I hate places that drop ship from Amazon.

In my experience, Excel gets a lot of developer hate primarily for two reasons.

1.) They’ve seen it abused way too often. Things like using a workbook as a database or placing a copy to a shared one on everybody’s desktop and treating it like it’s a distinct application. In total fairness, Excel was not designed for either of those scenarios.

2.) They don’t know how to use it effectively.

To be clear, I’m no Microsoft fan and there are legitimate things to hate about Excel. But, it can be a very valuable tool in your toolbox if used properly.

Excel’s bread and butter is data analysis and for that it is a phenomenal tool. Despite many claims to the contrary that I’ve heard over the years, none of the other spreadsheet programs currently available can fully match it’s capabilities.

I can take data sets from a variety of different sources and parse, combine, refine, and distill them down to a really nice looking report that someone upstairs can read in a small fraction of the time it would take me to whip up an application to accomplish the same thing. If they want to adjust the the fields on the report, it’s super easy to make some quick changes to a pivot table.

There is a point where Excel is no longer the best tool for the job. In my opinion, the most obvious indicator that this point has been reached is when there’s a need for multiple people to manipulate the contents of a workbook. When that starts happening, it’s time to look for a more scalable solution. If data in an Excel workbook is being used as the “source of truth”, as in raw data is being stored in it rather than it pulling the raw data from elsewhere, that’s a recipe for disaster.

That said, I also realize that not every organization has the same resources. I’ve worked with plenty of small non-profits that don’t have the money to hire devs to create nice fancy software suites for them and primarily work off of spreadsheets. It’s not ideal but it’s understandable. If they’re doing good work, I’m not going to judge them too harshly for using Excel as a database. In those situations, I usually suggest having a comprehensive disaster recovery plan and solid, frequent data backups.

One of my old bosses, who was an electrical engineer, liked to say, “The choices are often not between right and wrong but somewhere between worst and best”. Sometimes Excel is a good tool for the job. Sometimes it isn’t. Knowing when a particular tool is the right one is learned by experience.

My electric bill last month would have been $1,700 at that rate. We would just have to freeze to death.

What’s funny is their attempts to rebrand Office have just fallen completely flat. Kind of reminds me of when Willis Group bought the naming rights to Sears Tower and all the Chicagoan’s were just collectively like, “Yeah, No. We’re still going to call it ‘Sears Tower’.” Hell, nobody that I know of calls it “Willis Tower.” Nobody calls Microsoft Office “Office 365”. Nobody is going to call it “Microsoft 365 Copilot.” This is just a huge waste of effort by a tech firm that has long since run out of ways to be innovative.

I’ve always found it interesting how brands that are either not household names or have been mostly forgotten shaped technology that we use every day. You can find LED bulbs or cheap electronics with the Curtis-Mathes brand nowadays but back in the 60’e and 70’s, they set the standard for repairable TV’s, at least in the US. They basically modularized everything to where there were like 10 replacable parts and the repairman carried all of those with him. They could swap out a bad component in minutes.

Another one that was never a household name is Allen Organ Company. They make electronic pipe organs, which replicate the sounds of an actual pipe organ, sans pipes. In the early 70’s they created the first fully digital organ. It had a small computer that generated the tones. Even though it had a several large PCB’s and a pretty big footprint for its limited capabilities compared to computers today, at the time it was a pretty impressive feat.

Delivery services hate this one simple trick: Going out to eat/takeout.

I lolled at this comment.

☹️

Salesforce needs no help ruining their own image. Their software is just a giant smoldering pile of shit.

Well he promised to “run it like a business.” Unfortunately, most of his business experience is scams and running casinos into the ground.

CT Scan imagery. Apparently medical clinics have finally graduated from faxes to optical media. This was in 2025.

Not that I know of. The shift to Bittorrent after Limewire’s demise pretty much killed new Gnutella client development. There are a few desktop clients still under “active maintenance” but most of them haven’t been updated in ages.

Gnutella network is definitely still active, athough not even close to the level it once was. It has plenty of drawbacks but one of the few advantages over torrents is that it doesn’t need trackers. Just enough clients online to connect with one another.

You can even still find Shareaza with a quick search.

I often VPN to my home network while on the go. The overall web experience is so much worse without DNS level ad blocking.

Forgot substance abuse and suicide.

Those Protectli Vaults are neat little devices.

It definitely makes it more difficult to switch endpoints manually. I have multiple VPN connections with different exit nodes configured for failover in case one (or more) of them is unreachable. I don’t run into geoblocking issues very often but I also don’t route all my WAN traffic over VPN. Just some of it.

What you can automate depends on your routers capabilities. Mine is a Mikrotik which does have fairly extensive support for custom scripts. However, detecting Geoblocking is probably going to involve parsing HTTP responses which is beyond the capabilities of almost all consumer grade routers. You would have to effectively do a MITM attack (aka deep packet inspection) in order to accomplish that on something other than the client device.

TLDR: I manually change routes to a different VPN if needed but I very rarely run into Geoblocking issues.

I exclusively use my router as the VPN client for a few reasons. There are multiple services on my network that use the VPN. I’ve got static routes configured which effectively act as a kill switch and I can use QOS to prioritize traffic. It’s pretty much set it and forget it. You can use any VPN service as long at they offer a protocol your router supports. I use Proton via WireGuard and have for years.

Once again, I would like to thank stupid politicians and greedy media conglomerates for their contributions to media piracy. If not for all their hard work, we would still be playing Russian Roulette with shitty DIVX rips on Limewire.

Employing the chiplets can reduce 50 percent of power needs for an operator, effectively doubling performance, the company claims.

Reducing power consumption is good but those efficiency gains don’t directly translate to better performance. That claim is a stretch at best.

The regulator is designed to be installed in very close proximity to the chip it powers. I wonder what kind of impact it would have on the chips ability to disapate heat since the regulator itself would be generating heat as well.

learn prompts engineering

“Can you please do it right this time? Pretty please?”