What to do if your Thinkpad T520 won’t power on

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Recently, my Lenovo Thinkpad T520 died. Fixing this problem cost me two days of work, and much anxiety and frustration. Since not much information about this particular issue seems to be available online, I thought I should write a post detailing my solution, in the hope that it might help others solve it more quickly and with less stress. It is, of course, possible that the solution won’t work for you, since the problem might be caused by some other factor. It is also possible that the solution will work for you even if you have a different laptop model. Continue reading →

Latest update: 3rd August, 2014

C. D. Broad: a bibliography

Socius, lector, thesaurarii iunioris inter belli
angustias uice functus, moralis philosophiae in
academia professor disciplinae illius alias quoque
partes singulari acumine et diligentia lucidissime
tractauit. Non minus se ipsum quam alios nouerat.
In sermone plus salis quam fellis habuit. Sueciae
amorem prae se tulit. Huic collegio studuit opera
consiliis testamento sustinendo. Vita decessit
A.S.mcmlxxi suae aetatis lxxxiv

 

This bibliography is based on (1) C. Lewy’s ‘Writings of C. D. Broad, to the end of July 1959’, in Paul A. Schilpp (ed.) The philosophy of C. D. Broad, New York: Tudor Publishing Company, 1959, pp. 833–852; (2) Andrew Chrucky’s Works by C. D. Broad; and (3) my own research online and at various British libraries.  It is my best attempt to make Broad’s writings freely available on the web. Corrections and additions are welcome.

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Latest update: 9th September, 2022

Blogs I like

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These are some of the blogs I like.  When this is not otherwise obvious, author names for individual blogs, or for group blogs with a primary author, appear in parentheses.  If you think I’m missing something I would enjoy, please let me know. All-time favorites are boldfaced.

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Latest update: 30th May, 2022

Chrome extensions I like

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See also: Android apps I use

These are the Chrome extensions I currently use. My favorite ones are boldfaced.

  • Application Launcher for Drive. Open Drive files directly from your browser in compatible applications installed on your computer.
  • Bitly. URL shortener.
  • BuiltWith Technology Profiler. Find out what the website you are visiting is built with.
  • Bypass Paywalls. See paywalled content from all the major media outlets (e.g. Financial Times, The Economist, etc.) as well as other sites.
  • Browserpass. Browser extension for pass, the standard Unix password manager.
  • CLUT: Cycle Last Used Tab. Toggle between your current and last used tab with a keyboard shortcut. I use this extension hundreds of times per day.
  • Contact Out. Find a person’s email, as long as they have a LinkedIn account.
  • Dark Reader. Dark mode for every website. My personal settings are here.
  • Don’t add custom search engines. Prevent Chrome from auto-adding custom search engines.
  • Get RSS Feed URL. Adds one-click subscription to Chrome’s toolbar.
  • Ghost Text. In combination with Atomic Chrome, this extension lets me enter text (e.g. writing a comment or editing a Wikipedia article) directly from Emacs.
  • Google Docs Offline.
  • Grammarly. Spell checker and more.
  • I still don’t care about cookies. Do you like clicking a consent button every damned time you visit a new website? Then why are you not using this extension? [Mostly relevant for EU residents.]
  • Keyboard Shortcuts for Google Translate. Provides keyboard shortcuts on the Google Translate page.
  • My IMDb. Highlights the movies you’ve already seen (voted for) when searching IMDb or displaying actor/director pages.
  • Print Friendly & PDF. Improves the print version of a web page by removing ads and fixing broken layout.
  • Return YouTube dislike. For inexplicable reasons, although YouTube still lets users dislike videos, it no longer displays the number of video dislikes. This extension restores the dislike count.
  • ReviewMeta.com Review Analyzer. Adjusts Amazon’s ratings to exclude fake reviews.
  • Shut up. “If you’ve ever gone to a website and read its comments section, you’ll have seen that it’s just a vitriolic, idiotic wasteland. Why subject yourself to that?”
  • Tag Assistant. Helps troubleshoot installation of various Google tags including Google Analytics, Google Tag Manager and more.
  • uBlacklist. Blocks specific sites from appearing in Google search results. My list of blocked sites is here.
  • uBlock Origin. A fast, potent, and lean ad-blocker. I shared some customizations here.
  • Unhook. Hides YouTube related videos, comments, shorts tab, suggestions wall, homepage recommendations, trending, and other distractions. I set it to replace the home feed with my subscriptions.
  • Vimium. Provides keyboard shortcuts for navigation and control in the spirit of Vim. My settings are here.
  • Wayback Machine. Reduce annoying 404 pages by automatically checking for an archived copy in the Wayback Machine.

With thanks to Tom Ash, Ryan Carey, Sam Deere, Peter McIntyre, Claudia Shi, James Ting-Edwards and Matthew van der Merwe for valuable suggestions.

Latest update: 20th February, 2024

Anki decks by LessWrong users

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In a recent LessWrong post, Qiaochu Yuan noted that “various mnemonic techniques like memory palaces, along with spaced repetition, seem to more or less solve the problem of memorization.” The list below is an attempt to compile all existing Anki decks created by Less Wrong users, in the hope that they will be of help to others in memorizing the corresponding material. (Anki is arguably the most popular spaced repetition software.)  If you know of a deck not included here, please mention it in the comments section and I’ll add it to the list. Thanks!

Please note that I have excluded some of my own Anki decks, which may not be of interest to members of the LessWrong community; all such decks may be found here.

Update (August 2019): The links to many of the decks below died in the intervening years, in part because AnkiWeb deletes shared decks with low download activity. Fortunately, I managed to regenerate almost all of these decks from my own master deck. To prevent further loss of content, I have now uploaded all of the extant decks to my server and added backup links to these archived versions.

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Latest update: 3rd March, 2021

The Gift

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by Ian Parker

The New Yorker, vol. 80, no. 21 (August 2, 2004), pp. 54-63

Last summer, not long after Zell Kravinsky had given almost his entire forty-five-million-dollar real-estate fortune to charity, he called Barry Katz, an old friend in Connecticut, and asked for help with an alibi. Would Katz call Kravinsky’s wife, Emily, in Philadelphia, and say that the two men were about to take a weeklong trip to Katz’s ski condominium in Vermont? This untruth would help Kravinsky do something that did not have his wife’s approval: he would be able to leave home, check into the Albert Einstein Medical Center, in Philadelphia, for a few days, and donate a kidney to a woman whose name he had only just learned. Continue reading →

Latest update: 16th May, 2014