The Computer Thread

While impressive I am still stuck with a 10Mb plan that barely reaches 7Mb.

I can tear down some walls, I can't make my ISP any less shit.

It makes sense given that the frequency of visible light is much higher than the frequency of radio waves. The issues are, obviously, range and obstruction, but a properly designed environment could minimize both.

edited 24th Nov '15 5:34:07 AM by Fighteer

You know how (allegedly) some construction companies in China hire feng shui specialists to help design their floor plans so as to maximize proper flow of energy and stuff? I bet a specialist could make some dough by helping people design their homes to maximize Wi-Fi spread.

I'm sure they already do, but that's the sort of thing that can only reasonably be done with new construction, and it has to be custom, which means muy caro.

This would come down to proper positioning, a highly placed Li-Fi tower without any Line of Sight interruption doesn't need to be indoors, but if combined with optical fibers you can potentially distribute a high velocity internet without needing long sets of cables or radio antennas from one point to the other but locally.

Like having the Li-Fi providing the connection between two buildings set apart but within the building the connections run through smaller length optic cables and Wi-Fi.

This would be a cost saver, since installing a high velocity and bandwidth cables between buildings is expensive but a Li-Fi would be potentially cheaper.

Well, yes, for large-scale coverage, Li-Fi would be really good as long as you could guarantee line of sight between the base station and each receiver.

Firefox misadventures: Creating a new Firefox profile now allows Firefox to start normally, but it keeps getting dragged to a halt by various bits of webpage scripting. What can I do about this?

I haz NOSCRIPT, let's me choose which scripts to load. There is palemoon if you need a script. I run some pages on that, isolated from me Firefox session.

To anyone who is familiar with Link Shell Extension and/or how symbolic links and similar things work... Is there any functional difference between symbolic links and junctions when applied to folders? I've noticed that the latter takes up 4 kilobytes per junction, which while quite small can have quite an impact when used extensively (200 junctions take up close to a gigabyte in space); the former, on the other hand, seems to not affect disk space at all, as the value before and after the symlink's creation never changes in the disk properties.

http://superuser.com/questions/343074/directory-junction-vs-directory-symbolic-link

... That doesn't answer my question, as it talks pretty much only about how it affects inter-computer interaction. All my usage of junctions et al. happens on one PC that is connected to a handful of external hard drives.

edited 27th Nov '15 3:59:43 PM by MarqFJA

200x4kb is not 1gb. It's 800kb, which is nothing.

... <Face Palm> I can't believe I got such simple math wrong!

Happens to the best of us.

Well, I have a different question to ask now.

I'm getting tired of Win7's flawed File Explorer design, and wish to find an alternative. Do you guys have any recommendations?

Little strange thing here Which capacitive stylus would work best for specific input?

Today's a holiday and I just spent 5-6 hours of it, road-testing Gmail Inbox.

I do love the snooze feature, but why is there no canned responses, and I "hate" the default position of the forward button.

There's also Google tried to deliver your message, but it was rejected by the relay smtp.gmail.com by smtp.gmail.com. I sent about 20+ emails, and 3 of them got this error.

And I still haven't figured out where the "Smart Reply" feature is. I've got a bad feeling that's still a USA only feature.

OK, I think something's hinky about the wifi adapter in my netbook. Since if the computer goes to sleep on battery power it loses the ability to connect to anything when the system wakes, and if I restart the system the MAC address changes. Oddly, this doesn't seem to happen if I do a shut down reboot rather than clicking restart.

So I guess I'm asking if anyone has any recommendations for USB wifi adapters or something.

I'm looking into installing f.lux on my computer to control blue light/brightness/whatever when I'm getting ready to sleep. Would you guys recommend that or a similar program?

Yes. I would also recommend getting your eyes used to dimmest light setting when you're "computering" at night.

I personally found f.lux to make my display harder on my eyes. I dunno, see if it works for you, I've only heard good things about it sans my own experience.

I usually keep my brightness all the way down to begin with. But okay, I'll try it out.

Whenever another person borrows my tablet or use my laptop, they complain that it's too dark.

And whenever I bring my 3ds anywhere outside, I'm pissed off that I can't see shit until I remember that I can turn the brightness up beyond 1. :P

I once got yelled at by my mother because she thought that the screen was too bright.

Trying to set up my laptop screen to be anything but cool-biased is rather hard to do.