Geek's Home page (or Blog...or whatever)

My two MOST FAVORITE websites on the Internet

#1 - Wikipedia !

I once pondered the query of "if there was just one website on the whole Internet, which one would you want it to be?". Almost immediately, my answer was "That's easy." The Internet's 'encyclopedia': Wikipedia ! !

#2 -The 'StackExchange' family of Q/A communities

Much more recently, I arrived at a nominee for my 2nd-favorite Internet site. My 2nd place choice is one called "stackexchange". In a nushell, it is a 'community' of Question/Answer 'communities' (aka, forums). (I believe there's now about 100 sites in the whole family.) Each community covers a separate 'field of knowledge', whether it be a hobby or a career-discipline or whatever. Here is their page describing all the various communities available within the whole 'stackexchange' family of communities: List of community sites

For example, let's say someone's hobby was gardening...they would choose (and join): the Gardening community whereas a career psychiatrist might join: cognitive sciences community which includes psychology psychiatry, and other related disciplines.

Of course, you will probably end up reading and maybe even posting questions (or answers or comments) into more than one of these various communities. The beauty of the system is that once you JOIN your first community, if you later decide you want to join any additional community, your 'join-click' will recommend you choose to use your common profile and login-credentials, rather than go thru the long-winded form used to 'join', needed ONLY by someone who doesn't already have an existing stackexchange membership [profile].

Another great feature is that, rather than it having single sub-categories into which you'll post your questions within a given community, they use (multiple) 'tags'. So, when anyone writes up their question, before they actually hit the 'post' button, they must associate one or more tags to their question. So, say in the gardening community, someone asks some question, and chooses the 2 tags 'watering' and 'fertilizer'.

Now someone else in that community reads your question and decides to post a 'comment' to their query, maybe just asking for clarification about the query, or just offering a sort-of-an-answer. Or, (bolder/more confidently) they decide to post a real ANSWER to the question. (Note...there can be more than one ANSWER to any given question.) And, answers can be voted-on, which is similar to Facebook's idea of 'likes'. People can 'vote' up or down on how good any given question and/or answer is.

Another VERY COOL feature is the ability to determine which of two or three possible communities would probably be the best community to post your question. Recall that 'tags' are the topic words on various subjects. So, in other words, what you want to know is which community has a 'tag' that matches what you're looking for. So, let's say you want to find some tag named "adware"...well, you probably want either the community named "SuperUser" or the one named "StackOverflow"...yeah you could go into each of those two, and do a 'tag' search for '[adware]' in each. But, what if you did NOT know of those two community names. No problem! In EITHER case, simply go to the special 'top-most' community named "StackExchange" and do the tag search for '[adware]' there. Bingo! It will tell you that the community named "SuperUser" contains such a tag, so you should go to that community, and post you question there!

And even yet another VERY COOL feature is the ability to get an email-notification under various conditions. One condition is that you want to 'subscribe' (receive an email) for any activity on any one specific question that you see in the community. A similar feature a concept of you creating various 'filters' (that you give separate names to). So, when you click on some 'tag', you can then create yourself an email-notification filter, so that (e.g. once a day), you'll receive an email containing a summarized list of any new posting-activity on an/all questions that contain that specific tag.
So,if there is some tag that you truly care much MORE about than other tags, you can create a 'filter' for that tag, that will then notifiy you as I described. There's the 'meta' community, which discusses how to USE the features COMMON among the various community Q/A forums. Here's a query related to filters and subscriptions, that will give you insight into the various email-related concepts: META-info on filters, subscriptions, etc
So, for example, let's say our psychiatrist specializes in sleep disorders, so she could setup a filter so that all new posts in the next 24-hours that contain the 'SLEEP' tag, cause her to get an email containing the subjects of those new 'sleep'-related postings.

Other related info

Chromecast device and how to tab-cast to it

I originally purchased Google's 'Chromecast' HDMI-device ('generation 1'), back in 2013. It sold for about $30.00. (Now, in 2021, I still own that gen-1 device, and two additional 'generation-3' Chromecasts.) Here are instructions to setup tab-casting for your Chromecast device.

As of 2020, it seems like 'Chromecast' and 'Roku' are the 2 most popular solutions, to make a non-smart, HDMI-ported TV, into a 'smart' TV. (A third popular choice these days is the Amazon 'Fire-stick', which is operationally much like Roku devices.) To get started in deciding, there is a good device-tradeoff discussion between Chromecast and Roku here. Note that the major DIFFERENCE between Roku and Chromecast is that Roku-devices come with their own dedicated handheld remotes, whereas to control a Chromecast, you use a laptop-PC or a mobile-device (e.g. tablet or smartphone) to act as the 'remote-control'.

If you seem afraid/indecisive in making a choice between Chromecast and any of the others, don't be! Just ask yourself whether you want a permanent REPLACEMENT of your service-provided set-top box (i.e. Roku or Firestick) or the 'use-it-sometimes' nature of a Chromecast device. (Or just flip a coin...order something, via Amazon, try it for a week or two, and return it! I'm willing to bet that I've done at least half a dozen returns of tech-devices to Amazon and never regretted any of them. Amazon really DOES intend to encourage you to do exactly that!)

My Linux-cheat-sheet (for Debian-family Linux distributions)

Here's my tribute to the "Women's Lib" movement (my mother was a 1960 'graduate')

A quote from a very literate British playwright...(he was a "Nobel Prize in Literature" winner...)

(From a western cowboy...his "5 Rules for a Happy Life")