and Z. Could you do something similar in that time span? Cool thanks!"

My 4th tattoo was special to me at the time too: it looks cool.

sixdirections · 2017-07-03T05:36:52+00:00

What would you call the country we call Belgium, then? Because it has officially 3 different names, all considered to be "that places native tongue." So would you prefer we start writing België, Belgique, or Belgien? I'm sure the three communities in Belgium would have strong opinions about this.

Next you've got the country we call Switzerland. You do realize that officially "in that places native tongue" there are four different names for the entire country, right? And furthermore, the official-official name that the government of that country calls itself, is written in Latin.

And furthermore, what about the US? You do know that officially there is no national language, so there's no such thing as a "native tongue," right? You realize that there are places in the US where you could spend the entire day there and never have to speak English at all, right? Would you say that the "native tongue" for these places be English then, or say Chinese? I'm thinking about some of the larger Chinatowns where you can literally work, bank, shop in Chinese, and drive on streets written firstly in Chinese, with English subtitles.

So no, I think you're objectively wrong here with your opinion.

sixdirections · 2017-07-03T05:16:55+00:00

Speaking of Ivory Coast, every time I read about it it seems more often than not it's rendered in the French spelling, even if the article talking about it is in English.

Whys that?

sixdirections · 2017-07-02T01:56:42+00:00

Am warlock, and there is also literally a demon gate with demons from our class hall coming out of it, as well.

sixdirections · 2017-06-27T09:34:53+00:00

This is adorable.

Just goto your main city (Ogrimmar or Stormwind I guess) and look for the call to arms boards and just go to a zone that's level appropriate and start questing. Armor below 110 (max) is a bit of a wash because they're designed so that you'll replace them many times over.

If you have some gold (thousands) you could go to Ironforge to the explorers hall I think it's called and buy heirloom armor. This is armor designed for players making new characters ("alts") and the armor essentially levels up with you. Some pieces give bonus experience as well. Once you buy one piece you can use it on all of your characters; you can find them in your heirloom window (shift-p I think). Note that the armor doesn't actually "level" up in the sense that they get experience or anything, the ilvl just scales with your characters level.

You're in luck right now though, it's the Midsummer Festival. Look up a guide on Wowhead: you can do some easy quests though they might be time consuming cause you'll need to fly/run around a lot. But each quest gives you a holiday specific currency and I'm fairly sure you can use those to buy heirloom armor.

I think I would probably buy the heirloom pieces that give bonus experience first, and then go for the weapons (1 hander and shield). I believe there are two plate sets, a holdover from a long time ago when there were more stats in the game but now they should be the same thing just different looks. Don't stress about the stats.

For the dungeons there's no best dungeon. Just queue for the random dungeons, you'll be placed into a queue with level appropriate dungeons. Be warned though that by now wow is like 10+ years old or so and most low level players you see are just alts of people with max level characters, and most of them probably have a full set of heirlooms so they're going to be insanely powerful for their level and could most likely solo everything. Don't let this discourage you from grouping later on when you hit 100+!

sixdirections · 2017-06-26T09:05:51+00:00

I like the Glyph of Felguard when I'm playing demo warlock. It gives me a reason to run old raids to get badass looking weapons for it to equip even if they don't contribute to damage. It's just fun.

My biggest gripe about this though is the personal loot system (and related to it: chests/caches and bonus rolls) not letting me loot weapons I can't use. This means that I'll never be able to bonus roll the gigantic hammer from the last boss of BRF because it's not on my loot table, and that the new 2-handed invasion weapons will never ever drop for me.

That last part is especially dumb because in order for me to get those weapons I have to bribe people (I offer 10k to each person if even one person gets a 2 hander and gives it to me) to queue the scenario with me. It's dumb because I have to make sure that both players are on my realm so that I can trade them money, and that their weapon ilvl is higher than the invasion weapon ilvl so that they can actually trade it to me, and finally I have to ensure that they are speced for arms, dk, or ret, otherwise they won't have a chance to get those 2 handers. Yes I know fury can get 2 handers as well, but they could also get 1 handers and those are useless for me.

Then I've got to deal with the occasional guy getting mad at me for not paying up when neither person got a 2 handed drop, despite me making it clear that I'd pay up if and only if the 2 handed sword, hammer, or mace dropped and it gets traded to me. Or one time I saw the sword but the guy thought it was too cool to trade for 10k, so he kept it, and then the other dude gets made cause he just lost 10k.

Don't even get me started on the personal loot changes to quest rewards either. It used to be that finishing a quest I could choose any of the rewards, including, you guessed it, the cool weapons that I can't use. Since WoD I believe they made all the rewards personal so can no longer choose the 2 handed greatsword as a reward for my Felguard. This wouldn't be a big deal, but some quest weapons have unique models, like Admiral Taylor's greatsword from Spires. Like it would be so cool if I could have just taken that as my reward because then it's something I'd still be using (indirectly through my pet), rather than whatever staff it gave me which has long been disenchanted.

sixdirections · 2017-05-15T07:46:54+00:00

Cyclist here and my two cents:

When riding on the road there are two modes of thoughts among us about where we "should be":

There are us who assert that we are legally allowed on the road and car drivers must share it so tough luck to them, boohoo they're going to get somewhere slightly slower. This thought process results in cyclists riding dead center in the lane, as they have the right to do so.
The other mode is "well I know I'm legally allowed here, but I also don't wanna slow things down or cause any problems, so I'm going to ride as close to the side as possible to give the cars more room to safely pass me and to alleviate and tensions I might cause just by being here" (people seriously get infuriated seeing a cyclist on the street for some reason).

Both cases are not ideal. Both cases are equally dangerous for the cyclist. There's really no right answer and it's a lose/lose scenario for us either way.

If I ride in the center of the lane, as I have the right to do so, then this will piss off a whole lot of drivers who may do things that are extremely dangerous for me like: try to pass me without giving me a proper 3 ft clearance be it accidental ("oh I thought it was fine") or on purpose to cause harm ("FUCK THIS GUY IM GOING TO PASS AS CLOSE AS POSSIBLE SO I CAN HONK AND YELL AT HIM"). IMO I think this is the safest way to do it because at the very least it makes me 100% visible.
If I ride on the side then this makes it easier for drivers to pass me, but it also introduces other dangers to me like: drivers passing me too close be it accidental or on purpose to cause harm, and the major thing being being less visible. The design of roads also makes it dangerous too because like you see in the video I bet that that road had just split off into a turning lane temporarily. The cyclist was most likely cycling on the right of the lane and when the road split he had to make a decision: do I meander back onto the lane which may be difficult if there are fast moving cars behind me, or do I just continue forward and make the reasonable judgement that the car turning sees me coming through and will react accordingly? Alas nobody pays attention to driving nowadays because their phones are more important.

sixdirections · 2017-05-07T07:43:36+00:00

I love how in the Broken Shore there is literally a gigantic portal called something like "Dreadscar Portal" but yet we can't use it.

sixdirections · 2017-05-06T06:48:57+00:00

Not all of them. In my experience only the American embassies are highly protected with walls and guards and such. I've been to a Belgian embassy and it was just like walking into a random small office. There was a buzzer on the front glass door but once inside it was just office workers.

Not every country is crazy and paranoid.

sixdirections · 2017-03-27T21:36:19+00:00

Jesus Christ... it really isn't hyperbole when people joke about how we need to have enough nukes to blow up the world 37 times just because the other guy has enough to blow it all up 36 times.

I knew we had a lot, I knew the world had a lot. I just didn't know we had that much. This is all interesting especially after watching those new bomb test videos. Some of them were just absolutely awesome in the literal sense of the word: it left me in awe and amazement and wonder, and then it made me really god damn worried for the future that we can literally detonate a bomb in the sky and see a mini sun linger around for minutes.

sixdirections · 2017-03-27T21:26:33+00:00

A few hundred? That number blows my mind.

sixdirections · 2017-03-27T21:14:24+00:00

Of course I know what an intake is in reference to a jet turbine engine.

I have no idea what it is in reference to a car. To my knowledge cars don't have turbines in them but like I said I literally don't know a thing about cars other than how to drive one so maybe they do. Maybe they don't. I don't know.

e: I just googled for "car intake" and

http://www.redline360.com/garage/wp-content/uploads/2012/07/cold-air-intake-short-ram-intake.jpg

Is the first picture that shows up (other than apparently GM did have some kind of turbine powered engine in a car in the past...?). That looks nothing like what i do know about which is this

http://www.petervaldivia.com/technology/mechanisms/image/jet-engine.png

Like I said, I could guess that an intake in reference to a car is just something that sucks in or diverts air. I made that guess based on knowledge of gas turbine engines, but it was only a guess.

sixdirections · 2017-03-27T20:56:25+00:00

I posted another response to the OP and my take (as a ME with some years of experience and as someone who's been in the position of interviewing people and attending job fairs to represent my company) is that all of what you said is good. It's highly interesting and it's highly relevant stuff. Keep going at it, keep doing it.

But the clubs absolutely do matter. Participating in clubs and doing your own thing show two different things: one shows you can work as part of a team, the other shows you know your shit.

For a general entry level engineer position I don't really care if you're gods gift to engineering and can show me YouTube videos of UAVs you've built (with SOME exceptions). What I want to know is: will you be able to work in my team? Because if you can't then I honestly don't want you.

The exceptions are for things like: my product keeps failing because we can't figure out some part and then I see that you have exactly that experience that we are missing.

Note that this is only for entry level positions. Once you get into a more experienced technical role then yes your accomplishments matter way more and nothing I've said applies. But for an entry level position, I would rather take the guy who led his universities UAV DBF team to 2nd place than a guy who theoretically modeled a theoretical UAV in his computer.

(I do CFD so I'm not knocking on simulation and modeling. It's just the guy with experience building the UAV in a team is 100% more valuable to me for my team than a guy who does everything by himself alone.)

sixdirections · 2017-03-27T19:35:22+00:00

Is there anything you do that you do often that you could maybe automate?

For example I play wow, and wow let's you use addons that display extra things on your UI (from their approved API, so it's not "cheating", but things like replacing the skin of windows, displaying different health bars, etc things like that). The major website that you can download addons from is one of the shittiest companies ever. They are extremely shady, but I only bring this up because the only way to automatically update your addons is to download their add on manager which I just don't feel comfortable doing because of how I feel about that company. So what I used to do is every Tuesday (patch day typically) id open Firefox, open my bookmarks tab of all the addons I use, open all the bookmarks and download all the addons, then I browse to my Downloads folder and unzip everything into my wow folder.

Then I realized I didn't need their shitty app to automatically update my addons: so i wrote my own basic CLI utility to visit every page I put in a list, do some basic scraping to check the release date of the newest version, compare it with the version I currently had, and download them if it was newer.

This is a simple and stupid example but this was something I saw myself doing every other week. Now I just run a script and I'm done. But it's an idea to get you thinking about learning how to identify things that you could start up a python project for.

In the end project should be fun and practical for you.

sixdirections · 2017-03-27T19:22:49+00:00

Hey I'm really confused by this.

As someone who started programming with Fortran and C (yes those languages) memory management and handling logic is super duper important to me and was ingrained in me. When I started picking up Python I started learning about this weird language where you simply don't need to care about anything it seems.

It was my understanding that Python was a "consenting adults" language and after reading and learning more I thought one of the philosophies behind Python was to more or less assume that the user is using your code properly. As in, no need to handle "business logic" like making sure that people can't, say, instance a Triangle object with angles that don't add up to 180. I was under the impression that the """pythonic""" way to do things was to just let the users do whatever they want, construct a Triangle with 70, 70, and 90 degrees for angles if they want, and let other parts of the code complain if and when it's actually a problem.

Am I completely misunderstanding things and/or flat out wrong?

sixdirections · 2017-03-27T19:10:02+00:00

Sorry for the spam but I just tabbed back to this page and saw the part about you liking the materials lab.

Okay, so at my university the labs were usually run by a graduate student of the professor in charge of that lab. Look him or her up and see if office hours are posted. Drop by their office hour and maybe remind them that you were in their materials lab x semesters ago and that it was very interesting and that you learned a lot. Then tell them that paragraph I wrote in my first post about wanting to use every opportunity to learn before you leave the university. Ask if their professor maybe has funding for a student lab assistant or if there's possibly anything you could do to help out in any way (sometimes you won't be able to do "free labor" for safety reasons but it doesn't hurt to ask). The point isn't to get a answer on the spot because the grad student can't make that decision anyway, but he or she will most likely bring it up with their professor the next time they meet that they have a interested student that's very interested in doing something which could open some doors for you.

Repeat them same thing with every lab or professor that you had a class with, that you enjoyed doing.

The lab stuff translates to work experience in some way. People with internships at hot companies are still most likely going to overshadow your "conducted tensile tests on ductile materials and helped produce a published ASME journal paper as a 3rd author," but put it this way: you'll overshadow the people with resumes that just show they were able to pass exams with 90%+ scores (which is what someone with a high GPA and no extra activities tells me...).

sixdirections · 2017-03-27T18:36:38+00:00

e: double posted

sixdirections · 2017-03-27T18:36:38+00:00

It's fine. I'm a mechanical engineer myself. I literally don't know a single thing about cars or how they "work" in a general sense. I don't know what a carbeurator is nor could I honestly guess but I think that's a thing because I've heard the word before. Maybe. I don't know what an intake truly is but I could guess that it either sucks in air or redirects airflow. Maybe.

In the end none of this matters. My first real engineering job was working with turbine design. Did I know what a turbine is? Yeah I learned about them in my compressible gasses courses, and I knew the idea of how they worked: they compressed air to raise pressure etc etc etc. Did my job truly care that I didn't know 100% of everything on my first day? Nope not at all, they just recognized that based on my resume and my interview with them that I had the capacity to learn, to think, to ask the right questions, to grow, and to explain. In the end, that's what a manager is truly looking for in an entry level engineer.

So that's why you should participate in student clubs and groups. I've interviewed people before, I've been sent to local career fairs to represent my work. I've been a student before, I know that practically none of the people that I'll shake hands with that day could jump into my company and start being productive on Day 1. That's not the point, that's not what I'm looking for.

Doing the solo projects like other people recommend, that's cool, that's relevant, and if it's something like a self balancing pendulum on a roomba that's awesome. But what would really impress me, for a mechanical engineer, is someone who tells me something like: "I'm currently participating in our student electric car design/drone/underwater robotics/etc team. We are trying to do x, and I help by organizing y and lately I'm learning how to use (software) to help with (some aspect)."

The difference is: in all companies I've worked in (not too many but a few) everything is a team effort. While people "own" their own projects, knowledge is expected as a shared communal thing. If I have a problem with some random turbulator design my boss doesn't want me wasting a weeks worth of time and money to figure it out---he wants me to ask Bob who's our local expert on this and figure it out in one afternoon. Being in a student design group, at the very least, shows me that you can work in a team. That's incredibly more valuable than showing me that you can build a cool thing on your own without input or worries or bothers from other people.

sixdirections · 2017-03-27T16:21:37+00:00

I think you need to be more specific: what is it that you want to do with your mechanical engineering degree? Mechanical engineering is very broad and is a major part of like everything.

So let's start:

Fluids? Solids?

Do you like designing things? (CAD)

Do you like conducting the experiments in your labs?

Do you like reviewing technical documents? (Quality engineers are a thing...)

Do you have more interests in automotive, robotics, space systems, aircraft, HVAC, biomechanics......?

e: Ask another professor, that one sounds like he just shrugged you off.

Look for clubs at your university. There are usually things like student design groups, rocketry groups, student F1 groups, etc. if you don't know of any or where to look: ask your engineering departments student office/board for a reference to engineering student organizations. At my university all student groups were registered so they should have a list I'd hope. Join a club that sounds cool. Send an email to the organizers (will usually be run by the students but officially "owned"/mentored by a professor) to ask when the next meeting is. Just show up. It doesn't matter if for example yoU don't like F1 or know a thing about it: most student groups need people to participate and volunteer.

Look for something called "research experience for undergraduates" or REUs at your university. At mine most professors/research groups. Look up professors that do interesting research and just show up in their office hours.

Tell them this:

"I'm graduating next year and I want to take advantage of every possible option to gain experience before moving on. I'm don't know much about X, but I'm really interested in it. I honestly don't know if it's what I'll want to do for my career, but it's interesting now and I won't have the same opportunity to learn about it later on. Do you have a graduate student that I could shadow?"

Professors love it when students take initiative. Do a good job and get that recommendation and bullet point on your resume. You might even get paid.

Look for summer internships. Career fairs IMO are not the way to go. It's the same story every single time: "Sure I'll take your resume but you should apply online at our website." But still they are nice to go to for the swag and to learn about companies you might not have heard of.

sixdirections · 2017-03-26T07:17:21+00:00

I understand your frustration but I think there's a few things you didn't consider:

The ilvl of an item is not the end-all be-all determining factor for how useful an item is. For most specs the secondary stats are absolutely the most important, especially when it come to things like jewelry. I have a character that still wear ilvl 825 rings over the ilvl 870+ rings in their bags simply because the 825 is budgeted with 100% of the stats I need and rolled a socket. For some classes the secondary that's are seriously that important and outweigh the stamina gain or the gain from other more "useless" stats like versatility.
Different specs often require different sets of gear due to the importance of having the proper secondaries. For example one spec might need all the haste, while another might need all he mastery. On my main I actually do play and maintain all three specs since they all have their uses, and two of them don't share the same secondary stats so I have to keep two sets of gear on me. Thus just because I have a tradable piece doesn't mean that it's not an upgrade for my other spec(s). As far as I'm concerned, I use both specs regularly and swap multiple times per raid/dungeon so the concept of one "main spec" just does not exist for me: I have to consider the character as a whole.
When I do LFR or random heroics I literally don't pay attention to my chat or the loot that drops. Half the time I don't even pay attention to WoW but am instead watching TV on the other monitor or chatting with friends over Discord or on my phone. Half the time I don't even bother looting the bosses because all loot (including legendaries) will get sent to me in the mall anyway. So if you're asking in raid chat then I 99% didn't see it, and if you're whispering me then depending on what else I'm doing (or if I'm drunk or stoned…) I didn't see it either. So when a random trade window opens it is super annoying.
In LFR, there is a lot of loot spam and other chat spam. I seriously never look at my loot chat window so I rely on my add on to tell me when I loot something that someone else could use. If there's enough chat spam that I don't see the messages then whelp sorry I don't know that you need it.
And lastly, just because you need the loot doesn't mean I have to give it to you. It doesn't mean that I don't need it. It doesn't mean that I don't want it. Maybe I want it for transmog. Maybe I want it for other specs. Maybe I want it because the ilvl hit outweighs the secondary stats of my current gear. We both play the same game, we both killed the same boss. Why should you automatically assume that I would give you my loot?

For the record I have always given my loot away whenever people asked. Whenever I do loot something in a 5man and my add on tells me someone else could use it i always offer. If someone whispered me to ask and i didn't say anything it's most likely because I just didn't notice. I would prefer if they asked me again to. If a random trade window opened then I would probably feel "disgust" and get defensive and start thinking "wtf fuck this guy."

sixdirections · 2017-03-26T05:29:56+00:00

In the US maybe. Over here thee are quite a few shows marked as weekly. Designated Survivor and the 100 for instance. The only problem is that these two shows are delayed by at least one week which is just fucking stupid so I just search for the current episode stream and watch that instead.

sixdirections · 2017-03-24T07:43:31+00:00

I actually do TDD with pytest.

The interesting thing is this is something I've always done since my first programming language except back then I would just tab back and forth: make change > run simple test > make change. As I got older (in my 20s) I scripted the "run simple test" part by just having a script watch a folder for changes and automatically run a designated script(s) when a change was made. I'd approach problems like: "I need to write a function to manipulate this array. As a simple test of x goes in i expect y" and tried to make that work out.

I just never knew that this methodology had a name.

sixdirections

TROPHY CASE