timothyb89's comments

I've been experimenting with the ALFA HaLow HAT [1] for some personal projects. There's also a number of APs good for point-to-point use.

[1] https://www.sparkfun.com/products/19956

I've been using it for light CAD work to design stuff for (hobbyist) 3d printing. You can use exact measurements just fine. The main issue is that it isn't parametric but for my needs that isn't a big issue, and the one-time $150 pricetag is wildly easier to swallow than a Fusion 360 subscription.

It's a lot like Blender, if Blender was a few degrees more usable for CAD. That said, I've yet to try the Blender CAD Sketcher addon (https://www.cadsketcher.com/).

For what it’s worth, the Pixel 7 series (and maybe 6) has compatibility issues with some wireless chargers. It’s actually quite quick if you find one that plays nice: I measure 12-15 watts, so not much slower than wired. Incompatible chargers pull 3 watts or less, disconnect frequently, and often don’t even offset the phone’s regular drain.

I had to try a few to find one that works properly in my car. I’ve had good luck with chargers from Anker and Peak Design, and bad luck with Apple, JSAUX, and Spigen branded chargers. Google’s own chargers presumably work fine as well.

(Also, a lot of Qi chargers are extremely picky about the USB-PD or QC specs of the power adapter you use. I highly recommend using a USB power/voltage monitor to make sure they negotiate PD or QC power at 9/12v rather than the base 5v/1a. Without that, you’ll be charging at an absolute maximum of 5 watts before Qi losses.)

GEOS (a Garmin subsidiary) offers this for most devices on the Iridium network, including Zoleo and Garmin's own inReach communicators: https://my-geos.com/products

I have a Zoleo device and pay for the $40/yr coverage. You just register your device's IMEI with them.

Most dealers don't do this, though admittedly as another commenter mentioned, this isn't stopping the all the less scrupulous dealers.

I paid MSRP for a Mach E I ordered online with relatively little fanfare, albeit with a ~10 month wait and a model year bump (for which Ford gave me a discount off the slightly higher MSRP).

By far the simplest solution is to just crack a window. Even a modest amount of fresh air exchange is enough to offset most of the CO2 generated by the people inside.

I use a relatively small 10x11ft spare bedroom as my home office. If I close the door and window, it'll quickly climb above 1200ppm after 15-30 minutes (and set off an alarm on my sensor). It'll cross 1500ppm easily if left unchecked. HVAC helps but gets outpaced quickly if my apartment windows are all closed.

That said, keeping doors open, running HVAC normally, and cracking a small window open, even 1-2 inches and on the opposite side of my apartment, is enough to keep CO2 levels around 550ppm while sleeping and 700ppm (in occupied rooms) while awake.

I have one of the Anker batteries. It'll happily take in >1000W from an AC wall outlet to charge fully in ~1hr. It's 300W max DC input from solar (which is where that 3.6hr number comes from) or 100W max from a 12v car adapter.

Those other batteries you linked look like a potentially great deal for raw capacity, though there's something to be said for having a mostly portable package with thermal management and a bunch of different inputs and high-powered outputs.

I'm about halfway toward a PPL myself and have been trying to practice with a simulator. My biggest complaint is that control inputs seem to be almost completely different from the real thing. Maybe it's the hardware I'm using, maybe it's my own lack of experience, probably some combination of the two... but it's been a mixed bag for me, largely due to the controller situation.

For example, I explicitly stopped using a supposedly more realistic yoke controller in favor of a HOTAS joystick because I repeatedly found that I just _can't_ translate the physical inputs to a real plane. Yoke controllers in particular seem hard to get right (or maybe mine is just bad), but more generally, PC controller axes have a surprisingly low resolution (just 256 steps on an axis) making them wildly less precise than real thing, plus there's no force feedback. Using a completely different (and more precise) type of controller seems to help keep my brain from drawing conclusions it shouldn't.

Simulators _do_ seem helpful for more abstract stuff, like going through checklists, practicing maneuvers, experimenting... so long as you're very intentional about what you're trying to learn. I think I benefited some from practicing ground reference maneuvers [0] in X-Plane with a VR headset, for example, since they're largely visual and aren't tightly tied to physical inputs. On the other hand, practicing stalls in the simulator has probably lost me a decent amount of time in the air with my CFI trying to un-learn the wrong ideas I picked up, due to both control differences and (I think) simulation differences.

[0] https://www.faa.gov/regulations_policies/handbooks_manuals/a...

It was mentioned later in that thread, but the Kona EV also lets you control the AC remotely via its mobile app without leaving the keys in the car. I don't know if it'll run indefinitely, though; my old Chevy Volt would turn off remotely started climate control after 15 minutes or so, and I haven't tried in the Kona yet.

That said, even if it is time-limited, 15 minutes is usually enough to cool down the car without leaving the AC on all day.

Their older models from 2015 or so with 970m GPUs won't boot due consistently due to the hybrid (Optimus) graphics. The situation may have improved with the newer models, though, and their Stealth line only has Intel graphics which should work fine.

No idea, but I'm not going to complain. It's incredibly useful.

youtube-dl is still plenty active, its last commit was just a few hours ago: https://github.com/rg3/youtube-dl/

For the most part these issues are all fixed in recent kernel versions (> 4.2). The default trackpad driver (synaptics) is indeed buggy, but the newer libinput driver (available in the Ubuntu repos since 15.10) works perfectly. The WiFi card is a bit annoying if you want to build the driver yourself but it works out of the box on stock Ubuntu 15.10.

Admittedly there were some issues early on, but now that issues have all been patched it's an excellent laptop. Fantastic build quality, great battery life, and the display is the best I've seen on a laptop.

Bulb detection used to be a big frustration for me as well, but they've 100% resolved my issues with it in the latest firmware update (now a few months old). I'd previously had issues with detection after power-on since WiFi would take ages to connect, but now its down to a pretty impressive 5-6 seconds from cold start and is far more reliable.

Random color changes or flickering sounds like a defective bulb, I'm sure they'd replace it for you if you contacted them.

Same here, I love mine as well. As a plus, the company seems to be pretty open-source friendly, and they've published official APIs and full protocol documentation over the last few months.

It hardly seems fair to reject the format simply because Apple hasn't added support for it to their image viewer. At least here my desktop environment happily displayed the saved image with its built-in image viewer (Gwenview).

I'll admit that support for the format isn't perfect, but at least in your case it can be remedied pretty easily with a quick search [1]. That said, format adoption has to start somewhere. It'd be pretty sad if we were still using GIFs for all of our lossless images because PNGs were never allowed to catch on before they could become universally supported.

[1]: https://github.com/dchest/webp-quicklook

I've been working with PyCharm [1] a lot lately and I've come to like it a lot. Probably the best context awareness I've seen for any dynamic language - it (almost) feels like working in something more tool-friendly like Java in that regard.

[1]: https://www.jetbrains.com/pycharm/

I've been using an older tablet PC for notetaking for a few months, switching from a combination of typed and pencil + paper notes. Anecdotally I think think is the best notetaking solution I've yet tried since:

  * No smudging (left-handedness issues solved!)
  * Never out of paper or space to write
  * Very fast erase, almost no cost to correcting mistakes
  * Can move things around on the "paper" very quickly
  * Copy and paste, resizing, shape recognition, ...
  * Can insert graphics, formulas, etc as needed, quickly

Honestly the only downside is battery life and I'm working around that with a 2nd battery. My overall note quality has massively increased and I find I can keep up with lectures without any trouble, something I often couldn't do with only pencil + paper due to my slow writing speed and frequency of mistakes.

Specifically I use xournalpp [1] and ipython with a custom onscreen keyboard layout for math-related activities. It works exceedingly well for a ~$300 total investment (used PC + FOSS apps).

[1]: https://github.com/xournalpp/xournalpp

It's worth noting that Android 4.4 does support pretty much all JDK7 features (multicatch / try with resources / etc), finally. I've run into the occasional missing method from some of the newer class libraries, but nothing too serious.

Of course, if this is any indication it'll be several years before its safe to use even JDK7 features considering Android's update trends, let alone JDK8 ...

I'm a bit curious, why would those goals be at odds? Is there a specific reason build systems like this don't scale well? I'm genuinely curious, not having had much experience with larger projects.

I'm not certain how use of a "proper scripting language" is much different than using automake, cmake, ant / maven ... in what ways are these necessarily different from something like gulp.js, other than syntax? Does the introduction of extra language features have a negative impact in scalability implicitly?