Megan clicked on an ad on Facebook, it turned out to be a scam site (offering things like $25 adult electric trikes) but I looked over her shoulder and was simply amazed that the URL of the site has emoji in it! Check it out!
Here’s the important parts of the URL if you want to try it yourself. It’s a neat, little trick. :-)
We’ve been thinking about buying an RV for about a year. We went to an RV Show in Sacramento yesterday and put down $500 on an RV. When we got home, we researched it a bit and… dodged a bullet, I believe.
The RV Show was run exclusively by La Mesa RV Center.
BBB Complaints about La Mesa RV Center – Paraphrased: “Terrible, very slow (2-12 months!) service on promised work, leaving people’s RVs sitting around for a looooong time. 100+ complaints in the last 3 years, 40+ in the last year
Yelp – All reviews are either “luv my new RV” or “I spent $200k but I got a broken RV but can’t use it because their service department keeps screwing me over” Yelp 1 , Yelp 2 , Yelp 3
Looking for good board games (and similar) that aren’t adversarial to play with my 8 year-old. We played Pokemon for the first time today and she understood the rule mechanics immediately but hated the threat of her creatures being killed. We played the venerable Ticket To Ride last week and with some teamwork we all had a blast!
AI experts issued a dire warning on Tuesday: Artificial intelligence models could soon be smarter and more powerful than us and it is time to impose limits to ensure they don’t take control over humans or destroy the world.
“Mitigating the risk of extinction from AI should be a global priority alongside other societal-scale risks such as pandemics and nuclear war,” a group of scientists and tech industry leaders said in a statement that was posted on the Center for AI Safety’s website.
Sam Altman, CEO of OpenAI, the Microsoft-backed AI research lab that is behind ChatGPT, and the so-called godfather of AI who recently left Google, Geoffrey Hinton, were among the hundreds of leading figures who signed the we’re-on-the-brink-of-crisis statement…
I switched to using Google Password Manager today, changing the most 100 out of 600 passwords to be random strings of characters. I also use Authy, a great Mult-factor authentication tool, on the most important sites. We’ll see how that goes. Maybe I’ll upgrade to Lastpass or similar soon.
After 19 years of amazing shows and dedication to kids, I am crestfallen to report that The Bay Area Children’s Theatre has closed its doors last week.
I’m terribly saddened. Our family attended several really terrific shows and events of theirs over the past several years. It is a really great institution!
The Very Hungry Caterpillar
Frog and Toad (5 times, if I recall correctly! Four times before COVID and once after)
-k –convert links – edit each page so the links on it link to the new static site instead of a website
-p –page-requisites – fetch all the support files too, like .css and javascript
-r –recursive – download the whole site, not just one file
-R –reject – don’t download pages with these names in them
-E –adjust-extension – make all files end in “.html”
In 2007, Michael Prados, Jon Foote, and I co-organized the OrbSWARM art project along with 25 amazing mechatronic artists, it was a blast!
The project was active from 2007 to 2012 but the orbs are still out there, rolling somewhere! I just reorganized all the content: turned the wiki and blog into static sites, put all the sound files into one neat pile, and such.
The image quality of the monitor is pretty good (update 5-17-23: my new Macbook Pro screen is much more crisp than the AOC screens!), though you can’t adjust the colors.
In Windows, you can adjust the brightness with the open source software ScreenBright or my favorite ClickMonitorDDC 6.0 or some others. :-) You can’t directly change the brightness or colors in Windows 10 or 11.
To get it to work on my Macbook Pro 2019 16″, I needed to install a driver. Without it, when I plugged it in, the startup screen would flash for a moment and then nothing.
– Go to https://www.synaptics.com/products/displaylink-graphics which is the former Displaylink.com. Download and install the driver
– plug it in and go! I’m using an Anker USB C Hub to convert the USB-A on the monitor to USB-C
To be able to adjust the brightness, I went to the Apple App Store and got the free and open source MonitorControl Lite.
Done!
