K‮ly‬e @khird@qoto.org

Here's a trick for #volvo #windshieldwiper blades. Volvo, in its wisdom, decided to invent a new nonstandard attachment style, which means that cheap blades you get at retail can't be mounted. However, you can make it work in a pinch if you don't feel like paying fifty dollars for new high-end ones.

1. Buy some cheap truss-style wiper blades and remove the rubber piece from the metal frame holding it. It's easiest to pull it out starting at the barbed end. Discard the flexible metal strips embedded in the groove on each side.
2. If the groove doesn't go all the way to both ends, get a sharp knife and carefully extend it. Be sure not to cut all the way through!
3. Cut the rubber edge completely away from the metal beam on the original Volvo blades. The top lip is actually an extension of the rubber edge, so this will come away too, leaving a thin gap along the length of the beam.
4. Squeeze the beam in the middle to disengage the clips holding the plastic mount to the metal rails, and remove the plastic mount. With the mount removed, you can now move the rails independently to make the gap between them wider.
5. Thread the new rubber blade into the gap such that the metal rails fit into the grooves from which you removed the flexible strips earlier. Make sure the blade goes firmly all the way into each end cap, then work inwards to seat the rubber onto the metal.
6. Snap the mount back onto the metal rails. There is a small plastic stub which fits into a corresponding notch in each rail to make sure the mount is positioned correctly, and a clip at each corner to hold it on. Make sure all are engaged correctly.

Looks like we are getting a lot of former Twitter users today - I hope you enjoy exploring QOTO and the rest of the Fediverse! Our rules are at https://qoto.org/about/more#rules and you will be expected to abide by them. Be aware that our rules are not the same as Twitter's, and other instances on the Fediverse will have different rules that their users are expected to follow.

If you're considering reporting a foreign user (i.e. from an instance other than QOTO), please take a minute to read that instance's rules. There's no point in filing reports over conduct that the foreign instance doesn't prohibit. You can block the user or his whole instance yourself, but QOTO won't intervene except where the offending user is evading your blocks e.g. by setting up alts to contact you.

If you think the user's conduct *does* violate his instance's rules, make sure you tick the little box to forward a copy of the report to the foreign moderators. They might hand down some kind of punishment to him if they agree with you. But in either case, no punishment will come to him from QOTO's team.

I'll do my best to answer questions if you tag me.

@freemo could you please check in on QOTO's infrastructure when you get a chance? I'm seeing symptoms of federation failing in both Mastodon (missing posts from last night) and Matrix (can't join foreign channels).

Satisfaction is... finding the sweet spot in your parallelised code parameters, so that it hovers at about 95% of CPU time, and the machine stays responsive for daily use

My best guess is that it's supposed to be a chimney - you could put a candle in the bottom and it would heat the air in the cylinder, driving it up and replacing it with fresh air from the bottom, driving its own circulation. At the same time, it would heat the contents of the bulb like a retort.

But there's no fitting to attach anything to the top of the bulb, so any vapours would just be exhausted upward with the combustion products of the candle. I also don't get the point of the serpentine tube - if it were just for support, why would it be hollow and matched to an orifice in the side of the cylinder? If it's for filling the bulb, why not just use the orifice at its tip, since you can't have anything attached to that anyway? Were it straight, you could maybe use it to stick a thermometer into the bulb, but the bends in the tube prevent that.

Can anyone #identify this piece of #glassware I came across today? It's a bulb suspended in a cylinder, with a serpentine tube connecting the bulb to an orifice in the side of the cylinder. The bulb also has an orifice at its tip, and the cylinder is open at both ends.

Does anyone use GNU #Octave #GNUOctave on Linux? Every time I switch workspaces it keeps hoisting itself on top of the other programs I have running - I would love to learn how to disable this behaviour.

Anyone with a #stats #statistics background:

I have a record of several hundred events. Each event occurred at a particular univariate condition x and had a binary outcome y. I don't get to choose x; there are about a hundred values that occurred exactly once, up to a maximum number of fourteen repetitions at one value of x (to measurement precision). The samples are roughly clustered around a central value of x, not uniformly distributed.

Is there a recommended way to estimate the local probability of y as a function of x (that is, if I measure the conditions as x=X, how likely is it that y will occur)? Simply averaging all samples at x=X doesn't give a usable curve, because all the single-sample values swing it wildly to zero or one, regardless of what any neighbouring samples have done. Currently what I'm doing is summing the averages over all samples where x<=X and the average over all samples where x>=X, then subtracting the average over all x. It looks more or less like the smooth curve predicted by theory but I'm pretty sure this counts as "misuse of statistics".

I'm especially interested in identifying regions (intervals on x) where I can say the observed probability differs from the prediction of theory by a statistically significant amount. I think coming up with a formula for a confidence interval would be the way to go, but feel free to point me in another direction.

Happy Riḍván, everybody!

I see that #QOTO now has 14,000 users! Thanks to everyone who's decided to become a part of our community :-)

Which of these is the past tense of the verb "shine", as you would use it in your variety of English? If you would use different forms for the past tense and the past participle, spoken and written communication, or formal and informal contexts, please leave a comment.

Is there a trick to code blocks (the ``` ... ``` environment) in the flavour of #Markdown we use here on #QOTO? Line breaks keep disappearing in mine.