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Comment Re:115F? (Score 1) 49

There are only three temperatures mentioned in the summary (C,C,F) and two in the NY Times article (F,F). I think this is more of a YOU problem. Roughly every country in the world uses Celsius other than the US.

Rough Celsius conversion can be done by doubling the Celsius value and adding 30. It isn't perfect but it's close. Another datapoint is 37C = 98.6F Ever wonder why our US body temperature standard is such a strange decimal fraction? For the rest of the world it is a convenient integer.

20C = 68F
30C = 86F
40C = 104F

2C+30 isn't exact, but it gives you a ballpark. 2C+25 is slightly closer but harder to remember.

Comment Re:I predict everyone will want tips now (Score 2, Insightful) 61

Pretty nice to get $25k tax-free every year, eh?

You should rephrase that. "Pretty nice to not be taxed on part of your income labeled as Tips."

First, that only applies to your Tips, not your main income. If you received a basic salary and occasionally get additional tips, you might be able to flag your tips as non-taxable and not pay 12% tax on that amount, or about $3000 lower tax. If you earn above $150K the tips start getting moved into the taxable income with the benefit expiring when you reach $400K. By that time the tips are not the majority of your income anyway.

For those individuals where $25K in tips is a larger percentage of their income, this might be helpful. There is a big jump when your income exceeds $65K where the non-taxable tips and standard deduction still leave above $48K taxable and the tax rate jumps to 22%. If my taxable income was hovering around the $48K threshold after deductions, I would be closely monitoring my income. The difference is about $4800 above and below that income threshold. You might actually be better off to take a week vacation to keep below that threshold.

I'm not a tax consultant, but that's what my back-of-the-envelope ciphering shows.

Comment Re: Sure... (Score 2) 55

To convert a OneNote page or section to a PDF, use the "Export as PDF" or "Print to PDF" option directly from the OneNote desktop app or OneNote for the web by going to the File menu, then selecting the desired export/print option. For the desktop application, choose File > Print, select "Microsoft Print to PDF" from the printer list, and then click Print to save the file. If using the web version, you may find an "Export as PDF" option directly in the File menu.

I think there is also a Save to Word, but I don't know if that would be any better for a Mac.

Comment Almost normal (Score 1) 60

Where do you think most people read magazines anymore? There's a reason the toilet is called the "reading room" in many homes. I can't remember the number of Field and Stream, American Rifleman, or Golf Digest I have seen in bath rooms over the years. I would imagine a casual survey of Kindle owners would find the two most common locations where the device is used in on a bus and in the bathroom.

If there was actually a correlation between reading on the toilet and hemorrhoids it would have been found decades before this "study". The only contributing factor I can imagine is the involuntary tightening of the sphincter when reading something inflammatory in social media sites.

Comment Re:Dehydrated water (Score 3, Informative) 155

It would be much less carbon intensive to ship little bags of salts to mix with local tap water.

No, not tap water. Distilled water. Tap water would still have all the dissolved minerals and gasses to possibly make the experience different at each location. Better to start with a clean base and customize it from there.

Comment Re:I already use Band Camp (Score 1) 48

For some people their phone is their entire life. They want an app for everything.

  • Wake up to the alarm on your phone. Remote start the coffee pot. Quick check email while getting dressed. Get notification coffee is ready. Remote start car. Leave house and change security status to "out". Open car door with app. Arrive at work and authenticate with 2FA on phone. Go to lunch and pay with phone. Get notification that someone rang your doorbell. Give voice instructions to delivery person to hide package behind the orange planter. Quick trip to gym and show your membership using your phone. Take photos of new personal best legpress setting and sync to cloud storage. Hurry home and get pulled over for exceeding speed limit. Show officer your driver's license and insurance from phone app. Retrieve package from porch and sync new BT headphones to phone. Register warranty and get upgraded app with dynamic bass feature. Watch Netflix until tired. Verify sprinkler system is set to override watering schedule based on weather forecast on your phone. Set one-time alarm to get up early the next morning for team presentation.

I wonder what would happen to some of these people if I "accidentally" dropped a 10Kg weight on their phone one afternoon. Would their world stop spinning and come crashing down or is everything backed up?

Comment Re:Can't use this due to confidentiality issues (Score 1) 132

Turning off Bitlocker decreases security. Maybe it doesn't have a huge impact on your home computer, but there's no arguing that turning it off somehow increases security.

Totally agree. My suggestions are directed toward desktop computers, not laptops. I stated laptop users have to balance security vs recoverability. If my computer fails, I want to be able to put the SSD in a new computer and read it. Not something you can do with it encrypted with Bitlocker. I agree for laptop users this might be a liability, but for personal home computers it might be preferable.

And put your passwords in a CSV file? Not very secure. A password manager like KeePass, or even Chrome, is more secure.

I agree, but I also don't like a third party holding all my passwords. My suggestion was for an offline backup of your passwords. If your computer dies, local password vaults might be lost. If you have a online password service, that would be helpful, if you can remember the logon and 2FA information to login. Having a local copy of your passwords stored on a thumbdrive or even printed on paper might help during a computer failure.

I agree, no single method will work for every situation. Digital security vs physical security vs data security might mean tweaking best practices to fit different priorities.

Comment Re:Can't use this due to confidentiality issues (Score 1) 132

Agreed. Some things to consider.

1. Don't use a Microsoft account for login to your PC. If you did use a Microsoft account, change your logon back to a local account. CyberCPU Tech

2. Check if your harddrive is encrypted with BitLocker. For a home desktop machine, I see no advantage and I would turn off BitLocker and decrypt the drive. For a laptop, you can decide if having your drive encrypted is needed. I recently purchased two HP laptops with Win11 home and BOTH of them had BitLocker enabled by default. I disabled BitLocker and decrypted the drives on both of them. Without a Microsoft account I was responsible for finding and storing the BitLocker key myself. No thank you.

3. License and install a copy of Microsoft Office 2021 or 2019. They are not the absolute newest versions of Office, but they are single license, locally installed versions of Office. I'm still running Office 2016 because I prefer it slightly to LibreOffice, but I do have LibreOffice on my laptop.

4. Download a copy of Hiren's Boot CD and use it to do a cold metal backup of your machine regularly. I prefer Ghost 12 because I can restore to any size replacement drive and I can retrieve individual files from the backup file. A cold metal backup means you can restore your entire OS drive, with settings, licenses, registry changes, accounts, software, etc. to a replacement drive and be back to work in 15 minutes. https://www.hirensbootcd.org/

5. Backup all your passwords in a separate location. Either download your password list to a CSV and store it on a separate computer, or print the list on paper and store it inside any of your reference books on your shelf. Having a boot failure shouldn't mean you can't access your critical services like banking, healthcare, email, or gov't services. The inability of requesting prescription refills because your computer won't boot can be serious.

These suggestions might not work for everybody but some of them might be helpful.

Comment Re:4 batteries ? (Score 2) 68

Noise cancelling headphones, flashlights, tablets, tablet keyboards, kindles, vapes, medical devices, travel alarms, cooling fans, lighted travel mirrors, gaming devices and controllers, GoPros, massaging neck pillows, white noise generators, etc.

Everyone has their personal comfort devices that require portable power.

Comment Re:God forbid people learn for free (Score 2) 36

Textbooks are a huge gouge. We need a system to put them into the public domain fast enough that they can be useful to people that can't afford them, or legislation to keep them affordable.

Unfortunately the number of people that can write a good teaching book is very small. Most of us have noticed that some instructors are much better at communicating with a class of students and seem better than average at introducing new concepts without loosing most of the class with dry repetition. Writing a textbook is similar. Introducing new concepts with understandable examples is a balancing act that not all writers can do well. Plus, the more specialized the knowledge in the book, the fewer writers there are to attempt it.

Many people can write a textbook about beginning geometry. Fewer can write a good book on calculus. Move on to 400-level mathematics courses and, well, you get the idea. Then there is the review process, error checking, re-writes, and sample teaching with the book, then finding a reputable publisher. This process might take four or five years before the first accredited class uses the textbook.

Now that the book is ready for classroom use, how do you determine the price of the textbook? Minimum wage times the hours needed to write and validate the book would be prohibitively expensive. A target return for the author divided by the projected number of students, plus the ridiculous fees the publishers add on still means the books are expensive.

Suggesting that an author goes through all that work for free is unrealistic. Same with suggesting the publisher prints and lists the book for free. I still have textbooks I paid over $100 for that I couldn't resell or even pass on to the next class because the course selected a different book for the next semester. The more specialized the course, the more expensive the textbook will be.

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