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tal

@tal@lemmy.today

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tal, (edited )
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Ironically, I just noticed this morning that the pizzaria on the corner (here, in the US) can take orders via fax (as well as in person, via phone, and on the Web).

I don’t know about today, but back around 2000, stuff on the Japanese market was quite a bit ahead of the US in small, portable, personal electronic devices, like palmtop computers and such. I remember being pretty impressed with it. But then I also remembered being surprised a few years later when I learned that personal computer ownership was significantly lower than in the US. I think that part of it is that people in Japan spend a fair bit of time on mass transit, so you wanted to have small, portable devices tailored to that, and that same demand doesn’t really exist in the US.

Then everyone jumped on smartphones at some point after that, and I think things homogenized a bit.

tal,
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Ditto. Also rest stops.

tal, (edited )
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Mostly Amazon, myself.

If one wants an occasional old gizmo that’s no longer made, eBay can be helpful.

Specifically for cables – which aren’t that pricy relative to other items people buy, and are often marked up a lot by retailers – I’ve gone to Monoprice for quite some years. Useful if getting a bunch of cables.

tal,
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My understanding – and I’m not a New Yorker – was that he has been often credited with reducing crime in NYC. Part of that was, as I recall, by cracking down on minor crimes, things like aggressive panhandling, with the idea that that was kind of a gateway drug to more-severe crime.

I don’t know whether that approach or him in particular was responsible for it, or whether it was other phenomena at the time – my gut is that changes like that usually aren’t just driven by one person – but my understanding was that crime did considerably fall off around the time, and crime was something that a lot of New Yorkers had been really upset about.

tal,
@tal@lemmy.today avatar

MPD + ncmpcpp, I hate both and I’m yet to find anything better.

I’m an Emacs graybeard

Emacs does have a music player, emms, which is what I use.

tal,
@tal@lemmy.today avatar

It is whatever you buy a battery and charger for first. Then you are unwilling to forfeit that battery to just buy another too

One could go pneumatic, get a compressor and pneumatic tools.

tal,
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You can get portable compressors.

tal, (edited )
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At my mom’s place — air-source heat pump, double-paned windows — I can’t hear the thing at all from inside the house, and can only hear it if I go on the side of the house where it’s operating, which doesn’t get a lot of foot traffic. You can hear the fan there.

Generally, I haven’t heard people complaining about it in the US. I have seen some people talk about it recently in the UK, which is in the middle of a push to transition to them, and I’m wondering if that’s because townhouses are more-common there, with houses packed closely together.

I understand that you can get noise-reducing enclosures:

www.silent-mode.net/domestic-equipment.html#/

There are also water-source heat pumps. I don’t know how the noise differs, but I’d bet that it’s quieter, because you’re moving water through a pipe rather than a lot of air. However, their installation cost is considerably higher (though their energy efficiency is also higher).

tal,
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The most-recent release of lemmy dicked up outbound federation pretty badly on the instance I use.

What is your unpopular flim opinion

I’ll go first. Mine is that I can’t stand the Deadpool movies. They are self aware and self referential to an obnoxious degree. It’s like being continually reminded that I am in a movie. I swear the success of that movie has directly lead to every blockbuster having to have a joke every 30 seconds

tal, (edited )
@tal@lemmy.today avatar

Mine is that I can’t stand the Deadpool movies. They are self aware and self referential to an obnoxious degree.

I haven’t read the comic books that they’re based on for a long time, but as I recall, they also break the fourth wall. I don’t think that that was introduced specifically for the movie.

googles

Apparently that wasn’t always there:

screenrant.com/deadpool-fourth-wall-break-first-t…

When Did Deadpool First Break The Fourth Wall?

Marvel’s Deadpool is known for his over-the-top violence and crude and crass humor, but perhaps his best-known character trait is his penchant for repeatedly breaking the fourth wall. Deadpool talks to the audience in comics, films and videogames - but he didn’t always have this power. In fact, early Deadpool was known for being quite serious and firmly rooted in the fictional realm…so when did the Merc with a Mouth first break the fourth wall - and how did he insult editors everywhere by doing so?

Deadpool and the assassin with superhuman accuracy Bullseye teamed up in previous issues, and in Deadpool , the two are reunited after a long absence. “How long has it been!?” Bullseye exclaims. Deadpool simply states “Issue sixteen.” It’s the smallest of fourth-wall breaks (he hadn’t even began speaking to the readers yet), but it shows that Deadpool is doing more than acting out - he’s acting as his own editor. Considering convoluted comics continuity, it’s normal for editors to occasionally place footnotes in certain panels, specifically when characters reference past events. Perhaps Kelly and Woods considered the old method, but wanted to try a new technique. Whatever their reasoning, Deadpool’s fourth wall breaks became a staple of the character.

Looks like Deadpool dates to 1997, though, so Deadpool breaking the fourth wall has been around for over a quarter of a century.

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There isn’t a legal right of fair use for fan fiction, if that’s what you’re asking. Rights holders often ignore it, though.

tal,
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I just have a concern about fan noise and was wondering how loud or quiet these things are since I will be sitting next to it all day when working. It doesn’t need to be silent, since nothing else in the rack, though currently nothing like the levels of typical rack equipment.

Not really what you’re asking for, but there are enclosed racks with sound isolation. Though they are a bit pricey, to my way of thinking.

tal,
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You can get powdered porcini. That won’t require the soak.

tal,
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Magnesium supplement pills, I imagine.

tal, (edited )
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Well, there are some fairly reliable maximum bounds, I suppose:

en.wikipedia.org/…/Ultimate_fate_of_the_universe

There is a strong consensus among cosmologists that the shape of the universe is considered “flat” (parallel lines stay parallel) and will continue to expand forever.[2][3]

The ultimate fate of an open universe with dark energy is either universal heat death or a “Big Rip”[12][13][14][15] where the acceleration caused by dark energy eventually becomes so strong that it completely overwhelms the effects of the gravitational, electromagnetic and strong binding forces.

Neither a universal heat death nor a Big Rip — and we expect one of the two to occur — seems likely to be conducive to capitalism.

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heat_death_of_the_universe

The heat death of the universe (also known as the Big Chill or Big Freeze)[1][2] is a hypothesis on the ultimate fate of the universe, which suggests the universe will evolve to a state of no thermodynamic free energy, and will therefore be unable to sustain processes that increase entropy.

The theory suggests that from the “Big Bang” through the present day, matter and dark matter in the universe are thought to have been concentrated in stars, galaxies, and galaxy clusters, and are presumed to continue to do so well into the future. Therefore, the universe is not in thermodynamic equilibrium, and objects can do physical work.[15]:§VID The decay time for a supermassive black hole of roughly 1 galaxy mass (10¹¹ solar masses) because of Hawking radiation is in the order of 10¹⁰⁰ years,[16] so entropy can be produced until at least that time. Some large black holes in the universe are predicted to continue to grow up to perhaps 10¹⁴ M☉ during the collapse of superclusters of galaxies. Even these would evaporate over a timescale of up to 10¹⁰⁶ years.[17] After that time, the universe enters the so-called Dark Era and is expected to consist chiefly of a dilute gas of photons and leptons.[15]:§VIA With only very diffuse matter remaining, activity in the universe will have tailed off dramatically, with extremely low energy levels and extremely long timescales.

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Big_Rip

In physical cosmology, the Big Rip is a hypothetical cosmological model concerning the ultimate fate of the universe, in which the matter of the universe, from stars and galaxies to atoms and subatomic particles, and even spacetime itself, is progressively torn apart by the expansion of the universe at a certain time in the future, until distances between particles will infinitely increase.

In their paper, the authors consider a hypothetical example with w = −1.5, H0 = 70 km/s/Mpc, and Ωm = 0.3, in which case the Big Rip would happen approximately 22 billion years from the present. In this scenario, galaxies would first be separated from each other about 200 million years before the Big Rip. About 60 million years before the Big Rip, galaxies would begin to disintegrate as gravity becomes too weak to hold them together. Planetary systems like the Solar System would become gravitationally unbound about three months before the Big Rip, and planets would fly off into the rapidly expanding universe. In the last minutes, stars and planets would be torn apart, and the now-dispersed atoms would be destroyed about 10¯¹⁹ seconds before the end (the atoms will first be ionized as electrons fly off, followed by the dissociation of the atomic nuclei). At the time the Big Rip occurs, even spacetime itself would be ripped apart and the scale factor would be infinity.

How to pull rocks out of pipe in the ground?

My mom has a hole in the ground that she puts her clothes drying hanger in. Like this. The hole in the ground is a 2" or so pipe, set in concrete. The pipe has filled with gravel. Anyone have a tip on getting the rocks out? I can only get so many out using my fingers and then trying to use a set of chopsticks.

tal,
@tal@lemmy.today avatar

a powerful vacuum

A shop vac, maybe with a narrow extender.

If OP is in the US – which I assume he is, from the inch measurement – I’d bet that he can probably rent one at a large hardware store, like Home Depot, if he doesn’t have any use for one outside of this.

Hardware question

Hello! This might not be the right community but I’m looking at building a new server and you operate in similar areas and might have experience with this. I’ve got a GPU without video outputs, can I combine that with a CPU without integrated graphics and still get video output from the HDMI located on the motherboard?

tal,
@tal@lemmy.today avatar

While it might work in the OS, setting the OS up may be a pain (the installer may or may not work like that) and I strongly suspect that the BIOS can’t handle it.

I suspect that an easier route would be to use a cheap, maybe older, low-end graphics card for the video output and then using DRI_PRIME with that.

tal,
@tal@lemmy.today avatar

This post, a day before yours on the lemmy_support@lemmy.ml community, is describing some similar behavior, with some CPU usage at start (at least on the first boot; not clear whether that is a one-off on migration from the text) and then federation problems with 0.19.1:

lemmy.ml/post/9563852?scrollToComments=true

After upgrading Lemmy from 0.18.5 to 0.19.1, the lemmy_server process is taking up 200-350+% of my CPU…It seems like my instance isn’t federating properly now tho.

tal, (edited )
@tal@lemmy.today avatar

I kind of wish that multi-unit housing came with sound isolation ratings. That’d create an incentive to have better isolation and help customers weigh the tradeoffs.

Possible workaround for 0.19.1 outbound federation issues

If anyone else is having problems with 0.19.1 federation where outgoing messages don’t seem to make it out to other instances other than at instance restart, it sounds like @mrmanager, the lemmy.today admin, may have managed to resolve the federation issues on his instance. He hasn’t posted here yet (I assume because he...

What is Something Scientific that you just don't believe in at all?

EDIT: Let’s cool it with the downvotes, dudes. We’re not out to cut funding to your black hole detection chamber or revoke the degrees of chiropractors just because a couple of us don’t believe in it, okay? Chill out, participate with the prompt and continue with having a nice day. I’m sure almost everybody has something...

tal,
@tal@lemmy.today avatar

I mean, define “scientific”. A currently-held, consensus theory? Because it’s easy to find theories that were developed in accordance with scientific theory, held for a while, but discarded.

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aether_theories

In physics, aether theories (also known as ether theories) propose the existence of a medium, a space-filling substance or field as a transmission medium for the propagation of electromagnetic or gravitational forces. “Since the development of special relativity, theories using a substantial aether fell out of use in modern physics, and are now replaced by more abstract models.”

Is there an app or way to set a start time and end time and totally simulate an automatic sunset with Hue lighting

I want to set a start time and end time and have my Hue lights slowly and very gradually over that timeframe shift from like yellow–> red or even white/blue at the start of the day–> red at end and have it automatically carry that out....

tal, (edited )
@tal@lemmy.today avatar

I rigged up a simulated sunrise about 20 years back with a regular light, a computer, and an X10 controller back when I slept in a room without windows and wanted a more-gentle way of waking up than an alarm clock. So I totally get wanting to simulate a sunrise.

But why do you want to simulate a sunset?

Also, you might want to ask on !homeautomation, as they specialize in this sort of thing.

tal, (edited )
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You can link to videos if you want. I don’t think that lemmy or kbin instances will likely provide free hosting for them, though.

There is a Fediverse service that provides video hosting, PeerTube.

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PeerTube

I’m skeptical that it will scale – it costs to host video – but it’s there. You can host something on any PeerTube host willing to serve your content and link to it from the Threadiverse, same as you could on YouTube.

joinpeertube.org

EDIT: For a list of nearby instances:

peertube.fediverse.observer

tal, (edited )
@tal@lemmy.today avatar

I don’t think that RSS is a reasonable alternative for social media at all. Different use case for me.

I mean, I’d use it if I had a selection of known sources that publish content regularly that I like enough of to see all the content and have a website. Only a few sources actually meet that bar for me. Then, RSS lets me put a common interface on all of them, combines a list of new content.

I use something like Reddit or the Fediverse to take advantage of people finding useful content elsewhere, which is kind of a different use case.

I mean, you’re on social media here, rather than just following an RSS feed, so presumably RSS doesn’t replace social media for you either.

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