Category: Computers


  • Stores like for us as consumers to give them a customer ID to track what it is that we are buying. Many have phone number or a card or an email address. They use this information to track our purchases and personalize their nudges for us to buy products.  There is one way they might…

  • Social media plays with our minds in allowing us to stay connected to old friendships. We feel like we are maintaining the relationship. But, it lacks something. Social media tends to bring out our worst. We portray ourselves at our best. We compare our worst to others’ best. Assumptions, gossip, and negativity abound. It really…

  • In shopping for Mother’s Day the algorithms now think I am female. Obviously, they took the items I looked at for this quest and incorporated them into my profile’s records and are basing new recommendations on them. They are fresher. And they have left over inventory they want to move. So, I get it. This…

  • Dear Facebook, it would be awesome if you would create a spoilers option for posts where the poster could say what it contains. You get users feeding you data about engagement with media useful for advertisers. Nice people could contain the damage of spoilers. As it is, I saw several people created a post and…

  • A talk on how the process would work presented a couple years ago. Interesting how closely the actual image matches the reconstruction before they did it. At the heart of the Milky Way, there’s a supermassive black hole that feeds off a spinning disk of hot gas, sucking up anything that ventures too close —…

  • Steven Johnson wrote in Everything Bad Is Good For You about how in video games we have to figure out the rules of the built world. We are not just exploring a virtual space but build a mental map of cause and effect. The humor of memes about video games having prepared one when finding…

  • When people post a link, a Facebook bot looks at the content and finds the content of the <title> tag and creates a summary. My modest proposal is that it also locates the post datestamp to include here. Every Facebook post has the name of the poster with when they posted it. It might be…

  • I generated some text files working with Get-Acl Powershell, but I did not know how to get Powershell to do some advanced features. (Basically, I wanted to the Select-String to include the next 2 lines and see whether a specific group was in that list. And maybe some exclusions.) So, I copied the files over…

  • The Make Me Smart Podcast episode 96: Do it for the ‘gram had an interesting quip that Instagram was what the Facebook News Feed was before it got corrupted by ads and political arguments: the trivialities of our daily lives. All social networks became popular because of trivialities. “What’s on your mind?” THAT is what…