Dan's Data

> I don't know anyone in my life who's heard of the site besides my uncle, but I enjoy showing it to friends and coworkers as an example of the type of website I grew up with, and which stands in a class of its own, at least to me.

I came across the site when I read Daniel Rutter’s Dan’s Data(1) pre-blog blog in the early-2000s when I was devouring everything about Palm devices as a geeky teenager. Dan had a tendency to link terms and phrases to sites that discussed what he meant in detail. Everything2 was his go-to for a lot of references and it soon became mine. Before a certain point, I think I was looking stuff up on E2 before looking on Wikipedia.

A few years later, I found my group of “wholehearted geeky but well-masking” friends in university. A couple of them also read Everything2, and the discovery of this site was one of those subconscious things that nudged us closer together.

I hope this site stays up forever, and I am disappointed it does not often come up in search results for random topics.

Of note, E2 has indeed had a small change in the last decade, and that was the main interface colour going from Burnt Orange to Purple.

(1) http://www.dansdata.com/

Phones already do that. It's the bar graph we already have.

There are multiple reasons why it's not terribly useful:

1.) Signal quality depends on many different variables, and fluctuates wildly from second to second. You can have a great signal at one moment, but if the guy next to you starts a call, the radio in their phone will ramp up to the full 500mW, and drowns out the tower. You can have a signal graph that realistically reflects "signal strength", and it'll jitter constantly, and the grandmas will complain.

2.) Marketing.

Good overview: http://www.dansdata.com/gz084.htm

As you may have noticed from every cell phone advertisement in the last decade, marketing is heavily invested in the notion of bars. It's in brands, logos, ad copy, everything. More bars are better.

If engineers ran the company, they'd just stick the SNR in dBm at the top of the screen and it'd be wonderfully pure and objective; and everybody else would hate it, and the company would go bankrupt. So we have "bars", and the bars lie.

>You set the price when you consume the content that you know is funded with ads.

You're objectively wrong. If that were the case, I would be blocked from accessing the content without "paying the price".

The situation is instead clearly analogous to a "pay what you feel it is worth" model.

The creators of the content allow anyone to view it, regardless of whether they run an ad blocker or not. Sometimes, they place alternative content where the ads would be, requesting that I disable my ad blocker, or like them on facebook as an alternative.

I think the "recommended price" of this "pay what you feel it is worth" model, which is usually watching advertising and allowing myself to be tracked, is too high.

I have once or twice directly sent the creator $5-10, when they offered a payment method that didn't require a paypal account. If it's good content, that's pretty reasonable. Dans Data[1] /is/ good content, even if it's getting a bit dated these days.

[1] http://www.dansdata.com

I got RSI like 15 years ago. The only thing that's worked for me long term when I'm actually doing coding all day long, is a combination of:

a) a keyboard holder below the desk - something similar to https://kw.pricenacdn.com/files/images/products/original/14/Fellowes-Keyboard-Holder-and-Office-Suites-Mice_3145576_45ae0a57ac523fe92e4159d6ecc149aa_t.jpg - I got mine from IKEA a long time ago - unfortunately they discontinued that product - the key thing here is the get the keyboard as close to your legs as possible, i.e. enabling your arms to be purely horizontally oriented while typing - or ideally even sort of downwards-pointing.

b) Microsoft Natural Keyboard Pro - manufactured 1999-2001 (e.g. https://mechanicalkeyboardtryout.blogspot.com/2016/03/microsoft-natural-keyboard-pro-image.html or http://www.dansdata.com/nkpro.htm) I have two of these; they're very durable. You'll need to wash the key caps in your dishwasher once a year.

And I'd call a computer with 2 hours of battery runtime a desktop with a UPS. :) I jest.

That said, I think the Dell is okay in terms of connections. There's seemingly half a dozen video output plugs at the moment, including one that's been around since 1952[0]. I'd rather buy 4 adapting cables than have more than one video out on a subnotebook.

Getting data on/off seems easy: there's wifi, there's 3 USB ports for everything else[1]. Spinning (optical) disks? Really? Might as well put a LTO tape drive in there. I'd have like Ethernet, too, but in those cases where you're most likely to need it (at home, in the office), it's easy to stash an adapter.

[0] I'm not even kidding. http://www.dansdata.com/gz061.htm
[1] Also bluetooth. And there's an SD card reader, if your development process includes taking photos. External optical drives are like, 20 bucks.

That coating of thermal grease looks WAY too thick.

It also looks like he's measuring the temperature of the heat sink rather than the temperature of the die. If your thermal compound is acting as an insulator, then your heat sink is going to be nice and cold. (That smoke you smell is your processor melting through the bottom of your case, however.)

Finally, if you want to test heatsinks, it's better to use a resistive heating element instead of the CPU. You can't control how much heat the CPU is putting out (what with automatic frequency scaling and whatnot), but you can control how much current you are pumping through a resistor. Dan's Data has an article about this:

http://www.dansdata.com/coolercomp.htm