Updated 03-Aug-2025 Movement from a democracy to an autocracy seeks legitimacy in legal and democratic terms. Because the transition is from democracy, there is either implicit or explicit democratic action that is taken to limit or essentially destroy democratic power. This is seen throughout history. Why an autocracy needs such legitimation is mostly an issue ... Read more
Updated 03-Aug-2025 Looking at recent data, what I see is the death of Firefox and Internet Explorer. Too bad for the former (you had your chance), and expected for the latter (and no, Edge isn't showing any real adoption rate). One surprise is how Safari is showing uptake on the Mac platform. I find this ... Read more
Updated 03-Aug-2025 My air conditioner died a few days ago and while it is a bit uncomfortable (I’m in Thailand and it is the hot season, so it gets up to around 34c in the office), it is insufferable to work when a 90 thread kernel process has 90% of the processor. It is really ... Read more
Updated 03-Aug-2025 For when your wifi breaks down and all you have is an ethernet port on your DSL, and a Mac Mini. Not so bad, but it does keep the fan running and eat up the processor. Good for short term (ship out the broken wifi router, get replacement). Limitations of Internet Sharing on ... Read more
Updated 03-Aug-2025 See also discussion of WebP Note I no longer use OSX but instead Debian 9 Linux, and therefore have switched to the Trimage image compressor GUI which works well much of the time. When it doesn't I resort to ImageMagick. A recent post from one of my favorite blogs, the Tips-and-Tricks-HQ people spurred ... Read more
Updated 03-Aug-2025 A smart home has a certain promise to it, that is, an intellect, a brain. But before we apply that metaphor we need to understand the basic elements of a home (and only after that, what would make it smart). But even the idea of a home is already too constraining and not ... Read more
Updated 03-Aug-2025 Email signatures are those bits of text below the closing of a message and the name of the sender. They can be pretty crazy, or non-existent (which is worse). I've seen misspellings and other indicators of ineptitude. One of the worst types of infractions is when lawyers are involved, and legal disclaimers are ... Read more
Updated 03-Aug-2025 I read a provocative article on Micro Course Content which was linked from an article on the (potential) rise of mobile learning. Note the word potential as we only really see smartphone adoption rate information, not actually micro course content adoption or success rates. > Side note: unclear why a learning company couldn't ... Read more
Updated 03-Aug-2025 Water, not so good Turns out that water is not good for very young babies. The main problem seems to be that urination also removes not only water but sodium and other essential minerals from the body, and the baby may not be getting these replenished at the same speed (since the their ... Read more
Updated 03-Aug-2025 The great work of so many organizations are directing consumers and devops to weave crypto through everything: every communication, transaction, and interaction in the digital, as well as offline world. Why? Well because there are no functional legal rights currently present in all countries regarding the search and seizure of devices and the ... Read more
Updated 03-Aug-2025 Facebook, Google Adwords/Analytics, and Bing all have moved their tagging for conversations and tracking page views and other activity, over to their respective Tag Managers. - For Google this is called the Google Tag Manager - - For Bing this is called UET Tags and Conversion Goals (UET stands for Universal Event Tracking) ... Read more
Updated 03-Aug-2025 The two kinds of email: marketing and transactional, and the need to manage this has resulted in a proliferation of solutions from various providers. Marketing email consists of messages to the customer from the organization; transactional are messages to the customer by the computer system (e.g., invoices, receipts, email list confirmations, contact form ... Read more
Updated 03-Aug-2025 The force-feeding I am talking about is the force-feeding of babies, not adults. This is actually quite an alarming action taken on the part of moms who are mistaken about their role in feeding babies. There are actually quite a few things that can help a baby feed if they start to get ... Read more
Updated 03-Aug-2025 Not baby back ribs, but the ribs on human babies. Yes, turns out they can be a bit funny (non-symmetrical) and stick out on one side and not the other. Of course nearly everything one notices about the baby causes some concern, but this one was allayed by the many other cases found ... Read more
Updated 03-Aug-2025 Pacifiers are Artificial Nipples says the Dr. Sears site. His site is one I take with a grain or two of salt, but it is definitely a good second-ranked site for me. First rank are actual medical organizations in the US, UK and UN, as well as actual healthcare research (though of course ... Read more
Updated 03-Aug-2025 The issue of various Englishes is one that can help increase customers when targeting different native English speakers from different countries. English as we know is not monolithic, but most sites have a single site per language. The complication there is of course flags are used, so either a British or American or ... Read more
Updated 03-Aug-2025 Turns out that teething can start as early as 3 months. This was news to our doctor (which is quite sad). The state of health care with children is unfortunately the same as that as with adults, which is even more inadequate for several reasons: - Adults can tell you symptoms and the ... Read more
Updated 03-Aug-2025 There is a runaway train of add-on fees, mandatory subscription fees, and per-site costs for reasonably functional Ecommerce on WordPress. Why is that? We are not referring to fully hosted solutions, or custom development. But merely WordPress Plugins that work reasonably well, are reasonably stable, and are updated reasonably often. WooCommerce - The ... Read more
Updated 03-Aug-2025 The point of this is to free the cloud, though we won't have full rights for a while (total freedom), still quite a bit can be done within the cloud. First, Drop Dropbox The first step is unintuitive. Drop Dropbox. Yes, that's right. Dropbox is a cul-de-sac in the evolution of the Internet. ... Read more
Updated 03-Aug-2025 The first month is a killer. Death of your sleep, your schedule, your uninterrupted time. To stop it from being the death of your marriage and your family, by all means take a month off from work. Sure you can put in the odd few hours per day, but in general, expectations should ... Read more