things i've learned so i don't get screwed buying tires
Every time I have to get new tires, I hate it because there are a thousand different ways to get screwed buying these things. I've been buying tires for close to 30 years, both for cars and trucks I've owned. In that time, I've come up with a few ways to get screwed less.
I do love one-liners that I can do on the command line in Linux, and this one has to do with TAR archives.
TAR, on its own, doesn't encrypt anything. This being true, a separate utility has to be used to encrypt it. The easiest one is GPG.
I learned this one the hard way, but fortunately I didn't wreck my coffee maker.
One would think that using distilled water would be better than tap for brewing coffee, right? That's what I thought. I was wrong.
One time in my life I had an arcade machine in the house. It was a video arcade game, Mortal Kombat 3. I think I had it for a year or maybe slightly longer, then sold it. I've no regrets about that whatsoever.
Once or twice a year I'll go play some arcade machines. I enjoy the games, but I am VERY glad I don't have to maintain these things.
Navigation is wrong, and often. This is how to make it right, and also make it very easy to store locations for retrieval later.
To this day I see negative Amazon reviews from people who bought computer media storage and believe they got scammed - except they didn't.
One of the more common ones are people who buy a 512GB flash drive, plug it in to their computer or phone, see a total storage limit of 476, and immediately think they got ripped off. Wrong. The number is accurate.
I recently did a massive reorganization of all my backups, which included thousands of JPG files I had to move around.
The JPG image format has been around for over 30 years. Yeah, that long. JPG goes all the way back to 1992. As old as it is, it's still the best image format. However, I wanted to see if the newer formats available were any good, so I did some tests, and here's what I came up with.
Since I started using DVD again for long term data storage, I've had ups and downs with this. Things were off to a rocky start at first, and it took me a few tries (along with several discs that ended up being nothing but "coasters" due to bad writes) before I found out what worked.
I figured I might as well document all this here since a lot of this is sprawled across the internet in hard-to-find places. I've mentioned some of what's below before but will also put it here to keep all the info in one spot.
If you took a Fender Stratocaster and tastefully modified it for modern play, what you would end up with is the Pacifica. This is the guitar Yamaha can build that Fender can't because they're not "allowed" to.
I'll explain.
This may be a small thing, but it was mighty convenient.
Flash drives. Tons of them are out there. Easy, cheap data storage, except something is missing that they had before...
...an indicator light.
