Part of the issue there is that for a large number of people the ‘few times a year’ are major holidays when everybody else wants to tow their house-sized RV and boat to the lake for a day or two. The rental fleet just isn’t big enough to service the surge demand.
FTA:
The so-called plug-in systems involve routing the direct current generated by the panels to an inverter, which converts it to an alternating current. They can then be plugged into a conventional wall socket to feed power to a home.
So, yeah, almost certainly illegal in pretty much any grid-powered home in the US.
The basic problem is that if the grid power goes down the inverter can back-feed the grid enough to electrocute the people who are working to fix it.
Utilities require an approved isolation system of some kind that prevents that happening. They are pretty strict about this for various other technical and political reasons too, but evidently it is mostly a safety concern.
I’ve got some good locations at home for panels, and about 500W in panels that I use for camping, but the equipment I’d need to handle easily and safely consuming the power at home is kind of expensive (just running an inverter and a battery for an isolated system is easy enough, I’ve got all that, but it’s not cheap to seamlessly connect it to my home power system). Would love to have a safe and approved system like what is described in the article.
He has claimed the bathroom sink as his bed. While this is very convenient for petting the cat while using the toilet, he tends to sleep in the morning and evening which is also the most likely times I want to brush my teeth.
Fortunately, the kitchen sink is just around the corner, so it is not necessary to disturb the adorably sink-napping cat.
This is why I pay for YT Premium. No way in hell am I watching ads, but I do want to be able to use the platform, and the money has to come from somewhere. So far it’s been pretty good value, although SponsorBlock is of course still required.
It’s English, so it’s difficult to be wrong, but that phrase do be weird.
It does indeed. My job includes writing and deploying .NET apps on multiple platforms, and it works fine for me.
But some people prefer not to use .NET when comparable native options are available, so they might prefer KeePassXC.
Nothing major as far as I can tell. Here’s an overview via SuperUser. KeePassXC might be a better option for some use cases if you’re mostly not on Windows as it does not require .NET. Note that “KeePassXC does not support plugins at the moment and probably never will”, but it does have built-in support for some things you might want a plugin for in KeePass2.
So what will everyone having their own AI look like in a way that doesn’t just sound like a chatGPT joke? What would make it a desirable future?
I guess that depends on how much authority you’d want to delegate.
For me, it would be nice if I could have it do things like shopping tasks without being more of a pain than doing the task myself. For example, I needed to buy a hot-water carpet cleaner today. It would be great if I could tell it
Hey Staffie, buy a carpet shampoo machine for home delivery within the next two weeks. Pick a highly rated machine from a widely recognized brand, and focus on carpet cleaning and water extraction performance, I don’t need any upholstery cleaning features. Don’t spend over $400. If the best option is under $200 don’t ask, just buy it. If it’s over $200, show me the top two options before buying.
And end up with something pretty close to what I’d have picked if I did the shopping myself.
It would also be great if I could have it reliably perform arbitrary tasks that it isn’t specifically programmed to do. Like
Hey Staffie, check if I’ve got enough PTO to take next Thursday and Friday off, and if so, reserve a campsite for me at Foo State Park for three nights, preferably one close to the water, then send Mr. Boss an email letting him know I’ll be out those days.
If it were particularly smart it would infer from previous conversations that I might want a 1lb propane cylinder, marshmallows, graham crackers, and Hershey bars added to my grocery list and would add them automatically (because it already knows my preferences about small automatic expenditures like that and is aware of the spending limits I’ve given it).
Then it might come back a few minutes later and say
'Hey boss, all the campsites within 250 of the water are already reserved, but site 1701D, which is near the only restroom and a tailhead, is available. Reviewers report that the park WiFi access point is installed at the restroom, so that site has good free internet service. Shall I reserve it?
So yeah, in general, the ability to take arbitrary directions and execute them in reasonably intelligent ways (for example If I ask for a site Foo State Park, and there are two such parks in my country, it should be able to guess which park I’m talking about based on the context (like, if I’m reserving 3 nights and one of the parks is an hour down the road and the other is a two day drive, just assume the closer one)) and not require pre-programmed interfaces to every single thing. It should be able to search the web, find the interfaces humans use, and use those to do the kinds of things humans can do. It should also have some capabilities to use my accounts and passwords under a delegated authority to get shit done as my authorized assistant.
Ideally it should also do things like observe my choices and infer my preferences so it can constrain choices it offers me:
Hey Staffie, order lunch from Subway for pickup at 3.
Sure boss, do you want your usual 6 inch turkey sub?
Yep
Nacho cheese chips or salt-n-vinegar?
Nacho.
Done, I’ll let you know when it’s ready.
Stuff like that.
After more than 20 years of DVRs and on-demand content it seems really weird to me that anyone watches broadcast content (other than sports) anywhere other than waiting rooms.
It’s funny how much this varies from family to family. We never eat dinner before 9PM. Usually two meals per day, lunch at maybe 1PM and dinner between 9 and 10PM. We’re just doing desk-work though, so no extra calorie needs. If I’m doing physical stuff I’ll usually add a light breakfast.
I was curious if that would work on ethernet cable! I’ve seen it done on coax, wasn’t sure if it would work well enough on UTP to be useful outside a lab setting. Cheap too. Cool!
Wire tracker maybe? You might want a higher quality version than that particular one if the cable run is long, one of the reviews suggest that the distance is limited.
I grew up playing World of Walmart
Me too! Good memories. It was better before they nerfed the produce department though.
About 15 years ago I saw an independent film at a local theater and it turned out that the guy who made it was couch-surfing the country showing the film at small theaters and was staying that night with a friend of a friend, so after the showing we went over to the friend’s place to hang out and talk.
The guy who made the film was pretty cool and told us lots about the process. Basically he spent a year and all his time and money on it, borrowed money from everyone he knew, and pulled favors from all his friends and their friends to get access to locations for shooting, costumes, props, etc.
What it came down to was that at that level there is no process. You just call in every favor you can, make lots of promises you can’t keep, max out your creative problem-solving abilities, and hope like hell you can get it done enough to show before you completely run out of money and friends.
While we enjoyed the film quite a lot the dude was not terribly happy with it (all he could see at that point were mistakes and limitations), and was beyond broke (that’s why he was couch-surfing his way through the cities he was showing in, he could barely afford transportation to the next city).
Film making technology has come a long, long way since then, so you could probably make a similar quality film much easier and cheaper now (I wouldn’t be surprised if the expensive cameras he was renting at the time are outclassed by what you can do now with a nice phone and a second-hand Canon). But the rest is probably pretty similar. Lots of dollar-stretching and creative problem-solving.
I’m currently a fan of Eluktronics. I haven’t used their lower-end models near that $1k price point, but the two MECH-15 models I use have been fantastic.
huh, Windows still distributes a handful of .com programs. Neat.
I liked .com back in the day because it was easy to write assembly and dump it through the MSDOS ‘debug’ program to create an executable.
That’s what I’ve been wondering too. I keep seeing people complaining about ads, but I use Edge (and Firefox) with Bing regularly on an up-to-date Win 11 system and I’m not seeing anything like that.
Maybe they’ve got demographic targeting that I don’t fit into or something.
I’m not entirely sure how I’m earning Microsoft reward points, but they keep sending me $10 Amazon gift cards for them so… that’s cool anyway.
I kinda like the general idea, but I think you’d just end up with corporate fat-cats that personally hold close the limit, and then have a couple of hundred ‘friends’ who hold the rest and live in fear of themselves and their families getting disappeared if they touch the wealth without directions from said fat-cats.
Can’t forget the boat! For reference, while this isn’t typical, it’s not uncommon. That’s a pretty small travel trailer and boat. I’ve seen this setup with much bigger trailers and boats several times.