heypete

Indeed. I wish this was not so.

While I can get on board with restricting 2-stroke engines in most cases (there’s still many situations where there’s no viable substitutes), I’m puzzled how they expect to have gas-powered generators be zero emission. That seems to defy the laws of physics and chemistry.

By definition, people use generators when there’s no source of mains power, whether that’s during a power outage or needing to use electric devices in a remote area, job site, etc. I don’t see how requiring such things to work on battery power (from where would they charge their batteries?) would be viable in any way.

That said, I wish they’d consider the use of alternative fuels (like propane), particularly for things like generators and larger equipment like riding mowers. Most 4-stroke engines can easily run on propane and dual-fuel devices like generators are already commonly available. Propane burns very cleanly, efficiently, is inexpensive, widely available, easy to store, and doesn’t go stale like gasoline.

Would you mind expanding on this?

I've read both books and am curious what you mean.

I got from central Switzerland to Japan on about 10W on 20m once using JT65 or JT9 (I can't remember which). The antenna was a random length of wire tied a rock and tossed out of my fourth-story apartment window into a field below.

I've purchased unregulated 80% lower receivers (they're only legally "a gun" if more than 80% of the machining work is complete. At or below 80%, they're just considered a chunk of metal.) and machined them using nothing more than a woodworking router, a hand drill, a jig, and a vise in about 30-45 minutes.

The jig is the most expensive part, costing about $160 or so, but once you have it there's no wear parts and you can use the jig to build as many as you want.

How would Signal working with Microsoft to implement the Signal protocol in Skype somehow kill Signal?

Signal (the organization) has worked with other companies, like Facebook and WhatsApp (owned by FaceBook, I know), to implement the Signal protocol on their respective messaging services. It appears that's precisely what they're doing with Skype in this case. It's not like Microsoft is buying out Signal.

Plus the fact that as the source of electricity to the grid changes, so too does the cleanliness of all the vehicles.

Sure, things today may be a wash in terms of overall emissions in many areas, but as time goes on and dirty power plants are shut down and cleaner sources brought online, the emissions due to EVs increases.

I'm seriously evaluating buying an electric car like the Bolt (though the cheap interior is a bit of a turn-off for a longer commute) or the Ioniq EV (much nicer, though with less range) since many employers are offering EV charging at work. That'd make my out-of-pocket operating costs basically negligible (other than occasional air filter and tire rotations), which is nice.

I'd love to see the tax credit turned into a point-of-sale reduction in price so more people can benefit, rather than just those with a >$7500 tax bill.

As much as I love LibreOffice -- and I prefer to use it whenever I can for several reasons -- the UI is just painfully awful.

My university and one of the journals I publish in require Word (docx) files for papers and other documents, so I'm required to use Office. No alternatives are allowed, not even LaTeX or sending in PDFs: their whole internal editing and typesetting system is based around Word. Still, while I disliked the ribbon in 2007, I've found the Word UI to have improved significantly over the years, with 2016 being remarkably decent and producing quite presentable documents. I would not object to there being a similar UI them in Writer.

I wanted to use Writer for several papers and my PhD thesis, but it has some difficulty importing my otherwise-not-very-complex Word 2016 files. While the text is imported more or less correctly, table widths and alignments get all screwy (which is a big deal), Word's internal cross-references (e.g. "See Figure X", where X is a number representing a specific figure and if that figure is re-ordered in the document, the number changes) get horribly broken, among other issues. Having Word export as ODT and opening that in Writer fixes some issues but creates more issues to the point where there's no real alternative for me than Word, at least for papers and other academic documents.

It really bugs me, and I blame Word for the interoperability issues. Even so, I have no alternatives due to the requirements of the journal. Bah.

I'm the same way with electronic components, though I tend to buy certain often-badly-counterfeited parts (e.g. logic-level MOSFETs, TTL-to-RS-232 converters, etc.) from reputable sellers like Digi-Key since I've run into a lot of issues in the past.

For stuff like resistors, capacitors, some microcontrollers, power supplies, etc., the Chinese sellers are pretty reliable.

I use CrashPlan on Linux, Windows, and Mac OS X. Works great for me. Saved my bacon a few times (e.g. accidentally deleting my wedding photos, tax information, etc.). Worth checking out.

(Disclosure: I'm a paying customer of CrashPlan, but otherwise have no connection with the service.)

I run one of the many keyservers. I have various checks running regularly to make sure everything's fine, both on my own server, some selected other servers, and the pool in general.It's rare to have an issue, and bad servers get taken out the pool within an hour thanks to the pool's automated checks (which are completely separate from my own).

What sort of issues are you seeing? What server are you querying? Where in the world are you located?

There's a bunch of servers out there -- https://sks-keyservers.net/status/ -- but most tend to be in North America and Europe. That might be an issue, depending on where you are.

That's what password managers are for. Just remember the password for the manager, plus maybe one or two critical accounts (e.g. email) and you're good to go. Let the manager deal with the complexity of generating and remembering random passwords.

EGNOS and WAAS use the same frequencies and same protocol. They're essentially two implementations of the same thing. As far as a receiver is concerned, they are identical. My Garmin eTrex 20 receives both without issue.

NAT != stateful firewall.

pool.sks-keyservers.net is a round-robin pool pointing to several dozen synchronized keyservers (including the MIT server). It's usually the default option for most PGP clients. See https://sks-keyservers.net/

While I doubt neither the veracity of your claim nor your reaction to Gandi's actions (if such a situation happened to me, I would certainly not want to give a company my business going forward), I have had a very different experience with them: all of my queries to Gandi support have received prompt, relevant replies that addressed my issue.

Also, ny domain registered with Gandi can be renewed by any Gandi handle. In the event that you're having trouble accessing the handle that owns a domain or otherwise cannot renew it normally, you can create a new handle and use that to renew the domain. See https://wiki.gandi.net/en/domains/renew and https://www.gandi.net/domain/renew?lang=en for details.

I'm not sure if their "any handle can renew any domain" policy/system existed at the time of your situation, but it should prevent similar issues from occurring today.

I seem to remember that being the case with Network Solutions back in the early days.

Gandi seems to hide your handle these days for certain domains if you have whois privacy enabled: my .com/.net names with Gandi don't show the handle, but my .org domains do. My .us domains (which don't allow whois privacy) also show the handle.

Then again, one can easily enable two-factor authentication and it's essentially irrelevant if the handle is known.