I can confirm that us Brits do like to have a good old whinge ;) A national trait that's for sure. Personally, I don't notice people whinging quite as much as they did as when I was younger, I feel possibly we've absorbed a bit of the American positive thinking mentality. But certainly wonder how this shows itself on surveys. Its quite possible that Brits when asked in a survey, say their life is "s**" then having had the fantastic privilege that day, of whinge-ing in a survey as well as to anyone around them who fancies listening, they go on their merry way, quite cheerful for having told someone extra how terrible everything is. ;)
Because when the grocery store employee picks the fruit for you online order they don’t care about getting the ripe ones with no blemishes.
Additionally they seem to always pick the perishables with the closest expiry date. IE milk from the front of the shelf that is expiring tomorrow rather than the stuff at the back that has 7 days before expiry.
Around 10 years ago i worked in a company that had lots of software and physical VOIP phones. One of the models of phone had a pretty nice colour screen on it. I forget the brand .. it might have been polycom.
At that time I was very much into nmap'ing everything and noticed that these devices had all sorts of interesting ports open including telnet and ftp. FTP was read only for anonymous but it was trivial to download and crack the passwd file and discover that the admin password was something like 1234. My colleagues and I only got as far as showing images on the screen to surprise people but my imagination was running wild with the surveillance possibilities (let alone doom!).
This was one of my first glimpses as how bad security on commercial embedded devices can be.
Interesting. Do you think these phones were made that way by design? I am having a real hard time believing people with capability to produce these products are unable to secure them in any meaningful way.
IME, it is sort of by design.
I have worked for a number of companies developing forms of embedded products. It often felt like nobody really felt like the product was 'complete' until we were 8 or so major releases into things. So you wind up with things like SSH, FTP, etc. either directly enabled, or easily enabled via a not-very-well-hidden method to allow the dev or support teams to get into devices that were not behaving properly in the field so that they could diagnose/fix issues.
It's only been about the last 4 years or so that companies have started to realize the risks in operating this way, and I feel that a lot of that has been brought on by the end-user/buyer organization starting to require cyber security audits and asking more questions about cyber security during the buying cycle.
Indeed. The biggest immediate risk to a newly developed product is that it won't even have any users, much less a sufficiently interested attacker. So why add initial obstacles for yourself, right? So yeah, if effort to increase security is not valued by the buyer it ain't gonna happen.
I have been suffering from gout for the last 4 years or so (36 y/o now) with roughly 1 attack per year, prominently in the right big toe. There is a history of gout in my family. More recently I've had the odd time where I have mild symptoms - pain in foot rather than toe and still able to limp around without too much issue. I have wanted to avoid taking allopurinol daily and have done a lot of research to find more natural / dietary solutions without really finding any silver bullet. Interesting things i have come across:
1. There is at least one study showing Lemon Juice it can lower uric acid levels in humans[1] seemingly by lowering PH of urine.
2. Tart cherry juice is mentioned a lot as a cure. There are a quite a few studies[2]. Make sure and get the tart cherry (Montmorency) juice, you can get it in a concentrated syrup. My uncle says he has not had an attack since he started drinking a generic supermarket tart juice every day. I have never had an attack whilst taking cherry juice but i haven't been taking it consistently.
3. Interesting article linking fructose and gout which matched my intuition a lot more than the link with meat - https://tim.blog/2009/10/05/gout/
4. Hot bath with epsom salts seems to temporarily ease symptoms.
I personally haven't noticed a correlation between eating meat / fish and gout attacks. I have gone from eating meat twice a day to about once a week now and there has been no noticeable change in the gout.
> 2. Tart cherry juice is mentioned a lot as a cure. There are a quite a few studies[2]. Make sure and get the tart cherry (Montmorency) juice, you can get it in a concentrated syrup. My uncle says he has not had an attack since he started drinking a generic supermarket tart juice every day. I have never had an attack whilst taking cherry juice but i haven't been taking it consistently.
Tart Cherry Extract capsules are another option. Gout pain relief within hours. (Note, there is a drowsy/melatonin side effect with big doses)
Creams with high concentrations of menthol and methyl salicylate seem to help. Also applied to the ankle and knee (along with massage) to help stimulate circulation away from the big toe.
At this level of quality of speaker the accoustic properties of the room (and the location of the speakers) will have a bigger impact on the quality of the sound than spending more money on kit.
I have the M040 which are a newer and more environmentally friendly model aimed at bedroom producers (i believe). There is also a cheaper M030 model.
The M series offer only basic room response controls (e.g. if the speaker is located near a wall or in a corner). The parent alludes to much fancier calibration achieved with the use of a mic and DSP's in the speakers.
The other thing worth noting is that genelecs are very neutral sounding speakers and also (as they are designed as nearfield studio monitors) have a relatively small sweet spot. So maybe not the best choice to fill a big room at a party, but I love them very much :)
You probably don't want to buy Genelec "just because musician X swears by them or Steve Jobs had a pair at his desk". See this comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20587970
The cheap Polks I have in my living room make a whole lot more sense for that use case than any smaller Genelecs I could've gotten at trice the price. One of the few residential use cases where Genelecs make sense is as actual 'computer speakers' where you get to enjoy the intensity of that near-field sweet spot.
Even the G Ones plus the F One sub are terrific for this, but at a price where you could get a pretty nice basic home theater.
The pair of Genelec 8330A we use at the cottage are just big enough to be enjoyable for our sessions of couchlock debauchery, where we also turn up the volume, and take breaks in order to do so. And the room is super good sounding, too.
My musician friends are usually horrified when I say we listen to Genelecs (or any near field monitors) for fun. This kind of speaker are precision tools, made to be used in specific settings, to painstakingly obsess over adjustments in audio mixes.
Near field monitors are unforgiving and harsh sounding if set up wrong. And they will absolutely not flatter your source material. You usually need a companion subwoofer if you get near field monitors of any size, because they're deliberately made to give a flat frequency response, not to sound beefy, or give a room-filling sound at lower volumes.
