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wpearse

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We put AirTags in road cases/Pelican flight cases packed with AV/IT equipment. Pelican makes a stick-on AirTag holder that works well.

We’ve found the AirTags work just as well as LTE/4G GPS trackers —- with no-ongoing costs, better battery life (we get 6-9 months on the AirTags, 4-6 weeks on the GPS trackers), and AirTags are 1/5 the cost of an LTE tracker.

This product would work well for us.

I used to work with a delivery route planning system that had 24:00 as midnight on one day, and 00:00 was midnight on the following day — the same “instant” but on two different days.

I forget the reasoning, but I remember it being described to me as both necessary and a reasonably common construct.

I drive a 2018 Hyundai IONIQ EV. The forward radar is hit-and-miss in heavy rain: the car will often barrel quite happily into stopped traffic when it’s raining hard, requiring a stomp on the brake pedal.

Just a couple weeks ago I was driving on the motorway around 4am, no other traffic for miles, and the forward collision alert sounded and the car slammed on the brakes for ~quarter of a second and then released as if nothing had happened and we merrily resumed our journey. Having the brakes slam on at a smidge over 100 km/h gave me a sore shoulder and quite the rush of adrenaline, quite the rush at 4am!

So yes. The radar does have a mind of its own.

Friend of a friend works the satellite trucks for onsite broadcasting at sports events. He told me once that he phones the satellite operators and they coordinate to make sure the beams are aligned as tightly as possible to reduce the power loading on the satellite. I’m guessing there’s probably a similar constraint here — I don’t think (pure conjecture) it’s feasible to have a tonne of iPhones (and let’s be honest, they’re everywhere) hanging off satellites.

I can’t speak for other ObjC devs back when the iPhone SDK was released; but I remember just being so grateful that I had any tooling to develop for iOS that I was more than happy to overlook any ObjC weirdness/clunkiness.

ObjC is very simple (often confused with archaic), but also wildly complex. Once you wrap your head around the ObjC way of doing things, everything makes sense, is very consistent, and you could develop very effectively.

I did a 100-level paper at University that explained floating point arithmetic and how to solve for equality. Without being snarky, how do developers miss this sort of stuff?

My EV is 1/10th of the cost to run and maintain than my diesel car. I’m more than happy to spend an extra 20-30 min charging on a 4 hour drive when I choose to drive the EV.

My diesel has also done just over 340,000km and it’s pretty shot. Hard to start on cold mornings and I’ve had to sort out some leaky injectors and seized joints on the driveshaft. There’s another couple of hundred thousand kilometres left at best.

The EV is coming up to 100,000km and it stills drives just as spritely as the day I got it. The battery is showing 100% state of health and I’m convinced it’ll happily do a million kilometres or more.

Hey, I felt exactly the same way about ICE vs EV. I have a V8 that I tinker with on weekends. I have 4 other ICE vehicles.

The kicker for me was borrowing a friend’s EV for the day. The driving experience was so completely different to my cars it was mind-boggling. The only other time I’ve felt the same way was picking up the first iPhone.

We bought an EV a couple years after that (6 months ago, now) the first couple of weeks we struggled with range anxiety and suffered from inconvenience. Now we’re completely in love and wouldn’t ever buy another ICE. (Except maybe another old Saab…)

We bought an EV 6 months ago. We financed ~60% the purchase cost over 3 years. We would otherwise never have spent this much on a car.

We calculated our estimated petrol savings and put down a deposit large enough such that our weekly finance payment and estimated charging cost combined would be ~75% of what we’re spending each week on petrol.

Now that petrol prices have skyrocketed, the finance cost of the car + charging cost is less than half of what we were spending in petrol.

So far we’re very happy. Our total running costs for our petrol car was around 28c per km, our total running costs for our EV are around 4c per km. (Total running costs = absolutely everything attributable to the vehicle: fuel/charging, servicing, insurance, tyres, wiper blades, …)

We switched to buying USB-rechargeable AA/AAA lithium ion batteries. The brand we buy is Pale Blue, but there are many other brands.

These batteries have a regular form factor, with an added micro USB (and USB C on some larger battery sizes) port for recharging. They work really well for us and charge quickly (and conveniently — everything has a USB socket nowadays).

The price may seem expensive, but after 10 or so charge cycles they should have paid for themselves. I expect these batteries will be good for many hundreds of charge cycles.

I took apart a 2010 Mac mini the other to install an SSD. It’s basically been running non-stop since new in a corner of our office for over a decade. Sure, there was some dust but it wasn’t at the point where it would affect performance. A quick wipe with a soft paint brush and it was as good as new — the first time we had ever opened this machine.

I don’t understand the insistence that we must regularly clean our computers, it seems daft. Maybe vacuum your house/office once in a while. The computer breathes the same air as you.

The checklists bring the aircraft back to a known state.

One 777 pilot commented to say that this issue should have been caught by at least two checklists, implying that neither checklists had been followed.

Tangentially: if my 2006 Mercedes is reset (battery disconnected) it needs to idle for 20 minutes to re-learn the idle pattern. The vehicle then needs to be driven around for a bit to re-learn driving patterns. I wonder if there are similar settings on a 777 that would need to be preserved between 'resets'.

How to rest well 5 years ago

I’ll often have an espresso in the evening after dinner, and I sleep well after.

it is now impossible to brick the system with a bad BIOS/EFI flash

I had to flash the T2 to do a Bug Sur update on my 2018 Mac Mini a couple weeks ago. The flash failed and bricked the machine.

Sent the machine in for service and the entire logic board was replaced under warranty, the machine was at least 2 years out of warranty as far as I know. This makes me think failed flashes are a known issue?

macOS Monterey 5 years ago

I just had a similar endless loop on update (Catalina to Big Sur) last week. Apple guided me to do a T2 firmware update which bricked the machine. Sent it in for service.

Logic board was replaced "under warranty" (it's a 3 year old machine with no Apple Care!).

Yeah. We stopped giving the dirty dishes a quick rinse and scrub after watching that video and all that happened is the dishdrawer drain blocked and the kitchen flooded. (First time ever.)

We’re back to giving the dishes a quick rinse and scrub before they go in the dishwasher.