SomeoneSomewhere
@SomeoneSomewhere@lemmy.nz
- Comment on World Conker Championships men's winner cleared of cheating | UK News 2 weeks ago:
"We are gentlemen at the World Conker Championships and we don’t cheat. I’ve been playing and practising for decades. That’s how I won.
“I admit I had the steel conker in my pocket, but I didn’t play with it. I show it to people as a joke, but I won’t be bringing it again.”
Mr Jakins won the men’s competition but lost in the overall final to women’s champion Kelci Banschbach, originally from the United States, who only took up the game last year when she moved to Suffolk.
Hmm.
- Comment on Why did my bus driver want me to not pay the fare and instead just "TAKE A SEAT!!!" 4 weeks ago:
If we knew what city/route/service and day, we might be able to get a better idea.
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Sometimes operators declare a ‘fare holiday’ when everyone rides free, usually as compensation for some major fuckup previously, or for some other PR stunt. Metlink in Wellington doesn’t charge on Christmas Eve, Christmas Day, or New Year’s Eve.
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Operators sometimes half-strike and refuse to collect fares.
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The specific route, service, or time of day might be free.
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It’s an express service that you can’t pay cash on (only fare cards) and it’s easier/nicer to tell you to ride for free than to tell you to get the next bus because they don’t take cash.
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You might be part of some group (youth, students, elderly) that doesn’t have to pay.
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Something is broken and they can’t collect fares.
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They don’t want to deal with the big banknote you had.
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- Comment on Mona’s ‘Ladies Lounge’ wins court battle to exclude men from art-filled space 5 weeks ago:
Isn’t that fundamentally the idea behind ‘separate but equal’, which has been pretty thoroughly smacked down in the US? It very quickly turned into (always was) separate and not equal.
Doing it in an ironic, performative way for art is one thing, but I’m not sure it’s a great blueprint generally.
- Comment on mrrp mrrp meow :3 1 month ago:
Tumbleweed, at least per marketing spiel, is rapidly updated like a rolling release distro,(e.g. Arch) but has good testing and stability like a conventional fixed release distro.
It’s not quite lived up to that fully for me, but I’m pretty sure the times it’s broken have mostly been my fault.
- Comment on Square! 1 month ago:
You don’t normally need to specify that the sides are parallel if you specify four right angles.
- Comment on Natural Inspiration 1 month ago:
Well, that’s certainly the answer.
I wouldn’t have thought you’d want to put a building quite that close to the waterfront even in a Fjord, but apparently they did.
- Comment on Natural Inspiration 1 month ago:
I don’t think the US/Canada usually does that style of power pole, with three phases on a crossarm and no neutral below.
Barriers on what looks like a pretty low-traffic low-risk road too.
I would think somewhere Scandinavia or central Europe. NZ wouldn’t put barriers like that up.
- Comment on My new m.2 ssd 2 months ago:
B key vs M key. Laptop likely needs a SATA M.2 using B or B+M keying, you have a PCIe x4 drive with M keying.
- Comment on Anon drives a bus 2 months ago:
The problem is telling the difference between a good bike (noting that even Samsung screwed that up with the Note 7…) and these: cyclingweekly.com/…/fire-brigade-calls-for-e-bike…
- Comment on Anon drives a bus 2 months ago:
Aircraft typically have a limit of 100 or 160 watt-hours and require that the battery be separate or the whole device be small (think laptop sized) so that you can dump it in a fireproof bag.
An e-bike has a ~1kWh battery that is probably strapped or zip-tied in place and there’s probably no serious firefighting equipment.
- Comment on Anon drives a bus 2 months ago:
Cabin crew on aircraft have fireproof bags and rather effective fire extinguishers. Dealing with a battery in the cargo hold isn’t possible.
If you want to carry a battery on an aircraft it generally has to be less than 100 (sometimes 160) watt-hours, whereas e-bike and other batteries are often 10x that.
- Comment on Anon drives a bus 2 months ago:
It’s not just that; it’s that a regulator signed off on the bus, the city has liability insurance on the bus, and the bus manufacturer will themselves be accredited and insured.
- Comment on Anon drives a bus 2 months ago:
Electric buses have a battery from a probably reputable supplier, with a decent BMS.
Escooters often come from AliExpress.
There is a difference.
- Comment on ochem 4 months ago:
More generally, -ate itself means ‘with oxygen’.
Carbonate = carbon + oxygen
Nitrate = nitrogen + oxygen
Phosphate = phosphorus + oxygen
There is apparently some nuance but it is a good rule to remember: …stackexchange.com/…/when-to-use-ate-and-ite-for-…
- Comment on Why don't electric car manufacurers put solar panels on the car roofs? 4 months ago:
You’re better off putting the panel somewhere where it always gets sun, and isn’t extra weight you have to haul around.
- Comment on Why don't electric car manufacurers put solar panels on the car roofs? 4 months ago:
Leafs have battery packs with no active heating or cooling, which significantly impacts their performance in bad weather and when fast charging. Coupled with very small packs in the early models, and you have a recipe for a bad experience.
- Comment on Why don't electric car manufacurers put solar panels on the car roofs? 4 months ago:
Bear in mind also that the extra weight and possibly aerodynamic compromises actually reduce range. In some cases, particularly at night, in poor weather, and at high speed, the panels would be a net negative.
They would only be useful if your car sat around in the sun for long periods without access to a charger.
- Comment on Cable or adapter? 5 months ago:
HDMI and DP do not carry their signals in the same way. HDMI/DVI use a pixel clock and one wire pair per colour, whereas DP is packet-based.
“DisplayPort++” is the branding for a DP port that can pretend to an HDMI or DVI port, so an adapter or cable can convert between the two just by rearranging the pins.
To go from pure DisplayPort to HDMI, or to go from an HDMI source to a DP monitor, you need an ‘active’ adapter, which decodes and re-encodes the signal. These are bigger and sometimes require external power.
- Comment on For security reasons 5 months ago:
It’s pretty common to own a domain but not actually host the email server; doing on-premises email is a security PITA and most providers simply blacklist large swathes of residential and leasable (e.g. VPS) IPs.
Unfortunately, if you get someone else to host your email, they often charge by the account, not by the domain. Setting up a new mailbox is therefore irritatingly expensive.
A catch-all email works well, though, and is free from most of the hosting providers. Downside is you get spam…
Jane@JaneDoe certainly seems more common than mail@JaneDoe.
- Comment on Caption this. 6 months ago:
Only 15mL and into a syringe, right?
- Comment on We need a permanent solution for universal broadband access 6 months ago:
Indeed, the US has a major lack of fixed-line competition and lack of regulation. Starlink doesn’t really help with that, at least in urban areas.
I’m not familiar with the wireless situation. You’re saying that there are significant coverage discrepancies to the point where many if not most consumers are choosing a carrier based on coverage, not pricing/plans? There’s always areas with unequal coverage but I didn’t think they were that common.
Here in NZ, the state funding for very rural 4G broadband (Rural Broadband Initiative 2 / RBI-2) went to the Rural Connectivity Group, setting up sites used and owned equally by all three providers, to reduce costs where capacity isn’t the constraint.
- Comment on We need a permanent solution for universal broadband access 6 months ago:
Starlink plugs the rural coverage gaps, but in urban areas it’s still more expensive than either conventional fixed-line connections or wireless (4G/5G) broadband. Even in rural areas, while it’s the best option, it’s rarely the cheapest, at least in the NZ market I’m familiar with.
It also doesn’t have the bandwidth per square kilometre/mile to serve urban areas well, and it’s probably never going to work in apartment buildings.
This is a funding/subsidisation issue, not so much a technical one. I imagine Starlink connections are eligible for the current subsidy, but in most cases it’s probably going to conventional DSL/cable/fibre/4G connections.
- Comment on How to open a textbook 6 months ago:
Apparently still alive at 85: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Goodstein
- Comment on CFCs 7 months ago:
Has it occurred to you that sometimes there’s actual evidence backing up the things you ridicule?
You can go measure the acidity of rain in your back yard if you want.
The sunlight in NZ is far, far harsher than if you go a few thousand kilometres towards the equator, where it should be hotter. We have some of the world’s highest rates of skin cancer. Are you implying that crisis actors are faking having skin cancer?
- Comment on Google’s self-designed office swallows Wi-Fi “like the Bermuda Triangle” 7 months ago:
Aggregate bandwidth now rivals or slightly exceeds gigabit wired connections.
Where that aggregate bandwidth is shared amongst large numbers of users, bandwidth per user can suffer dramatically.
Low density areas may be fine, but cube farms are an issue especially when staff are doing data intensive or latency sensitive tasks.
If you’re giving employees docking stations for their laptops, running ethernet to those docking stations is a no-brainer.
- Comment on What is wage theft exactly? 9 months ago:
It can also include situations where the worker isn’t paid what was agreed.
For example, if you were going to have a 10% commission but the employer lowers this to 2% or nothing, or where a $30/hour rate magically becomes $15/hour after hiring.
They might legally be able to cut your pay by giving notice - this will depend on the jurisdiction. In other regimes, they essentially have to go through the full legal process to fire you.
- Comment on Let's play Spot the Cold Solder. 10 months ago:
It’s most likely that it’s related to the original manufacturing. These will be machine wave-soldered, not hand soldered, and having quality vary across the board isn’t impossible if the setup/operators were less than ideal.
- Comment on YouTube: 5 ads the norm now? 10 months ago:
Local AdBlock (UBlock Origin) should be fine for anything browser based. It’s really only consoles and smart TVs, where you ‘own’ the hardware but have no control over the software.
- Comment on YouTube: 5 ads the norm now? 10 months ago:
They should for most purposes. YT has started to try and make it much harder to block their ads, which I think has made Pihole ineffective for that.
Connecting the Pi up to the TV and using it as the player should be an option.
- Comment on Why is alcohol measured in percentages? 10 months ago:
Yeah, NZ & Aus both have a ‘standard drinks’ system.
My guess is that larger quantities of alcohol (particularly bottles of spirits but also wine) simply aren’t intended to be drunk by one person in one sitting. Total volume of alcohol isn’t that useful; it’s more useful to be able to work out how much is in one shot or one glass.
This is especially important when you look at the same product being sold by the shot/bottle/cask/barrel, or being able to buy a gallon of it in your own container historically.