BostonEnginerd

I don’t think that photos are encrypted as you can view them from the iCloud website.

The cost of upgrades is prohibitive. It would probably cost us 20% of the home's value to really upgrade it to a reasonable place. Replacing our oil boiler with a heat pump based central air or mini-split system will cost us almost $40k -- 4x more than a simple oil boiler replacement.

How have they done that? Encapsulating the soil with a barrier layer?

Since we bought our house, we're saturated in ads for pest control companies who want to spray our entire property to kill bugs. It's unbelievable that this is actually legal.

I think that the use of pesticides should be strictly limited to acute infestations -- or small specific things like a barrier placed on the foundation of the house for termite prevention.

The Omnia was quite expensive, but I've gotten frequent updates for the last four years. It's a nice mix of hackable and "just works".

I've turned off the WiFi at this point, and just use it as a router now. The UniFi access point that I installed provides better coverage in my house since it's easier to place in a central location.

Overall, I'd rate it as a good value.

The 2007 Kindle also had a basic web browser.

I believe we only have two active nuclear plants in New England - Seabrook NH and Millstone CT. Seabrook has one reactor, Millstone has two I believe.

It's remarkable how much power these plants generate with a relatively small footprint.

I would have taken the fabs for half of that! :-)

TI has a bunch of fabs in Dallas, Maine, Germany, Japan and China. Most of the Dallas fabs have been part of TI since the beginning - some since the 1970s. They're building a new 300mm fab north of Dallas, and just acquired the Intel / Micron JV fab in Lodi Utah. They got out of the advanced logic game a while ago, and closed down one of their R&D fabs in ~2007.

National was acquired by TI ~8yr ago.

I’ve been a happy Newsblur customer since the Reader shutdown. Every now and again, I look into setting up TinyTinyRSS and similar hosted software but always go back to Newsblur.

Have you looked at T-Mobile's home ISP product? I'm in an urban area, but it's been working great here @ $50/mo. Last speed test was 220Mbps down / 60Mbps up.

It’s not lying. You need to keep your customers interests in mind.

I’m happy to lose a sale when there’s a genuinely better solution for the customer problem. I’ve had conversations with prospects on multiple occasions where I’ve directed them to a company with better solutions.

I’ve found that the people I’ve had those conversations with actually will come back when there is another issue that our products can help with.

I understand that the ducted systems are less efficient, but the ability to better control filtration, outdoor mixing and humidity makes up for that.

That’s my biggest issue with “sharing” economy companies. They are asking people to take on enormous risks -buying homes and cars - and then just algorithmically delist them when a problem occurs with no liability.

I think one good strategy is to buy the highest volume product -- the more of a widget someone makes, the better they are at it.

For example, a Ford Focus or Chevy Malibu is a lot more reliable and cheaper to maintain than a fancier and more fun car. Loads of third party parts, etc.

Regarding the mixer, I understand they changed the gears to plastic so they would strip without damaging the motor. Easier to replace a cheap set of seats than an expensive motor.

The rule in our house is to not order anything that goes in or on our bodies from Amazon.

The 1986 electronic privacy act consider emails older than 180 days old to be “abandoned” and do not require a warrant to access.

Self-hosting at least means that this should not apply, I think.

They also have better compatibility with glass cooktop’s as they are much smoother and less likely to scratch.

Harry did a great job organizing Emacs Boston while he was out here.

This was a really well done talk.

I also resent being tracked especially when I am a paying customer.

Long term the market has always come back up. A laptop only depreciates.

The chips on short order are mostly quite old but specialized processes - most are 90nm and up in size. The advanced nodes aren’t very useful for moving power around.

I think this is very weak on content:

"As if this wasn’t enough, his recommendation led to a staggering 1,100% rise in Signal’s stocks. Many more are following suit and giving their goodwill to Signal."

Signal isn't a publicly traded company, they have no stock. I would expect that the author would have figured out that the stock which went up after Elon's tweet wasn't the Signal Foundation, but an unrelated company.

Some of the SoCs are using leading edge nodes - but most of the microcontrollers, power electronics, etc. are using 90nm+ nodes.

Our city council posts PDF files which consist of scans of documents someone printed out. Sometimes they turn on OCR, but not often.

We use about 8500kWh per year in the northeast US. This does not include space heating yet, but does include our Chevy Volt charging.

Especially in the automotive sector which is mostly using relatively ancient processes.

TeXmacs is a great looking piece of software, but I've never understood the name. I don't think it uses TeX underneath the hood, nor does it use Emacs.

Weren’t there a number of long painful recessions in the US during the 1800s - when currency was tied to gold?

Also, I think the cleanup should be required when someone wants to build this sort of project. Absurd that they don’t have to clean up the whole mess.