As a lot of people may be aware, Google recently had a hearing with Congress about a week ago, and although the hearing was fairly lengthy, it had some noteworthy (and some amusing) content to it. found time over the past few days to watch a good part of it, and the Google CEO took the opportunity to explain many of the underpinnings of Google's technology and its search algorithms to a large number of people who had questions. Some of those questions were legitimate. A large number of them were somewhat amusing, and some even outright ridiculous. 



Also, more than one representative of Congress failed to distinguish the difference between iPhones and Androids, and that they were in fact made by two separate companies.

It was 7:26 was, in my opinion, that one of the best parts of the hearing. Out of context, it doesn't seem like much, but it was actually taken as a jab towards an earlier, and somewhat amusing part of the hearing in which Google's CEO yet again got asked questions about Apple's practices by people who were confused by the fact that iPhones were not produced by Google. (See 1:13 below) Steve King has been very outspoken about negative search results that of course have nothing to do with Google itself, and I suppose, as the ancient saying goes, well, I edited the last part out to avoid any possible offensive statements. I'll just let you watch for yourself...



Anyone else watch any part of the hearing? What were your thoughts?

for those of you that don't know, Ingress is a cyberpunk themed Augmented Reality game in the same vein as pokemon go... in fact the engine and servers pokemon go uses are based on it.

I've been playing it since the end of october, I'm not level 7, playing for the resistance, and I'm having a ton of fun with it.

the rules are simple.
you either play as the resistance or the enlightened.
you capture portals for your team, link portals together.
link 3 portals together in a triangle and you create a field.
the more fields you generate the more area you control.

it's sort of an AR capture the flag sorta thing.

you can hack portals to get loot drops.

there are two types of loot, offensive loot and defensive loot.
offensive loot is stuff like XMP bursters and ultra strikes, the former is an AOE attack the latter is a direct strike at your location, within a few feet.

defensive loot is shields, turrents, resonators and a bunch of other stuff.

you capture a portal by deploying resonators around it, you can have up to 8 on any portal and their strength is dictated by the resonator level 1 through 8.

the stronger the resonator the harder it is to take down and the more energy it can store.

the highest portal level is also level 8.

you can put shields and stuff on portals to make them harder to kill.

break all the resonators and a portal becomes neutral until you or someone else captures it.

and that's pretty much it, the meat of the game is actually playing it and interacting with other players IRL.

personally, I'm soloing it, I managed to push back a group of 5 enlightened players by myself through steady leveling and loot acquisition and am now level 7, should be level 8 by January maybe? as I have the time to play it.

there's also a whole story element but I'll leave that to you guys to discover.

ask questions and or talk about the game here.

wikipedia page

wasn't sure where else to put this.

working on another somewhat ambitious project.

here's what I have so far.



this is supposed to be the first main page, which is a vague direction and distance measurement for all exoplanetary systems within about 50 LY.

the pages after in order of distance will be a system map for each star system... FYI there's a lot but I wanted to draw it out first on paper before I even began working on a digital version, very oldschool.

the tools I'm using are a ruler, a bow compass, some graphite pencils, a blank drawing book, and a protractor for measuring angles and degrees and such.

I'll post more once I've got more completed on it but so far I have all known systems within about 30 LY done on the stellar distance map.

you're supposed to use this chart in conjunction with a constellation map to determine it's location and travel distance then the system map once you get there.

it's been bugging me for a whle but for the life of me I can't figure out why nothing like this has been done for more than just the sol system, so I decided to do it myself.

Read this article today: https://www.sfgate.com/business/technolo...338976.php 

What are your thoughts on fracking, and more specifically your opinions of its impact on the environment (to include geologic events)?



In summary, in case it disappears  in the future:

Quote: The only company drilling for shale gas in Britain temporarily suspended fracking Friday after a mild earthquake.
Cuadrilla said it halted drilling for 18 hours after a tremor was detected at its site in Little Plumpton, northwest England.

The British Geological Survey recorded the 0.8-magitude quake just after 11:30 a.m. Friday. It followed several smaller tremors earlier in the week.
Under U.K. rules, any tremor over 0.5 is classed as a "red event" and sparks a temporary shutdown while monitoring continues.
Cuadrilla said the tiny tremor was "way below anything that would be felt at surface, much less cause any harm or damage."
Fracking in Britain was halted after two tremors in the same area led to legal challenges. It resumed on Oct. 15.

Environmental activists failed in early October in Britain's High Court to keep Cuadrilla's fracking from proceeding.
Hydraulic fracturing, or fracking, involves pumping water and chemicals at high pressure to fracture shale rock and release gas.

Hey guys! 

Was wondering among us if anyone here was good at server management and hosting-related issues. As some of you know, we self-host on a VPS (with a whopping 2TB of bandwidth!) which allows us a lot more flexibility in what we want to do and keeps the website fast. For the most part it works great. We haven't had too many issues. (Don't forget we have Image Hosting as well. We have plenty of bandwidth to support it. )

However, I've had trouble with one thing since the very beginning of our existence. For some reason, emails always end up in the spam folder when they come from our server (for all users that have reported the issue). I have spent many hours trying to figure this issue out, and cannot, for the life of me, seem to find the culprit. It's apparently a pretty widespread issue and it has to do with a misconfiguration of some sort, either with the domain or with the server. 

Anyone good with setting up email on servers or setting up domain names? I think this one might be beyond my expertise just a tad.   

Thank you, 
-Darth

so my desktop's expansion slots are filled from top to bottom except for one.

it's a PCI expansion slot and I'm not exactly sure what to put there?



I was kinda leaning towards an IDE/Floppy Controller card but I've also thought about putting an old soundblaster card with FM synthesis there.
still I'm curious if anyone has a better idea.

any thoughts or ideas on something cool to add there?

so I got this from a friend of mine for $25 and dinner.

I'd say it's a great deal considering what mac's go for these days used, even old ones.

so I'm going to post about my new project, as I work on it!

to start with here's the system in it's current condition.



It's missing the right shift key



it's battery doesn't hold a charge for very long.

and this issue here... 



Kernel Panic!

luckilly that last one can be fixed with an OS load of mac OS 9.22 or any OSX up to 10.4.11 because this is a power PC I-Book and not an intel based one.

my next post will detail what I plan to load on it to test and how that turned out.

Apple has long been known to have fostered a somewhat greedy ecosystem in many respects when it comes to profits. And this has been compounded over the past few years. Think about the removal of the headphone jack on the iphones (the new ones don't even come with a dongle anymore) and the $70 fast charger that is not even included with new iPhones. Then it was the macbooks that had extremely pricey keyboard repairs and no ports, requiring a dongle to convert a single USB C port to any other port that you would need. 

And now... they will be bricked and rendered useless if a third party repair to a screen, SSD, memory, or anything else is done to the computer. They are doing this by requiring a proprietary system diagnostics system to be run after a hardware repair, which is something only Apple will have access to. 

And it's honestly unfortunate for a few reasons. Firstly, cost. Screen repairs alone at Apple will cost several hundred dollars, whereas a local shop can easily do one for less than $150. Secondly, old macs are generally considered legacy after five or six years, meaning Apple themselves won't even repair it. Mine is six years old. It will probably be considered legacy soon. 

I love macs to death. I truly do. But my computer is getting a bit old. I hate the 1280x800 screen, it has had RAM problems (which I fixed by removing a bad stick, thereby slowing down my computer and running RAM in single channel mode), and has a 3rd generation i5 that can't really handle Mojave that well and is no good for any kind of gaming whatsoever. I'd love to get a new one, but I'm almost unsure of what I would replace it with. The new macbooks are almost impossible to repair, very expensive, have no ports, and have keyboards that are unusually hard to type on. 

Looks like I'm either getting a 2015 air (actually not a bad computer), or just sticking with this one. Not quite ready to go back to a PC yet, but for the time being, not sure the Mac is going to be a better option in the long term either. 

Source: https://www.theverge.com/2018/10/4/17938...t-software

So for the past few days I've been tinkering with ways to make my own website more efficient, especially the tech mods section because that's going to have a lot of content and scrolling through it all to get to what you want might be a bit tedius.  Because of this I've been searching for a few days on how to create collasible boxes.  The main problem I ran into is that most sources say "use javascript, you have to use javascript, etc." However I found a source that actually gave explanations on how to use HTML and CSS only to create one.

This turned out to work really well, so well I've decided to share the details and any minor tweaks I made to make it suit better for columns and such.

now originally my CSS looked a little something like this.

After having my place of residence more or less destroyed by the hurricane, I have now finally moved into temporary housing and have a new place to live for the next couple of months while they rebuild. I also have internet once more, so I should be around a little more from the days coming forward without having to use a slow hotspot to connect. 

Being "homeless" (and by homeless, I mean staying with friends) is not the most fun thing in the world. It makes you thankful for the things in life that you do have, and manages to put things in perspective a bit. 

Oh, and I also got some monetary assistance from FEMA. Definitely very helpful during this time.