TimBurr
Joined 5 years ago
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Comment · 5 years ago
Comment · 5 years ago
This even works for some non-antique cars. Jeep Wranglers (TJ generation) and Mazda Miatas (NA generation) have both appreciated somewhat in recent years.
Of course, no one's getting rich when a car appreciates from $5000 to $6000 or $3000 to $3500 over a few years. Net of repairs it's probably break-even. But it's nicer than losing value :)
Comment · 5 years ago
This might be a different Ask HN, but does anyone have suggestions on avoiding the content farm stuff? Searching reddit works, but amounts to being trapped in a walled garden.
I've found a lot of great stuff on random independent websites (i.e. https://woodgears.ca/, http://gizmology.net/) that have no Reddit presence. Filtering those out is a great loss.
Something like the Yahoo Directory (hierarchical tree of hand-sorted topics) could work, but that's long gone.
Thoughts?
Comment · 5 years ago
On a quick and dirty look, I don't think those figures are right. Here's what I found for 2020:
USPS 2020
Revenues & Expenses
Package revenue: $28,537M
Overall revenue: $73,123M
Overall expenses: $82,309M
Net profit: -$ 9,176M
Mail volume - pieces per year
Packages: ~6.4B
Marketing mail: ~75B
First class mail: ~54B
Fedex
Revenues & Expenses
Package revenue: Unknown
Overall revenue: $69,217M
Net profit: $ 1,286M
Mail volume - pieces per year
Packages: ~4.6B
Marketing mail: N/A
First class mail: N/A
So USPS carries more packages, as well as insane volumes of mail that UPS/FedEx won't. Despite the significant volume differences, expenses are within 20% between the companies.
Comment · 5 years ago
Here's a NASA blog with slightly more detail:
https://mars.nasa.gov/technology/helicopter/status/296/mars-...
> An issue identified earlier this month showed a 15% chance for each time the helicopter attempts to fly that it would encounter a watchdog timer expiration and not transition to flight mode. Today’s delay is in line with that expectation and does not prevent future flights.
Comment · 5 years ago
Thanks! I looked at some tank drawings, but couldn't tell if they were omitting auxiliary tanks for simplicity's sake. Didn't want to say anything inaccurate.
Comment · 5 years ago
I'm not sure what was on the Shuttle tank, but other vehicles carry hydraulic fluid (for engine gimballing) & hydrazine (for small thrusters). They're usually vented at the end of a mission to safe the vehicle.
If you're wondering about practicality, Skylab was a Saturn V tank. Unlike the external tank suggestions, Skylab was built on the ground and never had fuel in it. But it was basically the same structure as the Saturn's third stage. Like ISS, Skylab had some micrometeorite shielding outside of the main tank.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Skylab
More recently, Nanoracks has looked at refurbishing ULA's Centaur upper stage into a habitat. Like the Shuttle, Centaur runs on a H2 + O2 cycle. Their plan is to lift an equipment kit onboard the Centaur. They'd cut a hole after the end of the mission and use on-orbit welding (not mature yet) to install all the floors/decks/airlocks.
Comment · 5 years ago
There are similar limits on photos/video. MMS photos are resolution capped at ~1MP, and videos have are compressed to be barely legible.
iMessage transfers photos/video at their native resolution.
Which means that if three iPhone users send photos in a group chat, everything's great. Add one Android user and all four are degraded to MMS quality levels.
I think my next phone will be by Apple, specifically so I can enjoy the seamless image/video sharing the rest of my family has. Probably a few generations back - I don't need the fancy cameras and screens.
Comment · 5 years ago
I mentioned it in a different comment, but take a look at Syncthing. It does mesh-style backup to synchronize a folder between multiple machines. That provides robustness against hard drive or PC failures, and it's easy to add an offsite node for extra confidence.
You can use Takeout to bulk-download photos: https://support.google.com/accounts/answer/9666875?hl=en
I don't know if you can automate syncing Google Photos to a local disk. Wouldn't be surprised if there was.
(edit: Wow. Lots of people wanting to help! I wasn't expecting two sibling responses.)
Comment · 5 years ago
Depending on what you need, a NAS + Syncthing is much simpler than the linked article. Building a PC isn't hard, and keeps prices down. These days, a RPi 4+2 USB HDDs would run circles around the motherboard on my NAS.
Syncthing is a great continuous backup solution. I use ~/NOTES as a scratchpad, and it updates automatically between my various computers. It gives you pretty granular control over shares, and I back up critical stuff to a cloud provider.
That said, there's no calendar/email/notes. XigmaNAS is built on FreeBSD, and will happily run NextCloud or a photo gallery or whatever.
Comment · 5 years ago
I've found http://neverssl.com very helpful for captive portals. It does what you'd expect - hosts a HTTP-only page that allows captive portals to work correctly.
Since it's only ever HTTP, it sidesteps the certificate errors or HTTP downgrades that normal sites are hit with during captive portal interception.
I am curious what happens to captive portals as HTTPS adoption rises. Some OS's (Android, OSX) already detect captive portals and launch a lightweight webview.
Comment · 5 years ago
A few examples in the blog post stood out to me - both refine ambigous letters to clear ones, which demonstrates concerns other folks were talking about in this thread.
In this one, i's are nearly illegible, but are corrected. It appears to be correct here, but could be wrong.
https://blog.adobe.com/hlx_fa6ee5a67d3f2e5b1945745176e6b955e...
This one's weirder. In the original, I can't read many of the letters. It looks like G[EL]NE[XR]A[IL]DI[ER][XK][IT]OR - lots of guesses. The enhanced version is GENERALDIREKTOR (I think). At any rate, it's much more confident in the spelling than I am, as a human.
https://blog.adobe.com/hlx_a337d462293b51f4d91182cbbebf68cf4...
Comment · 5 years ago
I set up a personal mailserver a few years back, and have hit a lot of painpoints. The main ones were software complexity (setup) and dealing with blacklists (ongoing).
Setup for a normal mailserver requires Postfix (SMTP send/recieve), Dovecot (IMAP mailbox management), SpamAssassin, a webmail frontend (Roundcube), something for user management (MySQL + PHPMyAdmin for me) and a generous amount of glue. Things like DNS records, config files, spam rules and classifiers, etc).
Blacklists are far more annoying, especially w.r.t. GMail. I use a DigitalOcean node, and some of their IP ranges are blacklisted due to past spamminess. Depending on the provider, there may or may not be a bounce email, and may or may not be a whitelisting process. I've even seen mixed results within GMail. I can send from my custom domain to my GMail without trouble, but emails to a friend using a custom domain on GMail are dropped silently. (That's the worst of self-hosting, I think. Silently dropped messages are way harder to detect than a mailer-daemon block notification.)
Long story short, it's a mess :)
On the flipside, similar commercial plans (3 domains, 20GB shared storage) run $30/mo or so, which is way more than I'm willing to spend on a vanity email. Sounds like a similar story for mailing lists.
I'd give self-hosting a shot and see how it goes. Since mailing lists are opt-in, users will know if they aren't receiving what they signed up for, and are likely to reach out for support help. That's different than conventional email, where a silent drop and no reply are hard to tell apart for the recipient.
Hope that wasn't too much info/text, and good luck!
Comment · 5 years ago
That's a similar spirit to Rockstar and Enterprise - they're joke languages to poke fun at employer requirements. Rockstar actually looks fun to play with, in a code-as-art sort of way. :)
Comment · 5 years ago
Thanks for the reference! I'll have to read about those more.
Sounds like that also eliminates any fuss with oil/fuel ratios, since they're introduced separately.
Biden Tax Rule Would Rip Billions From Big Fortunes at Death
and
Richest 100 Americans Would Pay $78 Billion Under Warren Tax
I think that billionaires are bad for democracy, and that Bloomberg is not aligned with our interests as non-billionaires.