Been doing email since it began. Same frustrations.

Solutions (workarounds):

1. Email is structured with "executive summary" & "detail". That way I can write all the words I want but people can only read the first paragraph.
2. Never ask questions. Tell them what I'm going to choose, & give them opportunity to disagree. That way if they don't respond usefully I can take their "non-response" as a response & proceed anyway.
3. If I need to ask a question, use a phone call or go to their desk, or (shudder) make a meeting.

Not sure if this counts (as a car), but it was a three wheeler (Reliant Robin), gutless and rattly, all the fun of going 50 mph without breaking the speed limit. All the engine weight was directly on the front wheel, so the back end (no weight at all) would slide out wonderfully around corners.

A long time ago I was repairing my dad's camera, I found an article describing the exact fault & a link to how to fix it, but the link was dead.

Used the wayback machine to find a text only copy of the fix (no pictures) which was enough.

Was immensely proud that someone had had the idea to invent the IA & have been recommending it ever since.

I guess it's more likely the list was drawn up before paramedic was a thing, and then no one thought to change it. The low effort option.

The nice thing about buying something like that is that you can modify it.

Computer doesn't fit because this bit is in the way? Chop it out.

Need some more holes in the back? Drill more holes!

This vertical strut is in the way of that other thing & it only fits here because that's where the mounting holes are? Make some new mounting holes.

The whole thing is 25 mm (1") too deep? Cut 25 mm (1") off the back.

As others have said, if your VMs are Linux, set up unattended_updates and forget about it.

If your VMs are windows, then Action1 is free up to 200 clients, it does need an agent installed, but that auto updates too.

Actually they might (in my experience) be interested enough to listen if you can dumb it down enough: e.g. I found this thing that wasn't very well written and I re-wrote it and now it runs 1,000 times faster. You probably need to ELI5 to manglement anyway, so why not for the family too? Hopefully they'll respond to your enthusiasm if nothing else.

Your dynamic is perhaps different, but you do have the empathy (or whatever) to know that it's different.

And of course if you fix things proactively (before they happen) then that's likely to be expenditure which will be seen as unnecessary if/when it doesn't happen. So:

a) the best way to do it

AND

b) management will hate you for it.

Yeah. I retired a year ago, every now & then I say to myself "I'm sure I had a script for that..." bit then I can't find it of course, which makes me sad.

Oh & I used to sign in to GitHub with a username & password, then GitHub said I needed to change my password, and emailed me a link to my old work address, which I can no longer access.

So I'm going to have to fork my own stuff!

Very nice! Well done 👍🏼

"Also car has great visibility forward and fuck all backwards, rear view mirror is like double the size of the rear window (in the reflection, not side by side)."

Yeah - this is exactly why you should reverse park. When you come out again into potentially a stream of traffic, if you reverse park, you're coming out forwards, you can see them & they can see you. If you forward park you have literally no idea what you're backing out into.

Interesting article, I agree with his analysis, not sure (yet) that I agree with his conclusions. My brain needs to think about it in the background for a bit (just the way mine works).

TLDR: we should expect conversational interfaces to be an addition to the workflows we currently use.

That's often the case, or for a smaller garage they will do (if you ask for it) a pre-inspection/service & then take it somewhere else to be tested. AFAIK It's allowed to be driven on the road without a valid MOT if it's on the way to or from an appointment at a testing centre, and a retest is free.

That was fantastic! 😊

I remember WordPerfect when it was still a DOS program. The simplicity of "this format code affects all text after it" was elegant.

And then we got Word foisted on us, with "this format code (which you have no way of viewing) affects the block of text before it" so if you accidentally delete or move that format code then you screw up a seemingly random bunch of text. And here we are.

The only paid app I've got is Sound Profile. Puts the phone on quiet (except for family) at night, or silent (with auto resume to normal) in meetings. It's on my & spouse's phones.

I always loved reading Joel's stuff, clear & well thought out. It was especially exciting when they were building Stack Overflow, but that's kinda got buried now. Things come & things go...

Some say the mice are testing us (Douglas Adams)

How do we know that lots of people didn't figure this out & then got on with their lives? Because there was no way for them to tell all the other people in the world, we'll never know, or if they wrote it down it's been lost, so likewise we'll never know.

Is hard to imagine what the world was like before mass literacy and mass communication.

I've noticed that whenever there's a group of people together, someone will be the leader, it doesn't matter who the group are, there will be a leader & everyone will know it.

Now that leader has a choice to be a bully, or someone who tries not to be a leader.

So yes we absolutely need to train our kids what good (inclusive) leadership looks like, so they can either follow those people, or be those people.