That is why you vote for people that invest in a usable power grid which can store overproduced electricity in batteries (chemical, water storage lakes with pumps, pulling weight up/down etc.),

Yup, which I’ve been doing for the last two decades and keep on doing, even though financially right-wing would serve my interests better.

Or just make electricity prices variable so that you can expect a ROI investing in your own battery (like charge your battery cheap or by solar and discharge it for bigger returns by night/bad weather)

We have variable pricing available here, the problem there is that having ADHD I need structure in my day and week. Guess I lack the courage, but having to plan chores around when prices are expected to be low sounds like a complete disaster scenario for me.

For a lot of homes simply putting solar panels on the roof is enough to generate a lot of power for the home itself and an electrical car.

Unfortunately panels don’t generate a lot, if anything at all, when the electric car is at home, often in the evening/night. You could add a home battery as storage, but that is, at least in my country, quite expensive and doesn’t have the capacity to bridge that gap in an economically feasible way.

Then there’s the problem with having your own driveway: that’s not the standard here, so depending on the distance to the nearest parking spot it’s often also not very feasible to hook up your car to your own grid.

Of course there’s also the late autumn and winter period where your panels will not produce enough for the average home, especially if you are heating with an heat pump. Which is rapidly becoming the standard here.

And as the cherry on top: our power grid has a hard time handling the strain of solar panels dumping their excess power during daytime. For this reason here you pay a fee for generated power returned to the net. Currently you still receive a compensation which is usually higher than the fee, but people are fearing that in the next few years solar panels might start costing money. This heavily impacts the return on investment, which unfortunately needs to be a consideration for a lot of people as their wallet has a limit.

Don’t get me wrong, I’m all for moving to renewables and I do not have anything against solar power. But it is definitely not a magical solution and comes with its own set of problems that need to be tackled.

It was in a poor / underdeveloped country.

Damn, I would have thought even the US would have holsters with a basic retention mechanism by now.

Come over and you can add STD to the list of three letter words you have!

For some I agree. But the response to the “I’m comfortable in my role” one I really dislike.

It should be fine to be satisfied with your position instead of having to eternally strife to a reach a higher step on the ladder. If that’s what somebody really wants, it’s ok and they should go for it. But for others that mindset will just end in a burnout and it should be applauded if they are able to recognise their limits. Work to live, not live to work.

To be honest, Mint is no better in that regard on my laptop. Closing my laptop and pulling the power adapter always results in the system not going to sleep mode, but remaining active. Opening it will actually cause it to resume going to sleep. Really annoying.

Reminds me of the time I ran a FreeBSD webserver from home, compiling Apache from source took the better part of a day. But still good times, learned a lot from that experience.

Less if you were sensible and included an error correction scheme to combat the unreadable sectors that were bound to pop up after a while. I can be quite nostalgic, but if there is one thing I don’t miss it’s the ‘reliability’ of floppies.

Personally I prefer Utrecht or Leiden. Although Amsterdam has more to offer in terms of larger/more renowned tourist attractions, I’ve always enjoyed the vibe in those cities more. Amsterdam is too busy, it smells and it’s way too commercial for my taste.

But of course I’m probably biased, I grew up near Leiden and studied in Utrecht. So I spent quite some time there.

Most problems are caused on the longer term and that damage can be quite insidious. N₂O deactivates vitamine B12, which ultimately causes nerve damage, especially for heavy users. Symptoms can be stuff like tingling extremities, muscle weakness and paralysis and can become irreversible with continued usage. The problem is that the early symptoms can be easily disregarded, while the damage is slowly building up.

Fedora was one of the first to get rid of pulseaudio and replace it with Pipewire, so that shouldn’t be an issue.

Skewed telemetry probably, as most users that are aware you can move the taskbar are also aware you can just disable the phone home crap and will therefore not show up in the statistics.

Here it’s 112, my first time was when I was stranded on the emergency lane of the highway. I was driving a van and parts of one of my tires were strewn across the right lane.

In my country you’re supposed to call the emergency number when your car breaks down on the highway, even when you’ve made it to the emergency lane. You’ll be towed to the nearest safe place by a salvage company, at no expense. Of course, how you get underway again from that point is your own problem.

At any rate, before you get towed they’ll usually display either a big red cross (to indicate a closed lane) or a reduced maximum speed on the matrix signs (present every few kilometres on most highways) for the adjacent lane to make the situation a bit safer.

In my case they closed the right lane to prevent cars hitting the debris of my tire and to make sure that the government agency in charge could clean up the mess. It was unfortunate to see how many people just ignore the red crosses.

I also learned about rethreaded tires that day. We bought that van not too long ago, the tire profile looked as if they were quite new and should have lasted for thousands of kilometres at least. But apparently revising tires by stripping of the old threading and basically glueing on a new one is a thing. In our case the thread came off suddenly. So screw that shit, only new tires for me.

Yeah, RAM prices are crazy. When I built my current system I threw in 64GB so I could mess around with stuff like Kubernetes and virtual machines without worrying about memory shortage. Memory was cheap enough that it was a no-brainer. I feel like a millionaire when I look at how much that would set me back now. 😅

Ah, yeah, that’s a design decision that sucks. Those games I’ll pick up in few years when I have a card that’s capable of RT at an acceptable framerate. I get that tech becomes mandatory at some point, the same has happened with OpenGL/DirectX and the various pixel shading versions back in the day. But in my opinion enforcing ray tracing came way too early, seeing how it eats performance.

It does depend on the game, Satisfactory for example uses UE5 (5.3.2) and runs perfectly fine for me without framegen at 5120x1440. Admittedly I run it on an RX 6900, so not an average card. But at the other hand it’s already an older one and that resolution approaches 4K.

Unless something changed fairly recently the game also doesn’t use Lumen by default, let alone raytracing. Was RT made mandatory in later UE5 versions? Because it’s definitely not mandatory for every UE5 version.

UE5 is by no means a lightweight engine, but I do wonder how many of the issues are caused by lack of optimisation.

Yeah, that’s definitely a concern. My first installation shredded its SD card in no time due to each request getting logged and stored on disk. Turning off long term query logging mitigated that issue, for my home network I don’t care about that history anyway.

Anybody got the feeling some games may be negatively affected by a PiHole ?

My RPi 2 has been happily running PiHole in my network for about 8 years now and with a number of pretty strict block lists, personally I never had any issues with games.

Must be a commie, he’s even dressed in red!

Pretty ripped, but he definitely missed forearm day.