Also, 1.21GW is famously used in Back to the Future.

Where energy efficiency isn’t a concern (maybe a blender or a toaster) this sounds nice, but otherwise…well…lots of wasted energy.

(Of course, it all has to be balanced against the cost of manufacturing/disposing.)

Heat pumps want low temperature differences, so I’m not sure you’re going to have much luck getting a heat pump oven to 475F/~250C.

Give turnips a shot! Make sure to add a beet so they get that almost neon purple color (ok, really “argon purple”) like you find in middle eastern restaurants.

The history of the smallpox vaccine is fascinating iirc — milk maids, orphans-as-storage+transportation, really crazy stuff.

And after reading about it, one thing that’s neat is that it makes sense. You don’t need to talk about homeopathic “water memory” or whatever, and you don’t even need a solid understanding of biology — the whole thing just kinda…makes sense.

And yet, here we are…

OP needs to stop Chase-ing up votes.

Yeah, good point. The “app setup” is built into android and iOS as far as I can tell (generating matter credentials, etc.). Better than 3rd party IMHO but not ideal, and a nonstarter for a lot of folks. Hopefully HA will come out with their own onboarding process at some point.

Fair enough; I have a dedicated SSID which is VLAN’d off from the rest of my network with no Internet access. Only my HA server can talk to those devices.

+1 for ThirdReality. They’re a little pricey but I’ve generally had good luck with them.

I’ve also had pretty good luck with cheap Matter-over-wifi bulbs. Pairing them can be a little finicky and needs to go through an Android or iOS process, but after pairing you can block Internet access for them and they work great local-only.

There’s a bug in some wifi matter bulbs where they crash, especially when going from off to a desired brightness/color state (as in, “light on” works but “light to 50%, 3000K” will crash the bulb).

I don’t think you understand what local control of smart devices means…

Chuck Yeager’s Air Combat would ask for various airplane specs (“what is the service ceiling of an F-4E?,” “what is the ferry range of a MiG-15?”), and you had to flip through a booklet to find the answer.

You could copy the book, but it was fairly long so I guess the friction kept you in check.

I had an…interesting…take home exam in college. The max score was 100, but the test had 200 points. So, if confident, you could answer half the exam and still get the highest score; if not confident in answers, you could answer more questions and rely on partial credit

It was a week long take home, “open everything” (book/Internet, but no discussions online or IRL). In some ways the hardest exam I ever took, but I learned a lot, and some of the questions were specifically meant to introduce new subjects.

my pro tip.

I see what you did there.

The difference between a cheap bike and a nice bike is similar to the difference between a Chromebook and a decked out ThinkPad or Macbook IMHO.

You’re absolutely right: most folks just browse the web, and a Chromebook is enough. But the other products do have value.

Whenever I mess with my bike brakes, I only do one wheel, then a few rides later allow myself to do the other. That way if I botch it I should have another brake that sorta still works.

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Right now the only thing I genuinely feel is missing that would increase my happiness, is an exercise routine.

I’ll put in a plug for cycling. You can nerd out over the latest bike gear, restore vintage bikes, or just pay the nice folks at your local bike shop to set you up and focus on the riding, it’s up to you!

You can also ride “unplugged,” or you can measure speed, cadence, heart rate, even power output (if you spend $$$)—again, something for everyone!

Good luck!

Maybe not a service in the typical sense, but setting up your router+server to route your home network traffic through a VPN is a fun project.

My router (MikroTik) supports WireGuard, so I can use it with Mullvad for the whole house—but wg is demanding and it’s a slow router, so while it can NAT at ~1Gbps, it can’t do WireGuard at more than ~90Mbps. So, I set up WireGuard/Mullvad on a little SBC with a fast processor, and have my router use that instead. Using policy based routing and/or mangling, I can have different VLANs/subnets/individual hosts selectively routed through the VPN.

It’s a fun exercise, not sure I implemented it in a smart way, but it works :)

Carnauba wax would like a word…

grep -rIi “John.*Cena” dir/

I have this sort of thing aliased, with some added --include flags to filter file type (e.g., only match source/script files). Super useful!