Friday Hodgepodge
Friday, January 10, 2020
Four Things
The Internet is sort of like a wish-granting genie...
Back in grad school, my class was treated to the unenviable task of writing grant proposals for projects we did not intend to pursue -- instead of for our proposed thesis projects like everyone else before or since. Oh, and we couldn't consult with anyone, either. (We were guinea pigs.) I chose to write mine on prions, then a still-emerging area of research. This turned out to be interesting and fun, but I reached an impasse: I knew what I wanted to accomplish experimentally, but had no clue how to do it.
"Wouldn't it be neat if I could..." was my line of thought, but I had no idea where to look, this not at all being my area. So, as if I were writing a message to cast to sea in a bottle, I crafted a search expression. And then I fished the pre-Google internet. To my great surprise and relief, I learned that, not only had someone come up with this, it had been commercialized. Problem solved.
Ever since, when I have had a problem to solve, but been unsure of how to proceed, I have used this tactic, often successfully. Here are just four more neat things I discovered by doing this.
1. Back in Boston, I wanted to save money when my wife had a winter accident and broke the tail light of her father's Mercedes. "Wouldn't it be cool if there were a way to ask multiple junk yards for the part all at once?" I thought. That's when I learned that I could specify a car part and whatever junkyards had it would offer it for sale. My phone briefly rang off the hook and between that and Pep Boys, I probably got the repair done for an order of magnitude less than had I gone to a Mercedes dealer.
2. I recently needed to de-silo some data trapped in a legacy Windows app. I could run it under an emulation layer in Linux, but nothing I could come up with could rescue the data. A few days after I resigned myself to keeping the old app running on Linux, it dawned on me that, if I could print the data to a PDF, I'd get what I needed. But that's an alien concept to Windows XP: Only my ink printer showed up on the print menu. "Wouldn't it be neat if I there were a virtual printer that would "look like" a printer to this old app, but create a PDF? There is and I successfully extracted the data.
3. Years after iPads and Chromebooks killed netbooks, which had been a favorite writing platform, it dawned on me that someone had probably figured out how to install Linux on a Chromebook. (See P.S.) I am writing this post on a Samsung Chromebook running a version known as Gallium OS.
4. Our subdivision is still under development. Consequently, I run over nails and get slow leaks every month or so. After finding two gas stations in a row with broken air pumps (while traveling!), I wished there were such a thing as a portable air pump that could run from a 12V DC adapter. Remembering this the next day, I looked. There is, and it costs only twenty bucks. And it's tiny, so I can just leave it in my car. It's so fun to use I almost look forward to my next slow leak.
I picked mine up at Walmart: See embedded video above for details. I didn't watch this, but it shows the package it came in, and I found it easy to use, quick, and effective. It has a light for night operation and stops at the pressure you set for it. It will pay for itself, dollar-wise after one or two slow leaks, and it will easily spare me at least an hour cumulative every time, not to mention the frustration of encountering poorly-maintained gas station air pumps.
-- CAV
P.S. Regarding the "netbook," memory might have failed me here. Based on this post, I probably caught wind of Gallium OS some other way. That said, I might have tried this kind of searching and learned about it eventually, regardless.
Updates
Today: Added a P.S. and fixed some wording in Item 4.
3 comments:
Yo, Gus, you write, "The Internet is sort of like a wish-granting genie..." And I can't resist retorting, some parts of it even speak Persian better than this genie did. It is actually (modern) Persian though. (In case you wonder, the big bird she pronounced "Seymour" is actually Simurgh, where the gh is German ch with the vocal cords vibrating.) The only other comedy show where any such accuracy didn't matter but they went ahead and used actual Persian anyway, that I know of (which probably doesn't mean much), was South Park (the episode where the boys went to Afghanistan, in which they used actual Dari--for instance, when the boys knocked on the door of the Afghan boy's house, he answered the door, "Are you selling something?").
Amusingly, I ran across that clip on YouTube a couple of years ago when I was looking up an episode I watched with my mother as a boy, in which Larry Hagman used a Texas accent. I said, "He does a good job talking like us!" My mother replied, "No, he does a good job talking like northerners." (In case you want a flashback to TV best forgotten, it's at 15:00 in of this episode. The most amusing thing about it is how reminiscent it is of the borborygmous interiors of the movie Brazil.)
And for something good to go with the funny, have some Persian jazz. (The singer, Shahrzad Sepanlou, is an Iranian-American singer who emigrated here in the mid-1980s. She usually sings a style of pop I don't care that much for, but a lot of her music was available for free on her website so I gave it a thorough listen. There are any number of versions of this song on YouTube, by the way, because it's a setting of a poem, "I and you, tree and rain," by a great modern Iranian poet. I am especially fond of this one.)
Hah. Posting now, but will enjoy links later... I have to get the kids up for school soon.
Yo, Gus, a couple of additional notes. There's a translation of the poem here. The group in the version I especially like is a largely Italian group founded by the singer, who has an interesting story; she also composed the setting of the poem. I hope she's not a commie like the poet, but I wouldn't be surprised to learn she is (heh and alas). (The video was produced by Radio Javan, a Persian music site based in the US that I think I need to explore more.)
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