I'm trying to figure out exactly what it is that you lose connectivity to when you lock your computer.

Try opening a cmd window and entering the following command:

route print

One of the items listed will be the IP address of your default gateway, which will generally be the router on your LAN. The following commands will assume that this address is 192.168.1.254, so you'll need to replace that with whatever route print... [more]
posted to Ask Metafilter by flabdablet at 5:20 PM on October 5, 2008

It does not happen every time I lock the computer.

That's a pretty good clue that it is in fact related to some kind of standby timeout, as dda suggests.
posted to Ask Metafilter by flabdablet at 6:58 PM on October 5, 2008

I know you said you didn't see anything relevant to middle-click timing in the Mouse control panel, but are you sure the wheel-click function is actually set up to generate a middle-click? I've seen lots of "intelligent" mouse drivers that allow you to choose a custom function for wheel-click, and this usually doesn't default to generating a middle-click, and this has often caused me to swear at software vendors who won't... [more]
posted to Ask Metafilter by flabdablet at 5:26 PM on October 5, 2008

I once dropped 10kg in a week by kick-starting a weight loss program with a water-only fast (starting weight was around 120kg, if I remember right). 5kg came straight back the following week, and I my weight then plateaued for three solid months.

Fasting for a week or two is a really interesting experience, and at 25 you'll easily get away with it metabolism-wise. But don't do it in order to lose weight, because it will retard your progress.
posted to Ask Metafilter by flabdablet at 12:59 AM on October 5, 2008

The other thing about large groups is that if there's only one conversation going on in a large group, each speaker will naturally end up with less speaking time than happens in a small group. If you remind yourself of that, the fact that it takes longer for your turn to come around, and the fact that you'll need to be a little quicker off the mark to get a turn to speak, will feel less like you're just being talked over all the time.
posted to Ask Metafilter by flabdablet at 11:35 PM on October 3, 2008

Insurance companies will generally have some procedure for letting them know about stuff like this without causing you grief. Mine just had me fill in a standard claim form and mark it "report only". Talk to your insurer.
posted to Ask Metafilter by flabdablet at 11:31 PM on October 3, 2008

Here's a numerical coding for all the pieces I can see in the photo.

To decode it, turn each digit into a binary number stood up on its end, with the least significant bit on the bottom. 1-bits then mark occupied voxel positions and 0-bits are empty.... [more]
posted to Ask Metafilter by flabdablet at 5:14 PM on October 3, 2008

I think you're probably right.
posted to Ask Metafilter by flabdablet at 10:33 PM on October 3, 2008

Something harmless you can try at minimal cost: when he bathes, have him scrub out his pits and his butt with anti-dandruff shampoo (the kind with zinc pyrithione as the active ingredient) and a washcloth.

Soap is no good for getting rid of persistent BO. It's usually fairly alkaline, and regular use promotes yeast growth in damp skin folds. The main effect of soap on BO is just to mask it with a stronger scent.

Shampoo, on the other hand,... [more]
posted to Ask Metafilter by flabdablet at 5:32 PM on October 3, 2008

Can't speak to the hormone question - just popping back in to point out that anybody who tends toward smelliness is much better served by cotton clothing than synthetics. There's a world of difference between the smell of a two day old cotton T shirt and a cotton/polyester blend. Perspiration plus polyester = phoo.
posted to Ask Metafilter by flabdablet at 10:28 PM on October 3, 2008

Niklaus Wirth's classic Algorithms + Data Structures = Programs is well worth acquiring, too.
posted to Ask Metafilter by flabdablet at 5:28 AM on October 3, 2008

False dichotomy.
posted to Ask Metafilter by flabdablet at 4:04 AM on October 2, 2008

By which I mean: it's a nuclear furnace made of electrical plasma.
posted to Ask Metafilter by flabdablet at 4:04 AM on October 2, 2008

Of course, there's that question of where that lightning bolt comes from. Never addressed.

In fairness to the plasma cosmology crowd, current answers to "where did the big bang come from" are also fairly vague.
posted to Ask Metafilter by flabdablet at 9:01 PM on October 2, 2008

dseaton, I'd be interested in your take on this piece by Eric Lerner, which is failing to set off my pseudoscience alarms; he seems to be using actual numbers to argue specific points. I don't know enough about the field to make an informed judgement on what's presented. Is Lerner presenting some valid criticisms here, or is he merely using data selectively to support a preconceived view?
posted to Ask Metafilter by flabdablet at 5:21 AM on October 3, 2008

Any thread with icarus's link in it needs this one as well for balance.
posted to Ask Metafilter by flabdablet at 12:35 AM on October 1, 2008

And here are non-b0rked versions of slo's second and third links.
posted to Ask Metafilter by flabdablet at 12:37 AM on October 1, 2008

Don't worry about it even slightly. No lead: no problem.
posted to Ask Metafilter by flabdablet at 12:25 AM on October 1, 2008

The only downside to using these doors for this application will be than in four years the louvres are going to rot out and spill compost all over. Until then you're golden.
posted to Ask Metafilter by flabdablet at 12:25 AM on October 1, 2008 marked best answer

I'm betting that they will continue to be attracted for maybe a couple of minutes after the power goes off. I'm betting this on the grounds that I've noticed my PCMCIA wifi card runs quite warm. I think they're probably attracted to the smell of warm plastic.
posted to Ask Metafilter by flabdablet at 12:22 AM on October 1, 2008

I've found Thunderbird to be far more stable with Gmail IMAP if I limit the number of cached connections. Under Account Settings, for each account: click Server Settings, then Advanced, and set "Maximum number of server connections to cache" to 1.
posted to Ask Metafilter by flabdablet at 6:15 PM on September 30, 2008 marked best answer

Another royal screwup you can perform with Disk Management is assigning an external USB drive the same drive letter as a mapped network drive. Whenever you put such a USB drive in your computer, you get the Connected ding, but nothing shows up under My Computer. It's most annoying.

In fact, Windows will do this very thing all by itself when it assigns a default drive letter to a new USB device, which is even more annoying.... [more]
posted to Ask Metafilter by flabdablet at 2:42 AM on September 30, 2008

NET USE * \\server\share will start assigning drive letters from Z: downwards, which does minimize the chances of drive letter conflict with USB devices, whose letters are assigned from A: upward. Trouble with that is that some apps expect Z: to be available as a "scratch" drive letter for use with SUBST, and will fail if they can't have the use of it.

Sysadmins working in an environment where drive letters are the expected way to do things really would be... [more]
posted to Ask Metafilter by flabdablet at 4:42 PM on September 30, 2008

ABC Radio National
posted to Ask Metafilter by flabdablet at 2:24 AM on September 30, 2008

Specifically: Late Night Live, the Health Report, All In The Mind and the Science Show will give you an idea of the quality of programming available from the ABC.
posted to Ask Metafilter by flabdablet at 2:29 AM on September 30, 2008

Two weeks ago, the gasoline-soaked rags hadn't actually caught fire.
posted to Ask Metafilter by flabdablet at 5:52 PM on September 29, 2008

If the person who sent it can't tell you the format, and the content isn't sensitive material, post it somewhere we can all have a crack at it.
posted to Ask Metafilter by flabdablet at 5:43 PM on September 29, 2008

OK, I went with taxreturnsaustralia. It was almost as straightforward as e-tax 2007 and got me the same refund I would have got myself. The $39 it cost me was worth not having to fartarse about any more trying to make e-tax 2008 work. Not too bad. Thanks, arha.
posted to Ask Metafilter by flabdablet at 11:07 PM on September 28, 2008

In C, as opposed to C++, a string is just an array of char with a null (zero byte) in the last place. That's the format expected by all the standard functions that deal with strings.

Now, you could declare a string value the same way you would declare any other array:
char example[] = {'H', 'e', 'l', 'l', 'o', ',', ' ', 'w', 'o', 'r', 'l', 'd', 0};But since this syntax would drive everybody nuts even faster than the rest of C does, the following shorthand... [more]
posted to Ask Metafilter by flabdablet at 7:05 AM on September 28, 2008

Should be safe.

6.7.8.21: If there are fewer initializers in a brace-enclosed list than there are elements or members of an aggregate, or fewer characters in a string literal used to initialize an array of known size than there are elements in the array, the remainder of the aggregate shall be initialized implicitly the same as objects that have static storage duration.6.7.8.10:If an object that has automatic storage duration is not initialized explicitly, its value is... [more]
posted to Ask Metafilter by flabdablet at 7:07 PM on September 28, 2008

If I wanted to read lots of PDFs without driving myself insane, I wouldn't even try to use anything smaller than a 9 inch laptop screen. 12 inch would be better.

As for software: the evince document viewer supplied as Ubuntu's default PDF reader has always worked fine for me; never felt a need to install Adobe's.
posted to Ask Metafilter by flabdablet at 1:51 AM on September 28, 2008

How old is your battery? If it's four years or more, replace it on general principles and see if the fault goes away.
posted to Ask Metafilter by flabdablet at 8:15 PM on September 26, 2008

Same in Australia.
posted to Ask Metafilter by flabdablet at 8:04 PM on September 26, 2008

Finally I just told him, "This isn't working. You are never to empty the dishwasher again. Only I will empty the dishwasher." He grinned and said, "Yaaay!"

A fine application of creative incompetence.
posted to Ask Metafilter by flabdablet at 8:02 PM on September 26, 2008

So would some example page URLs so other people with Firefox can see if it's everybody or just you.
posted to Ask Metafilter by flabdablet at 7:26 AM on September 25, 2008

Assuming that's Firefox text on the left and IE text on the right: it looks like Firefox is respecting the web designer's color choice, as it's been asked to do, and IE is using default colors (black text, dark blue links). So:

If I allow pages to "choose their own color" in Firefox, the text often defaults to a dark grey.

Website designers often choose dark grey text.

If instead... [more]
posted to Ask Metafilter by flabdablet at 7:08 PM on September 26, 2008

Is this tutorial any use to you?
posted to Ask Metafilter by flabdablet at 11:17 AM on September 26, 2008

Alan Greenspan set US interest rates very low. When interest rates are low, people can afford to take out bigger loans. That increased the number of people competing for any given grade of housing, which made house prices start rising. This rise was compounded as people bought houses as investments, often using interest-only loans, assuming that house prices were going to keep going up fast enough that when they sold the house later they'd make enough to pay out their loans and turn a tidy... [more]
posted to Ask Metafilter by flabdablet at 9:51 PM on September 25, 2008

How do I handle this

By learning from it.

This could have been a lot worse. If you'd sold your camera instead of giving it to Grandma, those pictures could have ended up posted online and archived for all time.

As it is, all you need to do is tell your parents that you're really, really embarrassed that you left that stuff lying around for them to find, and... [more]
posted to Ask Metafilter by flabdablet at 7:09 PM on September 25, 2008

Everybody warning you about frame rates is correct. That said, I think you'll find that of the LAN remote desktop solutions available, UltraVNC performs best provided you do choose to install its video hook driver and don't enable encryption during setup.
posted to Ask Metafilter by flabdablet at 5:37 PM on September 25, 2008

Go see a doctor, and get a referral to a dermatologist.
posted to Ask Metafilter by flabdablet at 5:26 PM on September 25, 2008

I first started using https://mail.google.com/ to get to Gmail a couple years ago when I read somewhere that this would prevent the flakiness I'd experienced when uploading attachments when logged on via http (unsecured). It did. I've used it as a matter of course ever since, basically because there's no reason not to. I also had a 502 within the last month (can't remember exactly when) but it went away within minutes.
posted to Ask Metafilter by flabdablet at 5:10 PM on September 25, 2008

It's just occurred to me that my original difficulties with attachment uploading happened when I was using Gmail at work, behind a HTTP proxy. Seems to me that using a HTTPS connection ought to give proxies fewer opportunities to screw things up.
posted to Ask Metafilter by flabdablet at 5:12 PM on September 25, 2008

Another clip of this skit, linked from Wikipedia, is introduced by Jana Wendt. So this will be from before 1997, when Clarke and Dawe were on Channel 9's "A Current Affair" rather than the ABC's "7:30 Report".

That clip also contains the punchline missing from the YouTube version.
posted to Ask Metafilter by flabdablet at 7:51 AM on September 25, 2008

Get her a transcript of this one while you're at it :)
posted to Ask Metafilter by flabdablet at 8:32 AM on September 25, 2008

Failing to broadcast your SSID adds no security, but it does cause assorted kinds of trouble. Live and learn.
posted to Ask Metafilter by flabdablet at 7:18 AM on September 25, 2008

For what it's worth, I'm thinking your scanner device is getting the wrong permissions applied to it. sane-find-scanner will track down what file under /dev is used to get to your scanner, after which assorted methods can be tried to set the permissions properly on that device.

If the device turns out to be one that's built dynamically by udev when the scanner gets plugged in, that will probably involve some editing of the udev rules, perhaps slightly differently to... [more]
posted to Ask Metafilter by flabdablet at 8:46 AM on September 24, 2008

You should be able to make sane-find-scanner available using

sudo apt-get install sane-utils
posted to Ask Metafilter by flabdablet at 9:44 PM on September 24, 2008

I may be dim, but I don't understand why you need to do this. If you've migrated some files to the target and then made ACL changes, why not just treat those changes the same way you'd treat any other change: declare the target file to be the newer one, and have Robocopy simply not update it at all?
posted to Ask Metafilter by flabdablet at 8:02 PM on September 24, 2008

Can a person be an evangelical Christian and still be a political liberal?

If their Christianity is actually rooted in the teachings of Christ and their own conscience, as opposed to something they just go along with to retain a sense of connection with the community they grew up in: sure.
posted to Ask Metafilter by flabdablet at 7:51 PM on September 24, 2008