Updated 03-Aug-2025 The World Until Yesterday: What Can We Learn from Traditional Societies? by Jared Diamond My rating: 5 of 5 stars Wow, very interesting. If the past helps us understand the present, and help informed decisions on the future, then this work is an important one, and a fascinating read. There is an amalgam ... Read more
Updated 03-Aug-2025 Paypal Sucks Paypal sucks, as everyone knows. It has one benefit for the consumer (those buying with paypal) and that is their dispute resolution, which I've used perhaps ten times and have never lost. Dispute resolution with credit cards and banks is much, much more difficult and harder to win. For the seller, ... Read more
Updated 03-Aug-2025 > Updated July 2019 - I no longer use Paypal, as it is roughly twice as expensive as Stripe when looking at $100 USD/month in transactions (more than 10% with transaction fees and currency conversion), and without currency conversion it is still 30% more when only looking at transaction fees (usually because of ... Read more
Updated 03-Aug-2025 Telegram is a great chat app, but there is more, and less to it, than say Twitter and Facebook. The first thing is that a lot of this gamification of likes/thumbsup is gone. Want to know if someone read your post? That has to be done either via direct message, or in a ... Read more
Updated 24-Nov-2025 APT -- Advanced Package Tool -- is all that is needed for most application installations when there are repositories which are regularly updated for packages of interest. Note that apt essentially makes irrelevant apt-get so there is no reason for that redundancy any longer. Note: Use aptitude when dealing with packages that have ... Read more
Updated 03-Aug-2025 Chrome, why are you such crap at simple things? I need to delete the cache/cookies from a single website. It appears impossible these days. There is an odd work around, as follows: > Three Dots > Advanced > Content Settings > Cookies > See All Cookie and Site Data > {Search for site} ... Read more
Updated 03-Aug-2025 Marie Kondo is an expert on tidying a house. Her Netflix series Tidying Up with Marie Kondo and two books (both of which are worth reading, best in chronological order) are best-sellers: The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up: The Japanese Art of Decluttering and Organizing (The Life Changing Magic of Tidying Up) Spark ... Read more
Updated 03-Aug-2025 Our three-year-old wasn't pooping regularly, which caused a lot of concern. Eventually we were going to go to the hospital for a thorough set of tests and what not, after about 4 months of once-per-week pooping. There are many potential causes and this behavior is not uncommon in 2-6 year olds. Possible things ... Read more
Updated 03-Aug-2025 Set to 24p Set ISO Set Exposure (no over expose) Do color grading (with LUTS) Note: Shotcut only accepts 3D LUTS (?) so have to convert from other format, perhaps... Set Fstop Use lights/lighting Good audio 12 db Steady (not shaky) Music (edit to music, rather than just dropping music in) Story (not ... Read more
Updated 03-Aug-2025 The saddest part of the discussion of construction innovation as defined by making buildings more efficiently, is just that. Missing are: Making housing more sustainable (see Earthships) Making housing more affordable (see tiny homes in Kristen Dirksen's channel) Mainstream Media Housing Innovation Coverage NYTimes - Piece by Piece, a Factory-Made Answer for a ... Read more
Updated 03-Aug-2025 Podcasting is growing (slowly) and offers a great opportunity for brand engagement. Generally free, the idea is to be where the audience already is, and have a reliable host for content and the rss feed. Media and RSS Hosting Soundcloud for Podcasting Google Podcasts and Google Play Music Podcasts Note, these are two ... Read more
Updated 03-Aug-2025 This is meant to be a reminder of important issues/decisions that already have some thought put in them (usually by others). Automatic categorization of text is a core tool now Instead of offering advice, rank priorities Build a website first (before an app), some forgotten article but the point is: faster, and desktop ... Read more
Updated 03-Aug-2025 Apparently, a reverse sear is the best way to cook a steak, and the basic principle is used to cook everything. Essentially, the idea boils down to cooking at two temperatures: Low and slow (cook throughout) High and fast (sear) In addition, reducing the moisture on the outside of the meat should also ... Read more
Updated 03-Aug-2025 I've written about WordPress at various points. I've been using this cms for 13-14 years, and for me it is well-known, though a bit worn out. The breakage it has has not improved much, and the resources needed are not up to the modern task. Essentially most performance gains are made through improvements ... Read more
Updated 03-Aug-2025 Automattic is the organization behind WordPress the content management system, wordpress.com, and a number of smaller entities. With some estimates, WordPress has ~30% market share of the web. It has taken on in excess of []$300m in funding](https://www.crunchbase.com/organization/automattic) over the years. After 2–3 years of development of WordPress, Automattic was founded in 2005 ... Read more
Updated 03-Aug-2025 Content Management Systems come in all shapes and sizes, and it is unfair to evaluate their maturity based on their functionality. However, to some degree this is still a useful metric, depending on the fucntionality. Below are hallmarks of functional maturity. Again, certain CMS's will not receive an accurate score based on specific ... Read more
Updated 03-Aug-2025 The original formulation of Zipf's law was based on naturally occurring word frequencies and their rank order in a given English language corpus. For one example, merely 135 words accounted for 50% of the total word frequencies. This could be extended to phrases as well. For foreign language learners, this means that there ... Read more
Updated 03-Aug-2025 On January 1, 2009 CNN published an article on memory. Now would be a good time to review and expand on that article, in the hopes of improving our own memory. It may be useful to conceive of the Art of Memory as having four broad application areas, a set of techniques (often ... Read more
Updated 03-Aug-2025 Necessity being the mother of invention, what if a densely populated, but small (~10m) country were to have zero access to petroleum for fertilizer and agriculture in general? Sustailable Agriculture would be a result (or starvation). What if Sustainable Agriculture Weren't Theoretical? The Case of Cuba Cuba's Agrifood System in Transition How to ... Read more
Updated 03-Aug-2025 Note: instructions for installing and configuring phpMyAdmin also included below. Related Artices in Debian Services and Applications - Debian on AWS Lightsail - OpenVPN on Debian + UFW Firewall - Nginx and Letsencrypt on Debian - PHP & MariaDB on Debian - Grav CMS on Debian As of December, 2018 there are decent ... Read more