Author: ryan
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Email tracking! This Geek in Review for Dec. 20, 2019
Superhuman is a company that is trying to re-invent email. Unfortunately, to offer some of their services they have to violate the privacy of anyone you send email to. The idea of tracking the opening of emails isn’t new, mailing lists do it all of the time. However, in this case, it is being done to people who have never consented to being tracked in this manner. After the privacy implications were brought to light, they have since turned off the tracking. Nevertheless, it is a lesson in how you can be tracked through the most trivial of ways.
Have you ever thought about how you would like to use an Etch-A-Sketch to show pictures? No? Then thank goodness we have evil genius who envision a digital camera in using an Etch-A-Sketch as a display.
Retro cartridges can be big business, as an unsuspecting seller brought the most boring collection of NES carts to a store, along with a cartridge worth $13,000.
One way to guarantee work for an IT contractor is to plant logic bombs in spreadsheets that only the contractor can fix. Just don’t ever leave town.
And here’s why it’s USB plugs are not reversible.
Finally, if your local Kmart has closed, head on over to the Internet Archive and relive your Kmart shopping days by listening to the actual tapes that were played in the stores.
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I just spelled aesthetically correctly without autocorrect!
I just spelled aesthetically correctly without autocorrect!
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Just I’m finished the Christmas classic Die Hard!
Just I’m finished the Christmas classic Die Hard!
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My latest song – Infusion Complete
I was visiting Rochelle in the hospital yesterday when one of the machines starting beeping with the message INFUSION COMPLETE. While waiting for a nurse, I started freestyling with the beeps, because apparently that’s a thing I do now.
After a little bit, I decided to record the beeps in to Garageband, and thus the song Infusion Complete was born. Only available here!
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I wrote a Secret Santa picker
I started this project last year, and the immediately lost the source code. So, this year, I re-created my script AND put it on GitHub.
The directions on using the script are in the repository, and it should work under macOS (with brew to install mutt), Linux, and Windows Subsystem for Linux. The only pre-requisite is Python.
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For all my age challenged friends – /r/boomershumor/
I laughed at several of these, but I’m not a boomer, so I don’t know what that means…
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Two years of 10,000 steps a day – 6.9 million for the year
Today is the two year anniversary of walking (not just averaging) 10,000 steps per day. This last year I walked a total of 6.9 million steps. This is a major increase over the year before, and that was because I stupidly signed up for a step competition at work.
Back in March, I was asked if I wanted to join a team at the high school for a step competition. I was training for a marathon at the end of April, so I said, why not? Unfortunately, I had no idea what I was getting myself in to.
I originally planned for approximately 18,000 steps a day. This would give me one million steps by the end of the competition, and, what I assumed, would be first place. Oh, how I could not be more wrong.
The high school soccer coach went out like gangbusters in the first week, beating me by 64,000 steps for the week. I could not let this go, and I stepped up my walking (see what I did there? stepped up my walking :-). My alarm would be set for 4:30am, and I would have almost 20,000 steps in before work. For last Christmas, we got a new treadmill for home. The old treadmill was set up in my office with a computer and dual monitors so I could walk and work at the same time. This became very important because I was having to spend 7-8 hours a day walking. Tara was not impressed, and neither were my feet. I rarely have issues with blisters, but for the last month I was continually having to deal with them.
With the help of the step competition I broke several person records. On May 14 I had 65,439 steps, first time I’ve broken 65,000 steps in a day. During week 7 of the competition I had 353,380 steps (over 50,000 per day)!
In the end I was victorious, with 2.2 million number of steps in the step competition. To put that number in to perspective, I had 4.5 million steps in my first year of 10,000 steps a day.
For the next year, I’m upping the ante to 12,000 steps per day. I started back on September 18, so I’m already two months into that goal.
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I like how everyone visiting Walmart on a Sunday look miserable
I like how everyone visiting Walmart on a Sunday look miserable
