twothamendment

I'd love to see the sum of time lost around the world with this one little change!

The first house I built (designed, generaled and did a lot of the work) was super insulated. Selling it taught me that people just look at square footage and price. They aren't likely to know or care if is built better.

It was eye opening. I got a taste of exactly why builders build crap homes. Building code is the minimum and they build to it for a reason.

We are now friends with the people who bought it and several times they have thanked us for building it well. They didn't know what they were getting, but it is nice to see they appreciate it now - especially when the power is out and neighbors are crying about their cold houses and these lucky people are staying warm.

My third and final build I built for me. I never plan to sell. Even when my kids are gone and I only need half the house it would be very hard to find something to downsize to that would cost me less per month than I pay now. Ground source is that good.

I started reading examples from the article to my wife and she brought up the fat controller. When my son was young we watched all the older, UK Thomas episodes on YouTube. We preferred the narrator and the fat controller to the US version.

I spent a lot of time packing my parents computer into my front passenger seat to haul it to a friend's house to play Doom - with a 30 foot cable so we could be in different rooms!

Giving up machining? For all the machinists I know I think that is called dying.

14%, not bad!

It is interesting how the numbers work out in different places. Where I'm at it doesn't make sense at all. So much of my bill is just to have a meter and the per kilowatt rate is crazy low. Because of the high fee just to be hooked up the only way solar wins here is to get off grid - but winter kills that idea.

I'm American, I think it isn't that bad, people are just like to whine and complain. America is also huge, so there is likely someone with a different experience and reason to complain.

My well pump is electric and I haven't been out of power long enough to be concerned about getting water.

I have a ground source heat pump to heat and cool my home. If you can do it, it is the best system I've ever had. You've got to have enough room for the horizonal loop, or drill some wells.

It is a bit expensive to put in, so I wouldn't do it unless you plan to live there long enough to recoup the costs. If I were to sell my house nobody would give me a dime extra for it.

My GE range is "Smart". I connected it to get updates when I bought it, reported one UI bug when running the latest. They fixed it in about a week. I updated again and promptly took away its Internet privileges. Everything works so I don't see a need for a later update to break something.

Good question. 100 miles to safety? Yes. Finding a place to stay is the challenge.

Where I'm at, 250 miles wouldn't be crazy. I have to drive an hour to see a stop light and in the summer, that city will be booked full. The next city is isn't any better, but at least I'd have family to crash with.

I live where wildfire is the most likely of any evacuation scenario that I can think of. I keep my pickup 3/4 full of diesel, but most of the time it is full (not a daily driver). This gives me 500 to 700 miles.

But we are talking about getting caught not full - I'm still going to have more range on a half tank than most EV have full.

If had to pick (and I guess I have) , I wouldn't pick an EV for evacuation. It is difficult to toss in a jug of electricity, but I can easily add 200 miles of range with two five gallon cans.

Now I just need some autopilot because I don't think I can stay awake for 900 miles of driving!

Lest I be framed a hater with my diesel (no rolling coal for me) truck, I think EVs have there place - just not in my area (yet).

Ham radio doesn't need to litter the area with these little setups. The Wasatch front already has a bunch of strong mountain top repeaters, some can even be tied together. Check out https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intermountain_Intertie

I love APRS. The big deal for me is being able to not just hit a repeater, but 2 or 3. Now my 5 watt hand held can reach out of the back county when I'm hiking and actually get somewhere. Bonus that there is a gateway between APRS and SMS.

Yeah, you can drive around and show the world where you are, but using it to write SMS messages when cell reception doesn't exist is awesome.

I don't know about everyone, but if I'm driving around with it on it is so I can see where I get coverage and where I don't. I have to use and test so I know it works when I want to communicate, but overall I'm not a ham to be social.

I've been using Linux as my daily driver for over a decade. I used to really fight things like multiple monitors, but things for better.

My current laptop is an HP Envy from Costco and I was kind of shocked that everything just worked, even the fingerprint reader.

And then it happened - one day my brightness keys quit working. Why? I have no idea and haven't spent time to find out. You are correct, it still happens, but it has been rare for me where it used to be common.

Nice! I really didn't want a company involved in my security, but I knew I didn't have time to build something like this.

I went the lazy way and used an Ademco Vista 20p. It is old school, but solid. I wanted to make it a little more friendly so I went with an AD2USB virtual terminal and raspberry pi. There is a python library for it and from there you can do whatever you want and the clucky old alarm system doesn't know the difference between you arming the alarm at the keypad or a cron job arming the alarm. Of course you also get all the events happening on the system.

Firewood is simple here. The only special machine used is a beat up old truck, because you don't throw wood in your nice truck. Equipment to get it out of the forest? A 100' cable to drag it out (because longer isn't allowed). Chainsaw? For sure. Waiting for it to dry? Nature does that. You don't cut the green trees, you cut the dead ones.

I wish people around me didn't burn wood, but since they will do it anyways I'm always pointing people to areas near me where there are dead trees standing. I'd rather have them pull it out than wait for a forest fire to clean it up.

It is impressive how fast one guy and a saw can fill his truck and be gone.

Firewood.

I didn't care who was on Twitter, why should I care who isn't?

It would be cool if it could factor in mountains - but I get why that is not an easy task. Fun isn't the best word to describe this page - but it was!

Whatever tech they've got has to be better than the incorrect conclusions the local sheriff made on my brother's accident. They way over estimated his speed by making an easy mistake. They, of course didn't want to hear about that.

In this case I'm not sure software would help, because bad measurement in likely mean bad data out.

It was good to see firsthand that people who you think might be knowledgeable on a topic are sometimes nearly clueless. I don't thing software can make this area worse.

My first programming job was at a survey place. Once some high paid survey writer flew in to get one out in a hurry. I was told to sit with him and build it while he designed it. Ever since then I've though about surveys differently. The level of thought that he put into not only each question, but every word. Considering how one question might influence another would cause a change in order, etc. Anyway, it was fascinating to see his thought process, compared to being handed the finished product like we normally saw.

Part of the problem is the ability to get a new battery for an older device. I was happy with my 4 year old phone, but needed a new battery. The only ones for sale had the same date of manufacture as mine and all the reviews said they were barely better than their old battery. It kills me that something so small and inexpensive as the battery was the reason I had to find a new phone.

Not to get too far off topic, but it sounds like this is going to be an issue with EVs too - I hope not.

Maybe moving the target to the bullet impact would work - walk the shot to the target or the target to the shot? Both still have many other variables - but there is one good reason why they moved the shot instead of the target.

It would be very difficult to find impact points of the misses - The best they could do was listen for where they hit.

Excellent point. I lost my savings to a hot tub. Should I start a go fund me to recover it?

I shared it with my wife because she likes puzzles. It took her about a minute to figure out how the game worked. Once she knew what to do she how do play - she was done in under a minute and said it was fun.

Nice work! Any feedback I would give is in other comments.

EV (currently) demands lithium and ICE uses lead. Why are we not running out of lead? 1.Lead batteries my be old tech, but it means we've had time to have a recycling process that recovers almost all of the lead one the battery. 2. There is a lot more battery in an EV. My pickup has 2 large batteries, but they don't even come close to the size, weight or volume of the battery in a small EV.

"What makes the AGPL unattractive?"

I won't pretend to be a lawyer, but I do know that when we were acquired we had to list ever piece of software we used and which licence it was under. They were very concerned about copy left. We didn't have any, so I don't know how that would have changed things. MIT was what they were hoping to see.

Taxes? I was a college student, so I didn't make enough to owe any taxes, but it was mostly cash. I wouldn't have done it if I had to hop through the business hoops.

Yes, it can be pretty simple. Back in the day when DSL and comcast were the options and all of the connections were things like UP TO 5 or even 20 Mbps, but speeds were rarely that - I paid for a dedicated 2Mbs up and down ($180/month) with no restrictions on use and started sharing/reselling it to others in my apartment building, not with wireless, but with cat5 out the window, up the gutter, back inside, etc. Across the parking lot another guy was sharing his comcast with another building - but comcast was starting to be so slow they couldn't use it. We merged our empires by stringing some cat 5 across the parking lot, around a pole and to his place. Later we added more nearby buildings, all wired until we had 5 buildings and about 20 "subscribers". Even with 2Mbps, everyone on the network was happier with a guaranteed speed than their flaky "up to" speeds they used to have. Did I run an ISP? I had subscribers, had to maintain a network, had a proxy server to reduce requests out of the network, had to deal with abuse and collect money - so I'd say yes, a small one, but yes.

"the place that you and your children sleep unguarded at night"

Speak for yourself... Maybe I don't have children. Or maybe they are guarded.