I just spent the week assembling furniture. IKEA’s instructions and overall build quality have fallen from the last time I did this. The instructions have gotten less detailed (as in, do I use the board that has six holes in pattern A or pattern B? The boards aren’t labeled and the patterns are very similar). Also, the hardware has gotten even cheaper than before. The cams that capture the hidden screw heads have always been fairly easy to strip if you’re not careful and they seem even moreso now. I didn’t have any trouble because I came into the task knowing this, but it was still a bit of a let down.

The store experience itself was about the same, with less employees milling around which is good for the showroom but bad for the warehouse. Overall the experience was slightly more negative than previously, especially since the prices have jumped for what IKEA offers which is, let’s face it, assemble it yourself junk furniture.

I don’t do full disk encryption on my backups. I use duplicity and encrypt the backups with three gpg keys: one that is for the IT department with a known passphrase, one for the business with a different known passphrase, and my personal key.

I’m a one man show but I set this up with the future in mind. Different data might not have all three keys, but this arrangement allows me to spin off bits of the data management as needed. The passphrases can be changed as/when needed without invalidating old backups.

Combined with ssh certificates it helps organize my IT needs.

Big Hero 6

My favourite little bird, the lowly barn swallow. Incredibly social, they gather on the power lines and twitter at each other when a storm is coming. Lightning fast, and voracious mosquito eaters, and they keep their nests incredibly clean, carrying out their droppings from the building.

I love barn swallows.

I’ve got one of those KeepConnect smart plugs which monitors a few different external servers and their own cloud, and automatically power cycles its outlet if things don’t work. They’ve damn near doubled in price since I’ve bought mine but it does work very well for me. Annual fee is reasonable too.

I could build something similar but I have too many projects as it is, and I feel I’d be fiddling with it endlessly just because I can. This is literally set and forget and in the last 2y it’s cycled the outlet 48 times, most of them in the middle of the night, presumably with my cable provider maintenance windows.

I’ve always felt that Quebec has been on the right side of these kinds of issues. They get heat for anti-Islam rhetoric but they apply the rules to all religions, which IMO is the right approach.

Exactly this. I use Shelly relays in the switch boxes and use the physical switch as an input to the Shelly relay. I have a couple AliExpress zigbee relays too that work well.

The trick is with three/four way switches where the smart relay needs continuous power and to be physically located at the end of the chain where power is actually switched to the light or outlet. Took me a while to figure that out but an SPDT relay with 120V coil solves that. The problem is space: fitting the relay to provide continuous power to the smart relay and the smart relay itself into a standard junction box with a physical switch and all the usual mess of wiring is not easy.

… not equipped to handle what, exactly?

Sexual assault is a pretty serious charge, and it appears in this case that the alleged victim seriously damaged her own credibility on several claims. I fully admit to not knowing a lot of this specific case but it sure seems like the justice system prevailed in upholding justice given the facts we have.

Interesting; I thought this worked be a single high power laser (or a few) with galvanometers for targeting.

Would love to learn more about how it’s really done (as opposed to how I imagine it’d be done).

EE (specifically embedded systems) here: just how much power do you need to zap a weed effectively? I would’ve thought a 40W laser would have been more than enough, and then scale that up for a hundred acres.

only solar would be tough, but a small EV battery with a large panel in the sun for 12h seems like it’d be a lot of juice to run WeedZapper2000 with a topping off charge overnight, no?

My NAS is filled with 16 4TB spinning rust drives from various manufacturers. I have been staying away from the helium filled drives mostly because I don’t know much about them but I do know that helium is hard to keep where you want it. How are your drives holding up? How long have you been using them?

The spirit of the law is a very real thing and is taken into account by judges all the time.

I don’t understand the end game here. What possible benefit is there to RFK or the federal government to reject sound science? I don’t see a profit motive, I don’t see a grift that’d be “worth” the deaths… it’s not like ivermectin is something you could profit off of… why?

Hudson’s Bay doesn’t exactly have much for a luxury experience either. At one point when I was a kid maybe, but they’re a loooong way from that point in their history.

“I moderate heavily. If someone is rude or abusive, their comment isn’t published. Unless it’s really funny.” :-)

ssh -D8080 myserver and then use any of the proxy extensions (i like proxyswitchy omega I think it’s called). Also works with tsocks or anything that can use a SOCKS5 proxy, and as an added bonus, it’ll resolve DNS through the proxy as well.

I’ve been using the -L2500:localhost:25 -L14300:localhost:143 trick to access my personal email without leaking anything outside of the ssh tunnel for years, and things like sslh and corkscrew allow me to get around/through draconian corporate IT policies with almost 100% success.

The last trick I have is iodine which can tunnel traffic through DNS. If you can’t get a direct connection to the iodine endpoint it can be damn slow, but if you gotta get through it can be a godsend.

Gang of Four?

unless I am very much mistaken this is only true for air source heat pumps. If you’re in a cold environment I would expect you’d want a ground source heat pump instead, although the installation cost for that will be significantly higher than air source.

Exactly how I feel about it as well.

oh I wasn’t talking about storage media. I’m talking about rack servers, switches, storage arrays (with new drives), etc., etc… The older hardware can wear out/break (I used to do MTTF/MIL-HDBK-217 calculations for avionics) but generally speaking it’s got a lot of life left in it by the time it hits the surplus market. It’s also usually designed with redundancies/failover mechanisms which means you don’t have to bodge together inferior solutions.