My headcanon for The Matrix’s “humans are batteries” is that it’s the machines’ perverse interpretation of this — killing the humans is off the table, and for whatever reason letting them live with no purpose to serve the machines is also disallowed. But giving their lives “meaning” in the form of a shitty (and thermodynamically dubious) “battery” somehow satisfies the rules.

It’s a very big stretch, I’ll admit…

I’m guessing it’s because the developers either have a different speciality that they focus on, are employed to support specific hardware, or both.

You can also take a fairly selfish view and come to the same conclusion. Like, I don’t want to see homeless encampments, or really sick and untreated people, or panhandlers, or (…) while I’m walking around in my city. I can solve this problem by 1) moving to a nice suburb, or 2) having my tax dollars go to fix a problem that affects me. 1) is off the table because I want to live in the city, and 2) — while it helps the greater good — also helps me directly. (2 can also be addressed in a draconian fashion, which is not what I’m advocating at all.)

I think one problem is looking at things as zero sum. It’s not. If you are healthy and housed and fed then you’re not — to be very crass — an eyesore, you’re adding to the fabric of the city. I want street musicians who are playing for fun, not because they’re trying to make enough to afford dinner.

If you have a TV, you likely already have the receiving device. Antenna can cost, or you can play around with wire length and orientation.

I am devastated that I got rid of my 2000s HP LaserJet (with Ethernet). Only flaw it had was that it didn’t have a duplexer.

It can be daunting to get into the hobby, there are a ton of niches.

To start: where are you? I’m in the USA, so that’s where my experience is.

License: required to transmit on the ham bands; you can listen without a license.

Range: are you looking to talk to people in your city/region? If so, a cheap “walkie-talkie” style (called “HT” in the biz — best avoid “walkie-talkie”) is a good place to start. These VHF/UHF (very/ultra high frequency) radios are affordable — something from Baofeng(~$30) or similar will work just fine, though they are often looked down on (I have one — for the price, it’s great). You will have the most luck if there is an active ham scene in your area, in large part because they may have a repeater, which can greatly extend your range. Many regions will have scheduled “nets” where you just go around and chat.

If you’re looking for the ability to chat with folks on the other side of the world, you’ll want to look into HF (high frequency). This is much lower frequency, thus longer wavelength, than the handheld VHF/UHF HTs. So…the antennas take up a lot of space. Mine is 52 feet long, in the attic. And the radios are much more expensive (more like $1k new). ICOM 7300, Yaesu FT710 are popular entry level units (but you also need power supply, cables, and antenna).

That said: if you just want to listen to HF, the antenna doesn’t matter as much at all, and you can use an SDR (RTL-SDR probably works?) for listening. You can probably also find a used shortwave radio that covers some of the HF ham bands.

The only flaw in Corel’s logic was that as soon as you’re running Linux, you lose all desire to run WordPerfect, and develop an irresistible need to align yourself with vim or emacs…

I think (?) it’s generally true that the root user should never mess with users’ files.

Imagine your home directory is shared across many systems on a network (my alma mater did this). It would be really bad if a sysadmin for alpha.university.edu removed a program, and suddenly your personal settings were removed from beta.university.edu — even though that computer still has the program.

This is one of the “UNIX on the desktop” issues — a lot is designed for a sysadmin/multiuser situation, and it has some gotchas when using it as a desktop machine (I’m used to/really appreciate the directory structure and settings management at this point, but it may take some getting used to).

I have an old Nexus 6P, spiritually the Pixel 0.

Replaced the battery at some point, and it’s now entered service as the toddler’s entertainment on airplanes.

It’s old and slow, but the screen still looks really good.

Right, I just meant that you can’t sudo cat file > /dev/sda but you can sudo dd ..., because IO redirection isn’t elevated to root with sudo. I’m not saying anything too profound :)

Compiling a kernel yourself isn’t a big deal these days, especially with DKMS. Generally the type of people I’ve encountered who care about which kernel version they’re usiyare the type of people who are capable of compiling it themselves…

One caveat is that you will need write access to the drive, which probably means you need to run as root — can’t run that with sudo as-is, unlike dd.

Also a super useful tool for measuring real world bandwidth, both on physical media and over the network ( dd status=progress ... | nc ...).

“Please, please, ladies — one at a time. No seriously, one at a time, the global interpreter lock can’t handle more than that.”

Only joking. Sorta…

My kiddo is just a toddler, but in our VHCOL area, at this age the only thing that really matters is childcare expenses. If we had family/grandparents taking care of them, the additional cost would be pretty minimal, in the scheme of things.

The max contribution to dependent FSA (tax free account for daycare) is a joke, less than 2mo of care.

The material things we’ve needed probably amount to less than one month of daycare expenses (diapers notwithstanding).

Saving for college, on the other hand…

I picked up an old HP LaserJet (with the Ethernet option) for free during grad school. It was a great printer — good CUPS/Linux support, reliable, cheap 3rd party toner.

It’s sad how the mighty have fallen. Would never recommend one for someone today.

I just got one of the cheap Chromecast+Google TV things and I’m pleasantly surprised by the Jellyfin app.

UI is definitely sluggish on home screen.

Also X often supported a different size viewport and desktop so the view would scroll.

I remember encountering that the first time I used Linux! Can’t recall personally finding a good use for it but…neat I guess?

Certain crops can benefit think from some shade throughout the day:

The study aggregates the effect of agrivoltaics on crop yields at different sites. Tomatoes saw up to double yield with agrivoltaics, while wheat, cucumbers, potatoes and lettuce showed significant negative impacts and corn and grapes showed minimal impact.

I assume that maximal crop output would happen if you just grow things in their optimal climate, but then you rely more heavily on transportation.

Multiple desktops, 1999. What an amazing feature.

A quick web search suggests that macOS (then OS X) got this in 2007 (“Spaces”), and Windows not until 2015.

This alone makes this GUI more functional IMHO.