I’ll see if I can remember any interesting ones. One is a portable satellite messaging device using this:

https://blues.com/starnote/

Simplest case would be a small waterproof box with a battery and a board and MCU inside. UI would be a phone communicating by wifi. The box could run a web server so you would operate it with a phone browser and not have to install an app. Nicer version could have a minimal keyboard and display, like from a Lilygo Deck.

Note: this functionality already appears in a few high end phones (Iphone 15, Pixel 9) so it may make its way into more affordable phones after a while. Thus, the special hardware might stop being interesting. Meanwhile there are things like the Garmin Inreach which require over-expensive monthly subscriptions.

Another: a privacy oriented health monitor something like a fitbit (it wouldn’t have to be as small), that communicates with your computer or phone but doesn’t send anything to Google etc.

There were a few more. I may make another post later if any come to mind.

Go to physical therapy if your insurance covers it or you can afford it. They’re not omniscient but they do have some training and experience treating this stuff.

Anyone who actually does their homework knows Democrats are far and away the party of the working class compared to Republicans.

“Compared to Republicans” is a pretty low bar, just sayin’ :).

It would help if you said what your interest and skills are. If I wanted a small GNU/Linux desktop or server thing I’d just write it myself. But I can suggest some Android apps since I’m not set up to write those at the moment.

There used to be a GNU project task list but it no longer has concrete suggestions, oh well.

Actually one desktop thing I’d like is a gnus.el back end for Lemmy (if you don’t know what gnus.el is, this project isn’t for you). I might pursue that someday but I’d rather that someone else do it so I can use it.

Another thing I could use: a Pandoc exporter for bbcode, for some other forums I visit. So I could easily convert Org or Markdown files to BB. Pandoc is written in Haskell so that could be an interesting language learning project too, if you don’t already use Haskell. There could be an Org exporter as well, or instead (written in Emacs Lisp).

Those are off the top of my head. Maybe I can think of a few other things too.

“Make this” evokes hardware projects for these. I have many ideas for those that I can’t really pursue myself, as I’m not a hardware guy and don’t have the resources for it.

Start CRIMP, the Committee to Re-IMpeach the President?

Mute the entire TV and use the closed captions when watching the programs. I do this.

They don’t say what models but it probably doesn’t matter. It’s fine with me if my phone is basically generic. (Moto G Stylus 5g 2023).

I set up ZNC and got it working but it was a pain in the neck, took some trial and error, and the docs were confusing. Once I got it going I basically left it alone rather than try to clean up the situation.

Don’t, just don’t, or maybe do. A lot of those apps phone home with your period info to help marketers and the secret police infer when you might be pregnant. So if you’re going to use such an app at all, use it for anything except actual period tracking. That should at least confuse them.

Psychological or possibly medical disorders. There is a whole branch of clinical practice to deal with this. It might or might not help, but it probably beats asking the internet.

The High Table sends an adjudicator with a special type of haircut. I think the hair style has a name, but I don’t know it.

In chess there is a fairly common situation where you are in first place in the last round of a tournament, 1/2 of a point ahead of your opponent (you get 1 point for winning a game and 1/2 point for a draw). So if you win or draw the game, you win the tournament and get a lot of money. If you lose the game, your opponent wins the tournament and gets the money. You get 2nd place, i.e. less money possibly split with other competitors.

That means you can choose a safe playing strategy that likely leads to a draw, while your opponent has to choose a risky strategy with higher chances of winning.

(Some chess context: high level games are usually drawn. They are only won by someone making a mistake. Also, the first move (white pieces) confers an advantage, so it’s usual to seek winning opportunities if you have white, while just trying to hold the draw if you have black. To attempt winning with black requires seriously risky play. Bobby Fischer basically conquered chess in the 1960’s by constantly trying to do that, which required playing with maniacal intensity all the time).

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Ok, I emailed my friend (above) and she said Khan Academy and she says it has exercises. That’s great, I had thought it was just video lectures. So I’d go for that.

I’d expect textbooks would have tons of exercises at that level. Schaum’s outlines are good for college level math but I don’t know if they have them for stuff like basic algebra. I have a friend who is a HS math teacher so I can ask her for recommendations and get back in a day or so, hmm.

You didn’t see the movie “My Beautiful Laundrette”.

You have to write out a lot of exercises and there is no getting around it. You can’t learn the violin by watching videos or reading a book. You have to practice. It’s the same with math. But as people said, Khan Academy lectures are very good in steering you through a topic.

Besides algebra, I think it is important to know a bit about probability and a bit about logic. Don’t worry about stuff like covariance matrices, but understand what conditional probability is (be able to explain the “prosecutor’s fallacy”) and write out some of those annoying exercises about urns full of colored balls. Also, show how to write e.g. “you can fool all of the people some of the time, and some of the people all of the time, but you can’t fool all of the people all of the time” in predicate logic notation, and see how the parts of the sentence involve switching the order of quantifiers.

Empirically, 42.25 instead of 42.

I don’t know what to add, I haven’t used Matrix so I’m unfamiliar with it and might be misreading it. But it seems to have an aura of “look how cool and hip this is”. Irc is old and comfortable even though it has a bunch of annoying limitations.

The interesting thing is if the manufacturer is shipping them that way by default.