Once again, The Finance Buff has a updated and excellent guide on how to correctly report backdoor Roth IRA contributions in Turbotax 2023
https://thefinancebuff.com/how-to-report-backdoor-roth-in-turbotax.html
I love mapping software, and the Google Maps teams has done some amazing work. It’s not just mapping and route-finding to more incredible things like Google Earth and Google Earth VR. They’ve got features that auto-update store hours, update street speed limits by reading the road signs, how crowded transit routes are, and trips. Now they’re adding a new immersive view.
Say you’re planning a trip to London and want to figure out the best sights to see and places to eat. With a quick search, you can virtually soar over Westminster to see the neighborhood and stunning architecture of places, like Big Ben, up close. With Google Maps’ helpful information layered on top, you can use the time slider to check out what the area looks like at different times of day and in various weather conditions, and see where the busy spots are. Looking for a spot for lunch? Glide down to street level to explore nearby restaurants and see helpful information, like live busyness and nearby traffic. You can even look inside them to quickly get a feel for the vibe of the place before you book your reservation.
It starts rolling out in Los Angeles, London, New York, San Francisco and Tokyo later this year with more cities coming soon.
There’s also a new Live View that has AR elements to help you orient yourself to destinations. What’s interesting is that people with vision problems are now finding it very helpful.
It’s a reminder that really innovative things can come from helping those with disabilities and re-affirming the value of their lives. That’s a fundamentally different approach than the alternative.
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Infocom games were THE games to play in the late 70’s through the 80’s, featuring such classics as Zork, Planetfall, and Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy.
In 2019, Jason Scott posted all the source code for Infocom’s text adventure games.
Infocom’s interpreter source, however, remained obscure. ZIL (or Zork Implementation Language) wasn’t designed with a particular platform in mind but instead could be interpreted to work on a variety of systems using machine-dependent interpreters. The interpreters were well studied by enthusiasts who even made a modern Z-machine specification and an open-source IF interpreters.
That source was largely considered lost, despite Brian Moriarty donating the interpreter code for the TRS-80 Color Computer. That is until a few weeks ago when someone said they had the code and posted the original interpreter source code.
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The Royal Game of Ur is a race between two players on a board of twenty squares. For three thousand years this was the most popular board game across the whole of the ancient Middle East, played by kings and commoners alike.
Understanding how it was played has been a detective story, combining archaeological evidence with ancient writings in Babylonian cuneiform and the recurring features found in traditional race games.
The amazing Dr Irving Finkel of the British museum is credited with finally deciphering how to play the game from a cuneiform tablet (which actually described a more complex version), and has a wonderful video about how it all was figured out:
If you want to give the game a try, there are modern replicas including one that the British Library itself sells.
Another option is to play the game for free online at royalur.com
It’s definitely a game you could play today and find enjoyable. Tom Scott definitely did when he played Finkel
Modern Vintage Gamer reveals a secret that would have blown the minds of anyone in the 90’s. The lack-luster game Alien Resurrection on the Sony PlayStation PS1 has a secret cheat code that enables you to play backup discs without any additional mod chip or soft mod.
It’s definitely not a simple or fast hack (requiring a lot of button mashing and menu manipulation), but it’s still pretty incredible. It’s caused copies of the game to go from $5 a copy to $100+ on eBay.
PS1’s have been hacked, modded, and emulated for a long time now so it’s not enabling something that wasn’t possible before; but it’s a wonderful bit of history and trivia.
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People are starting to experiment with the latest VR headsets – especially the Meta Quest 3 and Quest Pro. One of the big questions is, can I finally get rid of my desktop environment and work purely with VR headset?
It turns out, most of the reviewers believe the time is almost here and believe it is possible.
Hallden seems to think it is possible, but points out some issues with working in moving environments (like airplanes), connectivity and lag, and the possible advantages of an AR vs VR solution. His take is primarily from a coders point of view.
Alan Truly also believes the time is almost here, but points out app quirks with copy-paste, the browser, content editing, and the extra pound of weight on your head might be too much for a full 8 hour day of work.
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Studio RAP has completed the ceramic house in Amsterdam which features a rippling, 3D-printed façade. Opens some very interesting possibilities for building decoration.
They also are experimenting with other 3D printed interiors and exteriors. Worth checking out on their website.
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At the John Deere booth at this year’s CES in the Las Vegas Convention Center, conventiongoers could do something incredible with an iPhone. They could pushed the PAUSE button on an iPhone and thirteen hundred miles away, in the middle of a field outside of Austin, Texas, a giant, bright green, driverless tractor stopped short. Hit RESUME and the tractor started up again. Put down the iPhone and the tractor resumed tilling the field, all by itself.
The breadth of what you can do with the tractor via the demo app was limited. You could stop and resume the tractor, as well as increasing or decreasing its speed in a straight line and while turning. There are no turning controls. But what this signals is huge.
In the demo, a farmer first geo-fences the field boundaries and then the tractor can determine its own path based on how wide the tiller is. Tillage is the only job the technology is programmed to handle but John Deere hopes to have a complete autonomous production system supporting every step of the farming process by 2030.
The John Deere spokespeople ballparked such a tractor between $600,000 to $700,000, with the autonomous technology implementation adding a further $100,000 on top of that. Older tractors from the 2020 model year and up can also likely be retrofitted with the tech. The update should “take only about a day” according to a 2022 CNET story.
There’s no doubt in my mind this is how the future of farming will look. It’s been coming for a long time; and spending long hours out in the field will almost certainly be a thing of the past very soon.
There are already calls that John Deere and other equipment manufacturers will have fully autonomous fleets that they manage and simply send to your fields on a subscription-like basis.
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There are many in the world who are dying for a piece of bread, but there are many more dying for a little love.
Mother Teresa
The poverty in the West is a different kind of poverty — it is not only a poverty of loneliness but also of spirituality. There’s a hunger for love, as there is a hunger for God.
Try ORCA: Open Research Content Archive, a library of professionally-created 3D assets donated to the research community by Amazon Lumberyard, SpeedTree, NVIDIA and Epic.
