tal @ tal @kbin.social

Trying a switch to tal@lemmy.today, at least for a while, due to recent kbi

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2 yr. ago

No. Why, are they doing something like that?

It definitely works, as I've done it. Maybe there's some kind of bug you hit.

Large cities might have dedicated fueling stations, but I doubt that smaller places do.

If you're serious, I would assume that it's not that hard to red-flag cases where fuel mileage drops after you have used the vehicle, as well as before. After it's happened a couple of times, should be able to identify the cause.

Maybe it's phone autocorrect and it was supposed to be "leather" or something?

Not really the focus of the article, but I think that /r/place was a neat idea, but hard to produce much with.

I feel like maybe there are forms of collaborative art that might go further, like letting people propose various changes to a chunk of pixels on an artwork and letting people vote on the changes.

I never really understood the purpose of it.

Like, I don't know whether the aim was to address some sort of abuse, or whether it was to reduce Reddit's storage costs in some way or what.

I'm not familiar with whatever this Sandisk portable thing is, but SanDisk is a drive manufacturer, in which case it may be drive-level.

googles

Sounds like when it's locked, the drive presents itself as a CD drive containing a Windows executable that unlocks it.

https://www.techrepublic.com/forums/discussions/how-do-i-fully-remove-sandisk-unlocker/

I wouldn't expect Linux to be able to write to it if that's it. It won't even see the actual drive, just the non-writeable CD drive.

Honestly, I'd probably just write off the drive if the data isn't important. The amount of time that's required to basically get a used hard drive is probably not going to be worth it.

https://pbs.twimg.com/media/D7MDB4VWsAEnP9u?format=jpg&name=large

https://i5.walmartimages.com/asr/c0a7c488-1d8c-444f-9922-5e8cee487457.2fa857007de957c3ee737531999b62d6.jpeg

We can cool OURSELVES by letting a regular fan blow on us = WE are the moist filter, and the evaporation of our sweat cools us.

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

You do do the same thing.

However, I have a small evaporative cooler which can evaporate 5 gallons of water a day. You aren't gonna do that yourself, and it'd drench you in sweat.

They're a couple of times more energy-efficient than air conditioners, though more maintenance heavy and require being in a dry climate. They also (normally) require outside air coming in, which is nice in that it keeps carbon dioxide levels down but means pollen or whatever too unless you filter that.

sauna

If you're using an evaporative cooler correctly, you have to keep (dry) outside air coming in so that it doesn't just act like a giant humidifier.

FWIW, you can actually use what's called an "indirect" evaporative cooler. That has outside air come in, go through an evaporative cooler to cool it, then sends that through a heat exchangerthat dumps heat from inside air into the heat exchanger, then sends the moist air outside without increasing inside humidity.

You can even extend that to use the cooled, humid air as the input to the "outside" side of an air conditioner's heat exchanger that dumps best to the outdoors. That is basically an indirect evaporative cooler plus a heat pump, a "hybrid" air conditioner, which will boost the air conditioner's efficiency.

Unfortunately, I don't see much by way of small indirect evaporative coolers or small "hybrid" air conditioners on the market, though it's not technically-complicated to build one. Seems to be done by large commercial installations.

I'm on AnySoft, but it's not perfect, and I gotta say that the onscreen keyboard situation for Android was one of my biggest unexpected disappointments when moving to the platform. What I'd expected was that there'd be one FOSS keyboard that would be incredibly configurable and take over, but everything seems to significantly lack in some ways:

• Some keyboards aren't great when it comes to arrow keys/control keys/other keys useful in Termux or ConnectBot to Linux systems.
• Lack of keyboards that provide a straightforward way for users to create their own bindings. The ability to resize and relocate keys and to assign tap/hold/swipe bindings to individual keys seems like it'd be straightforward to me, but it doesn't seem to be a thing. I mean, why can't I remove a key that I don't use or want (say, the "mic" key if I don't use that functionality) and add my own key. Even better, my own modifier keys a la Shift to add more functionality to the other keys?
• Some keyboards don't have typo correction. My accuracy on onscreen keyboards on a phone-size screen isn't good enough for me to really operate without that. I really wish that typo correction was an external program that the keyboard program could just plug into, so that this gets solved once and every new keyboard developer doesn't have to deal with reimplementing this.
• Unicode input. I mean, we have this incredibly rich character set these days. Most on-screen keyboards seem to let one choose a language and to make it easy to input the common characters in that language, akin to a traditional physical keyboard. And they often provide for some common extensions to that, like superscript characters. And for some reason, a lot provide emoji support, though damned if I can see how that's essential other than maybe on something like traditional Twitter, where character count is artificially-constrained. But support for inputting Unicode seems to be remarkably limited. On desktop computers, I'm used to using emacs, which has a ton of arbitrary input methods for inputting characters. I can use various mechanisms that do things like ^2 becomes "²" or lets you search by name for Unicode characters (C-x 8 RET and then a tab-completable and searchable DIVISION SIGN becomes "÷") or lets you use TeX sequences (\rightarrow becomes "→"), lets you input Unicode characters by codepoint, or a zillion other things and lets you switch among them as is convenient. An on-screen Android keyboard could do all that and unlike emacs has the ability to manipulate the actual keyboard in front of a user and could leverage "long press" and the like, but nothing like that actually exists.
• Chording seems remarkably underused. I mean, you've got the ability to detect multiple finger presses, but it doesn't really seem to be exploited. I get that one-hand use is a thing, but I'd think that there'd be at least a toggle between one-hand and two-hand use to be able to leverage that.
• The "drag on spacebar to move the cursor" isn't offered in AnySoft and some other keyboards, which seems like a reasonable way to deal with cursor movement where one doesn't have the precision of a mouse.
• No macro support. I mean, okay, in the absence of fully-configurable keys, I'd have at least expected some limited ability to assign user-specified snippets of text to some menu or keys.
• No external editor support. For some long chunks of text -- like, say, Markdown on kbin/lemmy -- I'd just as soon use one of the various dedicated Markdown editors than the in-browser editor.

I think that there are a few legit issues for mods who don't want to spread out, but I think that those are problems that either are going to have to be fixed at a technical level on the Threadiverse anyway or where we want to push people to spread out anyway:

• If you put work into creating a community, you don't want it to be on an instance that vanishes. Legit concern. Lemmy.world is the biggest lemmy instance right now, so "safety in numbers" -- if everyone else is there, then hopefully it is going to stay up. But (a) every other would-be mod is in the same camp too, and the only way to address that is to have people start spreading out, (b) having some mechanism for post-instance-failure community portability to another instance might be interesting, but we don't currently have it, and (c) right now I think that people look at user count and maybe community count to figure out where they should go, and so it'd be nice to have people spreading out.
• The way lemmy and kbin presently work, communities are only visible to users on other federated instances in searches that aren't specifically for community@instance if they have at least one subscriber on that other instance. However, they're visible to all local users regardless of whether there are subscribers. Setting up shop on an instance with a lot of users thus helps visibility. I think that this is legitimately a technical problem right now with both lemmy and kbin that will have to be addressed. Maybe messages don't need to go to other instances, but at least communities should -- not a lot of traffic there. Or maybe high-vote/high-traffic threads should have a chance of going to other instances. Or maybe some entirely-new mechanism to help improve discoverability of new communities should be introduced -- I don't think that either the lemmy or kbin developers are adverse to new things being implemented to improve community discoverability, but I suspect that they've had other things that they're busy with. Maybe in the meantime, someone will make an external website that tries to help users find interesting communities. This isn't fixed now, but I suspect that it's going to have to be. In the meantime, there's presently a straightforward way to mitigate this if you're a mod -- create a user account on the most-populated lemmy and kbin instances and subscribe to your community there. You can also post to newcommunities@lemmy.world, and my guess is that someone may create another community or communities for trying to promote or do reviews of or whatever existing communities. Community discoverability needs work, but everyone's in the same boat right now.

I'd also kind of argue that it would be desirable to encourage creating communities other than on one or two instances, that for load and reliability reasons, it'd be nice to leverage the federated nature of the network.

If someone is tying up "documentaries" on every lemmy and kbin instance, okay, fine, that's a legit concern. But if they have it on one and it's not very active and a would-be moderator thinks that they can make a more-appealing community, then why not just go make a better community on another instance?

I mean, it's creating a fight over a resource that (a) isn't scarce in the first place and (b) would probably be better-spread out anyway.

Would be nice to have some form of account portability that would work after a server vanishes. Like, way to register a pubkey on a server and then register a signed message at another server that this is your new account.

You don't even need an account if you just want to browse.

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

Chicle (/ˈtʃɪkəl/) is a natural gum traditionally used in making chewing gum and other products. It is collected from several species of Mesoamerican trees in the genus Manilkara, including M. zapota, M. chicle, M. staminodella, and M. bidentata.

My understanding is that it is more common in offices, though, than in residences.

Just looking at the start and end figure there, the number did something like double in inflation-adjusted terms, but in the US, new build house sizes (this not being specific to rentals, dunno if one can get that figure) also roughly doubled, and I'd expect costs to be something like linear in size of house. So my off-the-cuff take is that it's probably about reasonable.

That being said, Jimmy McMillan was specifically talking about rent in New York City when he did the "Rent is Too Damn High" thing, not rent across the US, and that is going to have a variety of other factors going on, including restrictions on construction, rent control, other regulations that specifically impact New York City, and I would guess transportation accessibility from outside New York City, to let that housing compete for people who work in New York City. It's very possible that New York City has local factors dominating and is doing other things.

IRC has had a history of people trying to take down servers from time to time.

I'd guess a random person who got banned from a lemmy.world community or the like.

I'm not actually sure that the war is as fantastic as it might seem for defense contractors, because a lot of the hardware is older stuff that I suspect would have fallen out of inventories at some point not that far down the line. Yeah, some will be replaced by new hardware and wouldn't otherwise have been, but I bet that some won't.

GMLRS rockets are being produced new. That's going to be good news for Lockheed Martin.

But the HAWKs that found a new life as an affordable way to shoot down the the Iranian Shahed-136s are quite old, and had already been pulled out of service. I doubt that their consumption creates a new hole that will be filled by something else.

Javelins were consumed to shoot mostly Soviet-era tanks that they were originally designed to shoot. I don't know if there will ever be such a large mass of tanks assembled again. Russia may rebuild tanks to some degree after the war, but I doubt to the same level. If there isn't a large stockpile of tanks, I suppose that one doesn't need as many anti-tank weapons.