Cryptography. As in, using encryption and encryption keys to authenticate me, rather than just a password.

Last week or two I’ve been learning more about passkeys, and it makes threads like this seem ridiculously out of date. Given the choice between emojis and passwords and hard crypto, I’ll take the crypto.

Yeah that was also just a shitty phone- big heavy phone that’s a mediocre phone but only needs charging once every few days.

I’m saying make a GOOD phone, maybe 10-12mm thick, and you can get a phone that lasts at least two full days.

For the batteries your outta luck for now due to a SOB called physics.

How so? Give the battery more volume. Bigger battery = more mAh = lasts longer.

Yeah but if you make the battery 3-4mm thicker you double its volume and then you have a phone with 5000-10000+ mAh.

You don’t think ‘this phone battery lasts a week’ is a selling point? Trust me, it is.

Then get yourself a basic black & white laser printer. Brother is usually pretty good for that. The cartridges don’t expire and it’ll be ready instantly when you need it, whether that’s tomorrow or next year.

Here’s one for $120

What bugs me about this is THEY ARE ALL THE SAME! Flat rectangular phones with no buttons and few ports. Where is the innovation? Where is the experimentation? Where are the different form factors?

Go back to like 2003 and you had all kinds of variety in the market. Some phones had slide out keyboards, some had physical keyboards like blackberries, they were all kinds of different expansion ports and slots and interfaces, and occasionally something totally different like Compaq had a gadget that took different backpacks that bolted on the back to give it extra capability.

Skip 20 years ahead to today, and every phone is the exact same fucking form factor. And so we obsess over millimeters and megapixels and software. There’s no innovation here. There’s no variety here.

The only even slightly interesting development I see is the new flip and book phones, but that technology is being used in the most boring way possible. I want to phone the size of a Snickers bar where I pull the screen out of it from the side and it unrolls as far as I want it to. I want a phone that flips open like a laptop to reveal a keyboard. Or even simpler, I want a phone that’s 4 mm thicker and has a battery that lasts all week. Give that phone a headphone jack and wireless charging, put a little rubber around it to make it indestructible, then you’ll have something interesting.

Until that happens, you have like six manufacturers that are basically building the exact same product. Boring.

IT person here. Avoiding HP is a good idea. But a better idea is don’t buy shitty cheap consumer level inkjet printers from any brand. Most of them have this sort of bullshit, although not usually as bad as HP does. Instead I suggest buy it for life. Get a nice color laser machine, spend a few hundred bucks, and you will have a printer that lasts until you die. I like the Canon MF743CDw, it’s a little on the pricier side but it scans both sides of the paper in one pass. Also does color duplex printing.

If you don’t want the extra size or weight of a color laser, get a black and white laser. How often do you really need color? And if you must get something cheaper, get one of the newer inkjet printers that use refillable ink bottles rather than cartridges, like there is an actual ink tank on the printer and you refill it with a squeeze bottle rather than replacing the cartridge.

Yeah I think indoor farming / vertical farming is going to be the ultimate answer. Much more efficient in every way, including resource use, water, pesticide, etc.

Try HomeSeer. I ran it for years before switching to HA.

Nice in concept.

In practice this is useless- a $150k fine when removing the satellite will someday cost millions.

It’s also worth noting that de-orbiting was never the plan here. Geosynchronous satellites are too far up to make that practical- at 22,000 mi altitude, the amount of delta-v necessary for a deorbit is gigantic. So instead the satellite ‘boosts’ up to a ‘graveyard’ orbit about 300km above the geosynchronous ring.
Dish only boosted it 122km above the geosynchronous ring. Thus the fine. In practice this satellite will probably cause nobody any problems.

Ah how three mighty have fallen.
I remember the days when Google was optimizing their page to save 1/10th of a second of load time, when they publicly stated their goal was to get people off of Google as quickly as possible and on to whatever they were looking for. That was back in the ‘don’t be evil’ days. Those days appear to be long gone.

Just updated a Windows 7 box to Windows 10 the other day. So apparently this only applies to Windows 11. No idea if it lets you use Windows 10 as a stepping stone between 7 and 11 but don’t care. I have no plans to use Windows 11 anywhere anytime soon, so as far as I’m concerned if this means it will stop nagging me to upgrade, so much the better.

Interesting. Do you have any sources on this or more reading material behind it? I have yet to really see any things suggesting utilities are asking to do CapEx on infrastructure improvements but are being told no.

Small tractors are easy. The issue is efficiency. The big tractor is big because the tool it pulls behind it covers ~10 rows per pass. You can easily build a small tractor that does 1-2 rows per pass, but that means you need a lot more passes, which means doing anything takes a lot longer.

I assume by “Raspberry Z-Wave module” you mean the RaZberry z-wave addon board, and I couldn’t agree more. I tried to get that thing going with another home automation package and gave up after a few hours of fucking with it.

That said, these days I’m using Home Assistant on a RPi with a Nortek z-wave/zigbee combo radio USB interface and I couldn’t be happier. If you’ve never used HA it’s worth trying out; used to require a lot of scripting but now it’s a beautiful and polished system that has all the tweakability a nerd wants with a nice high-WAF GUI. They have a plugin that does exactly what you’re doing and makes a virtual alarm system out of existing sensors.

I also agree block connections and use a VPN to access it, I do the same thing.

Very interesting. So you basically have an alarm system in software then? What do you use for software? Do you have an arm/disarm function?

Of course it is.

We have more energy consuming stuff than ever. But do you ever see NEW substations being built? NEW long range power lines? I don’t.

Around here, the utility has a deal- they will sell you a top of the line $400 color touchscreen WiFi thermostat that talks to Alexa and displays the weather report and does a bunch of other shit, for $10 (not a typo). In exchange, you let them remotely shut off your AC if the grid gets overloaded.

Why do they do this? Because a few truckloads of thermostats (with a bulk discount) are a fuckton cheaper than actually upgrading the grid.

And so we hear about grid overload days and possible brownouts and incentives to shut stuff off as if this is the way it’s supposed to be. But the reality is these problems only exist because utilities don’t keep ahead of necessary upgrades. After all, why spend the money when there’s shareholders to answer to?

security? For surveillance or something more?

This is harder than it looks.

See those rows of crops? On most farms, you need to be able to drive a tractor through them. I don’t mean a riding mower, I mean a giant thing that pulls a tool that’s working on 5-10 rows at a time doing things like tilling, seeding, fertilizing, harvesting, etc. If there’s big metal pillars every row or every other row, that tool can’t be used.
Thus, as pictured, those kinds of panels can only be used on a farm that’s not using large multi-row agriculture machinery. That means it’ll work for small family farms but not the large ag operations where this sort of tech could really kick ass.

What I would really love to see is more solar over commercial parking lots. That means a million little projects instead of a few huge ones, but think about how much surface area that is overall. It’s huge.
The key to doing that is twofold- 1. create a few cookie-cutter designs for the frameworks that can be tweaked for individual projects, and 2. remove red tape from their implementation.
It should be possible for a business to buy off the shelf plans for such a thing, have a local engineer tweak them for the project specifics, and then have a local contractor do the installation, and have this happen in under 6 months.

As it stands, building anything above where humans will be involves a nightmare of engineering and insurance and liability, making it cost-prohibitive for most companies. That needs to get easier. I believe every parking lot should have solar above it- that not only will produce a ton of power, but it’ll keep the cars cooler in summer.