MetaFilter

You can probably get a Garmin Rino for around $100, that has a pretty darn good GPS unit as well as being an FRS and GMRS radio.

If you get more of them they can plot the position of other units on the map, which makes them incredibly useful.

I can personally vouch for their build quality too.
posted to Ask MetaFilter by Skorgu at 1:34 PM on August 23, 2006

Page to RSS http://www.baekdal.com/web2rss/

I hope you don't mind a self link.. many of our authors are local to NYC (http://one-story.com/blog/publ/index.xml)

Don't forget about the Brooklyn Book Fair or whatever the name is, on September 16.
posted to Ask MetaFilter by shownomercy at 10:04 AM on August 23, 2006

Hi evarist... :)
never mind... but if you insist ... “It would be argument for a week, laughter for a month, and a good jest for ever.” William Shakespeare
eheh
:p
posted to Ask MetaFilter by zab at 2:08 PM on August 22, 2006

posted to MetaTalk by brownpau at 7:49 PM on August 19, 2006

goatse 2.0
posted to MetaFilter by snofoam at 10:58 AM on August 19, 2006

This isn't a time for half-truthes and guesses, my G.I. system is entering the time of consequences.
posted to Ask MetaFilter by c:\awesome at 6:48 PM on August 18, 2006

I use Georgia. It gives bad posts a sort of staid, upright air. Sort of like that old Daily Show bit with kids reading transcripts from pundit shows, except more like Old Southern Gentlemen reading transcripts from boring Flame Wars.
posted to MetaTalk by muddgirl at 6:09 PM on August 17, 2006

There's a predefined table, in firmware, of about a thousand entries which were, I think, created by statistically processing many hours of voice captured from real speakers of various languages.

It's bad enough to have human hair mixed into my soy sauce, now I've got real speakers of various languages sprinkled into my phone calls?
posted to MetaTalk by StickyCarpet at 9:20 AM on August 16, 2006

Esmael Lalfarwuchi

or

Adel Oqela?

Spelling might be off but that's what my coworkers tell me.
posted to Ask MetaFilter by Dagobert at 9:21 PM on August 14, 2006

OK, update.

Said co-worker just came running up to my desk "100%" sure that the person you are looking for is, in fact, Ali Mahmood Al-Essawe.

I will try to get these three men to you in the native script. When I can do this is iffy but I'll try to knock it out today.
posted to Ask MetaFilter by Dagobert at 9:46 PM on August 14, 2006 marked best answer

OK, I'll bore you a bit more:

One of the black magicians tried to explain to me how the variable rate codecs work, and though I pretty sure I didn't fully understand it, I'll tell you what I got out of it:

There are 50 frames per second, 20 milliseconds per frame. The algorithm takes advantage of the fact that over a period of time that short, human speech is actually quite slow moving. Most frames consist of the same spectrum end-to-end, or... [more]
posted to MetaTalk by Steven C. Den Beste at 11:12 PM on August 14, 2006

VOIP codecs don't have the same bandwidth constraints as cell phone codecs. Most modern voice calls are limited to 8000 bits (1000 bytes) per second, which really isn't very much. (I believe that 160 kilobytes per second is considered pretty normal for MP3's, isn't it?)

The Enhanced Variable Rate Codec (EVRC) which is current state of the art for IS-95 and CDMA2K usually uses much less than 1 kilobyte per second. Depending on the sound, it can be as little as 1000 bits... [more]
posted to MetaTalk by Steven C. Den Beste at 10:40 PM on August 14, 2006

MP3 and other modern forms of sound compression don't operate at the level of wave forms. You can't compress the sound enough when you're trying to do that.

Instead, the encoding process takes a certain chunk of the sound, the wave form for a few milliseconds, and the performs a Fourier analysis of it. What gets stored is more or less the coefficients of the Fourier function, after low amplitude coefficients and phase relationships are discarded.... [more]
posted to MetaTalk by Steven C. Den Beste at 10:24 PM on August 14, 2006

How to solve anal gland problems = feed your dog canned pumpkin.
posted to Ask MetaFilter by k8t at 12:20 PM on August 14, 2006

posted to MetaFilter by MonkeySaltedNuts at 8:22 PM on August 12, 2006

... [more]
posted to MetaFilter by Krrrlson at 8:26 PM on August 12, 2006

Well...librarina's response is actually closer to the mark. As a Spanish and French speaker I know that I can guess the gender of entirely new words pretty accurately and this is all based upon their similarity to other words.

Here, for example, is a list of French suffixes and gender. There are tons of exceptions, and you just have to learn those its true but thats different than implying that anything goes.
(Now, as to *why* certain suffixes are associated... [more]
posted to Ask MetaFilter by vacapinta at 4:15 PM on March 15, 2005

I've heard HSBC bank is good in that they will take your foreign credit into account when opening up lines of credit in a new country. You might want to look into setting up an account with them.
posted to Ask MetaFilter by reverendX at 1:19 PM on August 12, 2006

GMAC is the finance arm of General Motors and they've been a big help to ex-pats who've recently arrived in the states. GM sells cars all over the world and GM finances cars in most of those countries. I'm retired now but used to work in auto dealer management and GMAC was the only option to many buyers who were new to the US. Thay can rate your credit in your home country and base their judgement on that rather than your lack of credit in the US. The finance arms of other car makes may also be... [more]
posted to Ask MetaFilter by buggzzee23 at 2:10 PM on August 12, 2006

Cyrusdogstar, you're talking about the Internet Health Report, I think.
posted to Ask MetaFilter by donnagirl at 2:56 PM on September 12, 2005

There's no guarantee they aren't. We in the private sector realistically have no idea how advanced the government's cryptography systems really are.

I'm reminded of the first US standard algorithm, DES. Back in '75 during the evaluation phase the NSA modified seemingly inconsequential portions of DES before accepting it as a standard. It took researchers working in the private sector until 1990 to figure out that the tweaks greatly improved DES's resistance to... [more]
posted to Ask MetaFilter by crunchyk9 at 4:14 PM on August 11, 2006

"Blog", in this case, is insufficiently specific. There are some types of blogs (LiveJournal, Xanga) where, despite being obviously publicly available, the social convention is to treat the blog as a semi-private space. And then there's the high-traffic "i like readers" blogs about, say, politics or food or technology, where the entire intent is to communicate to the public.

I'm assuming you're talking about the former type of blog, in which case it's... [more]
posted to Ask MetaFilter by anildash at 10:52 PM on August 9, 2006

I am in your base killing your d00ds.
posted to Ask MetaFilter by mr_roboto at 12:59 PM on August 9, 2006

Not meant as a derail, but if you are in Chicago, have you checked out Timber Creek Organics? Local, organic and they deliver produce, meat, dairy and bakery items.
posted to Ask MetaFilter by jeanmari at 5:37 AM on August 9, 2006

The Broadway Antique Market is great place to find what you're looking for. It's an antique mall but most of the dealers deal in hip and modern stuff. There's tons of inexpensive artwork.

Happy hunting!
posted to Ask MetaFilter by Bighappyfunhouse at 5:02 PM on August 8, 2006

Extracting smokable DMT crystals from plant material.
posted to Ask MetaFilter by jack_mo at 8:11 AM on August 4, 2006

I second the ozone generator. I worked at a hotel for a while and that's what we used when a couple of guys were smoking pot in their room. Worked great.
posted to Ask MetaFilter by drleary at 1:41 PM on August 2, 2006

I think it's going to be difficult to come up with many examples like that, precisely because in retrospect if a war was avoided then it won't seem to have been inevitable -- since it didn't actually happen.

Such few cases as I suspect would fit your criteria, the reason war was avoided was because one side surrendered without a fight.

For example, the German conquest of Czechoslovakia in principle should have resulted in war, because France and... [more]
posted to Ask MetaFilter by Steven C. Den Beste at 11:22 PM on July 27, 2006

I'm recommending Shangri-La once again. The guy who invented it ended up with such low body fat that his friends were asking if he had a serious illness. He felt fine, but he actually had to gain some fat back to make them stop asking that. Should be worth a try.
posted to Ask MetaFilter by kindall at 5:03 PM on July 27, 2006

Maybe find someone with a really hairy (human) baby?
posted to Ask MetaFilter by EndsOfInvention at 5:02 PM on July 27, 2006

to Behcet disease

I had the same idea: it really sounds like Behcet

I love the Internet because it's the only place where I, a law school dropout, can actually diagnose people
posted to Ask MetaFilter by matteo at 12:14 PM on July 20, 2006

Wait until he's looking in your direction, then casually lick your eyebrows.
posted to Ask MetaFilter by RavinDave at 11:26 PM on July 18, 2006

Previously has nothing to do with this.

Rice continues to expand in the human body, plus it leeches liquid from the lining of the throat and esophagus. I put some oil in with the rice after the water has boiled down. This helps tons.
posted to Ask MetaFilter by parmanparman at 3:18 PM on July 14, 2006

I get crazy email all the time from magicians asking me to delete stuff on ask mefi because we are giving away their secrets.

magic blows.
posted to MetaTalk by mathowie at 9:01 AM on May 11, 2006

It's called "jamais vu" and is mentioned in the deja vu entry in Wikipedia.
posted to Ask MetaFilter by zadcat at 10:08 PM on July 11, 2006

My suggestion: start your own garden. Even if you're stuck in an apartment with a small balconey, you can likely grow enough to make your own self happy. Check out the "Square Foot Gardening" sites for details.
posted to Ask MetaFilter by five fresh fish at 4:16 PM on July 9, 2006

This is a problem that started during the Nixon administration. See, there's a really cheap, effective, easy answer to most of the kind of pain that's undertreated in the US: morphine. It works really well.

And any doctor who is suspected of overprescribing it can lose his license to practice medicine, and can even land in prison. Who judges it? Well, the Drug Enforcement Administration does.

As a result, doctors have for a long time now been... [more]
posted to MetaFilter by Steven C. Den Beste at 11:17 PM on July 1, 2006

This whole thread makes me cringe.

NYC party photographer here, and I take many pics at parties myself. My style does indeed ape the stuff on lastnightsparty.com, except I attend events that have substantially less cocaine, substantially smarter people, and substantially less ridiculous attire. I don't hold this against Merlin at all, I think his work rocks. I think he gets shots that are amazing, and that he finds himself in situations (ex: as a stranger, in people's... [more]
posted to MetaFilter by brianvan at 12:46 AM on June 24, 2006

Let's see... problems with supporting SSL:
It doesn't work with name-based virtual hosting, which means Matt would have to put every subdomain on a different IP address, possibly costing increased hosting fees.
It would consume more CPU time on an already arguably overloaded server.
A certificate costs money, and he'd need one for every domain.
Bandwidth usage would go up as many browsers do not cache SSL pages.
Any page where a user... [more]
posted to MetaTalk by Rhomboid at 1:55 PM on July 3, 2006

Seems like you're not the only person looking for this book - see this Google answers thread, which reveals that the answer is "It can't always be caviar/The Monte Cristo Cover-Up (alternate titles)" and provides some more information as well.
posted to Ask MetaFilter by teleskiving at 1:49 AM on June 30, 2006 marked best answer

A lot of double doors latch one door into the floor and top rail of the door frame, and the door that opens just latches to that fixed door. It's an easy set up to install, and doesn't come out of alignment in use frequently.

Double doors in multi-story buildings are often there for emergency access issues, with the expectation being that both doors will only be open in fire situations, or perhaps times when large objects are being moved in or out of the building through... [more]
posted to Ask MetaFilter by paulsc at 9:51 PM on June 29, 2006 marked best answer

If one were to decide based on karyotype rather than on which organisms produce the larger gamete, then we would have to conclude that women (with two of the same type of sex chromosome) are the same sex as roosters (who also have two of the same type of sex chromosome, whereas female chickens have two different types of sex chromosome).
posted to Ask MetaFilter by grouse at 9:47 AM on June 28, 2006

I've used Wegener Media successfully in the past. They repaired some dents in a PowerBook G4 for me. It was not cheap, exactly, but it was a lot cheaper than going through Apple. You can call them and they can give you a rough quote over the phone. Then when they get the laptop, they can call you with the details. They are *fast* on the turnaround, which is nice.
posted to Ask MetaFilter by zpousman at 11:57 AM on June 27, 2006

Our subjective experience of thought (for most people as an "inner voice") is an illusion. Thought in fact is a highly organized form of associative memory access and filtration. We think about something and our memory tries to bring out anything which might be relevant. Then there's a filtration step which examines all those things and decides which ones really make sense. The whole process is highly parallel, which is why the "inner voice" illusion is so misleading; that... [more]
posted to Ask MetaFilter by Steven C. Den Beste at 7:09 PM on June 16, 2006

I don't think there is. It's a hardware thing, not a software thing.

What you can do is press ctrl-cmd-option-8, and it'll invert the colors. Makes it a bit easier to read when there's a lot of glare outside. (Also, it freaks people out.)
posted to Ask MetaFilter by danb at 6:36 PM on June 16, 2006 marked best answer

You think so why, exactly?

I worked for 25 years as a software engineer, including as a consultant for a while. I don't think that there will be many who are eager to hire someone who spends a few months reading books and then hangs out a shingle.

There's a lot more to software development than simply picking up facility with one or more languages. Writing code is the easy part. The hard part is doing design,... [more]
posted to Ask MetaFilter by Steven C. Den Beste at 2:31 PM on June 4, 2006

Well if you sent her a money order, you know where she lives (I assume) so you have an address.

My recommend? Write some letters

There's over 1400 Federal agencies. In CA there's close to 1200 state agencies. And throw in my city of LA and there's another 1300 municipal agencies.

Wherever she lives, start writing. ANy agency that might remotely be connected with your situation should get a letter. Most contain bureaucrats... [more]
posted to Ask MetaFilter by rileyray3000 at 2:21 PM on June 1, 2006 marked best answer