frankus

The list of things that require an app rather than a web page was pretty long circa 2010, but it's quite a bit shorter now: it's mostly hardware access (Bluetooth/NFC), background activities (like background app refresh), persisting location permission, reliable offline storage, and system/OS integration (widgets/live activities, Siri shortcuts).

If done for the right reasons, a native app could theoretically be a bit more power- and bandwidth-efficient for a given level of polish.

But usually what you're getting is some cross-platform mystery meat UI, a boatload of tracking, and no real system/OS integration (because it isn't trivial to do from whatever cross-platform environment they chose).

If you're in the US, Costco has certain models at the old price through Saturday (or while supplies last). Just pulled the trigger on a 24GB/1TB 13" MbA for $250 off the new price.

The most popular proposal (from Henry George) is to maintain individual land ownership, but impose a land-value tax that approaches 100% of the land rent.

The result is that real estate basically sells for roughly what it would cost to rebuild whatever is built on the land.

There is still a premium charged (in the form of LVT) to allocate access to desirable locations, but the revenue goes to the government/community instead of the previous owner. And the eliminating the incentive for land speculation should actually reduce overall costs.

The difference is that investment in a company can create “more company”, whereas investment in land can’t create more land.

I'd like to see these if these can be scaled down into ebike size, or beyond that into micromobilty form factors that people carry around (like lightweight scooters and skateboards).

In the FAQ they discuss how in most of its range this particular species is invasive, feeds almost exclusively on humans, and is not believed to be a major food source for predators.

I grew up speaking German and still use "zu!" with my (otherwise English-trained) dogs for "get out of the way!".

This one is resistive (tiny and cheap to purchase) but will be just an emergency-backup shower once my home renovations are done.

The house is getting a split-system air-to-water heat pump with an indirect tank for domestic hot water, so it should cut that down substantially (the unit maxes out at around 3kW input but likely will run longer to recover/preheat).

I wish we did more e.g. district heating with that waste heat in the US.

The number I guesstimated for my e-scooter is about 500 miles per dollar of electricity.

The electric shower also seemed pretty optimistic. I live in an area with about 50°F/10°C ground temperature and my 14.4 kW water heater can just keep a relatively efficient shower head flowing at a comfortable temperature.

Every single ICE car driving down the highway is throwing away enough waste heat to heat a small apartment building on a freezing cold day.

I feel like the gist here is that "faster, better, cheaper: pick two" doesn't apply to sub-optimally-spaced bus stops. You really can have all three, at the cost of some political blowback from the people who used to have a shorter walk.

I wonder if part of it is also that mining companies are generally allowed to just leave their tailings in a big pile near the mine rather than have to responsibly dispose of the majority of the ore that has no (or negative) commercial value.

The diabolical case is M5 versus 10-32. About a 4% difference in diameter and about 0.8% difference in thread pitch. Basically indistinguishable with the naked eye and even the "nest the threads in each other" check doesn't help without a pretty long length of threads.

There's now a product for that: https://www.lowes.com/pd/Kobalt-1-4-in-to-1-2-in-Drive-Metri...

They're obviously not the most affordable things around, but if you have an iPhone and spending ~US$250 on a pair of wireless earbuds won't unduly stress your budget, the transparency mode on AirPods Pro is great for this.

I think the way this would work is you would have your Canadian friend/owner drive it across and then return via another mode of transport. It's entirely possible you could get away with it pretty much indefinitely (especially in an area where folks are used to seeing Canadian plates), but I could also see someone checking a list of "foreign vehicles that entered the US and never left" at some point and one or both of you having some explaining to do (i.e. being ruled inadmissible).

I had a couple of coworkers who had them. I vaguely remember it being based on a ~$35k value in 1997 dollars, so definitely out of my price range as a new graduate earning only a little more than that in a year.

On top of that I'm pretty sure the unit economics were firmly in the negative, even discounting the R&D costs.

They were pretty remarkable though—I got a chance to drive a pre-production one at a ride-and-drive a year before and was super impressed.

Pre-Tesla EV companies were kind of stuck in a catch-22, where they couldn't enter the low end of the market (because the tech was still super costly) and they couldn't enter the high end of the market (because either the performance was lacking or they didn't have the resources to scale production).

But with a combination of throwing a lot of money at the problem, being in the right place at the right time, and good execution, they managed to scale up the high end of the market enough to eventually move (somewhat) down-market.

Showering in hot water is one of the more energy-intensive things people do on a daily basis. I have a 14.4 kW on-demand heater that just barely keeps up with a 1.5 gallon (~6 liter) per minute shower head with 50°F/10°C incoming water.

On a per-minute basis that's comparable to highway driving in a smallish electric car.

My favorite memory is following a map to a small isolated hot spring off of some random gravel road in the middle of nowhere. It consisted of a hot-tub-sized pool and a shower.

Whoever was there before had left the shower running. We were the only people there, and hadn't seen anyone pass us on the (dead end) road, so it must have been on for quite a while.

Only when I went to for my pre-soak shower did I realize that it didn't actually have any kind of user-accessible way to turn it off.

From that article it looks like all you need to establish a secure connection with the passport is some data that is printed in plaintext on the photo page.

It seems (again, if I'm reading correctly) that you only really need a private key in order to issue a passport.

Isn't this just seeing a slippery slope and deciding to build a terrace[1], in that the existence of a digital ID doesn't automatically lead to mandate to carry one—any more than the existence of a physical ID card does?

[1] to paraphrase one many excellent John McCarthy-isms: http://jmc.stanford.edu/general/sayings.html

Rounding to a nickel has the advantage that's it's both simple (1, 2, 6, and 7 round down; 3, 4, 8, and 9 round up) and fair (there's no systematic bias in favor of the buyer or seller).

Dimes need to deal with how to round numbers ending in 5, making them unfair, or (with a more elaborate system of looking at both digits) complicated.

Quarters (being an odd value) are fair, but kind of a nightmare to memorize all of the values that round up or down (1–12, 26–37, 51–62, and 76–87 round down; 13–24, 38–49, 63–74, and 88–99 round up; and I'm not even sure I don't have an error in those numbers).

Also it's awkward if a higher-valued coin (e.g. quarters) isn't divisible by the least valuable coin (e.g. a dime)

I think business-logic-in-JavaScript is something cross-platform folks shouldn't snooze on either, with the usual caveats of not doing anything performance-critical or where an asynchronous API would be awkward (to be clear, using JavaScriptCore or QuickJS or the like, not just running in a WebView)

But it'll run on iOS (v7.0+), Android (I think more recently) and of course web and server-side. And most importantly, it's hot-reloadable, as long as you don't run afoul of platform gatekeepers (i.e. use it for bug fixes and minor behavior changes, not like whole new features).

One of the frustrating things about mobile development is that once you ship a version, that version will almost certainly be running on at least someone's device indefinitely without being upgraded. My day job is even on step further back in that we have to get our customers to update the version of our SDK that they're integrating (which for many of them means contracting out because they don't have an in-house mobile dev team), before they ship an app update, which then needs to be installed by end-users, whose device might not even support the new deployment target…

(I've been trying to sell this to the bosses for the last 9 years or so, and never gotten the go-ahead, so there could be aspects I'm missing, but it always seemed like a huge missed opportunity).

This would have been super helpful like 20 years ago when I was on the data center floor trying to debug rack-mount (headless) Linux servers. The center had like one KVM "crash cart" that needed to be plugged into a spare outlet in the rack that wasn't always easy to come by.

I'm sure we could have improved on that setup but we were an inexperienced skeleton crew on a shoestring budget and not the best management.

I always thought it would be great to have a "laptop without a motherboard" to manage these, and this is close enough given the price of the redundant hardware now.

For just straight up assembly of one-sided SMT boards (i.e. not reclaiming components from a donor board), a $30 plug-in electric skillet and a solder paste stencil from the PCB manufacturer (or patience and a solder paste syringe) works far better than it has any right to. https://www.instructables.com/Simple-Skillet-Surface-mount-S...

If a private jet is just too "new money" for you, you can travel in style like a 19th-century robber baron.

I had the same thought, with what looks like a ZIRP bump pre-2021 finally normalizing to where it tracks the stock market much more closely.