Mostly outdated, but not “throw coins in aircraft engines” crazy. It’s at least based on good advice, just a bit cargo-cult-y.

Batteries it depends on the chemistry.

NiCad/NiMH and some other older battery tech it can prolong shelflife, especially if you’re in a hot/humid climate. Lithium batteries it doesn’t really do anything.

Is your home connection down that much? I’d think that even syncing once every day or so would populate everything fine, and if you’re at home it should update over wifi.

I might just be spoiled because I’m the only one using mine and only for a handful of devices.

Passive vs active engagement.

These plates are a passive, very visual reminder. A tracker app requires you actively use the app, and not consciously/subconsciously underestimate portions.

Neither is a holistic solution, both require buy-in, each is going to have different effectiveness for different people.

I’ve tried bookwyrm and hardcover and a few others. In general I think they’re getting there, but there’s weird edge cases where it’s not as smooth an experience. Partly because they don’t have a critical mass of users, partly because Goodreads really was in a pretty decent place when it effectively froze.

All that’s going to improve over time, but atm, for me, switching costs from the old platform aren’t worth it.

See also: every other service Amazon has bought.

I miss when Goodreads had updates.

“Lets turn the Ionosphere and the Mantel into the halves of a capacitor! Free energy!” is Bond villain territory.

It’s definitely at least “Internet Lore” at this point? I mean the car company isn’t a namesake for no reason. I don’t want to give The Oatmeal too much credit but it seems to have been the meme generator for a lot of ‘the legend’ on the web, though it’s been kind of a counter-culture staple basically since he died.

IDK, just one of those things that I got interested enough to read actual books about awhile ago and it’s kind of scary how much “common knowledge” is more “common mythology”.

He wasn’t.

The War of the Currents was Edison and Westinghouse. The elephant was executed by the ASPCA and filmed by the Edison Studios years after, that company had been sold by Edison years before. The payment argument was Tesla and a manager.

Tesla and Edison wrote each other personal letters and spoke well of each other in public years later.

Edison was an asshole. Tesla’s ‘legend’ is weird.

Also a gas! Astronomical spectroscopy is fascinating.

“The star radiates at [these] wavelengths meaning it has [this] composition, after the light bounces off/through the planet we see <these> wavelengths, meaning it has <this> composition.”

The camera is many sensors.

You can overload anything by tasking it to do too much.

Yes

Have a few ebooks and audiobooks in calibre that have been removed from Amazon/Audible. Nothing dramatic drama wise as far as I can tell other than the license expiring/moving.

It’s nice not having to worry about it.

Honestly 5 gb is thousands of songs, especially if they’re not FLAC / mp3 320.

It won’t be your entire library if you’re a music buff but it’s days worth of music.

During prohibition grape (formerly wine) producers sold grape juice with the warning label “don’t store in a cool dark place for multiple weeks or this product may become illegal”. (or something to that effect) You can do much the same with any grain or fruit.

For Marijuana you have to at least get seeds/the plant first, which are now a controlled product. Yeah it’ll grow anywhere (hence “weed”), but you still have to source it and plant it somewhere with sunlight.

Brewing at scale and/or for a specific product is difficult, making alcohol is easy.

/“marshland”, which would give a whole new relevance to getting “swampy”.

Yeah from the list the absolutely nuts, one-off, dragracing versions of cars from the 50s/60s made ~400hp. Which could be outdone by an option on the Camero last year. And if you wanted more it’s not difficult, just more money.

And raw HP numbers don’t take into account how much better modern cars drive or how much safer they are. I daily a car from the 80s and love it. But lack of ABS or traction control or airbags or a collapsible steering column does come to mind every once in awhile. Cars from the 50s/60s will have notably worse handling/cornering/etc.

Is there a lot of benefit to running postmarketOS compared to rooted Android?

I’ve had some trouble with flashing an old Asus tablet in that all the old images/info are basically dead links. But that is mostly just your average link rot.

I figured compiling a custom ROM was more trouble than it’s worth but if the main branch is actively maintained maybe less so.

Currency is a pretty sound idea, whether it will ever get (back?) to a usable place is it’s own discussion.

A lot of the conversation about blockchain as a technology though involves the ones that store additional information as a distributed database, which comes with problems.

It’s also ‘neat’, but they all depend on trusting the validation method for putting info into the database, which largely defeats the point of having a “trustless” database once the data is in there. There’s the occasional proposed use case that seems vaguely useful, but they mostly boil down to replacing legal contracts with a database that’s distributed “somewhere”.

I thought it was the dude from Look Mum No Computer. (it is not)