Category: English

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When I See Toilet Seats Twice A Day, I Must Report It

The old toilet seat “fight between the sexes” will probably always be a mystery to me. While I always return the seat to its previous position when I’m in someone else’s place, I wouldn’t mind lifting it and lowering it back as much as needed in my own home.

Having said that, it turns out that the issue is subject to actual research. Not much research, but who would have thought? And for those of you who really have a hard time doing the seat up-seat down thing, here’s the PeaceMaker Toilet Seat Lifter.

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Inbox Zero – Merlin Mann’s Video

My email Inbox folder at work currently holds 181 items. Most of them are there because they need some kind of a follow-up, but I can’t deal with them right now or the action to be taken is in the future. Merlin Mann is a well known figure in the productivity and GTD (Getting Things Done) world (Merlin Mann’s website). Recently he gave a great talk at Google, called Inbox Zero, which is the name of his system for handling very large amounts of email.

After watching the video and taking action I now have 21 items in my Inbox folder. Soon to be zero.

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3D Mailbox Email Client – Good Or Bad?

3D Mailbox is an email client that visualizes the emails you get as people in a 3D environment. It is very hard to describe, so you can either read this Download Squad review of 3D Mailbox or see the 1 minute trailer (I didn’t get it until I read the review, though).

Download Squad, in a nice attempt to be impartial, interviewed the creator of 3D Mailbox, Robert Savage. It’s obvious from the interview that Mr. Savage believes his product is innovative and that outside-the-box-thinkers (and gamers) will sure like it. I guess only time will tell.

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Funny Stuff That Makes YouTube Great

There has been a lot of talk about YouTube’s problem with protected (copyrighted) videos users upload to the site. However, YouTube has a lot of original content created by users. I believe that’s actually YouTube’s creators’ original intentions, but who knows.

One of these users calls himself Doctor Ashen. He creates his own original videos (all of his videos here), but I especially like his reviews of crappy electronics, both modern and oldies. Here are some examples:

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What Is SIG32 During a GDB Debug Session?

Sometimes, when debugging with GDB on Linux, the debugger may stop with the following notification:

Program received signal SIG32, Real-time event 32.

This may be a little confusing and mislead you to think something is wrong with the debugged program, as I have thought when I first saw this message.

However, this is not an error. glibc uses SIG32 to signal the cancellation of threads created using the pthread library. That’s why, if and when you need to do some operation with all signals in the system, you must start from the minimum defined by SIGRTMIN and not the real (kernel) minimum, __SIGRTMIN. SIGRTMIN is defined in /usr/include/signal.h.

To disable these notifications inside GDB, so that you won’t be bothered with thread cancellation again, type the following inside GDB:

handle SIG32 nostop

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Are You Living In a Computer Simulation?

The movie Matrix was based on the idea that we all live in a simulated world while being physically located inside incubator-type containers during our entire lives. Now named The Simulation Argument, here’s a website that discusses a paper on the possibility that we actually live in a simulated world and the debate that follows that paper. The abstract itself lays down the very intriguing idea:

This paper argues that at least one of the following propositions is true: (1) the human species is very likely to go extinct before reaching a โ€œposthumanโ€ stage; (2) any posthuman civilization is extremely unlikely to run a significant number of simulations of their evolutionary history (or variations thereof); (3) we are almost certainly living in a computer simulation. It follows that the belief that there is a significant chance that we will one day become posthumans who run ancestor-simulations is false, unless we are currently living in a simulation. A number of other consequences of this result are also discussed.

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Some Soft Drinks May Seriously Harm Your Health

I previously linked to an article about what happens to your body if you drink a coke. Now there’s a new study that “suggests a common preservative found in drinks such as Fanta and Pepsi Max has the ability to switch off vital parts of DNA”. Reading this was the last straw for me. Up until now I drank quite a lot of Diet Coke in an attempt to avoid the calories, but this is simply too much. A co-worker of mine classifies all these drinks as “poison”. I can see why now.

While I drink a lot of water during and after my workouts and during lunches, I still want something else sometimes. Since the health issue is more important than the calories issue, I (almost completely) switched to 100% pure orange juice. Hopefully this won’t come with a weight gain.

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Microsoft Surface Parody Video

If you actually read this blog, you may remember that I found something funny in Microsoft’s Surface promotional videos (post link):

One thing I thought was funny in the videos was when the handsome young man and woman sit in front of each other in a pub and then, naturally, start playing with the computer on both sides of the table.

I wasn’t the only one who thought that, apparently. Here’s a parody video that dubs over Microsoft’s.