I was visiting some charity shops recently and had a thought about how to give them a boost - and the whole high street.     Real physical shops face a lot of competition from online retailers. These encompass everything from independent sellers to charity shops that just collect all manner of bric-a-brac. I think the big thing that hampers these stores is the lack of convenience when checking what is in stock. Perhaps they could get away with having a basic website with an address on it, and that might be enough for a search engine to index. Then they would be visible on maps for local shoppers, but that still wouldn't make the contents of their stores easily accessible and browsable. Certainly nothing compared to the big stores with an online presence. Online-only retailers have their entire stock available through a website, and many nationwide chain stores do too. This lets you check if something is in stock, lets you reserve it, or just have it delivered directly to you at no great cost...

It's sixth period, Thursday, October 31. Me and every other person in sixth period fitness at my high school are directed to the gym. "You must complete the registration to participate in the challenge." A man in a Army-branded polo says over the loud PA system. That's a half-truth. If you don't participate, you get a zero. I dump my backpack on the bleachers, and look for my friends. "Get in line, get in line." A minute and a half into passing period, and there is already a line at the 'registration' station. Everyone's phone is hidden away in their pocket, and some people are nervous...

Often streaming sites are filled with adverts and trackers, and the videos can be problematic or just inconvenient to play in a web browser. It is possible to stream many media sources with a separate desktop player in most Operating Systems and avoid the trackers and advertising. First up is the easiest options. Media Player Classic - Black Edition comes with Youtube support built in, and can use youtube-dl.exe for more sites. https://sourceforge.net/projects/mpcbe/ WACUP comes with support for Youtube, Vimeo, Soundcloud and Mixcloud https://getwacup.com Video LAN Client - VLC supports Youtube and lots more with addons. https://www.videolan.org/vlc/ Not as easy but very worth the effort, you can add Youtube decoding to Windows as Direct Show filters, so most players that can use URLs and system CoDecs can play them. inc. Windows Media Player and VLC. It requires manual installation so I recommend copying the files to a memorable location such as; C:Program FilesCommon Filesyoutube_source Then run the batch file in the folder to register the decoder in Windows. 3DYD Youtube Source https://www.3dyd.com Used with youtube-dl.exe it supports many other sites. Exponentially expand the amount of sites supported by 3DYD Youtube Source & MPC-BE with youtube-dl.exe https://ytdl-org.github.io/youtube-dl/ - [Huge list of supported sites] Browser integration You can also use an open source Send-to-player extension to send the media in your browser to your desktop player. https://add0n.com/send-to.html Supports: Media Player Classic - Home Cinema - https://mpc-hc.org VLC - https://www.videolan.org/vlc/ MPlayer - https://mplayerhq.hu/ MPV - https://mpv.io NOTE: It requires a helper tool (nodeJS) for the browser to control your media player. This will be downloaded from github if not installed. You can update the file node.exe from the latest official builds. Android For Android, NewPipe is an open source Youtube player with many useful features inc. the ability to save video or audio files and work as an audio only player. It can also use alternative decoding engines such as VLC. https://newpipe.schabi.org EXTRAS Using Cytu.be you can watch synchronised media from many sites but with other people in your own private or public virtual cinema. Includes chat and customisation, and can be self-hosted...

... is the title of a an article by Chris Coyer about managing complexity on websites and why simple & boring might get the job done where "fancy" might not. Head over to the article, it is well worth reading, and don't forget to follow the links in the article: Simple & Boring by Chris Coyier — March 2019

Long story short, for web browsing you can use your favorite browser on it, what ever it is. Well, that's a start, for video playing is there VLC. Office support is done by LibreOffice, it makes M$ compatible documents. Graphics editor is there called Gimp and 3D modelling app Blender. Games, yes there are some, but better yet get a console like a PlayStation.

As a programmer, I am very interested in using technology in pretty much everything to make our lives better. I'm equally interested in making sure that the increasing technological development doesn't ruin our lives, which can happen in mainly two ways as I see it: the rise of AI can take a turn for the worse and wipe out or seriously debilitate humanity and the second one is not adjusting our economic system so that this revolution helps everyone and not just the people who own these machines. I will discuss the second problem today. Today, more and more jobs are being lost to machines, and I only see that increasing. With that, many people are left with little to do for money and even though machines help make everything cheaper, so in theory they would still help everyone, the truth is that they can also create monopolies and give a lot more power to the people who own them, leaving everyone else fighting for scraps. This would leave us at the mercy of the owners of these massive corporations who will pretty much create and own all the wealth. I think this scenario is unlikely to happen, however it is already happening at a reasonable and growing scale. I believe the ideal future would be one where anyone can do what they want because machines will generate enough wealth for everyone and will subsequently give us that freedom. This future has its own problems to solve, such as a lack of purpose, what everyone will do with their time, etc...

updated ...at some nice evening of October 26 🙂 (9:44 ᴘ.ᴍ.): ...new script: Quote anything the smart way ...updated: Insert Your Own flexible timestamp everywhere. AutoHotkey resembles a construction set, with the help of which You can design from scratch various mechanisms to make Your life easier. You could summarize Its bottom line the following way: Recall some action which You often perform under Windows (it may be some ordinary thing, like searching some phrase via Google). Describe the action in the AutoHotkey way (it has its own scripting language, don't worry about the code - there are many ready-to-use examples out there), Ascribe a keyboard shortcut to it and that's it: from this moment forward, instead of taking several steps You're accustomed to, You need just to press a simple - usually thee-key combination. Most likely You'll appreciate this especially in the long run, when You can really feel how much time and hassle it saves....

Photo by Agustinus Nathaniel on Unsplash Two weeks ago I posted an article about the occasional problems of getting false positives in security software fixed, and specifically about our recent problems when trying to solve a problem related to a Sophos security product. A user had reported being prevented from using Vivaldi to browse the net by their company's firewall. Some commenters thought we were either too hard on Sophos, or hadn't properly checked the issue before contacting Sophos. These comments ignore a few of the issues we mentioned: We had a report about the users being blocked. We also had information from the same report about Sophos customer support claiming we did not support an API, the implication being that we were being blocked because of this. Either of these would be reason good enough to contact Sophos to learn about why this was happening, especially given that we should have the same API support as other Chromium based browsers. We then spent 5 weeks not getting answers to our questions. Part of our goal with the article was to inform Sophos publicly (just like we had at at least one occasion done privately) that we were not satisfied with how the process was going, and to try to get it escalated. The next day it got escalated to a support manager, and we started getting real answers to our questions. First of all, there was no central block by Sophos regarding Vivaldi; the block had been configured by the administrator of the customer installation. We are not yet clear on why the administrator did this, although our not being on the filtering feature support list has been mentioned as a possibility. This particular piece of information was never forwarded to us, and as far as we can tell was not provided to the original reporter, either. The second part was that the API support was NOT something required to be supported by the browsers. The APIs in question concerned Windows API functionality used by Sophos to configure firewall and network filtering for specific applications. This functionality is not presently enabled for Vivaldi, because those features had not been tested with Vivaldi. Sophos is now moving to get this functionality enabled and tested with Vivaldi, probably to be released in early Q1 2020...