Yet another Google account/service-banning horror story. For this reason, I proactively migrated off Gmail earlier this year to Fastmail. Very happy that I did.
The only important thing I have left on Google now is 15 years of Location History. I'm still figuring out where to move that to.
I didn't even know Google had this feature until people complained about it tracking you by default. I've always used OsmAnd for navigation and had automatic trip recording turned on as a gimmick, on rare occasions it would be interesting to look back where I went wrong and got rerouted or where the new road runs exactly to put it on OpenStreetMap. Now, with also some ten years of history, it actually makes for an exceedingly interesting plot of where I've been (around town as well as globally). I'm surprised OsmAnd manages to render millions upon millions of line segments from all the gpx files in a single map view
Anyway, roundabout way of saying: self-"hosting" years of location history works for me directly on my phone, no first- or third-party service needed. If you don't need a big tech product that uploads everyone's location to generate traffic info, it's going to be a learning curve (it's chock full of features, so getting around the UI can be tricky) but I can recommend OsmAnd. Also hearing good stories of OrganicMaps but don't know if they do gpx tracking or displaying
Importing should be a matter of figuring out how to convert whatever format Google uses into GPX files, which are just XML files with coordinates and timestamps in them. I'm confident someone will have made a converter given how ubiquitous as well as simple gpx is, if this is the route you want to go or try
Thanks for the tip about OsmAnd! Google maps is one of the last Google services I use because for some reason Apple Maps doesn’t support directions/navigation in the country I live in even though it has full maps and even traffic. Just installed the iOS app and while it does look like the UI will take a little getting used to, this looks like a solid option!
Oh, on iOS the app is quite different afaik (and, when I last used it, much more limited). I somehow was expecting an Android device, sorry. There may be better options for iOS (though my impression is that most FOSS mobile things happen on Android)
> Phrases were designed to mimic the writing style of elementary school students, including typical spelling errors observed at that age (Quinn, 2020).
I've always thought it would be nice if microphones can be merged when on a phone call with AirPods in. The mics in those headphones are really far away from my face and when it's windy talking on them is almost impossible. It would be nice to be able to just talk into the mic on my phone. Then the phone could boost my voice from multiple mics and filter out background noise.
Huh? You can literally do those things in 1Password. Every item has a notes section where you can type plain text. Custom fields are supported. List view is there.
> "To play an instrument means that you can understand music, which is a high cognitive function. It means you can interact with the instrument, you can coordinate both hands, you can exercise memory, you can count — because music is mathematics — you can test vision because the patient has to see the instrument, and you can test the way the patient interacts with the rest of the team," he said.
I take that to mean that playing the instrument uses many brain functions and so they're able to monitor many things at once.
The vision but seems plainly wrong to me, many (and I’d posit most) musicians who have been playing their instruments for years can play with their eyes closed. Definitely would test proprioception though!
Well, those musicians likely have highly developed internal visualization skills, but of course I'm not keen on how transferable that is to real vision.
It's more about muscle memory, touch, and hearing than it is about trying to visualize the instrument in your head.
Source: I'm an amateur musician. Judging that even I can play the instruments I know without needing to necessarily see the instrument or the notes to play (actually or imaginatively), I'd imagine actual professionals shouldn't have a problem.
I'm a trained musician, and what I'm referring to is often called mental play[0]. Einstein referred to it as visual thinking. Many successful experts across many domains will tell you that visualization skills are a key factor in their success.
Any practice routine worth its salt includes visualization exercises. For example, players are encouraged to use mirrors while they learn in order to strengthen their visual memory, and eventually players are taught to imagine the instrument in their head, to imagine practicing. This has shown to be a viable method for making real improvements while not even holding your instrument, including boosting your muscle memory as your body learns to make stronger associations.
I obviously cannot speak for everyone, but when I play music from memory (and yes, often with my eyes closed) there isn't any visualization at all. It's all a combination of sound and muscle memory. Indeed, for plenty of music I would never have seen sheet music to be visualizing...
Visualization is a skill you must develop, a muscle in its own right you have to mentally flex. You don't visualize because you were not taught to, didn't think of it on your own, and thus don't practice it. It's not required for success, but it's a great tool for learning and improving.
A tool that has been most useful for me when I am scheduling meetings cross-timezone:
http://timesched.pocoo.org/
IMHO when scheduling, you need to actually understand local time for all your attendees, so you can factor in things like when they are awake/asleep, when they might be driving to work, picking up their kids, etc.
But when simply reading/grokking times — i.e. in internal documents or web pages shared across timezones — I usually just want to see the timestamp expressed as my local time.
(Browser extension idea: automatically convert all dates/times to my local time, and be able to set rules for common timezone conversions for certain URLs/domains.)
Great feedback. I agree on the point of understating the local times of your attendees. hTime does that as well in the "Meeting Time" feature https://thehtime.com/intersect. Here you can choose the working-hour availability for all attendees so you make sure it's not after 10pm their time for example. You can then copy the link and share.
Here is an example of the best meeting time for a meeting taking place San Francisco, New York, London, and Berlin. In green, the clock shows the best time is between P-R baring in mind that the available time to meet is between 8 and 19 (7pm). Does that help?
I grew up in the city in Australia. Once when I crossed the road (as a pedestrian) at a red light, a police officer on the other side of the street stopped me and gave me a warning for jaywalking. Before I had walked, I had looked both ways and deemed it safe; there was no traffic and no other pedestrians waiting.
(In my mind: I am just a person on planet Earth, trying to get from position A to position B, less than 5 metres away).
Having now lived in the UK and Netherlands for over 10 years, I feel this would never happen here. I would expect this in the US though (so I rarely jaywalk on the few times I have been there).
I tell this anecdote as an example to my friends when I try to describe how Australia has a mix of influences from both Europe and the US.
As someone who was doing the other way around (hey dan!) working in australia coming from france i always find it weird how australian could accepts almost everything from the government with not much contestation,
I remember when there was a law who passed thru in Australia where every small company could fire anyone on the day (it wasn't the case before, i think there was a 3 month period or something).
The law passed and the only comments I could get from colleague at that time (not from you dan ;)) was "humm okay then"
In france there would be riots for months and years if such law passed.
France's exceptionalism was that people had time to riot. Most countries drown their precariat in work and cortisol. France has shorter weekdays so even well-to-do people can protest. This is no longer exceptional to France; the pandemic has dramatically increased the number of Americans who are both unemployed and have the resources to protest. That's why we get riots every few months and why those riots are not unique to one particular political movement anymore.
I mean, France is possibly an extreme case here, but in most developed countries this would be pretty unthinkable (assuming it really is a law that just allows small businesses fire people without notice in normal circumstances; firing people without notice for gross misconduct or due to liquidation is generally allowed, though in the liquidation case the employees would then usually be creditors for the notice pay that should have been paid in most places).
Australia is very apathetic in general. "She'll be right" is basically our national motto and while it can be good for overcoming external adversity and natural disasters, I don't think it's serving us too well when dealing with internal human and political factors.
Haha yes, "revenue based policing". Australia is pretty bad for that. I once got a $300 speeding fine for doing 1kph above the limit. In general though I think policing in Australia is still very different to the states. Police in the US inspire fear. They just don't in the UK and Australia.
> Quiet Australians accept authority moreso than UK folk.
This is so far from my stereotype of Aussies that I feel sure it must be a troll, designed to bring out a legion of shirtless, shrimp-barbecuing cobbers, turning the air blue with their feelings about authority.
Dual-national UK/Aussie here (ethnically a "Pom" then).
It's definitely true. Australia loves the smack of firm government and is quietly very, very authoritarian.
There's an Aussie term "Wowsers" [0] which is fascinating, as there is no British equivalent term. It often feels like the Wowsers and the Larrikins [1] are fighting an endless battle for Australia's soul. The Wowsers always win.
Current lockdown started on the 4th of Jan, and the travel restrictions came in then. We also had lockdown part 2 back in November, for the whole of November, lockdown part 1 from April-June last year, and various degrees of lockdown in between with regional variations...
I've lived in Aus before, and I agree it's great for many reasons, am looking forward to being back.
On the electrical thing, I know there are some restrictions on what you can do in the UK - putting in new circuits, adding new lighting circuits etc. I've pushed the boundaries a bit here AFAICT by fixing a lighting circuit* and swapping a few single sockets for doubles. Other work like putting cat 6 in the walls I did myself without a thought. Looks like I need to take a look at the regs.
( * the light switch in our bedroom somehow flicked between "one bulb on" and "two bulbs in series", with no off setting )
(oh wow, you're right, I can't change a light fitting, or even legally change a plug from UK -> Aus without breaking the law. Will have to buy new cables where I can, maybe change one or two plugs before I leave!)
There was (is?) a rumour that changing light globes was technically illegal under the letter of the law in Victoria. A quick search shows this may have been a 1998 law amended in 1999. Either way, people believed it which says something.
> This is the same in many countries, including the UK right now.
It isn't really. Many countries barred non-resident non-citizens from entering but only a couple went to the extent of attempting to prohibit their own citizens from leaving. The latter restriction is far more draconian.
I have a problem with it. The definition of "pandemic warranting a lockdown" is a national one, and other countries have a different opinion on it.
By all means, protect your own country by preventing people from going in, but people should be free to leave to a different place with more relaxed rules at their own risk.
Jaywalking is an odd example since I've lived in Sydney for 20 years and don't know anyone busted for it. I've seen many people cross at lights like this even with police cars sitting and waiting in traffic in clear sight.
I think what happens is they just get told one day to target it, when they'll stand around and catch people, otherwise they just don't care unless they take a personal dislike to you. I have heard of times they'll descend on Sydney CBD intersections like this in mobs to send a message. The rest of the time, jaywalking is generally very casually done here and not really a big deal like in some US movies.
I’ve been yelled at by police in Germany for crossing the road without a pedestrian crossing, but Germany is rather unamerican over all. So I think getting yelled at for jaywalking isn’t really much of an indicator for a place being American.
> Having now lived in the UK and Netherlands for over 10 years, I feel this would never happen here
Weird, as I met a dutch woman in Australia, from Maastricht, who was deathly afraid of crossing the road at the wrong time because where she was from she could get in trouble for that.
Whereas I lived in WA for a couple of years and never saw anything like it.
There is no reason philanthropy cannot be used to tackle multiple issues at once. I'm not sure there is a lot value in deriding one cause over another. We need to address both issues.
I just looked up the cost for my home for solar on Google's project Sunroof. It would cost me $14,000 upfront, after the personal tax incentives (tax $$) and some ungodly amount of tax-assisted R&D ($$$), and it will save me $8,000 over 20 years. It looks more like a dollar going into a dumpster fire to me.
You’re in the USA? If so, your permit and installation costs are the single largest part of the whole thing. The actual panels and inverters are cheap, utility-scale PV is cheap even in the USA, and even home solar is cheap when the government isn’t getting in your way — my parents and my in-laws in the UK (the entirety of which is north of the entire contiguous USA and which is not known for lacking building regulations) have PV systems which each cost about half your quote and which generate about £1,000/year each.
The cost of solar is now about half what they spent.
A well-done rooftop solar installation in 2020 will last you more like 30 years. That $8,000 comes after the payback period, meaning you end up with a 60% ROI.
That’s an insane argument that will just be continuously abused to erode privacy until everything you do is under surveillance by the government.
Oh you’re against DNS over HTTPS? Oh so you want our children to be abused? You’re for encryption? Sounds like someone doesn’t care about child porn. Oh you won’t share your Password with the government? Hiding something?
Do the same thing you do for other illegal things: throw the law at the people hosting them, and if those people are international, use good ole diplomatic levers to get the countries in question to shut them down.
Look, child pornography is deeply troubling, but so are lots of other things in life that people don't call for mandatory, obtrusive government censorship to prevent. The mandatory DNS blocking to prevent child porn is not particularly effective. In non-technical terms, DNS blocking is effectively the same as taking down the sign on the front door: it doesn't prevent anyone from getting to it, if they know where to look, and even people who might trap unwitting visitors into traveling to these sites can still do so (you can use IP addresses in lieu of domain names in links).
Indeed, if you know the DNS addresses of places to avoid, you actually know enough information to take more proactive action: for example, you could mandate that the IP addresses these sites use (or even the ISPs who host them!) are made to be unreachable, which would make it much, much more difficult to actually access these sites. Blocking only the DNS address is pretty much doing the barest minimum to look like you're tackling the problem.
First step would be to stop creating an environment where discussion of the issue can't even happen. Blocking content featuring the sexualization of children from spreading is a good goal but a better goal is to prevent it from being produced in the first place. We need better ways of making that happen, including providing ways for those who are mentally ill and want help overcoming it to get it. It's not an easy problem to combat and there probably will never be a perfect solution but instantly losing all semblance of rational though at the mere mention of the subject isn't helping much.
Stop routing traffic to/from ASes that host child pornography.
I mean, this is not about some deep darknet stuff or tor hidden services (where DNS filtering would not be effective anyways), so my question is why isn't government able to shut these sites down? And if the sites are hosted on uncooperative ISP then I think dropping the traffic is appropriate response.
As others have mentioned, if you know enough to make a blanklist, you know enough to go after the sites that host it. Better yet, instead of playing whack-a-mole with blocking sites (it's incredibly cheap to get a new IP/domain), go after those who make it (set up a sting and arrest a ton at once).
If a site is in another jurisdiction, you can still distribute a list of sites to ISPs, and ISPs can report suspicious activity to the police (so they can get a warrant for closer monitoring).
If you block it, you just alert people to which sites are more likely to have illegal content, which can encourage them to access it through other means (VPN, Tor, etc). I honestly don't see any real value in it from a practical perspective, and the only real "benefit" is it gives the government an excuse to add other stuff to the list it doesn't like.
First step: stop using a nuclear warhead to kill a wolf. The only worst thing to do would be to destroy humanity, so child pornography will be permanently dealt with.
The only important thing I have left on Google now is 15 years of Location History. I'm still figuring out where to move that to.