Some systems already have that. Replaced a switch yesterday and re-arranged some things on my network board and got a HomeKit notification that some things were offline and when it came back. Knowing when something goes offline isn’t as useful as keeping things up though. With something like a hardwired camera/NVR, even if your ISP service is interrupted the cameras can still record, and you can put a UPS there to keep things going, even if the rest of the network is down.

Canadian here, I guess offer directions to the airport so they can get a flight to British Columbia?

This is entirely regional though. The further you are from the equator, the more seasonal variation there is in sunlight levels, and heating/cooling loads. Around here our solar production is minimized during the season when our energy needs are maximized. We also don’t have variable rate billing, though we only get partial credit for excess generation, so battery storage will never pay for itself until something changes.

My utility gives a 50% credit on excess generation. Thing there is the utility is still the one taking responsibility for having the capacity and scalability to respond to variation in demand and production. When I was getting quotes, adding storage would have doubled the cost of the system for a day or two worth of storage. Probably would cost double again to have a system that would keep up through the winter.

I’d be technically impractical, but I’ve always thought there should be a system for weighing of individual users feedback. I follow a lot of trade related communities and 100% see a lot of issues where bad, wrong, and sometimes just plain dangerous advice gets a flood of upvotes from the amateur community while the handful of downvotes from qualified individuals gets drowned out. I think OP’s idea of making upvotes easy and downvotes difficult exacerbates this kind of issue.

I can also see the issue where a mod team simply blesses the users that they agree with and it just reinforces the echo chamber effect that is already an issue in some communities.

Canada recently stopped charging interest on their student loans, that goes a long way to affordability. The other thing though is just plain cost of education. It can be cheaper to get a 4-year degree from a Canadian University than take one year of a comparable program in the US.

Something kind of unique about UnRaid is the JBOD plus parity array. With this you can keep most disks spun down while only the actively read/written disks need to be spun up. Combine with an SSD cache for your dockers/databases/recent data and UnRaid will put a lot less hours(heat, vibration) on your disks than any raid equivalent system that requires the whole array to be spun up for any disk activity. Performance won’t be as high as comparably sized RAID type arrays, but as bulk network storage for backups, media libraries, etc. it’s still plenty fast enough.

I guess that works. There’s also Soda-Stream( and other carbonation systems) that just directly injects CO2 into a bottle. Then you can add whatever flavourings you like. Personally, I like doing something like 50/50 heavily carbonated water and fruit juice of choice.

Some of both. I remember a time where it felt like every time I got a new computer it had some different ports because they kept evolving. Modem/Ethernet, firewire 400/800, keyboard/mouse/USB, VGA/DVI/Displsyport(and mini versions of some). Sure, my old computer might have had a lot of different ports, but I might never have used some of them. For something like a laptop, I think 2x USB-C on each side is good for most, plus add hubbing to larger peripherals like HDD enclosures and displays and docks wouldn’t have to be so popular.

I feel like we’re just in the middle of a good transition period. Few years from now almost everything that can will be USB-C, we’re really just waiting out the replacement of all the existing devices and their incompatible ports.

While that’s true for taxes alone, there are income gaps where a small increase of income can result in a loss of various benefits that were worth more than the increase. This can be things like food stamps, subsidized rent/childcare, etc… People end up stuck because while they could potentially earn significant advancement and increased wages over a 4-7 year period, they’d have to weather a significant deficit through intervening years.

Ideally there should be no cliffs, and all these social programs should have a sliding scale of benefits so a person can always benefit from increased income. Part of the problem is they’re managed across multiple levels of government that don’t always play well together, and a sliding scale might mean more benefits paid out to people that don’t currently qualify. That’s probably actually a good thing, but gets spun politically as undesirable.

The bike thing is real. So often I hit my bell or call out “on your left” when about to pass people from behind. About 50% of the time those people immediately move to the left, which is why I always try to indicate far enough in advance for them to get in my way, realize their mistake and move back before I catch up to them .

I used to have the opposite issue. It was always the wire right near the jack that would wear out from having my phone in my pocket so my wired ear pods would always wear out in less than a year. Then I got a set of Bluetooth earbuds that had a wire between them. They lasted 2-3 years before the wire wore out. Now I’ve got a set of fully wireless buds and they’ve so far lasted longer than any other ones I’ve had.

Even in places where they have to use the actual ingredients, there’s a lot of tricks to making it look different in photos. That burger might only be partially cooked to reduce shrinkage, then the burger and bun are frozen so they hold shape for the photo. Vegetables carefully picked out and arranged, tomato/pickles blotted dry, and the sauce applied with an eye dropper to provide visual balance after the rest of the burger is stacked.

I will say from my experience, that tends to apply to advertising photography for large franchises. If we’re taking about food photography associated with a high profile event or restaurant where food is actually served, there’s minimal difference between the photo plate and what’s actually served. Sometimes the photo plate is just one picked out while producing the ones being served, sometimes it’s the first/last plate and a person takes a minute to pick out the best looking of ingredients from the same container that was used to serve the rest. Sometimes it’s just an extra minute arranging the plate nicely compared to the last 150 that were done quickly to keep up with service. Often the photographer then gets to eat the plate they’ve just photographed.

Also location it’s stored. Some people carry it differently, but fat often builds up around a persons mid-section and causes that pear/apple body shape. Muscles gain bulk on the ones being used. A person can loose the inches of fat around their waste, then build up muscle mass in their arms/shoulders. The fat loss is noticeable because a person starts using a different belt notch or their pants fall down, but the added muscle bulk around the arms will be less likely to require replacing/adjusting one’s clothing.

True, though Apple does contribute some things, like MagSafe for iPhones is becoming part of Qi 2. I think Apple get a bad rep just because they’re a large target sometimes, but I don’t recall other big platforms releasing a bunch of their work as FLOSS either.

I’m also on the fence about the repairability thing. It’s nice to be able to open up an old computer to add more RAM/Storage/etc., but I also get that making everything integrated and soldered improves durability and reliability. I do think they take that a little too far sometimes. While RAM/SSDs should typically last a long time, the battery life often becomes the limiting factor for usability so making that repair simpler would go a long way. Pricing can be hard to bite too, while I don’t mind the idea of soldered RAM, I don’t like that upgrades are pretty heavily marked up compared to most manufacturers.

Then again, I’m still in the ecosystem, so unless there’s some government oversight setting standards for Apple to follow they’ll continue doing what’s profitable and their sales keep steadily growing despite the occasional bad press.

My wife always gives me shit for trying to use this. Any job that involves communicating things like names or worse, random strings of letters, should train their staff to use it. Remember that part of the design was specifically to make it easier for people with English as a second language(or not at all) to still recognize the letters over potentially unreliable radio.

USB-A, USB-B, USB-B Superspeed, mini-USB, micro-USB, micro-USB-Super Speed. Some of those also presented the issue of not having a simple visual indication of whether it was USB 1, 2, or 3. At least with USB-C, the cables should all work, even if you get slower speeds, whereas a USB-B-3 connector wouldn’t fit a USB-B-2 port at all.

The solution to the USB-C mystery cable is to just get a pile of Thunderbolt cables and then you can be sure it’ll handle whatever the attached devices do.

Colloquially, most people use “day” to mean how long it takes the sun to get to the same place in the sky. Solar day vs sidereal day, the difference is only about 4 minutes on Earth, but can be much greater elsewhere. Venus’ solar day is about 117 Earth days, so you would see a couple sunrises/sunsets each Venusian year.

I used to do that about 10-15 years ago. I think the subsidies got to be not as good around the same time that phone prices rose sharply. Whereas you might have previously paid $200, and gotten a $500 subsidy for a $700 MSRP phone, now that $500 off a $1000+ MSRP doesn’t seem like as good a deal. I think they also widened the pricing gap between the prepaid and post paid plans, and/or started offering “discounts” for BYOD plans. Seems like the last couple upgrades the cheapest option for me now is to just buy the phone outright and then find a cheap plan.

For anyone in Saskatchewan, check out LUM mobile. It’s a Sasktel run MVNO that actually has a unique pricing structure that’s pretty competitive.

Good point on the ecosystem. I’m a bit of an odd one out in that I started using Mac for OS X, and then started getting all the other Apple stuff because of my experience there. Oddly enough I don’t think MacOS offers that much more for day to day usage than I get from Windows. With BootCamp I’m probably 50/50 MacOS/Windows, depending what specific software I feel works best/is available on either platform. I can’t imagine using any other platform for all the other gadgets though; Apple Watch, Apple TV, iPhone all feel generations ahead of the competition and that integration is probably what’s going to keep me anchored on MacOS too. Honourable mention for my UnRaid box that handles a lot of my background things like backups and media storage/service. Sometimes I like things that I can tinker with, and some I need to just work. Apple does a great job on the things I need to be reliable.