Posts by mjflory 67 publicly visible posts • joined 9 Oct 2015
A rhyming dictionary would be good. Usually you try to pick a slim dictionary. Bilingual ones are very good. The Atlantic article says Mathews used Langenscheidt's Standard English-German Dictionary. If I had it sitting around here I'd count the distance between "crowd" and "shroud..."
The results resemble those from a procedure devised by the Oulipo, a French literary-mathematical workshop, called "S+7" (or "N+7" in English), in which each noun is replaced by the seventh noun following it in a dictionary. My favorite example is Harry Mathews' version of Wordsworth: "I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud" becomes "I wandered lonely as a crowd / That floats on high o'er valves and ills / When all at once I saw a shroud, / A hound, of golden imbeciles..." I see real possibilities! (Re: "The Imbeciles": https://www.theatlantic.com/past/docs/issues/2002/04/rose.htm )
Yes, the Republican Party did once have a soul. It was founded in 1854 as an abolitionist alternative to the existing parties, in order to halt the spread of slavery to the new western states. Abraham Lincoln was the first Republican president. As a boy growing up in Wisconsin I went on a school trip to visit the tiny schoolhouse in Ripon where the party began. It's sobering to consider how the spirit of the huge party that grew from there has changed so greatly over the years.
Yes, this has been an aggravation to so many of us! Jerry3904, the inexhaustible helper in all topics concerning MX Linux, wrote a guide to solving this: https://mxlinux.org/wiki/xfce/changing-border-size-with-xfce4-window-manager/ . I find the hold-a-key-and-click solutions annoying and I found fiddling with the theme definition files to be just more aggravation, but the Blackbird theme, among others, has wider borders.
Very sadly, Jerry Bond passed away late last year. MX's indispensible Dolphin Oracle wrote a note about him: https://mxlinux.org/blog/r-i-p-jerry3904/ .
I wouldn't mind being able to see APFS from Linux. I put a big SSD into an old Macbook Air and installed Monterey, the most recent MacOS it can run; High Sierra, to run all the software that Monterey rejects; and MX Linux to get some work done. (A note on the case reminds me to hold ALT when I boot to choose where I'm going.) Monterey demanded APFS, which is of course terra incognita to MX. High Sierra uses it but complains it's unsupported (or maybe it just doesn't like the SSD). MX's ext4 is invisible to MacOS. For file transfer I use FAT32 USB sticks. It's a bit of a mess.
Medically, this is such an important question! The medical journals (JAMA, etc.) have had many articles examining the use of LLMs in generating clinicians' notes, recording which take a considerable amount of their increasingly limited time. For better or worse, LLMs like BioBert that have been pre-trained on clinical language are coming into use. But evaluating the effectiveness of the methods is not simple.
Thanks for the memories. In the early 90's I shared an apartment with a Comp. Sci. student who'd borrowed an AT&T 3B2 from the department and realized there was no way I could afford a Unix system. Then an old friend in the Unix division of Bell Labs told me his pals (you know, Dennis Richie and those guys) were excited about a new homebrew Unix clone, so before long I had a stack of SLS floppies on my desk and Linux on my fancy '386 PC. I spent weeks just getting an X Windows session running (just an empty screen, no applications) and realized that I could either get Linux running well or finish my post-doc, but not both. A few years later distros with graphical installers and other wonders appeared and I've been using them since.
I was amused to read that there were supposedly three roundabouts in the US in the 90s. We have three surrounding Prospect Park here in Brooklyn and nothing is that new here. The little one at the south end of the park https://maps.app.goo.gl/B7Byh27bLrs9EaJ78 is a special aggravation. New York, in its neverending quest to bring traffic to a halt, has installed five traffic lights within the circle, with a few more just outside it. If you're lucky you can hit three red lights in one turn around the circle. There are no lane dividers, so the usual direction to drive is diagonally. But it will all be OK, as they are set to further lower speed limits citywide soon.
I splurged on a 2TB Aura X2 SSD for a second-hand 2017 MBA and put Monterey (magenta mountains), High Sierra (golden mountains), and MX 23.1 (no mountains) on it with rEFIt. High Sierra is the oldest version that handles the SSD properly and it runs most of my old software. Monterey was just out of curiosity, as it of course refuses to run almost all the old programs. (Unfortunately, rEFIt gives both MacOS versions the same logo, so I often don't know which I'm booting.)
I do statistical analyses. My main stat workhorse, Stata, now ships with Windows, Mac, and Linux installers. I've used the R stat language occasionally, and I have to prepare text (LibreOffice Writer, SoftMaker TextMaker graphics (GIMP) and presentations (LibreOffice Impress, SoftMaker Presentations) that colleagues can bring up in Microsoft Office. My main three email accounts (it's a long story) are handled by Thunderbird, with Outlook accessed through a browser (Chrome/Chromium/Firefox). Zoom and VMWare Horizon's Linux clients work well. Occasionally I'll fire up an old Windows XP installation in a VirtualBox session for an odd program or two.
I use almost identical setups at the office and at home: Dell and HP workstations with 24 to 32 GB RAM, SSD for the system, RAID HDDs for /home. Dual monitors at work, just one at home, NVidia cards everywhere (and CUDA installed for machine learning experiments). I'm still on Linux Mint 18 but I'm setting up version 20 on another machine and playing with MX Linux. I've been using Linux since kernel 0.99 (the SLS distro on a huge pile of floppies) but I switched most of my work to Linux about 2010. Aside from occasional Caja annoyances on the Mate WM my principal problems are compatibility failures between LibreOffice/SoftMaker Office and the various Microsoft Office versions colleagues use. (I bought SoftMaker to try to remedy this but there are still occasional glitches; in desperation I can bring up MS Office 2007 under Wine -- it's fairly stable.)
> “Creatives” shouldn’t be let near user interfaces until they have been properly designed.
Properly designing "creatives" is a nearly impossible task.
No, seriously, your points are very well taken. After all, if the driver can't manage the car's UI, the result can be a crash. That's true of computers too, I suppose, but the results are usually less dire.
Then again, the Chrome and Firefox maintainers could emulate early Linux kernel numbering. In 1993 it felt like Zeno was numbering the kernels: http://www.oldlinux.org/Linux.old/docs/history/0.99.html . One hundred and five versions, from "0.99" (13 Dec 1992) to "0.99.15j" (2 Mar 1994), separated "0.98.6" from "pre-1.0". Perhaps "Chrome 99.99991" could follow ""Chrome 99.9999" -- or should it be "Chrome 99.99999"?
Inspired by a Hackaday post about Raspberry Pi palmtops I put some batteries in my DOS-based HP handhelds the other day. Sure enough, I soon encountered "Abort, Retry, Fail." And sure enough, I didn't know what to respond. (I think "Abort" got it to stop trying to access the memory card with a dead battery.)
I'm risking going a little off topic here, but I have quite a few Mate desktops on Mint and Ubuntu and I've had no trouble with left-side taskbars. I recall them working well in Cinnamon too, though I went with Mate for the greater choice of widgets (CPU load and temperature, etc.). I keep a much narrower taskbar on the bottom to show running processes.
On my dual-boot-desperation Windows 10 partition I've somehow avoided the updates that broke Classic Shell. Let's hope my luck holds. (Win 11 isn't even on my radar.)
Sometimes the antiques just work. Today a colleague sent a .docx document loaded with recorded changes and comments. I opened it on my increasingly creaky Mint 18.1 system in LibreOffice 5 but just to double-check I brought it up in Word 2003 -- I installed the compatibility add-on for .docx files ages ago -- and it opened without a problem. I checked my Wine version: it's Wine 1.6.2! It's not from CodeWeavers either, just the free release. Word crashes on exit and offers to report the problem to Microsoft, but I doubt they're too concerned about it. Neither am I, as I can open, read, and save documents with no problems.
I'm looking forward to getting Wine 7 running, but I think it will require the Mint 20.3 system I'm setting up now... and my Office 2003 disks, wherever they are.
Yesterday I rerouted some of my internet cables, then helped a neighbor reroute some of her internet cables. A few hours ago the ISS app on my phone excitedly told me a spacewalk was in progress. I tuned in and they were, yes, rerouting internet cables!
A minute ago I checked in on the spacewalk and Pyotr and Oleg were still rerouting the internet cables, and they sound very tired. Working in spacesuits, handling the cables with space-gloves, working in Zero-G, they have my respect for their persistence. Sometimes they have to stop for a minute just to catch their breath. The back of my desk is a cable-bound mess, but my rerouting was nothing compared to that.
Don't know if anyone else caught Piotr's (?) description of the round cable-spool cover, over the disposal of which there was much deliberation. He got it loose, held it up, and said, "What a beautiful object! This is the source of all those UFO rumours!" So now we know.
If only that were true... We have a smattering of old versions of MS Office in various offices and I've seem vertical lines go askew in PowerPoint and no end of variations on mangled text in Word when we exchange documents. I'm not the best at keeping my software up to date, but I've had documents go awry when I brought them up in LibreOffice and SoftMaker Office on my Linux boxes as well. My fallbacks are to open a sent document in Office for Mac or in Office 365 (or whatever that online pain is called). Still, yesterday a friend sent me a multilingual, footnoted .docx that choked his Office for Mac. I opened it in LO 5, added a space at the end, resaved it, and returned it. Today he said it opened perfectly now in Word.
I'll make the leap from LO 5 to LO 7.2 and see how it goes. (I should install that SoftMaker 2021 update I bought, too.)
I've wondered how people keep things straight in Japan. The country uses 100v (not 120v, though the outlets are the same as in the US), but what's worse is that it's 50 Hertz in eastern Japan and 60 Hertz in western Japan. (I think Siemens designed one end of the country and Westinghouse the other.)
Just over a third of a century ago my IBM Portable PC arrived -- a mere 30 lbs. of portability, though I think the keyboard added 7 lbs. more. It came with a postcard with a space for comments, and I mentioned that, though I was in New York, it had arrived with the power switch set to 230 volts. A few days later an IBM representative *telephoned* me to check on this grievous misconfiguration. Customer service and follow-up have changed a little since then...
256 BYTES! We used to program with 8 BITS of RAM! Every time we rewrote the byte we had to scrawl a letter on the cardboard box we lived in, in the middle of the road...
(8 BITS and a cardboard box! We just had ONE BIT! It was a hole in the road and when it filled with water it was 1 until we bailed it out to make it 0 ...)
[Sorry, couldn't resist. Programming in 256 bytes is quite a skill.]
Years ago I realized that much of my hand and wrist pain came from the pronation (wrist rotation analogous to roll of an airplane) required to use my Trackman Marble. I kludged a stand of sorts to tilt the TM by about 45 degrees and I felt much better. Since then there have been a couple of trackballs with this sort of tilt built in -- among others, the Logitech Trackman Ergo has an optional stand -- and recently I've been using a Kensington Pro Fit Ergo Vertical Wireless Trackball (https://www.kensington.com/en-gb/p/products/control/trackballs/pro-fit-ergo-vertical-wireless-trackball/). It tracks well, it's easy to pop the ball to clean out accumulated crud, and my only problem has been its tendency to switch itself from WiFi to Bluetooth once in a while. (I suppose I'm brushing one of its innumerable buttons by mistake, but I now know which button to push to unswitch it.) The Kinesis Advantage has eliminated the pronation pain I had from flat keyboards and the tendonitis that almost kept me from working thirty years ago hasn't come back.
I'll have to look up Cooper a.k.a. Avery. I wonder if implants couldn't improve upon our original design. (They might be biological implants, after all.) An eagle's resolution, a cat's night vision, an insect's UV perception... or are there contradictiory requirements there?
Best wishes re: your joints, ears, and all. I probably made my ailments sound far worse than they are. The arthritis has just started in a couple of joints, and my corrected vision is as good as ever. You'll get used to the omnifocals (or varifocals, I presume they're the same) and the formulae have actually improved in recent years. But do be careful walking, as the distance to the ground can be distorted a bit by them.
Mr IP, you have my sympathies for your nearsightedness, sore joints, and tinnitus. (Mine come from genes, arthritis, and friends in rock bands, respectively.) But I especially share your enthusiasm for widened color perception! I've read of some tetrachromatic women in Denmark and seen some colorful canvases by a tetrachromatic painter trying to convey her vision of the world, but -- alas -- it would take some serious genetic engineering to allow a man to see four primary colors. (Conceivably we could train ourselves to distinguish extra colors with notch-filtered lenses, perhaps a different one on each eye, but I'm sure it wouldn't be the same.) How was Mrs IP's gift discovered? I recall reading that some tetrachromats were unaware until they were tested.
Dr S, there have been some attempts at a KDE respin of MX. I had good luck with mikejade's one, described here: https://forum.mxlinux.org/viewtopic.php?f=127&t=54469 . My luck with the "Full Monty" respin was not so good. There are others I haven't tried. The KDE page in the MX wiki is very out of date, alas. There's a forum page devoted to KDE respins, though: https://forum.mxlinux.org/viewforum.php?f=127&sid=342539807776f8f77264344969732b9c . There is a list of all respins (not just KDE) here: https://forum.mxlinux.org/viewtopic.php?p=486469#p486469 .
My great-aunt's family realized too late that "Iva Price" had certain connotations in the late 19th century, so Iva Elizabeth was thereafter known as Beth or, sometimes, Babe (long before Babe Ruth or the famous pig). I've always thought her name was worthy of inclusion in "John Train's Most Remarkable Names" or "Remarkable Names of Real People" (also by John Train).
I can understand designing with Torx screws -- it's a lot easier to keep a screwdriver centered on them and apply torque, hence the name. But I didn't expect to find the bottom of my Toshiba Portege held on with 13 Philips screws and, hidden under a glued-on button in the center, a "security" Torx screw. Those are the ones with a tiny pillar in the middle of the head that prevents a standard Torx driver from even being inserted! (I suppose it would have cost them something to license pentalobe screws from Apple.) As usual, my iFixit screwdriver-bit set came to the rescue.
