asteli

Why no love for network switches? The old mechanical telephone exchange equipment is enormously satisfying to watch as well.

https://youtu.be/_xI9tXi-UNs

Saildrone's forecast app is like Dark Sky but even better and more beautiful. They don't have an android app yet, just iOS, but I believe one is in development, and they have a full-featured in-browser client. No affiliation, but I know someone who works there who showed me their app.

https://www.saildrone.com/forecast

I work in electronics and laser stuff, where we use german-style compound names like "multi-pixel photon counting" and "erbium-doped fiber amplifier." Even in low-level compute, packages are named descriptively e.g. FreeRTOS. Lots of acronyms, but very few cute single-word nouns to name things. I've only observed that trend in relatively high-level software.

Joke is on me. I picked those nouns at random but Pangolin is a bona-fide frontend framework[1] and Clamp is a text truncating utility.[2]

1: https://pangolinjs.org/ 2: https://github.com/josephschmitt/Clamp.js/

I used to troll my old housemate (web frontend guy) by saying something along the lines of "Oh, Node.JS? Yeah some people I work with use that, but they're mostly moving over to Pangolin with Clamp on the backend." (substituting Pangolin and Clamp for any other nouns)

I don't think he ever caught on.

Here's a hack I haven't seen anyone else mention:

Look at the calendars of venues that you like. Their whole job is curation, and they book lots of local bands. Throw one song from each band playing at each venue for the next month into a playlist and listen through it a couple times -- almost surely you'll find new artists you didn't know about, and guess what? Their show is just around the corner.

If you live in Florida, you can go down to the pawn shop, buy a gun, drive over to the airport and start shooting at planes. Doesn't take much sophistication to cause a lot of harm.

Wait, that exists. USB is the standard. The UPS with standardized DC-outs is a USB power bank with integrated pass-through charging.

The CFI let you do all those things?

The aforementioned Swedes appear to be quite content paying their high taxes, given the benefits conferred.

[1] https://www.theguardian.com/money/2008/nov/16/sweden-tax-bur... [2] https://taxfoundation.org/sweden-competitive-spite-high-tax-... [3] https://www.pri.org/stories/2016-02-09/bernie-sanders-wants-...

The unpainted steel of the DeLorean made it a pain in the ass to repair. You can't pull dents, apply body filler and repaint, you basically need a whole new panel if you want to restore damage.

Apparently 41% of the land in the contiguous US is pasture or grazing land for livestock (548MM acre). Just staggering.

To compare, land we use to grow crops that we directly eat account for for ~77MM acres.

[https://www.bloomberg.com/graphics/2018-us-land-use/]

Some venues are better than others. Figure out which places and events have sound engineers that give a shit, and go there.

I do the same kind of resource management with books when I travel. It's no fun to go on a trip with a mostly depleted fiction paperback and end up lugging around dead weight for 5 days out of 7.

For the purpose of this exercise, assume a rectilinear ant.

One cm^3 of water is 1g. Ant's a lot smaller.

I agree re: power. I do not agree about traction.

Assume you're stuck in mud somehow, a perfect case for diff lockers. If you lock the rotational rate of all your wheels together you are either:

a.) limiting the torque you're applying to the amount the tire with the least amount of traction available can bear before slipping out, or

b.) letting 'em rip and hoping you don't dig yourself down into a hole.

The beauty of having fine control over the power going to each motor is that you can put down the max torque that particular wheel can manage regardless of what the other tires are doing. And you can do so with a granularity that is unmatched by any ICE TC system (which IIRC use the brakes to control torque?)

The people who make money in industries that pollute would love for you to keep buying into the myth of personal responsibility. We saw this with cigarette and drink companies with the "Keep America Beautiful" campaign, a wildly successful PR move that shifted the blame for litter 100% to the consumer.

"Vote with your wallet" is valid, but it also takes the heat off of our elected representatives and regulators. We need to hold them to account for their failure to force companies to factor destructive externalities into their accounting. Vote with your vote, to hit companies in their wallets.

Plus, no propshaft or exhaust to get hung up on things, and you can get the CoG lower, improving handling. Plus, a level of traction control that simply isn't possible with ICE. I'm excited.

I'm getting a kick out of the image of getting spotted by a housemate while walking to the bathroom, fully nude with a DSLR.

"Hey asteli, whatcha doin?"

"Aaaah, cleaning the sensor. Yep. Definitely that."

it is good practice to keep emissions equipment in place. this way you can avoid paying to replace your cats if you have to move to a state that tests/inspects. it also reduces the amount of air and noise pollution that people in your community experience.

i have a lifted truck but i'm cheap so i just wrapped a length of chain around the cat, secured with shitty padlocks i had laying around. doesn't actually have to be secure, just look like enough of a PITA to remove that the thief moves on.

This is about transit safety. Cyclists are in a lot more danger than pedestrians, because unlike peds, they don't have special infrastructure set aside from them for the most part.

Depends on how they're set up. My Sony over-ear noise-cancelling set has ambient noise mics that assume a non-windy environment, and thus can pick up wind noise themselves. I turn the noise-cancelling off if I'm going to be somewhere windy, but I have a hunch that putting a little faux fur patch (deadcat) over the ambient noise mic port would fix this.

Based on the fact that the site is monochrome and about 8KB, I'm going to guess early 90s.

It's funny, the favico (modern asset loaded from the root of the domain automatically) outweighs the entire page by a factor of 4.

I think there's an argument that the consolidated internet caused 4chan to morph from a benign imageboard to the relative monster it is today. 4chan didn't start as a cancer, it became that way when all the 'normies' left for reddit|facebook|twitter.

Not knowing the real reason, I suspect it's so that parents can drive their children to school before starting their commutes to work. What proportion of kids do you reckon walk/bike/transit to school in your country?

Not just trains. Zoomed out a bit and was surprised to see a UAL flight departing from Haneda.

Haha! Was thinking exactly of this place. Either lucky coincidence or it's better known than I thought.

What? The US has the ability to repossess land under Eminent Domain, and it can raise taxes to pay for construction labor (a roundabout way of compelling people to labor for the government). That's not the issue here.