Things n' Stuff Thoughts about the universe in general

Every now and then, when discussing EVs (electric vehicles) or other alternative fuel cars¹, that offer basically zero pollution (in the form of green house gases and other poisonous gases) someone always raises the argument that these cars just “move the pollution upstream” to the electric power plants and you are still polluting just the same.

But this argument only works if the power production “upstream” really is polluting as much as an onboard gas engine – which really sounds weird to me, because as you increase the success of the engine – from something that had to be small enough to fit in a car to something that basically only had the limit of required to be cost effective – surely you can have large efficiency gains, even if burning the same fuel?

So here are some numbers:

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1. like the new “hydrogen powered” cars [↩]

ניגשתי היום לנקודת שרות של סלקום בשביל לשחזר את כרטיס ה-SIM של הטלפון שאיבדתי (את הכרטיס, לא את הטלפון), וכשאיש השרות שאל אותי איזה סוג כרטיס אני צריך, עניתי לא בפשטות “הרגיל – מיני SIM”. מה שהוביל לויכוח האם קיים דבר כזה שנקרא “Mini-SIM” (רמז: קיים, זה מה שיש ברוב הטלפונים).

שזה כנראה היה טעות מצידי, כי איש השרות א) לא מבין במוצר שהוא מוכר (שזה לא מקרה מיוחד), אבל ב) משוכנע ש(חוסר) הידע שלו הוא הדבר הנכון ו-ג) מאוד לא סלחני לאנשים שמנסים להסביר לו שהוא טועה – מה שגרם לכך שקיבלתי שרות ממש גרוע ויחס מזלזל.

Because if you don’t like exactly 100% what the GNOME developers think the desktop should look like, then too bad, you’d just have to suffer.

In addition to really annoying misbehaviors that I doubt anyone could justify (like the evolution color problem), here are the list of things that cause me to hate GNOME and will eventually cause me to reinstall KDE.

Full disclosure: I’m normally a KDE user and have been trying the latest GNOME using Fedora 21 pre-release. I expect that some of the things I mention below are bugs that will be fixed in time for the public release, and if so feel free to point them out. Also, I’m aware that some of the issues I have can be “fixed” by installing the GNOME Tweak tool or editing the dconf (the GNOME “registry”), but I don’t feel this is a valid way to build software – “if you want it to not be painful, you should be an advanced user”. Did I mention I love KDE?

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Well, I don’t have very high resolution displays at all (you might call them UHD displays?), but the name “4K” is really stupid – so please stop using it.

What is it 4000 of anyway? Can anyone tell me? Hint – no it doesn’t have 4000 pixels, nor 4000 scan lines or 4000 anything or event anything else that is divisible by 4000. Although the horizontal resolution is almost 4000 (actuallly 3840 pixels wide), and while Wikipedia will have you believe that is the reason for the name, it is not so.

No, the reason is so much stupider than that: the name “4K” is because “4K displays” are 4 times larger (in pixel count) than 1080p displays (1080 being about 1K). This is so stupid, because while UHD displays do indeed have 4 times the pixels of a 1080p (“1K”) display, the 1080 in the number does not relate to the number of pixels – it is the number of scan lines in the picture – of which a UHD display has only twice as much. But “2K” just doesn’t have the right ring to it… so, the branding masters made do with what they have. Sooooo stupid…

מתחשק לכם תבשיל סמיך בבישול ארוך, אבל עדיין לא קר מספיק בחוץ בשביל תבשיל ממש כבד, והרופא ביקש להפחית בבשר האדום? הנה תבשיל דמוי גולש, קל יחסית ומבוסס על הודו – בשביל שומרי המשקל שבינינו.

המצרכים:

• 1 ק”ג שוק הודו מפורק (ידוע גם כשווארמה הודו – בלי העצמות כמובן)
• בצל גדול
• גמבה או פלפל בצבע מתאים
• כרובית קטנה
• קולורבי גדול
• תפוח אדמה
• קישוא או זוקיני גדול
• 3 גזרים גדולים
• שאר במיני תבלינים לפי הצורך

הכנה:

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When you send an email to a list with a file attached, but you attach the wrong file. So a helpful soul replies with “you attached the wrong file” and you want to just ‘reply all’ and attach the correct file – but the helpful person didn’t want to cause you shame by publishing your error, and so their reply was private.

Now to send the correct file, you have to dig up your old email from the sent items folder and reply to that with “sorry for being stupid”.

So – it helpful friends: when you want to help, please use ‘reply all’. It’s the friendly thing to do, as it saves me both annoyance and face.

This was on the bus stop bench outside my work today:

The note under the memory modules (3 sticks, 512MB each, either PC100 or PC123) says “please take”.

I never thought about trying that. Do you think I can do the same with my old CRT?

International Business Times has published an article with some features made available by iOS 6 that is likely iPhone 5 will offer:

Answering/Declining Calls – Users will now have the option to answer or decline calls. Users may send a text message from a choice of pre-programmed options if you wish not to be disturbed at the moment. Users will also be able to remind themselves to return the missed calls later.

Really? That’s a new feature? Having used these features constantly since, like, forever on Android, I’m actually very surprised that iOS didn’t have those up till now.

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More interesting things will probably come up during the day, but so far I liked Google’s idea (also see a link from google.com).

הקומיקס הזה של XKCD מתאר בדיוק את הרגשת חוסר האונים שיש לי לפחות פעמיים כל שבוע:

[מוצג כאן ללא אישור המחבר – אני מקווה שלא אכפת לו]