Deactivating Facebook and more – This Geek in Review for 14 Feb 2020

There are good discussions going on now about mental health and wellness, but not enough talk about the little things that one can do to help themselves. By deactivating Facebook one can not only increase their happiness but also decrease their political polarization on the issues. Sounds like a win-win. I read so much about how everyone sucks in politics, but not anything on what we can do to fix it. The scariest realization I have on politics is that many voters will vote against their self-interests if it means people they believe are undeserving will get something. We saw this with the rise of the Tea Party. “Too many people are on welfare, but don’t you dare touch my Social Security and Medicare.” Wow, that’s enough of a rant today!

Finally, you can turn off those lousy Netflix previews! I didn’t understand why they were so long in the first place, they are basically a mini-version of the movie, giving away way too much about the movie. Unfortunately, to de-activate the preview you have to do it from the website and not the client.

What happens when you give Chrome 1.5TB of RAM?

Programmers re-use code all of the time for games, and now we benefit. Some very smart people figured out how to put Star Fox 64 Arwings for the Nintendo 64 into Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of time. An amazing hack.

If you have bought an Apple device in the last 6 months, you get Apple’s Streaming service, Apple TV+, free for the year. It’s estimated that less the 10% of purchasers have done so. I’ve only watched (and liked) a few episodes of For All Mankind. They base it on an alternative history of the first moon landing.

I’m not a big fan of articles that should be a blog post instead of spread across 11 tweets, but I liked Ally McBeal. One of the first “viral” moments in internet time was the dancing baby. Well, the model has been found and rendered in full 1080p glory.

Dates are hard on the computer, but I would think after all the Y2K shenanigans that storing only the last two digits for the year would be in the past (see what I did there?). That is not the case for a 101 year old man in the UK. The computer would like his parents to confirm his ID.

I’ve read that Tesla’s Cybertruck is a good rendition of what we thought in the 80s cars of the future would look like. And now an SFX company has given us this gem:

A New Time Machine? Cybertruck 2020 in Back to the Future – YouTube