WxFisch

The article title is misleading, but the research is interesting. Essentially it’s saying that when the rocket self-destructed due to it performing off nominal (as the first test ever of this vehicle) it ionized a large swath of the ionosphere from Mexico to the SE US which can impact the accuracy of GPS for systems that require high precision. The ionosphere reionizes very quickly naturally though so the effects are short lived (hours to maybe a day) and the impact to navigation at least should be small because of how GNSS works with built in corrections for exactly these types of errors. It feels like Nature is stretching a bit with the doom and gloom headline that the authors don’t even point to in the article (though I have not read the paper to be fair).

Link doesn’t work with ad blockers, archive.is link here: https://archive.is/TcDlm

From my reading this is misleading at best and likely wrong. I don’t work with CrowdStrike Falcon but have installed and maintained very similar EDR tools in enterprise environments and the channel updates referenced are the modern version of definition updates for a classic AV engine. Being up to date is the entire point and so typically there are only global options to either grab those updates from the vendor or host them internally on a central server but you wouldn’t want to slow roll or stage those updates since that fundamentally reduces the protection from zero days and novel attacks that the product is specifically there to detect and stop. These are not engine updates in that they don’t change the code that is running, they give the code new information about what an attack will look like to allow it to detect malicious activity as soon as CrowdStrike knows what the IoCs look like.

In this case it appears that one of these updates pointed to a bad memory location which caused the engine to crash the OS, but it wasn’t a code update that did it (like a software patch). That should have been caught in QA checks prior to the channel update being pushed out, but it’s in CrowdStrikes interest to push these updates to all of their customers PCs as quickly as they can to allow detection of novel attacks.

The reality is they may not know exactly what was obtained, but they do know it wasn’t anything they don’t collect (like DOB, SSN, etc listed in the message). Instead of looking at this purely as a CYA message, instead looking at it as informing you as soon as they had any idea your information may have been impacted instead of waiting weeks/months to inform you. Don’t let perfect be the enemy of good.

A lot of these depend on the model and where it’s installed (geographically and within the house). In many areas of the US, there is a drain in the floor near all water heaters as a matter of code, you can drain condensate directly to that (and unlike gas appliances, the condensate is clean and does not need treated to go in household drains). I honestly think the noise concern is hugely overblown and used as an excuse for people that don’t like change. Sure it exists, but if your water heater is in the basement or garage like the majority are at least in my areas of the US, you’ll never notice it. I also look at the cooling air as a benefit for at least half the year, I can close all the vents in our basement for the whole spring/summer and it’s super comfortable. In the winter it’s a tad chilly, but not uncomfortable. Drying the air is also great for our basement, it’s literally a dehumidifier in what’s usually a pretty damp location for many people. Ours (a rheem unit) has a flimsy plastic air filter you vaccuum off once a year as well so not really a huge deal. I think most are like this.

I agree that folks should do their homework and understand what they are getting. Heat pump water heaters are great, but are overpriced at the moment. Even with electric company rebates and a tax credit it cost more than a decent gas replacement would for us. It’s likely to only pay off because we have solar and so don’t really pay for electricity for a large chunk of the year. But I expect costs to come down over the next 5-10 years as these become the go to for most electric installs (and with fewer new gas hookups in new and renovated buildings that’s like to be most installs). Once these hit that $700-$1000 price point there’s really no good reason most people shouldn’t default to installing one.

They almost always have two high wattage resistive elements installed like a traditional electric water heater which require the 220v/30a circuit. The compressor runs on 220v but sips almost no real current while running.

YMMV of course, and will highly depend on how many people are in your house and how you use hot water, but a 50 gallon heat pump water heater easily supplies a dishwasher and two long showers with 1/3 of a tank of available water left in our house (and I take pretty hot showers that are not always as short as they should be). Sure, it takes an hour or two to fully recover but we aren’t ever looking to use much more hot water at one time. If you have a household of four, it may be a bit more of a problem, but then you can easily schedule other hot water uses to happen “off peak” like a dishwasher.

Idk, I DIY swapped out old gas water heater for an electric heat pump water heater heater and it was super straight forward. If you have the plumbing and electrical skills to add a circuit and move your hookups (since on most gas water heaters they are on top and most heat pump water heaters they are on the sides top and bottom), you probably have the skills to safely disconnect and cap off the old gas line. Just be sure to use pipe dope that is rated for gas, and check with soapy water once you pressurize the line again for leaks.

Ours is also Rosie, it just seemed so obvious

Or you can use something like Squarespace or Wix and have a fully functioning website with everything you need in a few hours and start monetizing your views with ads. Both start at $16 a month so it’s a larger hill to climb sure but you get custom branding and don’t have to deal with the baggage of a Medium page (largely that it’s considered in many circles an untrustworthy source for pretty much any topic mainly because of how easy and barrier free it is to write there. They also have a pretty well established history of working to screw over contributors to profit off of your work including you automatically giving a full license to medium for everything you post).

If all you want is a newsletter though without a webpage to back it you can setup something in mailchimp with a custom domain (.coms start at about $10 from cloudflare). Again an hour or so of reading and configuring and you’re on your way, with an Adsense account you can even embed inline ads to your newsletter.

I would recommend prowlarr instead of jackett for indexer management, and pihole as at least an additional blocking service but in reality it’s really all you need for use at home. I’d also strongly encourage use of a VPN on your *arr download services. I use a separate box to run Plex and then have my *arrs all running on their own VM inside if it to provide separation and allow be to more easily segregate the network traffic (as someone that doesn’t really know docker that well it “just works” for me. Also probably worth looking at how to store your media on an external target, it’s easy to quickly accumulate 10s of TBs of media and trying to store that all on the server locally is asking for trouble. Better to set everything up on a NAS to start.

I’ve not been formally diagnosed, but I’m 100% sure I have had ADHD. I talked with my parents about it a few weeks ago and they basically just said “yeah you probably have always had it, but we never argued your doctor about it”. The idea that I’m in my thirties and only recently really identified why I struggle with things is so infuriating. Worse yet is the fact that there were things that could have helped me succeed and be more comfortable in school is just the worst. I manage fine at this point with various strategies to be successful so it’s not really worth it to me to talk to my doctor and argue that I’ve always been like this, but man is it just hard sometimes.

I grew up in Loudoun county and lived in prince william county for a bit. It’s important to note that the wealth in Loudoun, prince william, and Fairfax counties are concentrated in pretty specific areas. Outside of Ashburn, South Riding, and the western estates of Loudoun it’s not terribly rich. The data centers bring in a ton of wealth though on top of the very large government contracting companies such as Lockheed, Raytheon, GD, etc. Additionally, DC and the surrounding cities just don’t have the density like other cities do, which spreads the wealth out a bit more (while still concentrating it in various counties around the area).

I’ve also never paid for a library card and I live in the US, so it’s clearly not always America. In fact most commenters here are noting they are paying small fees in euros so it seems this trend is common in Europe more so.

So I think the the big questions you need to answer before moving forward getting engineering quotes is what would you do with the space, how much is that worth to you, and are you in a position to take in the additional costs if it’s on the high end of what you consider worth it.

Even if it adds $100k of equity to your home, if you can’t afford to take on the debt, or have no real use of it beside adding square footage then it may not be worth the initial exploratory costs. On the same hand if you want more room for an office, kids room, etc, and are in a place to take on the extra costs then I’d call an engineer or three and ask about their costs and process.

I use protonmail with their family plan, it’s not terribly priced when you consider it comes with calendar, vpn, and drive storage as well. The biggest annoyance is probably that you have to use their mobile apps due to the encryption and they are not the greatest, but it does encrypt everything which I find outweighs the forced use of just their app.

You want to insulate first, otherwise anything else you do is just going to be pushing heat through your exterior walls. You should be able to get spray in insulation in those walls without needing to full tear down the drywall. Typically you’ll get a 1-2” hole on the top and bottom of each stud bay for foam to be sprayed in, then you patch that. It can be pricy up front but should pay off super quick if you have none right now (I’m still getting over 3,000 kWh… that just seems like an insane amount of electricity to use).

A mini split likely won’t help, you’ll just lose the cooling without insulation the same as without the mini split. You may want to look into balancing your ducting once you get the house insulated if you still have rooms that are too hot or cold. The bricks should help to stabilize temps and reduce swings over time but the effect is likely small and should be able to be ignored once you insulate.

Curious about the ears you have on your 8 port POE switch; I’d love to rack mount mine and get it off my “other stuff” shelf. Are they from UI? Or did you repurpose some from something else?

Not all modern furnaces and water heaters pull in outside air. Less expensive gas furnaces may still use interior air for combustion and almost all gas water heaters will. Heat pump water heaters absolutely need ventilation to work correctly as well.

Food theory covered this in terms of Christmas trees. The answer is yes, mostly, with a lot of caveats, and also probably not really.