Recent submissions

Comment · 12 hours ago
Not that I am an expert in this but living in a harbor city I know that mooring in harbours is not cheap (e.g. where I am 20k€/day). That means you will have significant mooring costs. Potentially wages are lower because there are less people om board.

When they are at sea they have to pay fuel (probably 100k€ per day), but they also have paying customers on board which is priced to be profitable. If cruise ships wouldn't earn money they would not exist. Without customers they don't have money.

Comment · 3 days ago
Let me tell you a story. A friend of mine earns a living creating WordPress sites for other people. Whenever there is a bigger problem I will get hired as the cavalry to fix it. That guy literally installs a plugin for everything. By that I mean every aspect of the original Wordpress is replaced by a set of plugins that were never intended to work together. Including layout. The content of posts is no longer stored in posts. There are multiple SEO plugins. There are plugins for simple things like image carousels that display ads in the admin interface, the code to display those ads is probably more complex than the plugin itself. There are paid themes, where the update would cost money that the customer usually is not willing to pay, since the website just works fine, until it does not. Needless to say if I wanted to build a ball of mud that is guaranteed to fail, I would probably call this guy the greatest of all time at that particular goal.

Needless to say, every now and then a plugin is not or cannot be updated and then a PHP update comes around and boom the house of card collapses. Or it is simply just a plugin that gets uninstalled and leaves the database vandalized. These are usually incredibly complex fixes and I am not cheap.

I have told the guy multiple times very precisely how to avoid these issues, but hey YOLO.

When he had a very important customer that demanded a low maintenance, high reliability website, he brought me on board from the start for once. Since I could not manage to steer him away from Wordpress, I at least told him every single plugin has to be vetted, and no fancy theme/layout builders. I still had to stop his urge to install plugins for some things and showed him how to fix them with simple CSS overrides, for the one thing we couldn't manage I wrote the plugin in extremely defensive PHP myself.

The site is going fine, but I didn't check in a while and he has admin rights.

Comment · 3 days ago
Diodes may not like a constant DC load like that. In any case you're now definily running that equipment out of spec and totally at fault for any damages to the equipment, buildings and people stemming from that, so you better know for sure that that specific power supply can handle it.

I am not saying there isn't anything that can handle this out there, what I am saying is nothing is rated for handling it and this is experimental territory.

Comment · 3 days ago
Does it run Linux?
Comment · 4 days ago
If productivity is raised, who will profit from the surplus of said productivity increase? The natural thought throughout the centuries has been that once the machines do more work, the people who had to do the shitty labor will have more spare time to do things.

The reality is of course that we live in a capitalist system and if productivity increases there are people who will be 100% focused on ensuring those gains go towards the profits of their shareholders. Meaning a new machine doesn't mean you let your workers work less, it means you fire the workers you don't need and require the others to replace the work of the ones who are gone.

Now this reaches white collar workers who always thought themselves to be somewhat immune from that issue, but this is a centuries old tale for the blue collar folk. And from them you could also learn how to successfully deal with that.

Comment · 4 days ago
Most modern aircraft have a 400V 360-800Hz three-phase grid, as this allows thinner (read:lighter) conductors. There are some high voltage DC rails on some plains in the range 270VDC or ±270VDC.

On the usage side for instrumentation, avionics etc. it is usually 28 VDC.

Comment · 4 days ago
1. It is not considered safe voltage, so you have all the downsides of the current AC grid with the downsides of high DC voltages

2. Nearly no equipment uses 120VDC by itself, so you would need specialized DC-DC converters that can deal with the 120VDC input to go down to usual voltages like 48VD, 24VDC or 12VDC

Comment · 5 days ago
Austrian here, nope. I mean there are similar lakeside beauties in Austria, but nothing has quite this combination of interesting topology, ancient history and atmosphere. If that combination doesn't make you excited, then it is probably okay to go to some other place instead.

That being said of the 3 times I was there during the past decade, it was only bad one time, but that was high season/winter and we booked the date because of a family event that we didn't want to move. That was bareable still since most Hallstatt tourists tend to be day-trippers that are bussed in and out and if you stay over night you get some chance to walk around late or early without a million people in an narrow alley.

Like with every touristy area it pays off to investigate which ones are the less popular weeks of the year to visit (hard to do that sometimes in Croatian, especially if you're there for a swim).

Comment · 5 days ago
I have used CSS for print layouts before. My stance on this is: If you can reasonably expect someone will print your website or (more likely) parts of it, because of its nature, add a nice add free, no tracking cookie print layout. If not, don't.

I often have to print for example online shopping baskets so others can decide which offer they will take. Meaning how your shopping basket looks print absolutely will have an impact by annoying or pleasing the people who make the decisions. Needless to say, 99% of all shopping baskets look like trash when printed out.

If you have a blog, it would be reasonably that someone might want to read your article offline or store it for archival purposes. Having that look decent is not a bad thing. And it is not that hard.

Comment · 5 days ago
Not everything you'd want to be true, is. Checking makes the difference, you just need to do it.
Comment · 5 days ago
Hallstatt is one of these places to visit. It's topology alone is crazy, built on the edge of a mountain right above a lake. Nobody reasonable would build a city there, unless there was a really good reason for it. And the value of salt was that reason. But that topology is also the reason why a lot of the city is extremely old today.

Hallstatt as a town is also affected by overtourism, especially since some Asian soap opera used it as a film location. But it is one of the places that is still worth a visit.

Comment · 5 days ago
Wide events are great if you don't face an error that can only be exposed by a more detailed metric, log or trace. And that in my experience is a big if.
Comment · 7 days ago
Not to be that guy, but: a debloated TV is a screen or a projector. There are many great open source solutions for running or hosting media player software yourself.

I have not owned a TV my whole life, because I don't get what it is supposed to add that I can't get with a computer screen or a projector with a retractable screen as well. The latter has the advantage that it does not take space when not in use.

Comment · 7 days ago
I feel beyond being able to play precise rhythms and pitches, there is great value in being able to be off-grid in a meaningful, purposeful way.

While it is useful to be able to be precisely on grid if you want to be so — be it with the timing of your notes or the pitches played — many musicians I know are so overly fixated on the metrum of click track or the accurate pitch the forgot how to feel the ebs and flow that comes with great music that is just played in its own space and time. And pitch is no different here, sliding into or out of pitch of being able to sing/play slightly of grid is a very powerful skill.

But technique as the ability to pull it off is one thing, the knowledge when to use it and how much only comes with years of practise.

Nowadays many beginning musicians tie themselves so much to these grids, they can't imagine playing without them. To quote a musician that was asked by the sound engineer to play without click to make the track less mechanical: "That is allowed?"

Comment · 9 days ago
As someone who worked in shipping at an onlineshop: The main problem of your idea is that the digital systems of nearly all shipping companies are absolutely, horribly broken. To implement your idea you would have to change all of them. And if they had the power or willingness to implement good ideas, the state of their software would be different.

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