signaturefish

(hackeridiot12 may be Jewish - IME Jews often type "G-d" because spelling the deity's name in impermanent text is disrespectful. Bit odd from my perspective, but harmless :))

Foundation licensee here in the UK, working on my Intermediate (and hoping to pass that exam this year). I manage the radio system for the UK Discworld Convention (every other year, next instance August 2026), and I spend a chunk of time on the VHF repeater near me, in the Cambridge area (mostly listening).

5 and 5, 73.

Simplified English is a thing that exists, for clarity - see for example https://simple.wikipedia.org/wiki/Practice

I don't know if the parent comment was trying to equate American English and Simple English - I can see it as a way to dismiss American English as a "lesser" language (which it isn't, as you say), but I wouldn't start by assuming that.

XRF will go a millimetre or so into the sample AFAIK - it's mainly useful for finding alloy contamination, e.g. "this is 99.99% gold" vs "this is 73% gold and 27% other things" - you really want to use both techniques. Resistivity/conductivity is about average composition, XRF is about elemental purity.

Huh, impressive - I guess I'm out of date (and/or the people I listen to about such things have a working XRF already and don't want to replace a working unit).

On the individual scale, something like a Sigma Metalytics resistivity analyser (passes an electric field through the sample, checks to see if resistivity, conductivity, weight or size all match up to what you'd expect from a homogeneous gold sample of that size or weight). On the commercial scale, an XRF spectrometer. Both methods are completely non-destructive, and highly accurate (the XRF more so).

(the two scales are due to price and bulk: the Sigma is about the size of a hardback book and a few hundred pounds, an XRF is the size of a large 3d-printer and many thousands).

I don't think it's a dumb question, though I guess some might question its relevance. Side-comments can be interesting, though.

I don't know why they did it, but it follows the same pattern as the pi400 - develop a whole new board, rather than a daughterboard for the pi4 compute module. If I had to guess, it's probably about reducing e-waste: if someone wants a compute module and it's out of stock but there are pi500s available, why wouldn't they buy a pi500, strip the compute module out and dump the rest of the machine in the bin?

And to be fair to them, they're dogfooding a fair amount - the RP1 and the RP2 are in the design, rather than a generic southbridge and keyboard controller.

Three "bad" missiles over a five minute period. The hit on the WCK convoy killed the latest 7 out of over 200 aid workers who have been killed in Gaza since this latest war began.

Do you have a copy of the hardware manual for the thing? If so, I believe the Connections Museum would love to borrow it :)

Yeah, same here: I upgraded to an FP4 about three months ago (from an increasingly-broken-down Samsung Galaxy S9), after puzzling for a while over whether I should wait for what looked like an imminent FP5 or just grab the FP4 that was available now. I don't regret my choice fwiw.

The battery already lasts two days under my usage model, and the phone still has a five year warranty and OS support for another three years. I see that Fairphone are still selling some repair parts for FP2 and FP3, so I expect to be able to repair my phone through that whole time period unless something weird happens.

The FP5 looks like a nice upgrade, but I don't feel short-changed: I got a new phone when my old one was failing, and it's not absolutely top-of-the-line, and that's fine. Like you, I'll think harder about the next round of upgrades (maybe to the FP6, maybe the FP7), and I'd love it if Fairphone were to be clearer about their release schedule, but I understand that they don't want to Osborne themselves.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Osborne_Computer_Corporation#T...

The thing is, there ARE chunks of spectrum dedicated to digital comms within the amateur radio bands.

Here's a link to the VHF band plan we use here in the UK - obviously I can't speak for other countries: [https://rsgb.services/public/bandplans/19/ ]. It's _littered_ with SSTV, beacon and digital mode allocations (and for clarity, that's a good thing). The digital mode allocations are full of people chatting in text using FT-8 or JS8Call (more in HF than VHF, those, but the principle holds). On the next page, there's an entire 1MHz allocation dedicated to wideband digital data modes.

If you're a licensee, there's plenty of innovation and digital experimentation space available. Sure, a chunk of the traditionalist ham community aren't excited about it, but there's plenty of us who are. And, as ever, you don't need a license to receive...

TBH, I don't have a problem with Rust so much as I have/had a problem with a section of the rust community.

The shouting fanbeings of rust put me off looking into it for years, because when I kept getting "rewrite it in rust!" as the answer to "there's a problem with $THIS_CODE" when talking with colleagues, _even when those colleagues had minimal rust experience_, all I could conclude was that the whole thing was an empty promise and that no-one knew how to solve the problem, but everyone "knew" that the New Cool Language was the way to fix everything.

Generalisation from incomplete data - no doubt there was a sensible majority in the rust community, but the fanbeings were _loud_.

FWIW I was wrong: I'm getting into rust now and I like what I see, and the discussions around it online and with colleagues are pretty sensible. But, it's taken a while to get there and when you've been in tech for a couple of decades you see this hype cycle and get jaded to it. Erlang is the new hotness ... OCaml is the new hotness ... Java is the new hotness, rewrite everything in Java, wait C# is the new hotness...

I suspect rust is here to stay, and I'm gonna learn more about it, and I regret some of my past words about it. But my problem was never with the increased memory safety, or the language at all, pretty much, just the early community.

TL;DR: Other humans are the worst, bug reported, fix unlikely :)

No, but I see what you mean. Generating hydrogen and methane using electricity will probably never be that efficient, but if you have spare power then using it to get 60% of its energy back again in the form of future burnables may still be worth it (percentage guessed and probably optimistic).

Yeah, I'd like to see those figures too, and I think they might surprise you (and me). I don't have figures or references to hand here, but as I understand it modern heat pumps should be good down at least a little way below freezing. They're widely used and popular in Norway, for example, and the Norwegians aren't exactly new to cold weather.

In the context of heat pumps, a "backup heating strip" is a resistive heating element - electricity goes in, heat comes out just like an old electric heater. They're generally used during defrost cycles for the external air handler in cold weather, or to provide a temporary thermal boost when the heat pump is having performance trouble e.g. when the exterior temperature is near the bottom of the heat pump's operating range.

More detail at https://carolinacomfortsc.com/hvac/what-are-heat-strips/ (no affiliation, they were the first authoritative return from my web search).

I always forget the size difference between US and UK homes (I assume toomuchtodo is speaking from a US perspective). Here, in my three-bedroom UK house I'm on a 60A service fuse and considering updating to 100A in the future (amusingly, as part of a solar PV / electric vehicle charger install).

I've never heard of a UK house having a larger than 100A service (although I imagine they exist here and there - it's certainly not common).

"Affordances" are a UI design concept - they're things that the design of an object makes you think you can do with that object, if that makes sense. In this context, door handles afford being pulled (because they stick out of the door and you want to pull the door, so you pull the handle), buttons afford being pressed (because they are small, often labelled with a function, and project above the surface they're embedded in), etc.

So yes, I think you're right that it's a word-play between the UI design concept and the cost of implementation concept.

It is indeed a concern, and I suspect that's why they're recommending any wikihous project include a full-house MVHR system (see About=>Product, the bent arrow near the middle of the image map). MVHR is the solution I've settled on for my house retrofit project - it should allow the house to breathe in a controlled manner, without leaking warm air in winter.

I really want to see more electric conversion kits for existing cars, I must admit. It seems like such a waste to throw away what is in many cases a perfectly good chassis/geartrain/body/etc just because you want to change the ICE engine and fuel tank for an electric motor and a battery pack.

They're not so much unreliable as ... really not very sensitive, as I understand it. Viral load in covid sufferers follows a curve with a rapid ramp up and a slower ramp down, both PCR and lateral-flow devices require a certain minimum level in order to read positive. PCR is much more sensitive (because it's an amplification technology, so can "see" a lower level of viral load) than lateral-flow devices - which means you can be "safe" on an LFD and "unsafe" on a PCR for a small amount of time on the ramp up and a fairly large amount of time on the ramp down. The level at which you're at risk of passing it to other humans is I _believe_ somewhere between the two tests, so it sounds like you maybe got unlucky with an LFD or two, but the results you report are about what I'd expect :(

LFDs are decent for telling you if you're infectious _right now_ - they're much worse than PCRs for telling you if you have covid at all.

Disclaimer: I'm a software engineer, do not take medical advice from me. My partner is a biochemist and I regularly chat with a couple of council covid-response officers, and the above is the explanation I've had from them when I've asked.

Most air-tight houses have an integrated MVHR (mechanical ventilation with heat recovery) system, which is kind of the inverse of an HVAC setup. There's a constant small air current being moved through the house, and when it exhausts to the outside world a heat-exchanger captures as much heat as possible from the exiting air and uses it to heat the entering air. Airtightness means you can control where the air enters and exits, which means this trick is possible.

All that being said, I'd expect a permanently-installed stove to have a flue (which results in the stove technically being a leak, but that's solvable). I assume the kerosene stove mentioned above is in use while the house is incomplete, so not yet airtight.

pv == photovoltaics - rooftop solar panels, in this case.

Correct, the British Royal Air Force.

Looks like that trial's currently not accepting new participants, but thanks for the link - I'll keep an eye on it in case that changes.

The retrofit plan that an eco-retrofit architect is currently drawing up for me indicates that the biggest benefits are on the "windows=>triple-glazing" (3->2 tonnes Co2e/year) and "external-wall-insulation" (2->1.1 tonnes CO2e/year) steps, but I don't have cost data to establish a cost-benefit ratio for them yet. I'd always suggest that someone who's looking to make their house slightly more efficient start with good triple-glazed windows, though - single glazing and some types of older double glazing can be really surprisingly lossy. The airtightness and MVHR work is spread out among several stages, so is harder to analyse, but older houses leak like sieves and anywhere you can feel a breeze in the winter you can be fairly sure that you're paying to heat air that's escaping the house.

"What works best" is really a bit of a rabbithole. The standards I'm working to are here: https://aecb.net/aecb-retrofit-standard/ and the AECB site in general is full of information though it can be quite dense and jargonized. You may also find https://passivhaustrust.org.uk/news/detail/?nId=867 interesting - it's a report on retrofitting an entire block of flats by stripping and rebuilding the interior using /Internal/ Wall Insulation instead of the more common EWI - it's less popular because it can be a pest to do electrical and plumbing work around, but it's an option. The three strong pillars of eco-retrofit, at least as I've seen them to be so far, are airtightness (and ventilation!), wall insulation and triple-glazing, and competently made and installed glazing will be the easiest sell to the management company I imagine (if you don't already have it). The other two are more involved.

The whole bill of work is as follows:

* Full external-wall-insulation (180mm thick) with brick slip dressing so it doesn't stick out like a sore thumb amidst all the brick houses in the road.

* Triple-glazed windows and doors throughout, replacing single-glazed original units which are at end-of-life.

* 300mm deep loft insulation, replacing poor-quality and patchy 80-100mm insulation.

* Full airtightness sealing (i.e. the house should leak almost no warm air to the outside world), ...with heat-recovering mechanical ventilation so we don't all suffocate.

* Air-source heat pump to replace the gas boiler, driving underfloor heating in place of the wet-circuit radiators.

* 12-panel solar photovoltaic install on the roof (plus batteries etc).

Fully agreed on decarbonizing heating, but it's not an either/or thing, both approaches work and are to some extent necessary. Any heat you're not losing to the outside world doesn't need to be replaced by the heating system, is the theory. Here in the UK, I'm working to AECB (Association of Eco-Conscious Builders) standards: we cant quite hit PassiveHaus without knocking the whole thing down and rebuilding, but we can get pretty close.

There's a whole separate argument to be had about subsidy of electric heating vs subsidy of gas heating, if I recall correctly. A good electric heating system should be just as effective as a gas system, but in the UK it can cost up to four times as much to run because of the current mess of subsidies. That needs sorting out, as well, as telling people they have to pay much more for a somewhat more eco-conscious system isn't going to fly with the general population.

Possibly-relatedly, I'm in the process of getting some retrofit work done on my house to improve its insulation and reduce the carbon costs of heating it. I absolutely had not appreciated that a place like this, an 80s brick-built terraced house in southern England, could be responsible for 3.4 tonnes of CO2 emissions per year in heating costs alone.

The necessary retrofit work is expensive, on the order of £50'000 over the next ten years, which makes it pretty much out of reach for the huge majority of people in the UK, but will take that down to 0.2 tonnes/year (narrowly missing net-zero because of the concrete-slab construction of the floor). We really need to be subsidising retrofit work like this, so that ordinary people can afford to have it done, because it makes a huge difference to what must be millions of similar houses in the UK alone.

Hey, accident twins! I once had a Zippo lighter that was playing up - you could strike it and you could see the spark fly, but it didn't light. I sniffed the wick, yeah, definitely fuel evaporating off it. I struck the striker, yup, spark. Sniff, fuel, strike, spark. Sniff, strike and OF COURSE the thing lights up immediately, sending a cigarette lighter flame right up my right nostril. I'm told by bystanders that half my face lit up in an "electrocuted film character" way for a fraction of a second before I jerked it away, and I was smelling nothing but burnt nose hair every time I inhaled for about a week.

Sorry, this fell out of my head for a few days.

It was a ~1000-person national level game in a fantasyish setting, and one of the game elements was that you were explorers and colonists in a strange new land, and you could send messages to your supporting factions "back home" to request support or supplies or whatever. Those messages had to be carried by a ship belonging to a trade house, and any supplies that your supporters sent you had to come back by the same method, and all the trade houses were represented by player groups on the field...

So yeah, a group of players would write to their "sponsors", and my group (as one of the trade houses) would open their letter, see what they were requesting and then forward the letter to the game organisers. The organisers would play the part of the remote sponsor, and send a letter back, which we'd open and read to see what orders the players were being given and what support they could expect (then we'd reseal the letter and deliver it). This positioned us super well to sell them exactly what they needed to achieve those goals, at an only slightly elevated "rush" price.

We didn't open every letter, and we didn't scam everyone - we made most of our money legitimately. But it was a fun side-game.

To answer your question, the lifting technique I refer to works well on flat paper and variably well on non-flat paper. Something as delicate as a letterlock, I'd be seriously concerned about my hot knife nicking or tearing a part of the lock that I can't see under the seal ... and /that/ would be obvious.

So it's not so much that the seal holds the lock closed, as that the seal obscures the lock to the point that opening non-destructively is much harder.

It's pretty easy to non-destructively lift a wax seal off of paper, with a sharp, hot knife and a bit of practice. You can then read the letter and reseal it with a touch more hot wax or the back of a heated spoon (to melt the back of the original seal).

Not that I've ever done that, as a courier, in a live-roleplay game, ever. Repeatedly ;D

Depending on the security level of the letter, of course, a non-letterlocked letter might be pretty readable even if sealed. A simple letter where the seal authenticates the sender but doesn't protect the contents might simply be folded in three and sealed closed - you can bend and flex such a letter without breaking the seal to read most of it. A more important letter being _protected_ by a seal might be folded into an ersatz envelope and then sealed on the join ... but that's most of the way to a basic letterlock.

So, like all communications there's a tradeoff between complexity and security, and whether you're using the seal merely to authenticate the sender (which was pretty common) or also to protect the contents.