Viewing profile — yakkers

For the purpose of cooling, just setting the thermostat to its hottest setting would be in effect "off" just about all of the time. Depending on the design/temperature range of the…

At the very least, I wish Digital Radio Mondiale won out over DAB. It’s designed to use the existing long, medium and short-wave bands and can even co-exist with an AM broadcast. I…

It’s still quite a lot of power for AM (amplitude modulation) broadcast on any band. If Radio 4 was on shortwave with 500kW transmitters, I probably would have been able to listen …

There’s still a lot of utility stations in the LF/longwave band. Particularly time signals (WWVB in the US, ALS162 in France, DCF77 in Germany, JJY in Japan, etc.) and NDB beacons.…

HF propagates through skywave (most reliably from 5-30MHz), which is where the signal bounces off the ionosphere. In the MF (AM broadcast) band, you can observe this at night - in …

Doesn't excuse CHU: two 3kW, one 5kW ERP. And by the virtue of shortwave propagation, it could be heard across the world. For the past month and a half (from when the news of its i…

The $17,000 Apple Watch was a (rather silly) attempt to compete in the high end watch space. However, they also launched the base "Sport" model at US$349.

Have to say, it’s quite wild to me that one of the design blunders of macOS Tahoe could be a pages long blog post. I’d actually forgotten about the menu icons in Tahoe (I tried Tah…

Nix is sort of that third option, though I really wish there was a well-documented way to use it on macOS as purely a binary/source package manager. A lot of stuff I read online go…

If it's a mechanical one, there's a possibility that it's been repaired or replaced. The mechanism after all these years will likely wear out. At the same time, I know someone with…

An aside on your last point: In the D gear, a lot of auto transmissions will be set up to allow for the wheels to spin somewhat independently of the engine (in any gear) when you a…

A long time ago, Apple actually did more or less this for the coreutils in A/UX, which was their own UNIX for the 68k Macintoshes. This page has a screenshot of the GUI provided fo…

Medium format digital is a thing for those with deep pockets (e.g. Fujifilm GFX). Large format, on the other hand…

I’ll absolutely admit knowing very little about the nuances of payment networks in the US, particularly with contactless —- but my experience (in Australia) is that payment termina…

It's been in macOS for quite some time. Mostly dormant now but at one point it was what powered the Web Sharing option in the Sharing prefpane. It was also used in OS X Server (bot…

>It seamlessly detects when the peer is local so it doesn't route out to the internet and back One of my use cases for Tailscale was connectivity between my primary NAS and an off-…

It's what happens when a country dismisses a proper national ID number/card -- the nearest available substitute gets used, sometimes regardless of how well the substitute works as …

Anecdata, but I think for pre-paid services Optus never stored that information, and only used it for the required identification. I had activated a pre-paid Optus service (in a st…

I've had mixed results depending on devices -- my Apple devices tend to hop between bands and APs quite excellently. On the other end, I've got a Nintendo Switch which stubbornly s…

As far as consumer routers go, wouldn’t it be trivial to re-tool the usual port forwarding interface to simply accept connections to a specific address-port? That combined with a i…

For me, the point is not constant active monitoring but being able to see when some application runs away with my system resources. At a glance network monitoring is also very hand…

I've personally had very good experiences switching back from Homebrew to MacPorts. Wouldn't go back to Homebrew. I find it much faster now, which is quite funny to me because back…

What exactly do you mean by “work with the USB-C format?”. USB-C defines the physical connector. Would a C-to-Lightning cable count? Because those do exist, and are now what you ge…

At present, by requiring the use of Apple's IAP system for subscriptions, this is already taken care of. Given the Apple vs. Epic stuff going on, this may change soon -- In that ca…

I wouldn't bring in an entire library, but one big thing I find Apple Music has over Spotify is how well your traditional library and the Apple Music library converge. I make use o…