
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?

Gotta see some evidence on that claim. Older stuff is more power hungry no doubt about it, but especially old data centre equipment is waaay more reliable and built with some very nice creature comforts.

This.
Almost all of my gear is bought used: switches, server, even memory. My main server is an old Dell C6100 blade server I got for $250. My disk array is a 12-bay SAN that I found for $50 and took a chance on being able to get it working. It’s power hungry but it’s got redundant everything and I have spare parts on the shelf next to it.
I’ve been branching into ARM servers a little and right now I’ve got an RK3588 board with 32G of RAM. That’s new (and expensive for me) but I got a fibre channel array for $20 that I’m going to try to make work with it. $8 FC HBA and a $12 cable along with a $30 m2-to-PCIe adapter intended for eGPUs. I’m not going for speed here, but used data centre equipment is nice and some of it is dirt cheap because it’s too slow for “real” work.

Monitor the current with the smart plug. When you want to turn it off, wait for the current to drop for a few minutes (this means the compressor is off/unloaded) then power off the outlet.
Might be an idea.

Very weird; I’m in twentynine palms today (visiting Joshua Tree and then just got back from stargazing) and saw/heard nothing about this. Drove through Palm Springs late this morning to get here.
What a senseless tragedy. I hope for swift justice for the perpetrators and peace for the victims.

Why not if (f & (F_1 | F_3)) {
? I use this all the time in embedded code.
edit: never mind; you’re checking for both flags. I’d probably use (f & (F_1 | F_3)) == (F_1 | F_3)
but that’s not much different than what you wrote.