{"id":3311,"date":"2015-01-16T09:10:10","date_gmt":"2015-01-16T16:10:10","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.contrapositivediary.com\/?p=3311"},"modified":"2015-01-16T09:15:24","modified_gmt":"2015-01-16T16:15:24","slug":"odd-lots-270","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.contrapositivediary.com\/?p=3311","title":{"rendered":"Odd Lots"},"content":{"rendered":"<ul>\n<li><a href= \"http:\/\/gizmodo.com\/verizon-wont-stop-using-the-tracking-cookie-that-you-ca-1679667368\" target=\"_blank\">Verizon refuses to stop using tower-side cookies<\/a> (which can&#8217;t be deleted by mobile device users) even as <a href= \"http:\/\/www.propublica.org\/article\/att-stops-using-undeletable-phone-tracking-ids\" target=\"_blank\">AT&amp;T has caved on the issue<\/a>. The solution is to stop using Verizon. That&#8217;s what Carol and I are about to do.<\/li>\n<li>Relax. <a href= \"http:\/\/arstechnica.com\/information-technology\/2015\/01\/actually-windows-7-is-still-supported-for-another-5-years\/\" target=\"_blank\">Microsoft did <em>not<\/em> pull the plug on Win7 updates on 1\/13<\/a>. That won&#8217;t happen until 2020. What&#8217;s going away are new OS features and phone support, two things I don&#8217;t think the world desperately needs.<\/li>\n<li>I like molten lava as much as the next guy. (Just wait until you read my novella <em>Firejammer,<\/em> coming out&#8211;finally&#8211;this spring.) That said, <a href= \"http:\/\/sploid.gizmodo.com\/i-have-seen-some-crazy-closeup-volcano-photography-befo-1679583256\" target=\"_blank\">I&#8217;m not sure I like it quite <em>this<\/em> much&#8230;<\/a><\/li>\n<li>With January only half over, <a href= \"http:\/\/coastwatch.glerl.noaa.gov\/glsea\/cur\/glsea_cur.png\" target= \"_blank\">the Great Lakes ice cover<\/a> is now up to 34%. Lake Erie has pretty much iced over completely.<\/li>\n<li>Britain&#8217;s Royal Society has published some evidence that <a href= \"http:\/\/rspb.royalsocietypublishing.org\/content\/282\/1801\/20142032\" target=\"_blank\">people born during solar maxima do not live as long as people born during solar minima<\/a>. It may be folate depletion by UV. Or something else. However, the correlation appears to be real. (Thanks to Neil Rest for the link.) Carol and I are solar minima babies, whew.<\/li>\n<li>Discovered two very good red wines recently: <a href= \"http:\/\/www.menageatroiswines.com\/wines\/red\" target=\"_blank\">Menage a Trois Red<\/a>, and <a href= \"http:\/\/www.menageatroiswines.com\/wines\/midnight?ag=1\" target= \"_blank\">Menage a Trois Midnight<\/a>. Both are dry reds, both are fruit-forward, and (in contradiction of the vintner&#8217;s Web writeups) neither has any detectable oak. I guess if you&#8217;re going to get the hipster market you have to claim oak, even if you lie about it. In this case, nothing of value was lost.<\/li>\n<li>I doubt that my readers are dumb enough to think you can lose weight by ingesting chemistry sets like Slim-Fast. But just in case, <a href= \"http:\/\/www.fathead-movie.com\/index.php\/2015\/01\/08\/u-s-news-ranks-the-diets\/\" target=\"_blank\">read what Tom Naughton says about recent diet rankings<\/a> in content-free publications like <em>US News<\/em>. Hint: The same doofi who bleat endlessly against &#8220;processed foods&#8221; (which now means &#8220;any foods I don&#8217;t like&#8221;) are endorsing fructose cocktails like Slim-Fast over Atkins and paleo.<\/li>\n<li><a href= \"http:\/\/www.popularmechanics.com\/technology\/gadgets\/news\/startup-city-americas-best-places-to-start-a-business#slide-1\" target=\"_blank\">Popular Mechanics lists the 14 best cities in America for startups<\/a>. None are in Silicon Valley, and all are in relatively low-cost areas. Maybe hipster city cachet is finally starting to lose its cachet. Or so we can hope.<\/li>\n<li>Lots has happened in CPU architectures since the 1980s, when a lot of us learned it. (I started a little earlier, but the IBM PC brought most of us to a new starting gate at the same time.) <a href=\"http:\/\/danluu.com\/new-cpu-features\/\" target= \"_blank\">Here&#8217;s a decent summary<\/a>. One consequence of all this is that human-written assembly language is less of a win over compilers, and the best reason to learn assembly these days is to understand what your damned compilers are up to in there.<\/li>\n<li>Before he broke into the SF business, <a href= \"http:\/\/my.pclink.com\/~dfritzke\/Laumer\/Laumer-Page.html\" target= \"_blank\">Keith Laumer was an ace model airplane designer<\/a>. (Thanks to Pete Albrecht for the link.)<\/li>\n<li><a href= \"http:\/\/linuxgizmos.com\/tiny-fanless-mini-pc-runs-linux-on-quad-core-amd-soc\/\" target=\"_blank\">Physically small, fanless PCs<\/a> have been around for awhile, and I was bullish on them until I began using Dell USFF (ultra-small form factor) machines like the Optiplex 780, which are pretty small and almost entirely silent. Should we settle for 1.6 GHz? Only if there&#8217;s a specific application in mind, like education (think RPi) or embeddedness.<\/li>\n<li>Bill Cherepy sends us news of <a href= \"http:\/\/www.dailymail.co.uk\/sciencetech\/article-2909775\/The-air-conditioner-BUTTER-Dish-warms-butter-s-soft-spread-keeps-cool-summer.html\" target=\"_blank\">a thermostatic butter keeper<\/a> that can keep a stick of butter (block? It&#8217;s a form factor we don&#8217;t make in the US) at any arbitrary temp from 15 to 23 degrees C. Butter is definitely coming back into its own, bravo halleluia!<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Verizon refuses to stop using tower-side cookies (which can&#8217;t be deleted by mobile device users) even as AT&amp;T has caved on the issue. The solution is to stop using Verizon. That&#8217;s what Carol and I are about to do. Relax. Microsoft did not pull the plug on Win7 updates on 1\/13. That won&#8217;t happen until [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[25],"tags":[37,15,39,54,18,88,13],"class_list":["post-3311","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-oddlots","tag-food","tag-hardware","tag-health","tag-science","tag-sf","tag-windows","tag-wine"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.contrapositivediary.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3311","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.contrapositivediary.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.contrapositivediary.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.contrapositivediary.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.contrapositivediary.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=3311"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/www.contrapositivediary.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3311\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3314,"href":"https:\/\/www.contrapositivediary.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3311\/revisions\/3314"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.contrapositivediary.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=3311"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.contrapositivediary.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=3311"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.contrapositivediary.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=3311"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}