Month: February 2018

Check out how the vehicle registration renewal works here. One of the conditions – passing an eco-friendliness test for emissions. You can go somewhere, and they’ll measure it for you in five minutes and give you a paper. Or you can go nowhere: RAPIDPASS will just send a letter to the owner of a randomly encountered vehicle on the road, via mail, stating that they ALREADY measured the emissions when you drove by the probe with a camera, and now for 28 bucks they’re ready to send this document to the local DMV. Or it sends info that everything is bad, and you need to go get treatment.

I just paid. And yes, you can also pay for the registration through the net, which I did too. And here’s the funny part: they give a ONE percent DISCOUNT on registration payment online. Not a surcharge, a discount!

In Europe from Washington fly Air France, British Airways, Delta, Brussels, United, Aeroflot, Austrian, and a few others.

For some reason, there is no information anywhere about which flights regularly go where from a specific airport. For example, let’s say I don’t care where to go on vacation, as long as it’s cheap. Which airline should I subscribe to?

In general, I couldn’t sleep at night, decided to quickly check manually what flies where from Washington. Not surprisingly, each airline flies home. Thought I would find examples when some, figuratively speaking, Aeroflot, regularly goes “left”. Didn’t find any)

I myself flew from Washington with United, Lufthansa, Iceland Air, Brussels Airlines, Air France, Emirates. Overall, they are listed in order of coolness. For instance, United has a terribly glitchy media system (important for a ten-hour flight). Lufthansa has a less glitchy system, but mediocre service, and weird planes. Air France surprised me with excellent everything. Iceland Air flies “not very far,” and they are budget, basically, they don’t even feed you.

Porter and Air Canada – to Toronto and Montreal.

Brussels – to Belgium (Brussels)

Air India – to Delhi.

Copa Airlines – to Panama (Panama City).

Qatar – obviously, to Qatar (Doha).

Aer Lingus – to Ireland (Dublin)

Virgin America, AA, JetBlue, Frontier, Delta, and Southwest fly throughout the USA

Alaska – also, to Seattle

Royal Air Maroc flies to Morocco (Casablanca).

Aeroflot – to Moscow

Emirates – to UAE (Dubai)

Etihad – to UAE (Abu Dhabi)

Saudia – to Saudi Arabia (Riyadh)

Aero Mexico – to Mexico (Mexico City)

South African Airways – to the Republic of Ghana (Accra), to Senegal (Dakar), and other cities in the region

Air China flies, of course, to China (Beijing)

Ethiopian flies to Ethiopia (Addis Ababa)

Air France flies to Paris

SAS flies to Denmark (Copenhagen)

Iceland Air flies to Iceland (Reykjavik)

Turkish Airlines flies to Turkey (Istanbul)

Ana – to Japan (Tokyo)

United flies everywhere. Throughout the USA, and to Europe, and Asia.

KLM flies to the Netherlands (Amsterdam)

Austrian flies to Austria (Vienna)

Korean flies to Korea (Seoul)

British Airways and Virgin Atlantic fly to England (London)

Avianca flies to Central and South America (San Salvador, Bogota)

Latan flies to Peru (Lima)

Lufthansa flies to Germany (Frankfurt)

CreditKarma presented me with a report on which leaks and hacks my data had been exposed. Just a typical service, there are many like it. Out of the list of 8 services, one was Russian (QIP, leak from 2011, 33M accounts). And guess which service was the only one on the list where passwords were stored in plain text, not as salted hashes? No matter how excellent our programmers in Russia might be, many projects are hastily put together and carelessly executed.

In the article linked, there is a symbol that, if sent via SMS or WhatsApp, will crash any outdated iPhone and cause dozens of Mac applications, including native ones, to crash. What’s worse, you can no longer access the message history for this user until you update, as the crash will occur every time you try to open the history.

This symbol causes any of the three browsers on my Mac to crash. Just paste it from the clipboard into the browser’s address bar, and without even pressing enter, the whole application crashes. This happens with Safari, Google Chrome, and Opera.

TechCrunch reports that this “symbol of death” causes Mail, Twitter, Messages, Slack, Instagram, and Facebook to crash. “While it initially appeared that the Chrome browser for Mac was unaffected and could safely display the symbol, it later crashed Chrome and the software would not reopen without crashing until uninstalled and reinstalled.”

https://techcrunch.com/2018/02/15/iphone-text-bomb-ios-mac-crash-apple/

Additionally, Facebook automatically marks any post containing this symbol as spam and deletes the entire text. I already did this about five minutes ago, and now, I am rewriting everything from scratch.

Even the Apple Watch crashes. So, update everything you have as soon as possible.

https://www.express.co.uk/life-style/science-technology/919343/iPhone-Text-Message-Crash-WhatsApp

Just an evil bug at Apple.

If you enter this symbol జ్ఞ‌ా into the address bar of any browser on a Mac (I tried with Google Chrome, Safari, and Opera), the browser crashes with a fatal error – you don’t even need to press enter. Just copy-paste. As far as I understand, this bug hasn’t been widely reported anywhere. Moreover, I can’t even search for it properly, as the browsers keep crashing 🙂

The same symbol in text messages, WhatsApp, and many other places will crash an iPhone unless it’s updated (an update has just been released). Moreover, once you receive a message with this symbol, you won’t be able to open that contact again, as the phone will keep resetting whenever you try to open the history.

https://www.express.co.uk/life-style/science-technology/919343/iPhone-Text-Message-Crash-WhatsApp

An interesting construction of doors at the museum. When closed, they form a showcase about 10 meters long

Interesting from the Chicago Manual of Style:

(night notes in the margins)

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I found out that verbs which always amazed me with their mutual transitivity have a special name – ergative. Thus, “change” can be used both as “to change something” and as “to change oneself”. For example, people change. Here I wrote about it a year and a half ago:

And here’s both a list and a description: https://learnenglish.britishcouncil.org/en/english-grammar/verbs/reflexive-and-ergative-verbs

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Along with, as well as, in addition to,

together with do NOT make the nouns before and after them plural. For example, in the sentence The bride as well as her bridesmaids was dressed in mauve, the correct form is was, not were.

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There is a preposition in English that consists of four words. “For the sake of” is a preposition.

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There’s a concept in linguistics called pied-piping. I don’t even know how to translate it: pied means mottled, piping is playing the pipe, and the phrase comes from the title of the fairy tale about the Pied Piper, who, as revenge for the king not paying him, lured all the children out of the town to the river using the same method. So, it’s when a question word pulls something else along. To whom did you speak? Which house did she buy?

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For example,

in 1220 the noun husband meant one who tilled and cultivated the earth {the husband has worked

hard to produce this crop}. It became a verb meaning to till, cultivate, and tend crops around 1420

{you must husband your land thoughtfully}.

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(to be continued)

Our curler and bobsledder got caught doping. What the hell do they need it for? Soon it’ll even reach the synchronized swimmers

Everyone knows about documents, spreadsheets, and presentations in Google Docs. It turns out, there is also a diagram editor. Quite decent. You can draw something collaboratively and share it for free. https://docs.google.com/drawings/

Zvyagintsev is indeed a great director, but he remains faithful to his gloominess and depression since “The Return”. Watched “Loveless”. https://www.kinopoisk.ru/film/nelyubov-2017-963346/