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Joined 10 months ago
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Cake day: February 1st, 2024

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  • My headcanon for The Matrix’s “humans are batteries” is that it’s the machines’ perverse interpretation of this — killing the humans is off the table, and for whatever reason letting them live with no purpose to serve the machines is also disallowed. But giving their lives “meaning” in the form of a shitty (and thermodynamically dubious) “battery” somehow satisfies the rules.

    It’s a very big stretch, I’ll admit…






  • It can be daunting to get into the hobby, there are a ton of niches.

    To start: where are you? I’m in the USA, so that’s where my experience is.

    License: required to transmit on the ham bands; you can listen without a license.

    Range: are you looking to talk to people in your city/region? If so, a cheap “walkie-talkie” style (called “HT” in the biz — best avoid “walkie-talkie”) is a good place to start. These VHF/UHF (very/ultra high frequency) radios are affordable — something from Baofeng(~$30) or similar will work just fine, though they are often looked down on (I have one — for the price, it’s great). You will have the most luck if there is an active ham scene in your area, in large part because they may have a repeater, which can greatly extend your range. Many regions will have scheduled “nets” where you just go around and chat.

    If you’re looking for the ability to chat with folks on the other side of the world, you’ll want to look into HF (high frequency). This is much lower frequency, thus longer wavelength, than the handheld VHF/UHF HTs. So…the antennas take up a lot of space. Mine is 52 feet long, in the attic. And the radios are much more expensive (more like $1k new). ICOM 7300, Yaesu FT710 are popular entry level units (but you also need power supply, cables, and antenna).

    That said: if you just want to listen to HF, the antenna doesn’t matter as much at all, and you can use an SDR (RTL-SDR probably works?) for listening. You can probably also find a used shortwave radio that covers some of the HF ham bands.



  • I think you need to include energy cost in the preparation stage. Bread requires a hot oven, which is a real amount of electricity — it’s close to $0.40/kWh where I live. From this link it says that a bread maker uses only .36kWh, but an electric oven would be more like 1.6kWh. So bakita single loaf of bread, you end up with a not insubstantial fraction of the total cost going to heating the oven.

    Of course, many bulk foods require heat, so it gets a little sticky this way. Oats/oatmeal probably wins out here, as you can just soak them overnight.




  • I think (?) it’s generally true that the root user should never mess with users’ files.

    Imagine your home directory is shared across many systems on a network (my alma mater did this). It would be really bad if a sysadmin for alpha.university.edu removed a program, and suddenly your personal settings were removed from beta.university.edu — even though that computer still has the program.

    This is one of the “UNIX on the desktop” issues — a lot is designed for a sysadmin/multiuser situation, and it has some gotchas when using it as a desktop machine (I’m used to/really appreciate the directory structure and settings management at this point, but it may take some getting used to).