benjya's New Writeups

Turing Gender Test (idea)

2013-04-09T11:59:40Z

Any remotely thoughtful, intelligent, observant person with decent general knowledge can disguise his or her gender online with relative ease and a low probability of being unmasked.

consumagenerica, above

The above quote is probably very true - in English.

But what about other languages? Many other languages are much stricter on differentiating between masculine and feminine in much more than just the pronouns. I suspect this would make it much trickier for someone to try this in~~, say, French ("mon" or "ma" for "my", depending on gender), and even harder in~~ say Hebrew where the word for "I" is always "Ani" but the verb following it changes depending on whether you're a guy or a girl.

After 15 or more years of speaking a language, how easy is it to temporarily flip into the other gender, without making a slip that would give yourself away?

Something to think about!

A few people…

Amen (thing)

2011-09-19T11:58:33Z

The hebrew word, "Amen", is made up of three hebrew letters - Aleph, Mem, Nun. This is sometimes said to stand for "El Melech Ne'eman" which means "G-D is the faithful King". In modern / Sephardi pronounciation, it's pronounced "Ah-men". In Ashkenazi pronounciation, it's often pronounced "O-mayn".

In saying "Amen" to a prayer or a bracha, it is as if the person is saying "Yes, I agree with what the prayer or blessing says". So, for example, the first few words of the Kaddish prayer say (roughly) "Great and Holy is his is (G-D's) name", to which the congregation respond "Amen".

In Synagogue, therefore, it's usual for everyone present to respond "Amen" at the end of every bracha. Indeed, there are certain parts of the prayers (such as the public recitation of the Amidah prayer) where it's essential for at least a minyan of men to respond Amen to each of the blessings in the prayer for it to be "valid". So the story goes, the Great Synagogue of Alexandria was so…

Decathlon (how-to)

2009-02-10T09:49:14Z

Apology

This is a "How-To" on "Decathlon". But if you came here for information on how to train for a Decathlon, I'm afraid you're going to be disappointed!!

Fact 1

I had Decathlon for my Atari 400 (and Atari 800XL and Atari 130XE) computers. And as others have mentioned, it was a great game that you just kept coming back for more, just to try and score one more point in each event!

Fact 2

I was a member of an electronics club in my school (yes, I'm a geek). We learned the basics of electronic components and "building block" circuitry. Including multivibrators.

Fact 3

I was a subscriber to Atari User magazine. This was for a number of years the only mainstream magazine in the UK dedicated to the Atari 8-bit computer range. On occasion, it would run a "series" of articles in consecutive magazines. And one of these was about controlling external hardware devices from your…

Television tuner card (thing)

2008-11-21T11:05:45Z

TV tuner cards have come a long way in the years since the previous writeups, mainly due to the arrival the Freeview terrestrial digital TV system.

TV tuner cards in the past were fairly complex cards, as they had to tune into the broadcast signal, decode the TV picture and then digitise it into a format for the computer to display. Hence they were usually PCI cards to get enough bandwidth, and enough physical space on the board for the electronics.

Now, things are different. As the Freeview signal is already an MPEG-2 signal, the card doesn't have to do any digitising itself. It still has to tune into the appropriate "channel" (more properly called a multiplex) and select the actual "channel" from within the multiplex (Freeview multiplexes typically contain about 6 TV channels). Once it has de-coded this channel - really no more than an MPEG-2 data stream - it then feeds it into the computer for displaying in the normal way.

This means that the TV…

digital dictation (thing)

2006-03-31T13:24:41Z

Most people in corporate environments (and especially in the likes of legal practices) are very familiar with the idea of dictation machines.

Lawyers are often highly paid, by the hour, and more often than not can't type (or can't type as fast as they can speak). So they dictate their letters, traditionally onto tape, and then get a secretary or typing pool to type the letters. They are then given back to be signed.

Digital Dicatation is just a new method of performing the same thing.

Instead of dictating onto a tape, the Lawyer dictates directly into his computer. This is often done using a microphone-handset that resembles a traditional handheld dictation machine, with "Play", "Record", "Forward", "Back" etc buttons on it. It also has a small loudspeaker so the Lawyer can listen back to what (s)he has dictated. Once they have completed the dictation, they simply give it a name and press a button to send it off.

There are also…

Powerline Area Network (thing)

2006-03-14T10:44:45Z

Power line networking also works on a smaller scale, as an alternative to wireless (802.11) or conventional wired networks in the home.

Conventional wireless has the following setup.

You buy a wireless access point and connect it into your ADSL or Cable router (or you buy a router with an integrated AP).
You buy wireless cards for your computers (many mid to high end laptops have them built in).
Potential problems with interference, walls which are too solid, large metal items and simply distance.

Powerline networking has the following setup.

You buy at least two powerline interface boxes.
One connects into your router and the other to your PC.
Most simply present an RJ45 connector, rather than being a network card in their own right, so there's no drivers or Operating system compatibility issues.
Most laptop and desktop PCs around now have onboard Ethernet ports (an

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