Chinese stuff has largely reached the same tipping point Japanese/Korean stuff reached in the 80s, where the previous couple decades it was cheap crap and “all of a sudden” it’s on par or better than domestic consumer tech.

The cheap junk is still cheap junk of course but if you look at the middle tier or better they can be very good. DJI is a prime example, there aren’t a lot of alternative drones if you want it to ‘just work’ and work well with decent support. You can also get a drone on Ali-express/TEMU for $20 but it’s going to be cheap crap, but DJI drones you can buy in BestBuy and the bigger/more professional ones get used on movie sets.

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If there is any thought to it, it usually goes something like “Radio is/was fine because it’s kilo/megahertz, Wifi/5G is gigahertz waves of electromagnetic radiation.(?!?!)”

Could always point to the Terahertz electromagnetic radiation source plugged into their nearest lightbulb socket and ask how that doesn’t hurt them.

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Not saying they couldn’t/shouldn’t but printers are a nightmare hellscape and it’s a miracle, mostly of HP’s marketing department, that they’re a household object.

Yes. Even with Plex I’ve had people just never log in. Or after I log them in and set it as a favorite they just never go to the unfamiliar icon.

Most of the problem isn’t even Plex/Jellyfin/etc.'s fault, it’s that the UI of smart tvs is a nightmare hellscape running on underpowered hardware and people just want to interact with it as little as possible. The absolute best thing would be to copy Netflix/Disney/etc and throw a QR code on the screen to sidestep that by throwing authentication to the phone.

And a 4tb SSD is the same price as a 16tb HDD.

If that trend continues, when you get to a 100tb of SSD(s) the equivalently priced HDD(s) will have 100x the capacity.

Garmin Instinct ticks those boxes.

They’re what I switched to when my pebbles died. Backed everything but the Round. The fitness stuff is a bit overkill but can turn it all off. If you have one of the solar Instincts and don’t use GPS you’ll get significantly more than a week battery life.

Neat!

One of my few remaining Google dependencies is maps and timeline. I just like having that data somewhere and most of the FOSS stuff I’ve seen previously is piecemeal at best. Will have to play with this.

Starlink sats

Ja der Typ.

Yeah that’d be brutal on the battery chemistry, probably need a wired sensor. Doesn’t get that cold here but was having similar issues in the negatives. Unfortunately there seem to be less options and they’re more expensive for wired last I looked, but it’s been awhile.

FWIW with zigbee I’ve had better luck with zigbee2MQTT and then using MQTT. If nothing else it made it a lot clearer what was/wasn’t a router and what was just and end device than the native zigbee integration. ( I was getting very frustrated with a less capable no-neutral wall switch. )

Might just be placebo but it feels like there are cheaper/longer batterylife zigbee sensors than there are zwave.

Will anyone be better than Tom?

Became everyone’s friend, became a millionaire, retired, (so far?) avoided falling off the right wing conspiracy cliff. Kind of just a quiet dude.

Yuppies are weird because it was originally just a way to keep them in the news (“new movement! new group! news at 11!”) and be ridiculous. They got the DoD to sign a contract about exactly how high they were permitted to levitate the Pentagon.

And then it had it’s own Eternal September moment. But everything seems to.

Disney hoped the clause would be enforceable. At least part of the reason Disney settled out of court was because they didn’t want to challenge that assumption.

You can put whatever clauses you want in a contract. The law still trumps those contracts if it ever comes to enforceability.

In the GW range batteries aren’t a great storage solution. At that point you’re basically sitting on a bomb with that much chemical energy storage. Before you get into all the losses from having to temperature stabilize the system. The most efficient/preferred solution is an artificial reservoir. Pump water uphill when you have excess power, run the generator when you need power.

Dams also aren’t permanent structures. There’s been a growing concern for awhile now about dams being managed by financial entities. Because local governments couldn’t/wouldn’t run them after their expected lifespan ran out in the 80s/90s they were seen as a reliable investment. Especially if you cut costs. On a dam basically the only costs to cut are maintenance.

Dams being decommissioned instead of failing is a better strategy.

By that logic signing up for Selective Service in the US means the US doesn’t have a volunteer military.

Love the horribly confused operator trying to fix problems with her equipment before putting the call through to the president.

Perfect use case