Funnily enough, in my town there used to be a Future Shop, and then a Best Buy sprung up in the new commercial district, but apparently couldn’t compete because it closed 2 years later. Then about a year later Best Buy bought Future Shop and they re-branded the existing Future Shop to Best Buy.

Yeah, ToysRUs is alive and well in Canada. I have no idea that the bottom-right one is.

My firefighter neighbour told me that the procedure now is just to let them burn, like they do with gasoline fires. They make sure it doesn’t spread, but they won’t try to extinguish it because it’d take 10-12 hours and thousands of gallons. By just letting it burn they’re done in an hour with a few hundred gallons.

Connecting more people to the Internet, giving more options in rural areas.

Hay is basically cut grass, straw is the part leftover from harvesting wheat and taking the seeds. Both are baled, but they’re used for different things. Hay is food for any animals that eat grass like horses and cows, buy straw is not edible so it’s used as bedding.

I’ve personally been a Starlink subscriber for about a year while I was traveling, and it really was a game-changer. Rock-solid internet in remote places, fast enough to have Zoom calls on, all for a price that’s only about twice what I currently pay now that I’m back home (people complaining about Starlink’s price don’t know what they’re talking about, this is 100+ Mbps statellite internet we’re talking about. Other options are ten times the cost for less than a tenth of the speed).

It just drives me nuts when I see progress being blocked for stupid reasons. Examples in other areas would be wind power (“but what about the birds”), electric cars (“but cobalt = slave labour”, “akschually, when you charge the car with the dirtiest fuel possible and take into account all externalities it’s less green than just the tailpipes of a gas car”), space exploration (“the potable water sprayed on the launch pad leaked into the environment, here’s a fine”). There’s some stuff that’s been disproved years ago by anyone with half a brain that keeps being repeated, it’s infuriating.

“Just asking questions”… It’s just a bit suspicious that as soon as the safety aspect was proven to not be an issue, you immediately switched to another angle.

But to answer your question, yes, vapourizing someting made of metal and plastics in the upper atmosphere could certainly count as pollution, and we don’t really know the effects it might have on it because no studies have yet been done.

What has been done, though, is a study of how many meteors fall on the earth every hear: early estimates in the 60s were of about 100,000 tons per year, but further studies (1) showed this was grossly underestimated and more accurate values would be about triple that.

Starlink has launched 6,054 satellites in orbit (2) that total about 3,838,042 kg or a bit below 4000 tons. Even if they all fell in the atmosphere tomorrow, it’d only amount to less than 2% of this years’ “stuff” that burns up in the atmosphere (the rest coming from natural sources). Honestly I don’t think that’s significant, but I’ll concede that we don’t really know for sure. I just think that there are other more immediate, much worse sources of pollution that people should direct their anger towards.

1: https://web.archive.org/web/20110512174406/http://static.icr.org/i/pdf/technical/Moon-Dust-and-the-Age-of-the-Solar-System.pdf 2: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Starlink_and_Starshield_launches

Says right in the article that the rate is 9%, and they give up a 10% stake in the company.

I got better terms than that on a CAR loan last month…

Man, you really are looking for any excuse to hate on SpaceX, right?

If you’re that worried about pollution, just look up the mass of a starlink satellite vs the mass a coal plant burns every hour… Even if the satellite ends up vapourizing as 100% pollution, I’m pretty sure it’s orders of magnitude below other industries like coal power or aviation.

They’d burn up / vapourize. This is partly why it took them so long to get their space lasers to work (for satellite to satellite communications); these things usually are usually based on a crystal that wouldn’t burn and could hurt someone when the satellite falls.

Shortest answer is that even if all Starlink satellites suddently exploded at the same time for no reason, they’d fall back to Earth in a matter of weeks. They’re waaaay lower than the other satellites you’re thinking of (see discussion on geo-stationary satellites for why), so they need to be actively pushed every few days just to stay up. They’re so low they’re still subject to atmospheric drag.

Respect has always been at the core of my wife and I’s parenting philosophy. Children are fully-qualified persons in their own right, they’re not an extension of their parents. They have their own tastes, dreams and aspirations. They’ll test to find the limits of what they can do, and it doesn’t really matter where it’s actually set but it’s really important that they do find it. They can understand why we have to say no to them, and if you communicate the reason they’ll respect it.

All of this continues well into their teenage years, BTW.

I keep telling my wife we have to write a book on parenting, but she thinks it’ll be too controversial (especially our views around daycare and schooling)…

I own a sailboat, and let’s just say that it’s not as simple as it looks. If you want to have good sailing performance you can’t just weld a mast to the deck and call it good: Half of what makes a sailboat go happens underwater, so it has to be designed as a sailboat from the get-go. Not an impossible task, but it’ll need new ship types and perhaps new construction methods; it’s not something you can just retrofit onto an existing fleet.

All sailboats large enough to sleep in also have an engine, and most of the time it’s a 20-60HP diesel depending on the size of the boat. There’s a lot of buzz currently around switching to electric auxiliary propulsion, but the benefits aren’t as big as you get on cars. Main “issue” is that marine diesel engines already spend most of their operating time in their most efficient range of RPMs; you don’t get stop-and-go like you get on cars. Given that, there’s no regen braking to be had on a boat. Regen can still happen when you’re sailing, but the available energy from that derives from the velocity squared or something, so you only get something negligible like 200W when sailing at 5 knots (which is the common case for most 30-40 ft sailboats). You see, the main limit to speed on a displacement hull (like sailboats or container ships) is hull speed, which is mostly a function of hull length. Longer boat, faster boat.

This is good news for a container ship, though, because they’re much bigger and thus tend to operate at much faster speeds like 12-16 knots. I know some bigger sailboats in the 50-60 ft range routinely see 2kW+ of regen when sailing at 7-8 knots, so a containership sailing at 12+ knots could conceivably generate in the tens of kW, which could recharge batteries for when they’re becalmed or in confined waters where they can’t sail.

Also, a lot of newer ships already use diesel-electric drivetrains with AziPods, where the powerplant is actually a big generator, and the propellers are attached to electric motors mounted in rotating pods under the hull. Helps a lot with maneuverability and is actually more efficient. It’d be relatively easy to add batteries in there, but the main obstacle here is that it substracts available mass for cargo.

Other main point about sails on a boat is that it’s very labour-intensive to manage, so I don’t think current ships with their skeleton crews could do it without almost double the people.

Which may or may not be part of China, depending on who you ask… (don’t ask me, I’m just a random dude on the other side of the world)

Gen Alpha’s main influence for slang is Cocomelon.

For self-hosting purposes, Docker = lightweight disposable VMs that are configured via docker-compose.yml. All important data should be in “volumes”, which are just shared folders between the host and the container.

The end result is that you can delete and re-create containers at any time and they should just pick up where they left off from the data that’s in these volumes.

Each individual published image has some paths they want to use for that; everything is usually specified in their example docker-compose files.

If you’re not a dev, don’t even try to understand Dockerfiles, it’s not for you.

It’s not quite as point-and-click, but I’m using Docker for that because Yunohost kept messing up updates. Most server apps will have some instructions on how to run them in docker, especially a docker-compose.yml file, so you don’t have to rely on the Yunohost team to package said app.

The way I do it is that I put each suggested compose file in their own file, and import them in my main docker-compose.yml file like this:

version:  '3'
include:
    - syncthing.yml

Then just run docker compose pull && docker compose up -d every time you change something or want to update your apps, and you’re good to go.

Software updates in particular are waaaaaayyy easier on Docker than Yunohost.

Owner of 2 pinecils here, there are buttons and a display that shows the current temperature and other stuff. I only just learned that there’s an app, it works more than fine on its own, out of the box.

I got that specific iron because I needed to power it from 12v, and it works very well on the USB PD power supply I already have for my laptop.

I don’t know why they’re categorizing the 3 in “luxury cars” but if you look at the actual numbers it’s about the same as a Camry, which is in line with what I’d expect.

Did someone make a “f150 deaths”, or a “honda civic deaths” website? I’d be curious to compare because 555 deaths in 4.5 million cars sold sounds to me like a pretty good number, actually; it’s around 0.01% of cars.

Looking at the StatsCan website, looks like there were 1.5 million cars sold in 2022 and 1931 fatalities, which would bring the industry average to around 0.12% of cars, about 10x worse. Of course, not only new cars were involved in crashes, so I’m not entirely sure it’s an accurate comparison, but from what I can tell, your sources aren’t actually making the points you think they’re making.

Docker’s secret that most “getting started” tutorials seem to miss is docker-compose.yml. Who wants to type these long-ass commands to start containers? I always just create a compose file, and then docker compose up -d.

Dockerfile is for developers, you shouldn’t need more than a docker-compose.yml for self-hosting stuff.