yakkers

For the purpose of cooling, just setting the thermostat to its hottest setting would be in effect "off" just about all of the time. Depending on the design/temperature range of the thermostat, this isn't 100% though.

If you want to be able to do both heating and cooling, it'd get a bit complicated since the above would be inverted for heating.

At the very least, I wish Digital Radio Mondiale won out over DAB. It’s designed to use the existing long, medium and short-wave bands and can even co-exist with an AM broadcast. I imagine digital radio would work quite well with the propagation characteristics of the mediumwave (and longwave) broadcast band.

There’s also DRM+ for the VHF band, including the FM broadcast band.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digital_Radio_Mondiale

It’s still quite a lot of power for AM (amplitude modulation) broadcast on any band.

If Radio 4 was on shortwave with 500kW transmitters, I probably would have been able to listen in on my radio at home in Australia, no UK-located KiwiSDR required.

Japan used to have a 500kW transmitter on 774kHz (mediumwave/AM broadcast band) for NHK Radio 2, and when the local broadcaster on 774 kHz went off air at midnight for scheduled maintenance, I could pick it up on my car’s stereo quite easily.

There’s still a lot of utility stations in the LF/longwave band. Particularly time signals (WWVB in the US, ALS162 in France, DCF77 in Germany, JJY in Japan, etc.) and NDB beacons.

At least in VK/Australia, there’s the 2200 meter band, but it’s quite limited (1W power limit, CW/digital only, 135.7–137.8 kHz).

At the same time, as much as I don’t want the AM broadcast band to die, I’d love an amateur band in the lower/middle part of MF/MW.

HF propagates through skywave (most reliably from 5-30MHz), which is where the signal bounces off the ionosphere.

In the MF (AM broadcast) band, you can observe this at night - in Australia I can pick up the 50kW Melbourne ABC station (public broadcaster) at 774kHz with a good radio, just about across the entire country.

In the LF (longwave) band, the earth’s surface and the ionosphere start to behave more like a waveguide than skywave. This is actually more reliable/consistent than even HF, but you need massive transmitting antennas due to the large wavelengths involved.

HF also generally wins for distance covered per watt - despite the massive power of Radio 4 longwave, I’d have no chance of hearing it reach Australia.

Doesn't excuse CHU: two 3kW, one 5kW ERP.

And by the virtue of shortwave propagation, it could be heard across the world. For the past month and a half (from when the news of its impending shutdown was revealed) I was regularly picking it up in Australia right up until the bitter end.

The $17,000 Apple Watch was a (rather silly) attempt to compete in the high end watch space. However, they also launched the base "Sport" model at US$349.

Have to say, it’s quite wild to me that one of the design blunders of macOS Tahoe could be a pages long blog post.

I’d actually forgotten about the menu icons in Tahoe (I tried Tahoe during the beta period and lasted less than a day) and at first thought this would just be a pretty short piece on Tahoe’s new application icons.

Going back to the article though: another amusing detail is that the one menu where having icons is actually helpful (the Move & Resize menu) actually had those icons before Tahoe.

Nix is sort of that third option, though I really wish there was a well-documented way to use it on macOS as purely a binary/source package manager. A lot of stuff I read online goes into setting up nix-darwin to manage desktop settings and etc. and I just don't need or want that.

That being said, if you haven't used MacPorts in years, I'd say it's worth the jump. I recall moving from MacPorts in the first place because Homebrew was faster and allowed for customising packages.

When I switched back to MacPorts again, it was because Homebrew had become slow and no longer allowed package customisation. Now, MacPorts is much faster and has the variants system for package customisation.

If it's a mechanical one, there's a possibility that it's been repaired or replaced. The mechanism after all these years will likely wear out. At the same time, I know someone with a car whose odometer has been at 249,999km for a few years now.

As for (early) digital odometers, does the soul more specifically exist in the EEPROM chip in the instrument cluster* that stores the odometer data?

*at least on my late-90s car, this is how the odometer/trip meter works.

An aside on your last point: In the D gear, a lot of auto transmissions will be set up to allow for the wheels to spin somewhat independently of the engine (in any gear) when you aren't accelerating, which accounts a lot for how well an automatic will coast when you release the throttle, even if you're not going fast enough for top gear (especially apparent with older four speed boxes).

Using the numbered gear options will enable clutches/bands that provide more engine braking.

A long time ago, Apple actually did more or less this for the coreutils in A/UX, which was their own UNIX for the 68k Macintoshes.

This page has a screenshot of the GUI provided for ls: http://toastytech.com/guis/aux3.html

Medium format digital is a thing for those with deep pockets (e.g. Fujifilm GFX). Large format, on the other hand…

I’ll absolutely admit knowing very little about the nuances of payment networks in the US, particularly with contactless —- but my experience (in Australia) is that payment terminals that support contactless inherently support Apple/Google/etc Pay, even if the payment terminal is unaware of those things, in which case the transaction will work the same as a contactless card transaction (e.g. transactions >$100 require PIN).

It's been in macOS for quite some time. Mostly dormant now but at one point it was what powered the Web Sharing option in the Sharing prefpane. It was also used in OS X Server (both the OS X versions designed for Xserve and the later "app" version) before that was largely whittled away.

I can't exactly find if it came with OS X since the beginning (which would predate nginx and friends), but it probably was a much more likely choice back in the day, and I guess that's why it's still included. Wouldn't be surprised to see it quietly disappear from later macOS releases, though.

>It seamlessly detects when the peer is local so it doesn't route out to the internet and back

One of my use cases for Tailscale was connectivity between my primary NAS and an off-site NAS I use for backups. Being able to bring my NAS to the same site/network I had set-up the off-site NAS and just have things work over the LAN without reconfiguring anything was a wonderful surprise.

(Yes, I’m aware I could save some overhead by reconfiguring but looking at the network traffic monitor I was happy enough with the throughput I got though Tailscale’s LAN routing)

It's what happens when a country dismisses a proper national ID number/card -- the nearest available substitute gets used, sometimes regardless of how well the substitute works as an ID. The United States Social Security card/number comes to mind as a particularly egregious example, though I'd also consider drivers' licences (as is common in Australia) to also be a bad substitute.

Anecdata, but I think for pre-paid services Optus never stored that information, and only used it for the required identification.

I had activated a pre-paid Optus service (in a store, using my drivers' licence as ID) but let it lapse a year ago, and allegedly my licence number was not in the breach.

I've had mixed results depending on devices -- my Apple devices tend to hop between bands and APs quite excellently.

On the other end, I've got a Nintendo Switch which stubbornly sticks to the first AP / band (I'm running a few APs with the same SSID/PSK) combination it grabbed onto during network setup. Even if I move completely out of range of the AP/band it grabbed onto it'll refuse to acknowledge other APs/bands until you run network setup again.

Everything else I deal with tends to be much closer to the former than the latter, thankfully. I don't use non-standard stuff like UniFi band steering, as it is known to cause issues due to non-standard behaviour.

As far as consumer routers go, wouldn’t it be trivial to re-tool the usual port forwarding interface to simply accept connections to a specific address-port? That combined with a internal block-all-inbound rule would be quite hard for a user to footgun themselves horribly with.

From a quick search, UPnP seems capable of automating this for user convenience, especially with stateless addressing.

For me, the point is not constant active monitoring but being able to see when some application runs away with my system resources.

At a glance network monitoring is also very handy — I can check if an application is absolutely chewing through data (or quietly not actually doing anything at all), which is quite useful for metered connections.

I've personally had very good experiences switching back from Homebrew to MacPorts. Wouldn't go back to Homebrew.

I find it much faster now, which is quite funny to me because back when Homebrew was new (and a lot less opinionated) it was much faster than MacPorts, especially with the bottles (binary packages) feature.

Today, MacPorts has binary packages, doesn't randomly force incredibly slow updates when I just want to quickly install something or run a package search, has entirely opt-in telemetry through installing a package (mpstats) and still lets me customise packages (through the variants system, which is more powerful than the with --with-feature system Homebrew seems to have abandoned).

The only pain point I've found is upgrading to new macOS releases, though I've often found just reinstalling MacPorts itself will get me going again in a pinch without having to take inventory of my installed ports and reinstall everything from scratch.

What exactly do you mean by “work with the USB-C format?”. USB-C defines the physical connector.

Would a C-to-Lightning cable count? Because those do exist, and are now what you get in the box with newer iPhones.

At present, by requiring the use of Apple's IAP system for subscriptions, this is already taken care of.

Given the Apple vs. Epic stuff going on, this may change soon -- In that case I'd also like to see rules against excessive retention tactics / dark patterns.

I wouldn't bring in an entire library, but one big thing I find Apple Music has over Spotify is how well your traditional library and the Apple Music library converge.

I make use of it a lot for albums and songs not available on Apple Music. AFAIK, Spotify doesn't really have an answer to this.

The software experience is the one thing I wish Apple would improve upon faster. It's got quite good as of late, but there's still a lot of things that could be way better all around.

I can certainly agree that Excel on iPad is an awful experience, though. I gave up using my iPad for Excel stuff at work in short order.

I'd really like another "Snow" release right about now. I generally don't mind Big Sur's look, feel and function too much, but there's still quite a few bugs and the overall UI responsiveness and visual smoothness often leaves a bit to be desired.

The M1 is great, but I think Apple has left some potential on the table. Given how they perform today with Big Sur, I'd really like to see what they could do given a macOS release focused (almost) entirely on stability and performance enhancement.

A few months ago when ROS 7's first few public beta releases were out (and before then), I'd agree with you.

However, MikroTik seem to be making slow but steady progress with new features. Stability is still an issue to an extent, but for home use I could almost make the jump.

In fact, if I didn't use CAPsMAN to centrally control the multiple access points in my home, I would make the jump purely for fq_codel/cake AQM, Wireguard and WPA3.

You can 'flick' the volume or brightness button on the Touch Bar to the left or right to turn down/up respectively. It even works holding down Shift+Option to enable more fine control of either.

Reminds me of the time I had a bit of fun with the modems I had lying around in my old tech drawers. Set up a small Debian system with a modem connected to the PSTN, got mgetty running to accept incoming calls.

Finding a friend who still had a PSTN line themselves was surprisingly difficult (in Australia, we’re moving away from PSTN in favour of VoIP), but I found one.

I only managed to get a remote shell going, but if I had more time to play around with it I probably could have got PPP up and running. Having someone else on the other end for a multiplayer DOOM session over dialup would have been really cool.