Tech-savvy time-saver: January 2016

Thursday, January 28, 2016

New Laptop Rites de Passage

Install Chrome
Install f.lux
Install Autohotkey
Install EasyWindowDrag_KDE
Change properties on taskbar to Auto-Hide :)
Install Wizmo (Steve Gibson)
Install Gwarble's Notify -- so you can use your other AHK script without it screaming :) ( I use it to get an indication of the CapLock status -- with 2 big monitors at work and a crappy Logitech keyboard, you're never sure...)
Yikes, how did I ever forget : Cygwin!

and then you're all set :) .. still need to install JDK, Android S, ...

Friday, January 22, 2016

Long live Syd Andrade for blowing the whistle.

Most of the time spent in the class was the students teaching the teacher!! *ds!

They guaranteed him a job and then placed him in an $8/hr job at the local Office Depot!

https://www.wfla.com/news/art-institute-of-tampa-grad-accuses-school-of-fraud/

Art Institute of Tampa graduate Sydney Andrade is preparing his claim package. He says he graduated owing more than $80,000

“If what was actually promised to be the education and what was promised to be my curriculum actually panned out the way they said it would, I would gladly pay for this,” says Andrade, who now lives in Austin, Texas.

Andrade accuses the school of lying about qualified instructors and industry-standard learning tools. He adds this forced him to teach himself much of what he knows through video game art and design YouTube videos. He also tells News Channel 8 the school didn’t deliver on an in-field job placement promise. Andrade claims the school helped him get an $8 per hour job making copies at Office Depot, which doesn’t require a college degree.

Wednesday, January 20, 2016

Beyond.com Sells Me Excel With Business

A $80 mini MBA and then I'm set to extort big companies for $300 an hour of meaningless twaddle..

Saturday, January 16, 2016

To Do's from One Session with the WSJ, Economist and Time

Lithium is hot. All other commodities tanking, but, if you can find a way to buy Li futures, go for it!

And... maybe not - I don't get it - the mag showed a hockey stick, but take a look at LIT and go figure.. :(

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Just had to go online and find some of the transcripts Michael Spicer cooked up - you know - Bill/Blair phone calls..

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El Chapo has a fleet of submarines and sent his boys to Alemania to study the craft of tunnel building. Really? What makes the Germans so good at tunnels? Why couldn't he send them to Spain to learn - where they'd already speak the lingo? The numbers make you wonder - this guy has caused the deaths of 70k people. Really? Is he related to you know who?

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Get "Money and Banking" from The Great Courses (done - req. placed)

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Research SQM and CITIC - something related to rare metals? Anyways, the trail goes cold when you pull up the charts - why would anyone want these? They've all tanked..

Alternate Row Shading in Google Sheets Using ISEVEN and ROW

You select the region of interest and then

Format > Conditional Formatting

Now, in the new dialog that showed up on the right, you have to change the dropdown below the "Format Cells if" to "Custom Formula is" and there, type in "=ISEVEN( ROW() )" (no quotes, yes = sign).

Thanks Google for making this so hard. Whoever thought something from you would be worse than what M$ sells?

Education is not the filling of a vessel but the kindling of a flame (Socrates), so here goes :

https://support.google.com/docs/table/25273?hl=en

A Triumph of Nanotech and Machine Learning

Marin Soljacic ist der Mann auf dem zehn mark schein. And I've wasted my entire life.

Your yesteryear's lightbulb operates on a simple principle. Heat the filament enough and it glows - giving you what you want - light. Unfortunately, you also get what you don't want - heat. So, a lot of the electric power you use to heat the filament is wasted.

Now, why not use some of the heat that the filament puts out to keep the filament hot - so you need a lot less electric power? Cool?

To do it, Marin and his buddies took a break from trafficking in sex slaves from Eastern Europe and built an anti-reflective coating with more than a hundred alternating layers of exotic materials. And to get it right, they used a program that embodied machine learning.

Forget 40 is the new 20. Eastern Europe is the new Silicon Valley!

Friday, January 15, 2016

The Things Windows Won't Let You Do

*ds of M$!

Anyhow, when you can't do (through Autohotkey)

Run rundll32.exe user32.dll,LockWorkStation

you can do :

Run C:\Tools\wizmo lock

https://www.grc.com/freepopular.htm (wizmo is powerful - with it, you can hibernate your PC through RDC - something I never could do before. Long live productivity!)

Another handy resource : https://www.autoitscript.com/forum/topic/21848-functions-in-user32dll/

Wednesday, January 13, 2016

Sell Everything! Royal Bank of Scotia's Advice was Good in 2008

Interesting activity in Dialog Semiconductor today - a sudden spike that corrected in about an hour. What does it mean? Insider trading?

If Dialog issued an okay to buy back shares since they're cheap, they'd do it through their brokerage over a period of days.

What does it mean that there was suddenly a large demand for shares of DLG.F? Go figure.. go fig her. Go f her. Gopher.

Sunday, January 03, 2016

Good One - From the Russians

Found this on YouTube by chance.. How do you know which side of the car your gas tank cap is on? Did you know about the arrow on the icon near the speedometer? How many times have I gotten out of the rental car? Winners don't do different things - they do things differently. After so many years in the game, if India needs the Russians to build nuclear power plants, there's something wrong mate. What's the solution? Fix the cities so the smart people are okay with staying there and can be productive (not losing 2 hours for a 4 km commute like my friend who works at Brocade in Bellandur does).

Thanks to Maria Popova : https://www.brainpickings.org/2015/10/23/nine-years-of-brain-pickings/

1	Allow yourself the uncomfortable luxury of changing your mind	It’s enormously disorienting to simply say, “I don’t know.” But it’s infinitely more rewarding to understand than to be right — even if that means changing your mind about a topic, an ideology, or, above all, yourself.
2	Don't do it for prestige,status or money alone.	Read Paul Graham's how to find your life's purpose. Work on what you like, not on what you'd like to like. Remember James Marcus Bach - "Secrets of a Tampa Bay Scholar" - focus on Authentic problems. Following extrinsic motivators will burn you out eventually.
3	Be generous	with time, resources, credit, praise, your words. There's always a person at the other end - remember that.
4	Build pockets of stillness into your life	As Trevor Blake puts it - create moments of insight. Meditation, daydreaming, boredom are all ok. DON'T SKIMP ON SLEEP!!
5	When people try to tell you who *you* are, don’t believe them	But believe them when they tell you who *they* are
6	Expect anything worthwhile to take a long time	Rome wasn't built in a day. That's why it's important to find work that has meaning for you.
7	See out what magnifies your spirit	People, ideas, books that elevate you - find them, hold on to them.
8	Don't be afraid to be an idealist	E.B. White, one of our last great idealists, was eternally right when he asserted half a century ago that the role of the writer is “to lift people up, not lower them down” — a role each of us is called to with increasing urgency, whatever cog we may be in the machinery of society. Supply creates its own demand. Only by consistently supplying it can we hope to increase the demand for the substantive over the superficial — in our individual lives and in the collective dream called culture.

India Says : Visual Pollution? What's That?

The Analog Hole not About Money Anymore

A long time ago, there was something in EE Times or EDN or one of those useless newsletter purveyors about concern about the analog hole - you encrypt your stuff and all's well, but, how do you prevent copying when the content eventually is delivered to the user in an analog fashion - say from a speaker?

Skype says : We're helpless :

Adrian Asher, Skype's chief information security officer, says his company can't prevent these technologies from compromising its service: "Can we control [spyware] taking an audio stream off the speakers or the microphone? No, there is nothing we can do."

So, the real question for us small-fry is : what can we do? How safe is Linux from these monsters? Can you install something on Windows that can watch for this crap that Hu Jintao installs? Has Apple done anything about this?

Few years ago, on a trip to die Schweiss, I bumped into a guy working for Lumension (a Luxembourgian) who said that, when they had an exercise to see which platform would cave in first - the Mac was the first one that was broken into.

http://leaksource.info/2014/08/09/hack-back-a-diy-guide-for-those-without-the-patience-to-wait-for-whistleblowers/

My question is : How can I hire these geniuses to do useful things for me? I'm struggling to get my crappy CAD tools to give me what Cadence can.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8143232

I had a question : What do these smart people do for a living? I mean, the guy who took down Gamma - what does he do to pay rent?

http://www.businessinsider.com/we-found-out-how-much-money-hackers-actually-make-2015-7

Natural Remedies : The Ugly Truth

Hope the pills you take work for you, but consider what I heard from a current employee :

I don't like working here because I have to deal with chemicals and they don't give me gloves. They only give me gloves if they know there's going to be an inspection.

Yikes - reminds me of Alistair Laporte saying "Some teachers are so stupid, they'll say : I'll be giving you a surprise test tomorrow."

Way to go India

What's New In Bengaluru

Been a few years since my last jaunt. What did I notice?

Fertility clinics everywhere. What do you blame it on? Pollution? Stress? Age?
You actually see people with tattoos in India, and the big roads do have tattoo parlours.
People are calling it gas instead of petrol.
Lots of diabetes care ads - India has the most diabetics in the world.
And, not a single cracked smartphone screen - how many of those do you see out here? Is the rest of the world just more responsible than the US?

What it Takes to Run a Successful Punjabi Dhaba

Surveillance system to keep an eye on kitchen and customers. Laptop to accept web orders (apps, etc) and play music through YouTube. Credit card machine. Check check check..