Category: mini-blog

One unwelcome change in Win10 is how it implements languages and keyboard layouts. In Win7 and before, you could have Windows’s interface language in English but remove English Input Method Editor altogether, and just keep Spanish and Korean. Korean IME has a built-in English entry (using the right alt key), so English was not needed.

Win10 ties together default keyboard layout with OS display language, so in order to see the OS in English, I must have English IME. So now, instead of having two keyboard layouts, I have three.

Having two keyboard layouts means that the keyboard switching shortcut (Left Alt+Shift) acts as a on/off switch of sorts. I start typing thinking of typing Spanish and instead Korean comes out, no problemo I hit Alt+Shift without even looking at the taskbar and I will be on my desired IME, If what I see is not what I want, just hitting the shortcut switches the layout, which makes for very easy multilingual multitasking. However, if there’s three keyboard layouts in rotation, the alt+shift shortcut is no longer a on/off switch, it’s a cycle rotator. Now, if what I typed doesn’t come out as I intended, I can’t just mindlessly press the shortcut. if I do that, changes are I will do it a couple of times (like 4 or 5) without realizing that I “missed” the desired IME. So what used to be a “toggle” type shortcut now became a “cycle through” type shortcut. Now I need to look at the taskbar to see which is the current IME, then hit the shortcut, then look at the taskbar again because I don’t remember which IME comes in in the cycle order.

I wish it was like it was before. I don’t need the English IME.

I have a strange permanent problem with video playback, only happening on Netflix and Amazon Prime. (But not on Hulu or YouTube)

I have a multi monitor setup – 4 monitors, 3 of them 1080p, plugged to a NVIDIA GTX 1050 Ti. Whenever I stream a video from Netflix or Amazon Prime in one of the two main screens on Chrome, the screen starts alternating between flickering, going green, etc, until going completely black or green. When I close the browser (I can’t see the screen, so I press Alt F4), screen goes back to normal. I had this problem previously on a R280X setup, and i3770 & i6700

A general Google search didn’t bring up anything specific.

For now I’m skirting the problem by plugging one of the monitors to a Windows tablet and connecting to the desktop speakers via Bluetooth. (So I don’t have to do so much recabling each time I watch)

One dissipating point of Crash Course Big History: The Deep Future is how, despite being assured that it’s very, very, very, unvisualizably far away, trilliion trillion trillion…. trliion years doesn’t sound like THAT much of time – especially when you write it as “10 to the power of 100”. Like, if a consciousness was immortal, it would just sit around for a long time, and wait patiently, and poof we would be there, like at the end of a long road trip, say from Arica to Punta Arenas. It probably speaks to how efficient the logarithmic notation is at zooming out quasi-infinite amounts into a speck of information. (The notation). I’m surprised that amount of time can even be represented in earth years, as opposed to, were it to exist, the time dimension’s equivalent of “light years” for space.

I’ve seen those videos that represent the 7,000 years of known history into a moving map’s representation of territories controlled by various human polities. It’s interesting, but 7,000 years represented in this way is not that long. It would be helpful if the 10^100 year thing was represented visually as a very fast spinning of the earth, where in each frame we can see a portion of the earth (a sixth of the sphere added to the sight in each frame maybe?), and we stare into the thing for.. i don’t know, 500 hours? 50,000 hours? split into videos of 10 hours each (YouTube’s length limit) to better represent the idea of “the amount of time after which some scientists predict matter will start slowly decaying.. headed to a heat death of the universe”

i remember when my digital program coach asked what inspires me to continue to do the work. what i described was 100% field organizing, which was throwing us off the curve because we thought we would find language that described my current focus, data and automation. well, there’s inspiring, then there’s fun. if for some reason inspiring and fun became a dichotomy, i’d always choose fun.

i had some light fever yesterday, and was given oscillococcinum (anas barbariae) by a colleague. It was unusual looking (dust in a tube), so I googled it, and found the above wikipedia entry. I said thanks but no thanks. Instead of ingesting some sugar and hoping it acts on the virus, I’ll get plain old traditional western medicine.

that moment when I think I clicked the gmail search box and start typing

> from:blabla to:blabla filename:(doc OR docx)

but turns out the click was off by a few pixels and the prompt was not in the search bar and instead a bunch of gmail in-browser keyboard shortcuts are triggered during the typing, and I’m not sure whether I accidentally marked innocent bystander emails as spam or trashed them

¯\_(ツ)_/¯

1. After watching Game of Thrones “The Mountain” advertisements, I buy a SodaStream carbonator to get sparkling water at home
2. i order a co2 replacement pickup-exchange service
3. some middle eastern looking guy delivers it and asks for the replacement, which I had forgotten to place on time. (i’m actually unclear how it works – do i place the bottle outside the apartment room door? or outside the apartment by the sidewalk? the exchange program does not specify)
4. apartment manager receives the package, and by middle eastern guy + small very heavy package + the guy rambles about needing the replacement => deduces the guy could be terrorist and the package be a bomb. Yes, in a delivery truck. Delivering bombs in a carton box. She sternly warns about its explosive potential to another person before passing the “bomb” to her to pass it on to me.
5. This is so great. I love America.

i was like “oh i need to pay today’s rent, i’m one day behind schedule (apt is pretty lenient)”, and cut out a check and was looking at my check records to see what the current rent amount was, and noticed i already paid the rent two weeks ago… -0-;

did i just get $900 for free?