While I know it’s easy to hate on everything MCU these days, I do still absolutely love the Milano from Guardians of the Galaxy 1 and 2. The design doesn’t feel practical at all, but it’s still a really fun to look at and agile ship, which is something a lot of sci fi doesn’t really depict very well.

It’s a prank riddle. Basically you make two statements about building bridges. They can be from anywhere and to anywhere else. My nose to your forehead, Baltimore to Seattle, it makes no difference. In one sentence, you use the word “okay” and in the other you don’t. The sentence with “okay” in it produces a good bridge. The sentence that doesn’t, doesn’t.

When you ask a person to build their own bridge, if they say “okay” in the sentence, it’s a good bridge. If they don’t, it’s a bad bridge and it falls down. This setup is built to make people frustrated because “okay” is one of those filler words that people don’t really pay attention to in sentences.

I’ve also heard of a similar setup where a person hands an object to another person (again, the object doesn’t matter) and says “This is a bean, okay?” And if the recipient says “okay” then they have done the task correctly and can pass it along to another person, declaring the object is something else. If the receiver doesn’t say “okay,” then something went wrong and one of the people who is in on the joke interrupts and starts the process again. with a new object.

Okay, so if I build a bridge from X to Y, it’s a great bridge.

If I build a bridge from A to B it’s a terrible bridge.

Do you want to build a bridge?

(If the person says Okay as a part of their bridge proposal, it is good. If not, then the bridge is bad)

This is a great way to make everyone at a gathering hate you.

This must have changed with 23.04 or something then, because when I set up my home server a little over a year ago, ZFS as root was not only not a part of the install, but also heavily recommended against as something that could be hacked in. Basically you could do it, but you shouldn’t was my impression. I ended up doing EXT4 as root, then mounted my ZFS storage in my home directory.

Every day when I come home from work, I kneel on the top step of our stairs and call our dogs over. They sit on the landing and put their front paws on my shoulders while I scratch their sides and pet them. My wife has taken to calling this ritual “motivation.” The dogs really love having a couple minutes of solid attention when I come home and it’s a good way for me to switch gears into home-brain, since my work is very stressful and tends to take over.

Ubuntu and many other distros do not come with ZFS support out of the box due to licensing, so it is not recommended to use ZFS for the root filesystem.

All of my passwords are in Bitwarden and important ones are shared with my wife who has her own Botwarden and has shared her important passwords back with me. If one of us goes, the other will have access to everything. I don’t (yet) have any descendants to inherit anything of importance, so I’m not worried about anything beyond my passwords so that if something happens to me, my wife can manage all of the accounts for bills, banking, communication, etc.

If/when I have children, I will likely make a new plan that builds on what I already have, with directions to access my password vault that can be given to my brother and his husband and my parents, should they outlive me and my wife. With my passwords, everything else of import is accessible. Thankfully, my brother is very tech savvy, so if my wife and I both go, I can trust him to be able to log in to everything and pull important media down.

I feel like Emby, as a for-profit company will eventually go down the same path as Plex.

Might be that the Roku app is/wasn’t quite up to the same standard as the Android TV one. I also remember not liking how they handled something in their official Android app, but it’s been six months. I honestly don’t remember. I just have a reminder to check it out again next summer.

I’m still on Plex because the app experience just isn’t there on Jellyfin yet. It’s close, but switching audio/subtitle tracks is not as intuitive or straightforward as I want yet. I’m thinking it will probably be ready for my server in a year or two.

A raspberry Pi is a very good emulation device using the RetroPie image. A Pi 4b can go up to PSX/N64 fairly easily.

On the handheld side of things, most of them that “come with” ROM sets will have them loaded on an SD card. These manufacturers often skimp on the cards though, so expect it to die quickly. You can usually just clone the whole SD to a new one and it’s fine.

Most of these devices use RetroArch and software emulation. However, there is another option. The Mister project and devices sold by Analogue use field programmable gate arrays - chips that can change their structure according to software. This means running an NES game on one of these devices is more literally like running it on original hardware. For accurate emulation, this is the best option by far. However, it comes with a significantly higher price tag.

In general the easiest and least expensive startup for emulation is on the PC. With fairly modest hardware, emulation of everything up to PS2 is possible with some newer platforms also being very emulatable (notably everything Nintendo puts out is easy to run because their architecture is largely straightforward, their systems are lower power, and there is significantly more demand for their games)

If you specifically want something hooked up to your TV, a first generation (launch window, before they increased the battery life) Switch can happily run a fair amount of stuff, including everything up to N64/PS1. The (new)3DS/2DS is also a great emulation device and can run basically everything up to SNES/Genesis handheld.

Oh and one more option. If you have Android, you can easily install a variety of emulators and use a Bluetooth or wired controller with them utilizing a controller phone mount.

Middle click (or command-click on Mac) will also open in a new tab in basically every browser.

When I’m talking about leaks, I’m not talking about the extra energy required to constantly run vacuum pumps. I’m saying that HSR infrastructure needs inspection and occasional repair, but not nearly to the extent that a vacuum tube based solution would. Any savings made via efficiency are pissed away by having to pay more maintenance crews and material cost to maintain the infrastructure. The tubes are also much less likely to be able to be automatically inspected like rails can be using inspection cars because any train moving through the tube can only inspect the interior walls. Besides, rail already exists across much of the US for use as freight infrastructure. These same rails, if inspected and tested properly, can be used for high speed rail much more immediately than waiting for tubes to be built. Besides all of this, more aerodynamic trains can and have been built, but are not in use in the US. Instead, we send bricks down the rails. The “immense” efficiency gain from 0.5 atmospheres of air pressure is likely significantly less impressive when compared against well designed trains with regards to aerodynamics.

All of this is also completely ignoring how dangerous tunnels are for fires. Even with proper safety precautions, fires in tunnels are exceptionally dangerous. By venting out the smoke that kills people, you increase the intensity of the fire that also kills people.

Sure on a small test track. As soon as it was meant to be scaled up, every attempt has been whittled down. Either it fails completely (Look up Brunel’s Atmospheric Railway) or has been so expensive and impractical that it gets reduced to cars in tunnels.

If you are most concerned with efficiency, then building the cheaper HSR infrastructure to get freight off of roads and passengers off of planes as fast as possible should be the first priority. Holding even a partial vacuum in tubes hundreds of miles long just to eke out a little more energy efficiency is laughable. Everything leaks. Maintaining cabin pressure in a 73-meter plane is a completely different beast from maintaining vacuum in miles of tube. It’s likely that maintaining the tubes will end up costing so much that any efficiency gains acquired from the vacuum will evaporate.

Just be careful with that. If Google is logging your sessions, then your country’s government can request that data. The idea that Google wouldn’t keep logs is laughable.

Atmospheric Railway and Hyperloop bullshit all over again. Unless you’re in space, this isn’t feasible.

Link to what? The person is either pirating or buying digital copies of TV/movies and storing them on a server. Likely being served with Plex, Emby, or Jellyfin.

Https://5e.tools/ has a plugin for Foundry that lets you pull basically everything from every source into Foundry. Oh and you can host your own 5eTools instance just in case the site gets nuked from orbit by Wizards

They can only be connected to your router if the router has POE support. If it doesn’t, you will need a separate switch that has POE ports. Many POE cameras etc are sold with power injectors. You plug the Ethernet from the router into the injector, plug the injector into a wall outlet, then run Ethernet from the injector to the device. If you don’t want to get a whole new switch with POE ports, you could get POE that way.

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