computers
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Ethiopian Food and Laptop Repair
You are viewing stuff tagged with computers.
So, I anticipated this problem when we gave Ess her full name: Esmé… but I didn’t quite realize the extent of the problems she’ll have with computers accurately displaying her name:
… my girlfriend’s surname contains an ‘é’. I have yet to see a year go by without receiving mail having ‘é’ on the address label where the é should be.
…
We’re Dutch, and the é is part of our language, and even part of the legacy character encoding standard everyone used before Unicode’s widespread adoption. This is just a matter of code that works perfect as long as all characters are part of the ASCII set, but fails on the characters that don’t conveniently match between UTF-8 (é) and ISO-8859-15 (é).I doubt these issues will go away within even, say, twenty years.
I’m typing this on my MacBook 13" (Late 2008), and you may know its successor as the 101, a machine which updated my computer’s internals but still used an almost identical chassis. The 101 was Apple’s last mostly-upgradeable laptop.
I have never, in my entire life, as I tried to complete the spectacular variety of electronic tasks that modern life throws at us, thought this: “Damn, I wish I understood Unix less.”
Wow, Apple is going through the roof bonkers crazy never seen it before sales with the college crowd. Writes Ars Technica:
New from the Improv Everywhere crew: three agents took desktop computers and massive CRT tube monitors into Starbucks, then pretended to work on them just as you would with a laptop. I like the lady who “took the joke a step further” by putting the monitor and keyboard in her lap.
Back in June of 2005, I said that in a couple of years, we’d have thin, transparent speakers. These would, of course, make our laptop monitors into big speakers. What happened? Where are my transparent speakers, Where’s My Jetpack?
T-Shirt with Undo Joke - Yes, the command for undoing your last action on a computer is either ctrl-z, or in this case, apple(command)-z. I’ll take one in a medium, please. From Insanely Great Tees.
Computers are most useful when they get out of our way. I recently realized that when I say I work with computers, people automatically peg me as that computer geek who loves hardware, spec sheets, and processors. Thing is, I only know about them in order to get these blasted machines to do what I want to do. I spend an inordinate amount of time shoehorning machines into working the way I think, so (pardoxically) I can stop worrying about shoehorning the machines into working the way I think. I’ve always seen Windows as a respectable software tool to deal with, but I must liken the experience to taming a wild stallion (without any of the glamorous trappings inherent in the animal analogy). Windows has to be poked, prodded, altered, trimmed, augmented, and examined from the top to the bottom and up again, to get it to do what you want it to do … when you want it to do it.
I think computer viruses should count as life. I think it says something about human nature that the only form of life we have created so far is purely destructive. We’ve created life in our own image.
— Stephen Hawking
Think about it; is it acceptable for text-highlighting to work unbelievably poorly (if at all) in CSS designs rendered in Internet Explorer? If not, why wasn’t this fixed two cycles ago in the development history? This, of course, begs the question: why do bad products sell well? When do marketing and perceived worth trump intrinsic value? A possible answer: when you are Microsoft, and you have massive business deals with massive companies, you can throw your weight around and compete in whatever market you choose.
Got a new mouse today. It’s optical so no dumb trackball lint problems. I can use it on my shirt, too! And picked up some new anti-virus software. Still reading Heretics of Dune. I fear as I have been reading the series that I have not made enough guesses or connections about the plot. Because of this, the information presented later on which was intended to clarify guesses has been passed over by me and only taken at face value. This may detract from my understanding of the plot and the books themselves as a whole. Then again, the time that has passed between books has been long. This could be my problem. A re-read may be in order. I’m awakening from the dream of summer and looking forward to the coming school year. School creates more stress, work, and scheduling than I normally have to deal with. The best plan may be to keep reading books throughout the year; escape literature has a value more than distracting the mind. It seems to enrich while diverting. Time for me to skeedaddle.