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

Sometimes I might say something

Cloning drives seems simple, but can be tricky. Dual booting can be a headache. Converting your MBR drive to GPT after doing both of those things is a nightmare.

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I recently saw a fascinating preprint of a paper testing GPT-3.5, currently the best public large language model, against the bar exam, the two-day test required to become a lawyer in the United States. As someone who has passed the bar exam and who is very interesting in programming, this intrigued me. I knew language processing had come a long way, but the bar exam requires months of study after years of law school to pass. Surely many seeing the rapid progress of GPT envision AI reaching th...

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The purpose of blockchains is to establish unchangeable records of digital assets without any trusted party. "Unchangeable" sounds good to prevent fraud, so some county recorders who seem to understand nothing about the law or technology, like Cook County's Karen Yarbrough, who thought blockchain made sense for government deed records, try to force blockchains onto physical property. But even on its face, this application of blockchains makes zero sense and only exists to appeal to the unwitti...

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I'm a lawyer, so I have a lot of files. There's always new clients coming in, so I keep needing more and more files. Obviously to identify these files, I print labels to stick on them. We use the very nice Avery 5166 Permanent Filing Labels for our files. These are quite nice as they and come on a standard letter-size paper with a template. Often times others have to print a list of labels for envelopes which you can't just print your list directly onto the envelopes. Thanks to the inventi...

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As I lay out in my (not) famous weight loss book, calorie control is key to any weight loss program. To accomplish this, I am/was a big fan of MyFitnessPal. It has an easy way to log calories on my phone or the web with a good searchable database, and it used to have a magical barcode scanner. I even got my cheapo smart scale's app to sync with MyFitnessPal through Google Fit so I don't even have to type my weight anymore like some plebeian.

However, it also has some veeerrryyy question...

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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:

InitDirectDraw(), SetDisplayMode() - DDERR_UNSUPPORTED - Action not supported.

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

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