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?

Mint, lemongrass, lavender… nothing works as far as I’m concerned (Ontario, Canada). Same with ultrasonic repellants, burning coils, torches, TiO2 bulbs, taking vitamin B or garlic.

What does work for me are devices like the mosquito magnet: they burn propane to produce humidity and CO2 and use a fan to blow that through an optional chemical attractant like octanol while using the use the suction of the other side of the fan to draw the little bastards into a mesh basket where they are trapped until they desiccate.

These machines serve two purposes: they take care of the mosquitoes today and over time they break the reproductive cycle of the mosquitoes in the area which after ~6 weeks DRAMATICALLY reduces the problem for the rest of the season. A 20lb tank of propane lasts about a month. The downside is that these machines tend to be VERY finicky and you have to futz around with them after the first season to get them working again. Not great for a $500+ device.

Additionally, building bat houses and encouraging swallows to nest in the area also do wonders: both of these creatures are voracious mosquito hunters (and barn swallows are my favourite bird).

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.

Kinder Surprise are readily available all over the US. The yellow plastic egg has been modified so it essentially splits the two halves of the chocolate egg, but I see them for sale at every grocery store, Walmart, etc.

They used to be banned, but not for quite some time now.

I’ve never seen a window AC with mechanical knobs not cycle the compressor when it hits the temperature set by its thermostat. The fan might run 24/7 but the compressor? How could it possibly regulate temperature otherwise?