Rants Blog

Before you start, the question most people want to know the answer to is – when you unfriend someone on Facebook, do they get notified? The answer given is – you disappear from your former friend’s friend list but your friend is not otherwise informed. You can still view your friend’s Facebook profile if it is public, but you have no other access.

1.Find their profile – by clicking on your list of all friends and clicking the person’s name.

2. Right down at the bottom on the left hand side is a link – “Remove from Friends” – click it!

3. Do what you have to do to get rid of the “are you sure” thingy.

You’re done.

How many people do you know who (I have come across all these, some quite often):

1. Believe google earth/street view could be used as a replacement for CCTV – e.g. to catch theives.

2. Are completely unable to understand the idea of a location in a file system, despite repeated attempts to explain it – e.g. – cannot find a saved file unless it is in the default directory of a given application.

3. Never empty their camera cards or back up their contents.

4. Do not have the slightest idea what is meant by memory sizes – e.g. would not know the difference between a 4GB SD card and a 64MB SD card.

5. Think day and night is caused by the sun going round the earth.

6. Think that clutches wear while the pedal is completely pressed down.

Know any other extreme tech misconceptions? Please post them below.

An example of the bloated greek public service. A set of traffic lights near us has not just one but two employees at either end of the contraflow waving flags. They appear to be entirely duplicating the function of the lights (twice).

All my tweets since I joined last year, in case you don’t use Twitter

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Following the interest in this post about sexism against men, and discussion of forming an action group, I’ve created a Google discussion group where we could discuss possible actions. Here are the essentials. Feel free to join up and discuss things related to this topic.
I emphasise, that personally I’m not interested in starting something rabid. I’d like to do something to create true equality of opportunity, not yet another “we’d like to be more equal than you” movement. I’m also not interested in equality per se, only equal opportunity – non discrimination on the basis of gender. It’s quite obvious that the genders are statistically speaking different in a number of features.
* Group name: hominism
* Group home page: http://groups.google.com/group/hominism
* Group email address hominism@googlegroups.com

Trying to figure out carbon footprints for manufactured products is absurd. Let’s take an extremely simple example. It must be easy to work out how much carbon it would take to produce and sell something as simple as a woodscrew, right?

Take a look at my attempt below and tell me if I’ve put anything in which is wrong (not if I’ve missed anything – I know I have). My aim here is to show how impossibly complex a full analysis would be, not even to try attempt a full analysis. I also want to show that an incomplete analysis doesn’t even give you a rough lower bound – it could even be too high if you don’t take everything into account (although it’s not likely to be).

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Rigihof hotel directions page needs work.shuttle costs 25 CHF, which is not mentioned on the web page and they only tell you after you’ve sat on it waiting for it to leave for 20 mins. Tram stop Winkelriedstrasse is not on the list on the ticket machine. There are 3 exits to HBHF and it took me 1/2 an hour to find where the tram No 10 goes from…. http://bit.ly/4tbU53
Otherwise, a nice hotel…