[QUOTE=retina;529640]Older clocks,...[/QUOTE]
It reminds me of a colleague who bought a bag full (literally) of radio controlled clocks (wrist watches) from where we were working in China, to sell them at home and make a lot of money. This was long before "GPS era", and those clocks were "a jewel of technology" at the time (1998), they were never late and never fast, as they were [URL="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radio_clock"]controlled by radio[/URL] (if I remember right, 75kHz or so), and you could get them locally almost for free, everybody on the street was wearing one, and our factory was producing a version of them too, we had a relay there to re-transmit the clock signal, which was used for testing, but it was somehow covering all the town...

Once home, he ended up with a bag full of clocks which were not working at all. None of them. Not that they were not running, but they were not showing anything. No display. Dead! What he didn't know, and didn't ask, most probably afraid that some of us will steal his 'business' was the fact that those watches even had no battery, they consumed very low power, nano-amps, and could work powered by the radio signal too, assuming you are close enough to the relay... That is why they were so common, locally. You couldn't even put a battery inside, because the space was taken by the energy harvesting stuff (coil, capacitor, antenna).

And even if you could put a battery inside, the radio clock signal in Europe has allocated a different frequency band, which means your clocks won't sync properly.

Similar to the Numberphile's calculator that works only in California ... hehe...

From which you can see that a business mind does not always mean a technical mind, and viceversa.

[QUOTE=LaurV;529675]It reminds me of a colleague who bought a bag full (literally) of radio controlled clocks (wrist watches) from where we were working in China, to sell them at home and make a lot of money. This was long before "GPS era", and those clocks were "a jewel of technology" at the time (1998), they were never late and never fast, as they were [URL="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radio_clock"]controlled by radio[/URL] (if I remember right, 75kHz or so), and you could get them locally almost for free, everybody on the street was wearing one, and our factory was producing a version of them too, we had a relay there to re-transmit the clock signal, which was used for testing, but it was somehow covering all the town...[/QUOTE]
Here in the good ol' USA, the Admin has tried at least once to shut down WWVB, the 60 khz station near Fort Collins, CO that is used to regulate millions of clocks and other devices by means of time signals.

[url]https://mobile.twitter.com/captmotorcycle/status/1191467158238355457/photo/1[/url] [quote]Oh boy, my lights won't work after 11/6.[/quote]Insignia Connect this time. They can't be bothered to run their servers any longer so say goodbye to your expensive, and now useless, IoT lights.

[url=https://apnews.com/651059b843294fd28ad959b33804d46f]Amazon says it’s considered face scanning in Ring doorbells[/url] (my emphasis) [quote]Amazon has considered adding facial recognition technology to its Ring doorbell cameras, according to a letter to a U.S. senator defending its video-sharing partnerships with police.

The company told Sen. Ed Markey that facial recognition is a "contemplated, but unreleased feature" of its home security cameras but that there are no plans to coordinate that feature with its law enforcement partnerships.

Markey wrote to Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos in September raising privacy and civil liberty concerns about Ring’s video-sharing agreements with police departments across the country. The company encourages police to tap into Ring’s Neighbors app, a forum for residents to share videos of suspicious activity captured by their home security cameras.

The Massachusetts Democrat also expressed alarm that Ring may be pursuing face-scanning technology after a patent application showed [b]the company is exploring a system that could flag certain people as suspicious and automatically alert police.[/b]

Markey released Amazon’s responses Tuesday.

Amazon’s initial response to Markey said Ring doesn’t currently offer facial recognition. Then Markey sent another letter to Bezos asking why it’s mentioned in Ring’s privacy policy. In a Nov. 1 follow-up, Amazon’s vice president of public policy, Brian Huseman, said that the company frequently innovates based on customer demand and that facial recognition is an increasingly common feature in cameras made by competitors such as Google’s Nest division.

"If our customers want these features in Ring security cameras, we will only release these features with thoughtful design including privacy, security, and user control," Huseman wrote.
<snip>
But Amazon also said it doesn’t require law enforcement to delete a user’s video footage after a certain period. Nor would it entertain Markey’s request that it commit to never selling users’ biometric information, saying only that it doesn’t do so now.[/quote]This illustrates why the Car Talk guys came up with the name they did for Corporate Spokesperson: Hugh Lyon-Sack.

[QUOTE=Dr Sardonicus;531073][URL="https://apnews.com/651059b843294fd28ad959b33804d46f"]Amazon says it’s considered face scanning in Ring doorbells[/URL] (my emphasis) This illustrates why the Car Talk guys came up with the name they did for Corporate Spokesperson: Hugh Lyon-Sack.[/QUOTE]
The range of Bezos' evil knows no limits. Regarding Car Talk, one of me favorites among their credits was their law firm: Dewe[COLOR=Red][U]y[/U][/COLOR][U][COLOR=Red][/COLOR][/U] Cheatem and Howe. (Still on the debilitated Human Interface Device. Noted elsewhere. Missing the letter between T and U.) :sad: (Fixed with different keyboard. A "junk" pile is a marvelous thing!)

[QUOTE=kladner;531085]The range of Bezos' evil knows no limits. Regarding Car Talk, one of me favorites among their credits was their law firm: Dewe_ Cheatem and Howe. (Still on the debilitated Human Interface Device. Noted elsewhere. Missing the letter between T and U.) :sad:[/QUOTE]Can it be done with cut&paste? Note I'm not using the character in question through careful use of alternative phrasing.

Reminds me of a game we had a long time ago. What is the minimum number of characters to be input into a Unix shell so that subsequent C&P operations are able to generate all of them?

I won with 0, assuming that at least one character is present on the screen at the start, one otherwise. A solution is:

[C]pcl@thoth:~$
pcl@thoth:~$ p
p: command not found
pcl@thoth:~$ man man
pcl@thoth:~$ man ascii
[/C]

where the first 'p' command is taken from the shell prompt.

Hold down ALT, type 121 from numeric keypad, release ALT.

For uppercase do the same except it is 89 instead of 121.


One is eleven squared, the other is the exponent of a mersenne prime, and moreover, 89 divides M11. Easy to remember... :razz:

The more bends in the pipes, the easier it is to clog them...
 

I had a plumber in yesterday. It was getting pretty dim outside by the time he was done. I wrote the check. He needed to take photos of it with his tablet, but he had a heck of a time. Even with the ceiling fixture on, there still wasn't enough light.

He had been holding a flashlight in one hand and the tablet in the other, and the tablet kept saying he wasn't holding it steady enough. I took the flashlight so he could use both hands to hold his tablet, and he got his pictures.

Whereupon he said, "This used to be easy. Then they upgraded." I started laughing uncontrollably. After I calmed down a bit he said, "A [i]lot[/i] of things were easier before they upgraded. But I'm just a lone voice." I said, "No, you're not."

[QUOTE=Dr Sardonicus;531152]I had a plumber in yesterday... I wrote the check. He needed to take photos of it with his tablet...[/QUOTE]It's comes across as a strange protocol.
Could you have paid by letting him photograph a banknote instead?

[QUOTE=Nick;531170]It's comes across as a strange protocol.
Could you have paid by letting him photograph a banknote instead?[/QUOTE]

Ha! And they say physical cash is obsolete.

So the easy-peasy (/sarc) techno-fix here would've been for the good doctor to use his flatbed scanner to scan the check after making it out, then send the image to the plumber, but now I'm thinking whatever !$&%@^ banking app the plumber was using wouldn't allow one to import such an image, i.e. would require a live-scan of a physical check.

Wonder if that plumber accepts paypal instead...

[QUOTE=Nick;531170]It's comes across as a strange protocol.[/quote]It's called "mobile check capture." Take a picture of the check with a mobile device, and the money goes straight into the recipient's account. My guess is, it's cheaper than paperwork processing. I don't see any great need for speed. What would they be worried about, losing half a day's interest? At today's rates?

I'm sure it's the bank they're using that offers the "mobile check capture" app. I can only imagine the nature of the upgrade. Higher-resolution images, perhaps.
[quote]Could you have paid by letting him photograph a banknote instead?[/QUOTE]
If someone offered [i]you[/i] a picture of a banknote in payment, would [i]you[/i] accept it?

<crickets chirping>

That's what I thought.

I didn't ask about paying in cash. It would have been a lot of cash to have on hand, at least for my taste.