Matthew Miner's Basic-ish BlogMatthew Miner's Blog

A moderate tragedy struck my small family recently. My wife began having pain on the left side of her mouth. She found a dentist, and got the problematic cavities fixed, but her teeth still hurt. She tried to be patient, and Sensodyne helped, but she still has pain anytime she eats or drinks anything hot or cold and worse: anytime she drinks coffee.

I wouldn't say she's an addict, but my wife is still a coffee aficionado. She drinks it most days both for sharpness and scrumptiousness. The pain...

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My wife is huge fan of the Nancy Drew games, so since we've been playing through them, which has been quite fun for both of us. However, some of them are rather old at this point, which occasionally causes some problems. I recently bought Nancy Drew: Secret of the Old Clock on Steam. We played it for a few hours Friday night, then went to play it again yesterday, only to be greeted by the following error:

So it says "DirectDraw" in there. That's an old graphic API in Microsoft's DirectX...

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My firm received an interesting email yesterday from a Gmail address:

Hello [name],

I have been contacted by Holy Cross Hospital regarding purchasing our Cardiac Magnetic Resonance Imaging Equipment. We have been negotiating and I have agreed to sell The 2012 used GE Discovery MR450 MRI Equipment to Holy Cross Hospital, 2701 W 68th St, Chicago, IL 60629. We have discussed and agreed on the purchase price and outlined terms for the transaction. I need your legal assistance to help draft a...

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Bitcoin is commonly known to those with more than a cursory knowledge of it to be a horribly inefficient product. Indeed, its very premise is to use large amounts of energy computing pointless math problems to prevent fraud without having a trusted agent verifying transactions. Yet, if you search about it's energy consumption compared to that of traditional banking, you'll just find tons of copy-and-pasted fluff pieces about how Bitcoin only uses half of much energy as traditional banking. Is this true? How can this be?

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There's a lot of talk about student debt forgiveness. (And not the forgiveness of PSLF for public service.) On the campaign trail Biden promised to forgive $10,000 of each student loan debtor, although this promise has seemingly been broken. Currently he's just extending Trump's pause, seemingly waiting for elections to pass. People who are further left even want a one-time forgiveness of all student loan debt.

Student loan debt is a huge issue. Currently public student loan debt totals...

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If you're anything like me, you've spent the last week or two getting spam notifications on Google Drive almost every day. These typically say something about how hot local singles just want you so bad and come with porn images to try to lure men with zero willpower into clicking some link that I'm sure eventually leads to you letting some person on the other side of the world do horrible, malicious things to your computer.

You know Google doesn't care about you at all and there's no chance yo...

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