Quote: "This freaks me out. Sometimes I'll finish work, and baring in mind I don't go there often, it will tell me how long it'll take to get to my girlfriend's house. How the hell does it know I'm going there?! Does it read my texts? Look at my past trends?"
It's Google Now, and it's a feature you opted into. It does indeed look at your past location trends and tries to predict where you'll go next.
Quote: "Allah dammit why do people pronounce turmeric as "choomeric"? Since when has "tur" been pronounced as "choo"?"
I say "choomeric". It comes from people misreading the word as "tumeric". Except for most of North America, "tu" (as in tunic) is normally pronounced "tyoo", which (especially in Australia) naturally gets shortened to "choo", hence "choomeric".
Honestly I'd never realised that the way I said it didn't make sense, but it's such a common pronunciation that I'm inclined to continue pronouncing it "choomeric".
Wikipedia says the reason for pronouncing it "tyoomeric" (or "choomeric) is something to do with "
dissimilation".
Incidentally, apparently there's actually a name for whether or not accents pronounce the R's in words like "hard" or "butter". It's called "
Rhoticity". Accents from places like Scotland, Ireland and North America (most of it) are rhotic accents. Accents from places like Australia, New Zealand, England and South Africa are non-rhotic accents.
-------------------------------
My brother and two of my sisters are
finally starting our own YouTube channel! We've been wanting to do this for more than a year. We're doing it purely for fun, not money, and after recording the first pilot episode of our first series (us playing Towerfall) I can honestly say the fun is worth it! It's way more fun playing games together when you assume there's an audience
We've been planning this for so long that we actually have heaps and heaps of older Minecraft and Gmod game sessions recorded in a big archive with complex technical setups to get the best audio, so eventually we'll probably edit those and upload them as well
Unfortunately the pilot episode's audio is somewhat... crap. We're inexperienced with recording audio when we're all in the same room, on the same PC, with no omnidirectional mic to speak of. What we ended up doing was each wearing our USB headsets, all plugged into the same PC, with Virtual Audio Cable (which we've used before) combining the audio into one stream and Audacity recording that stream. Then we had Shadowplay (which turned out to be the most reliable recorder for Towerfall) recording video and gameplay sounds. We don't want to play the game with no sound, but we had to have the sound playing through the main PC speakers since it would be laggy to VAC it through all four headsets. Unfortunately we had the game too loud and it was recorded far too much in the headset mics, so even with pretty heavy post-processing the game sounds tend to drown out our voices somewhat. Also, due to some misunderstanding as to how VAC worked, our voices are echo-y, like we're in a bathroom. We'll have to sort all that out for the next episode
Now, if only we could afford a Blue Yeti...
EDIT: I wonder if my JVC camcorder (which has a really good stereo mic) would be sufficiently multi-directional to work... maybe I could put it on a tripod behind and above the screen... yeah, that could work
