Skip Navigation

Posts
0
Comments
452
Joined
2 yr. ago

  • Ok so as a indicative figure, my air-conditioned three bedroom home in Australia uses about 20kWh a day in the hottest part of the year, which multiplies out to about 0.6 MWh a month.

    I wouldn't expect the average Chinese home to use more than that, because that's getting on the higher end of average usage in Australia and our homes are full of energy gobbling gadgets.

  • They should be able to put memtest on the boot partition and then break to an EFI shell on boot and Ioad it manually.

    There will be a bit of swearing and googling required but it's doable in a way that doesn't mess with the current boot arrangement.

  • You mention USDA food grade a lot. I will wager that's not the case for a lot of grey market vapes. It will be at most, "best effort" food grade with the occasional "whoopsie not sure what was in that drum before we used it" thrown in to keep you on your toes.

  • In Visual Studio you can set the build number in your project as something similar to a unix timestamp/raw excel date value, so you can convert it back to a date/time of the build.

    In that case it would always increment on each build regardless of whatever version numbers you set.

  • Speaking as someone from the West Island, I've found that tap to pay has made it a lot harder to have a budget for all the little things.

    In the Before Times, I'd have $20 or $50 in my wallet. I could see the cash on hand drop off as I bought bits and pieces, and when that ran out it would be a natural pause to think about it while I went and got some more.

    Now it's just "Boop Boop Boop" and oh crap I've just spent $95 dollars on sandwiches and iced coffees this week.

  • Time is a cube, and always will be.

  • Did they give you a very funny reason for this requirement, or is it just some windows exclusive garbage that doesn't work in wine?

    Why do people always ask this kind of crap?

    If you have a corporate laptop, it will likely have a suite of software centrally managed by your company's IT department.

    It will contain software that is also centrally licenced so that your boss doesn't have to figure out how to pay for thousands of dollars of software, they can just tell IT to bill a licence for software X to your cost centre at $13.75 a month.

    It will have a domain login that is your corporate identity which will usually require multi factor authentication.

    It will have some corporate VPN solution which operates mostly transparently and requires zero setup on your part.

    It will contain company sensitive data which will usually be encrypted by bitlocker, whose keys are stored with your domain account.

    It will have the usual Teams/Outlook/SharePoint stuff with a centralised calendar and contacts for your company, and likely security classifications for all the communications you do through it, allowing you to join groups, accept invites to restricted groups, and limit access, all linked to your domain account.

    It will have mapped drives to your corporate file storage , again, all linked to your domain account.

    It will probably have OneDrive, synced to a corporate server, again, linked to your domain account.

    It will have a printing solution that is linked to your domain account so that your printers follow you wherever you go and you can easily find and print to the secure print queue on some random printer you happen to walk past in one of your offices, so you can enter your PIN or swipe your access card and have that IMPORTANT_SECRET_RESEARCH.DOC file print while you're standing in front of the printer.

    And finally, your work laptop does not belong to you. Wiping it and installing Linux plus Wine and keeping company sensitive data on an unmanaged device will attract the ire of HR.

    Your IT department won't give a crap. But they also won't help if anything doesn't work, such as trying to join a domain to access allllll those domain-linked features with an unauthorised device.

    They will simply re-image your laptop to bring it back to a known state that they can deal with, because they are dealing with thousands of devices. They need everything to be homogeneous simply because they don't have the manpower to manage anything else or to audit a million different configurations for security issues or data leaks.

    So no, suggesting Linux + Wine to run some "windows exclusive garbage" isn't an answer here.

  • An electric Dash-8 equivalent with 20-40 seats would be a game changer on regional routes.

    The engines are the highest maintenance and cost items in aircraft. Electric motors should* drastically reduce that. Regional/small use routes are often on razor thin margins, anything to improve those margins will be taken on board very quickly.

    *Perhaps battery maintenance replaces that cost with a rough equivalent, I don't know

  • There is a certain amount of wank factor in mechanical keyboards. But if you are a high volume typist or heavy keyboard user, a keyboard that suits your typing style (with regards to springiness and feedback) absolutely helps.

    If you primarily just use the WASD keys a few hours a week with a bit of half assed sorta touch typing in between then they're not really needed.

  • I just would like to see the results of a recommendation algorithm that gives you something that it thinks you definitely won't like, say, 20 percent of the time.

    Because a lot of times in my endless scrolling I just end up with the same old drivel. Throw me something challenging occasionally, jeeeez.

  • This didn't occur thirty years ago when "reality tv" was in its infancy. The actual reality is well known and abundantly clear now.

    This was well understood 20 years ago.

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chart_Throb

    Reality television has always been manipulated for the most draaaama otherwise it's just hours of people sitting around.

    For a bit of an experiment, try watching it with the sound off and just subtitles. The music and staging absolutely are used to control the narrative to paint whoever they want as Public Enemy #1.

    I guess in that sense reality television accurately portrays modern media.

  • Precisely.

    A 1200 watt microwave is essentially like a 1200 watt bar heater if you're outside the oven cavity. To a person, it will feel pretty warm at a distance of a few feet as the energy is basically unfocused as it exits through the open door.

    But to a drone, it's 1200 watts of RF noise near a receiving device that's tuned to listen for signals that are typically around 0.00000001 watts. It would be like trying to hear a pin drop at a rock concert.

    Do need to make sure you point it upwards though as it will cause havoc with microwave motion sensors and a bunch of other sensitive listening stuff. Also, good luck getting wifi within a hundred metres of it.

  • "I think there's something wrong with the door switch on my old microwave oven. I've been testing it outside for safety, that's why it's out in the back yard pointing upwards with the door open."

  • The bug is the lack of documentation and that a simple unguarded command can erase all user's data on the system.

    Also, the principle of least surprise would like a word.

    If I look at the command line arguments of a program called "systemd-tmpfiles" and one of them is called "purge" I will generally assume that option will purge temporary files.

    Now it turns out that someone decided that this program would be a simple way to do something with /home directories(*) so they included /home in the config file for the program, the file that the program reads by default when it is invoked.

    Who decided it would be a good idea for it to deal with /home?

    Wellllll...

    https://github.com/systemd/systemd/blob/main/tmpfiles.d/home.conf

    (*)I have no idea what this program is doing with /home in its config file. I will presume that there is a useful and mostly logical reason for it, and that this command line option was just an unfortunate footgun for those users who were not intimately familiar with systemd.

  • Pretty much.

    Capable employees don't raise a huge stink.

    They quietly put the word out to a few people they know and play along until something interesting appears on the horizon.

    Then when they're good and ready they just "suddenly" fuck off to somewhere nicer for them.

  • Link the east and west coast grids to let afternoon solar on the west coast flatten the evening east coast peaks, pick a big old chunk of desert in South Australia for wind and solar, throw in a few gigabatteries and tart up some hydro systems, done.

    Probably only be $10-15 billion or so.

  • And how if you share a file in Teams and then six months later you want to share a file with the same name to ANYONE else via teams, well that's a big no-can-do. Teams just went ahead and uploaded that file to your "stuff to share" folder in OneDrive and didn't put it in a subfolder unique to the chat, or add a unique prefix or suffix or anything because hey, you'll only ever share a file with a particular name once in your life, right?

    And nobody would ever want to share a file with the same name, but different data, right? So Teams can just give the end user the choice between replacing the current file with the new one, or sharing the same one again to these new guys, because there's no possible use case for actually having two files named the same with different information in the file, right?

    Nobody would want to share a README.TXT, or Photo001.jpg, or contact.ics, or a zip file of a folder they just downloaded from Teams' SharePoint interface, the file that's automatically called "OneDrive.zip" without the option to change it before saving, more than once, right? Right??

    Fuck teams. And fuck Teams(New) too, just for the shitty name.

  • Eh.....Windows 3.1, 95, 98SE, XP, and 7 were all pretty great.

    From a user interface perspective, they were okay, perhaps because by the time people got to XP they'd had a decade of a consistent interface and were just used to its quirks.

    From a security context they were not ok. Not ok at all.

  • Assumption:

    Someone crams a 300 watt solar panel onto the roof of their EV and manages to integrate it into the charging system so that it's pretty efficient to use that power.

    Numbers:

    One hour of good sunshine on the 300 watt panel = 300 watt-hours (Wh).

    Average EV energy usage : 200Wh per kilometre these days. Maybe a little more, maybe a little less, depends on how and where you're driving.

    Result:

    One hour of perfect sunshine hitting the roof of your car equals 1.5 kilometres of extra range, or you can drive your car in a steady-state fashion at a 3-5 kilometres per hour because an EV is more efficient than the average usage at lower speeds.

    Conclusion:

    Probably better off increasing the storage capacity of the battery as a full day's sunshine will get you about 10 kilometres of range.

  • I hate how bloated the kernel is. I'd like it to fit into main memory.

    Take a copy of lspci, lsusb. Use them to build a kernel from source with only the bits you need and then make the bits you might need modules. Include your filesystem driver into the kernel and you can skip the usual initramfs stage and jump straight to your root filesystem.

    Might take a few tries, but at least it doesn't take 18 hours to compile the kernel anymore....