yakkers

For the purpose of cooling, just setting the thermostat to its hottest setting would be in effect "off" just about all of the time. Depending on the design/temperature range of the thermostat, this isn't 100% though.

If you want to be able to do both heating and cooling, it'd get a bit complicated since the above would be inverted for heating.

It’s still quite a lot of power for AM (amplitude modulation) broadcast on any band.

If Radio 4 was on shortwave with 500kW transmitters, I probably would have been able to listen in on my radio at home in Australia, no UK-located KiwiSDR required.

Japan used to have a 500kW transmitter on 774kHz (mediumwave/AM broadcast band) for NHK Radio 2, and when the local broadcaster on 774 kHz went off air at midnight for scheduled maintenance, I could pick it up on my car’s stereo quite easily.

There’s still a lot of utility stations in the LF/longwave band. Particularly time signals (WWVB in the US, ALS162 in France, DCF77 in Germany, JJY in Japan, etc.) and NDB beacons.

At least in VK/Australia, there’s the 2200 meter band, but it’s quite limited (1W power limit, CW/digital only, 135.7–137.8 kHz).

At the same time, as much as I don’t want the AM broadcast band to die, I’d love an amateur band in the lower/middle part of MF/MW.

HF propagates through skywave (most reliably from 5-30MHz), which is where the signal bounces off the ionosphere.

In the MF (AM broadcast) band, you can observe this at night - in Australia I can pick up the 50kW Melbourne ABC station (public broadcaster) at 774kHz with a good radio, just about across the entire country.

In the LF (longwave) band, the earth’s surface and the ionosphere start to behave more like a waveguide than skywave. This is actually more reliable/consistent than even HF, but you need massive transmitting antennas due to the large wavelengths involved.

HF also generally wins for distance covered per watt - despite the massive power of Radio 4 longwave, I’d have no chance of hearing it reach Australia.

Doesn't excuse CHU: two 3kW, one 5kW ERP.

And by the virtue of shortwave propagation, it could be heard across the world. For the past month and a half (from when the news of its impending shutdown was revealed) I was regularly picking it up in Australia right up until the bitter end.

The $17,000 Apple Watch was a (rather silly) attempt to compete in the high end watch space. However, they also launched the base "Sport" model at US$349.

Have to say, it’s quite wild to me that one of the design blunders of macOS Tahoe could be a pages long blog post.

I’d actually forgotten about the menu icons in Tahoe (I tried Tahoe during the beta period and lasted less than a day) and at first thought this would just be a pretty short piece on Tahoe’s new application icons.

Going back to the article though: another amusing detail is that the one menu where having icons is actually helpful (the Move & Resize menu) actually had those icons before Tahoe.

Nix is sort of that third option, though I really wish there was a well-documented way to use it on macOS as purely a binary/source package manager. A lot of stuff I read online goes into setting up nix-darwin to manage desktop settings and etc. and I just don't need or want that.

That being said, if you haven't used MacPorts in years, I'd say it's worth the jump. I recall moving from MacPorts in the first place because Homebrew was faster and allowed for customising packages.

When I switched back to MacPorts again, it was because Homebrew had become slow and no longer allowed package customisation. Now, MacPorts is much faster and has the variants system for package customisation.

If it's a mechanical one, there's a possibility that it's been repaired or replaced. The mechanism after all these years will likely wear out. At the same time, I know someone with a car whose odometer has been at 249,999km for a few years now.

As for (early) digital odometers, does the soul more specifically exist in the EEPROM chip in the instrument cluster* that stores the odometer data?

*at least on my late-90s car, this is how the odometer/trip meter works.

An aside on your last point: In the D gear, a lot of auto transmissions will be set up to allow for the wheels to spin somewhat independently of the engine (in any gear) when you aren't accelerating, which accounts a lot for how well an automatic will coast when you release the throttle, even if you're not going fast enough for top gear (especially apparent with older four speed boxes).

Using the numbered gear options will enable clutches/bands that provide more engine braking.

Medium format digital is a thing for those with deep pockets (e.g. Fujifilm GFX). Large format, on the other hand…

I’ll absolutely admit knowing very little about the nuances of payment networks in the US, particularly with contactless —- but my experience (in Australia) is that payment terminals that support contactless inherently support Apple/Google/etc Pay, even if the payment terminal is unaware of those things, in which case the transaction will work the same as a contactless card transaction (e.g. transactions >$100 require PIN).

It's been in macOS for quite some time. Mostly dormant now but at one point it was what powered the Web Sharing option in the Sharing prefpane. It was also used in OS X Server (both the OS X versions designed for Xserve and the later "app" version) before that was largely whittled away.

I can't exactly find if it came with OS X since the beginning (which would predate nginx and friends), but it probably was a much more likely choice back in the day, and I guess that's why it's still included. Wouldn't be surprised to see it quietly disappear from later macOS releases, though.