sanotehu

Syncthing to sync the grocery list to your phone whenever it is on the home WiFi. Any changes will be updated when you next get back home.

I use this with obsidian and it's a game changer, removing need for the cloud

If you're interested in chatting about this sort of stuff, let me know.

I'm a UK doctor working in the field, always looking to optimise processes while keeping quality.

Email is in my profile.

Interesting... Do you have a source copy for this? I'm always interested to play music as the artist intended and Stevie Wonder is one of my favourites :)

A solution to this is having user-chosen programmes with an allotted study budget. This is the model in UK post-grad medical education.

I know around London there are a couple of schemes running that teach practical skills using outdated non-sexy software that nevertheless works because of its strong educational underpinnings and excellent practical execution.

Agreed. You're putting an overworked, underpaid public servant in a "damned if you do, damned if you don't" scenario. They complied with a far reaching request and got told their response was too far reaching? I'd quit my job if faced with a legal minefield like that, especially one not actually related to the job itself

I'm a doctor of four years now and I completely empathise with you. The one thing I have learnt doing the job is not to fully trust anything but to check it yourself. That's how you get outstanding results.

It's unfortunate that it seems to take a toll on your private life. This past year I have developed a habit of double checking the front door even though I remember bolting it.

It's an interesting thing to ponder whether some mental disorders are extreme versions of adaptive behaviours that we all do from time to time.

Out of interest, what was your parenting style like? Was it just a matter of clear expectations and consistent rewards and punishments?

Did you have a source for all this or did you work it out by yourself?

Yes, through the "Import" feature. Excel will in that case allow you to choose what "type" each column in the CSV has (and will not parse text if given the "text" type). The problem is that a lot of users (myself included) will use muscle memory and double-click a CSV file in windows explorer rather than opening up Excel and initiating an import.

We don't adhere to the EWTD.

I think a UK doctor's hours are probably easier than a US doctor's but we all break the EWTD (except for some specialties like psychiatry). For example I am rostered to work an average 48 hours a week, although there are some weeks I work more, and I will often stay behind to get things done. My total hours per week is probably around 50 - and I'm in a job that isn't considered busy!

To answer your question about the difference between "clinical grade" and "consumer grade" hardware, consider [1] - where FitBit-measured heartrates differed from actual heartrates by about 30bpm. As a doctor I looked into getting a fitbit but realised they could not live up to the ideal of heartrate tracking that I wanted.

To be fair this is a hard problem. Even the pulse oximeters we use in our hospitals have a hard time picking up certain heart rhythms. The only way to be sure is to get an ECG done!

[1] http://www.telegraph.co.uk/technology/news/12086337/Fitbit-h...

A lot of it is essentially hacking around the fact that medicine & hospitals weren't designed for computers.

For example: we used to (still do) keep large files of old notes for patients. In the worst cases think reams of paper three inches thick held together by the flimsiest of plastic ties.

The solution for computerising this? Scan it all. Categorise by date and medical specialty. Unfortunately using this database turns out to be horrendously slow. Each doctor has to download each page from the database in order to look at it and make sure it's not the page they are looking for (no or poor text recognition). As you can imagine, hundreds of doctors doing this at 9am in the morning grinds the network to a halt.

That's just one component of the system we use every day - I have more!

I completely agree with this sentiment. Unfortunately there's no motivating factor for the companies that produce these things to continually update products that are "in the wild".

I recently bought a Volkswagen 2013 model and have been playing around with its bluetooth. Unfortunately the good stuff is only available in this years models - which is a hardware upgrade as well as a software upgrade. (Think Android Auto, automatic mirroring of the smartphone onto the car console, etc)

The only situations in which the Internet of Things will work is where it is acceptable to replace the Things on the same cycle as we replace phones - every year or every other year. For the vast majority of appliances, this is not the case.

Yes. Being in a queue means you have to constantly keep an ear out for being transferred to an actual human being. Which can be quite hard when the hold music is regularly interrupted with voice announcements. Yes I realise my call is important to you, but if you didn't tell me that every 10 seconds I could stop listening so hard and (maybe?) enjoy the music.

As an aside, their comparison of voluntary queuing with and without virtual queues is suspect as they seem to inform the customer about the length of the queue only when they also have the callback system. These are two separate things and should be measured separately.

Amen. As a doctor I have to deal with a lot of crappy computer interfaces. Data entry in hospitals (at least the sort that gets the hospitals money) ends up being done by non-medical personnel because the medical personnel are too busy trying to do their job to care whether they coded something wrong on the computer system.

Completely. While playing a complex classical piano piece I used to perform jumps with my hands "blind" - without looking at the keys. The trick (apart from lots and lots of practice) was the sidelong glance to eye up your target moments before moving your hands. That way both hands can perform jumps at the same time (and you dazzle onlookers :)

What, like the pharmaceutical industry? I would argue that much good knowledge is created that way but it, too, has its issues. See much of Ben Goldacre's work.

http://www.badscience.net/

Would you mind explaining the double-blind review in CS conferences? I'm a doctor by trade so am well acquainted with the way peer-review works but I've never heard of conferences being reviewed, either before-the-fact as an acceptance criterion or after-the-fact as a kind of rating.

Out of interest, which headphones did you go with? I've been looking at wireless headphones but I've always been put off by not knowing their battery life. Aside from the manufacturer's ratings, which have a variable degree of accuracy :p

A great parable for how we try to make technology more human-friendly with unintended consequences.

I went on a road trip recently and I've been thinking about how advances in car technology change how we view cars. I came to a similar conclusion as Don - specifically the change from manual to automatic gearboxes has meant that people have to concentrate less on driving and can devote their attention to other things.

But that's not necessarily a good thing - by getting rid of the idea that driving is an activity that requires full-time attention we are making it more unsafe because people then feel justified in paying it less attention. The reductio ad absurdum argument is the self-driving cars that he mentions at the end of the article, but this is just the end of the spectrum.

I'm not sure what the solution to this problem is.

What I found interesting while reading this article was the parallel to what a doctor does when diagnosing problems.

In medicine, it's commonly known that the interview with the patient (the 'history') is the first thing a doctor should be doing. Not just because it establishes a relationship with the patient, but because the diagnosis of most illnesses is guided primarily by the history [1] - even with modern MRI machines and DNA amplification techniques! At the very least the chat with the client provides context for the problem that you are investigating - you are now putting flesh on a skeleton of meaning rather than trying to create it on your own.

This article stresses the importance of first getting a verbal 'history' from the client - what the problem is, characteristics of the problem, time-course of the problem and co-incidence with other events (like software upgrades). There is also a parallel to medicine in that in this field a skilled practitioner may be able to diagnose the problem based solely on the history alone [2].

The second thing I noticed was the fault-finding mindset. As a medical student halfway through his second year of hospital placements this is something I took some time to learn. The initial approach to finding the reason for a problem is usually to (1)think of a possible reason for the problem, (2)try to fix that reason, and (3)if that doesn't work, goto 1. While this is a good because it shows you are actually thinking about the cause of the problem rather than its effects, it's not the most efficient way of going about things. One way doctors can narrow down problems is by restricting them to systems such as the cardiovascular system or the neurological system. A searing pain in your chest is more likely to be due to a problem with your heart or lungs than due to a problem with your kidneys or gonads.

This article takes exactly the same view of servers, classifying the individual hardware and software components that make up the vast majority of (linux) servers in the wild.

I don't fiddle around with servers much any more, but I'm bookmarking this page because it is such a useful illustration of a fault-finding mentality.

[1] http://archinte.jamanetwork.com/article.aspx?articleid=11058... [2] http://blogs.msdn.com/b/oldnewthing/archive/2012/08/29/10344...

Shivering is a common side-effect of general anaesthetic. I've not seen enough post-op recovery to know exactly how common, but it's high on the list of side-effects we have to tell people.

WRT the hypothermia, you may have been slightly hypothermic as a result of having so much of your body surface exposed to the air. People don't realise that ambient temperature (18-22C) is actually quite cold in relation to body temperature (36.7C) - it's only the fact that we wear clothes that means we don't feel it.

Nowadays we have heated blankets in theatre too, to offset this heat loss.

I think it's a testament to modern medicine that we can do these sorts of things. Glad to hear you got through the recovery alright. With the operation I saw, they packed the patient's head with ice bags as well as cooling the blood. I remember thinking to myself that I'd hate to be that guy waking up! Something like a large hangover ;)

Yes, they are indeed. As a medical student I had the privilege of seeing a heart valve being installed. They are a witness to how far medicine has progressed since the days of barber surgeons.

The blood is taken out of your body through the femoral vein (under the skin between your hip and your nether regions), taken through the perfusion machine and pumped back into the femoral artery. Because at this stage the heart will have been stopped, the high pressure in the femoral artery makes blood flow backwards up the aorta, where it supplies oxygenated blood from the machine to the whole body.

At one stage the flow has to be switched off in order to sew the metal valve onto the top of the aorta. In preparation for this, the blood leaving the perfusion machine is chilled (I'm not sure to what temperature). This slows the body's metabolism down and would cause hypothermic stupor if the patient had not already been under anaesthetic. I was told by the perfusionist that this gave the surgeons around an hour of extra operating time before the brain's oxygen content dropped to dangerous levels. All this is of course monitored by the anaesthetist and the perfusionist. The hypothermia will be reversed during the process of reviving the patient.

With the advent of endovascular procedures, this sort of surgery is becoming a rarity. It's much easier to pass a small tube up the aorta and inflate the narrowed artery from the inside than it is to open up the chest and sew a new blood vessel onto the heart. Of course, the medicine's more boring but it's all about getting a good outcome for the patient, isn't it?

and... did it work?