Viewing profile — rzimmerman

The article mentions this, but it works on Macbooks as well! You can set up a shortcut key (press the fingerprint button 3x) to enable and disable it. I have a work shuttle I take …

Yeah the solar array on Starlink is held perpendicular to the velocity vector, so the cross section relative to the colliding body will invariably be smaller than the worst case.

It's interesting to try to create a metric of collision avoidance "stress" and resiliency to outages. I don't think this is a particularly useful one (and the title is alarmist/fla…

If you're interested in building something, Planet released an open source hardware/software satellite radio that works over amateur radio bands for ~$50: https://github.com/OpenLS…

Should have said "potential legal requirement". There was a persistent threat of blocking the use of E2E encryption for this exact reason.

I can't believe how uninformed, angry, and still willing to argue about it people were over this. The whole point was a very reasonable compromise between a legal requirement to sc…

If your core concern is privacy, surely you'd be fine with "no bytes ever leave my device". But that's a big-hammer way to ensure no one sees your private data. What about external…

It's a web of danger for sure. Configuring CI in-repo is popular (especially in the Gitlab world) and it's admittedly a low-friction way to at least get people to use config contro…

I worked for about a year with a consulting firm that handled "Y2K compliance". Unlike this Andersen exercise in legal face-saving, it was a real job. Big companies hired us to do …

The Snoo is great and the key feature that actually helps prevent SIDS is the restraints and swaddle, which is not being moved to a subscription here. It's actually FDA approved to…

I spent time on a compile-to-JS language and found it very rewarding: https://github.com/rzimmerman/kal This was before async/generators were added to JS and callback hell was quit…

I'd argue that even propellent-less deorbit devices are a waste of time. The best answer is what we're doing now: rules about deorbit capability and orbit lifetime, as well as debr…

Active debris removal (harpoon satellites, magnet arms, whatever) are not a solution to this problem and are a huge waste of money. These missions answer the question "could one do…

Yeah that's an obnoxious take. Having a film about human climate impact in an air-conditioned desert venue is ironic and worth calling out. But not everything ought to be viewed th…

I went to see the Dead there and it was fantastic. The sound was excellent and they used the beam-forming to have the vocals sound like they were coming from the stage below, while…

It seems like this removes the footgun in vanilla AES-GCM where you really need to rotate keys every ~2^32 messages if you are using a random nonce. Nonce collision in AES-GCM is c…

We have a budgie (parakeet, a very small bird) that is obsessed with phones. Honestly anything reflective gets him going, but if you even reach for your pocket to pull your phone o…

He wasn’t fired for his beliefs. He was fired for screaming and interrupting a coworker’s presentation in a public setting.

+1000 for the B+W Brother laser printer. I've had it for years and it always prints when asked, no drivers or weird software, works from any device on WiFi. I've never replaced the…

By "offenders" I clearly mean parties exceeding a legal limit (or any treaty-negotiated limits). It's a way to enforce laws and agreements. Of course I'm not implying that creating…

There are several satellites focusing on human-driven methane emitters and monitoring that will be active in the next few years, like Planet's Carbon Mapper ( https://www.planet.co…

Brandon Rhodes has made such a wonderful contribution to the aerospace and python fields with Skyfield, pyephem, his port of sgp4, and astropy. Really wonderful helpful stuff.

One of the best purchases I have ever made is my Brother laser jet. I’m still on my first toner cartridge after three years. It works every time and never complains or updates.

This is an excellent answer and explanation. It’s helpful for people that want a deeper understanding of what’s going on with lithium batteries and where the 80% recommendations co…

It’s really disheartening to see the percentage of people that don’t understand this (and feel perfectly comfortable having an argument about it). People posting comparisons of rec…