While I know it’s easy to hate on everything MCU these days, I do still absolutely love the Milano from Guardians of the Galaxy 1 and 2. The design doesn’t feel practical at all, but it’s still a really fun to look at and agile ship, which is something a lot of sci fi doesn’t really depict very well.

It’s a prank riddle. Basically you make two statements about building bridges. They can be from anywhere and to anywhere else. My nose to your forehead, Baltimore to Seattle, it makes no difference. In one sentence, you use the word “okay” and in the other you don’t. The sentence with “okay” in it produces a good bridge. The sentence that doesn’t, doesn’t.

When you ask a person to build their own bridge, if they say “okay” in the sentence, it’s a good bridge. If they don’t, it’s a bad bridge and it falls down. This setup is built to make people frustrated because “okay” is one of those filler words that people don’t really pay attention to in sentences.

I’ve also heard of a similar setup where a person hands an object to another person (again, the object doesn’t matter) and says “This is a bean, okay?” And if the recipient says “okay” then they have done the task correctly and can pass it along to another person, declaring the object is something else. If the receiver doesn’t say “okay,” then something went wrong and one of the people who is in on the joke interrupts and starts the process again. with a new object.

Okay, so if I build a bridge from X to Y, it’s a great bridge.

If I build a bridge from A to B it’s a terrible bridge.

Do you want to build a bridge?

(If the person says Okay as a part of their bridge proposal, it is good. If not, then the bridge is bad)

This is a great way to make everyone at a gathering hate you.

Every day when I come home from work, I kneel on the top step of our stairs and call our dogs over. They sit on the landing and put their front paws on my shoulders while I scratch their sides and pet them. My wife has taken to calling this ritual “motivation.” The dogs really love having a couple minutes of solid attention when I come home and it’s a good way for me to switch gears into home-brain, since my work is very stressful and tends to take over.

I feel like Emby, as a for-profit company will eventually go down the same path as Plex.

Might be that the Roku app is/wasn’t quite up to the same standard as the Android TV one. I also remember not liking how they handled something in their official Android app, but it’s been six months. I honestly don’t remember. I just have a reminder to check it out again next summer.

I’m still on Plex because the app experience just isn’t there on Jellyfin yet. It’s close, but switching audio/subtitle tracks is not as intuitive or straightforward as I want yet. I’m thinking it will probably be ready for my server in a year or two.

You still need to scan individual plants resources or animals to get the Surveying perk upgrades, which gives you better zoom on the scanner, which can be useful sometimes.

When I’m talking about leaks, I’m not talking about the extra energy required to constantly run vacuum pumps. I’m saying that HSR infrastructure needs inspection and occasional repair, but not nearly to the extent that a vacuum tube based solution would. Any savings made via efficiency are pissed away by having to pay more maintenance crews and material cost to maintain the infrastructure. The tubes are also much less likely to be able to be automatically inspected like rails can be using inspection cars because any train moving through the tube can only inspect the interior walls. Besides, rail already exists across much of the US for use as freight infrastructure. These same rails, if inspected and tested properly, can be used for high speed rail much more immediately than waiting for tubes to be built. Besides all of this, more aerodynamic trains can and have been built, but are not in use in the US. Instead, we send bricks down the rails. The “immense” efficiency gain from 0.5 atmospheres of air pressure is likely significantly less impressive when compared against well designed trains with regards to aerodynamics.

All of this is also completely ignoring how dangerous tunnels are for fires. Even with proper safety precautions, fires in tunnels are exceptionally dangerous. By venting out the smoke that kills people, you increase the intensity of the fire that also kills people.

Sure on a small test track. As soon as it was meant to be scaled up, every attempt has been whittled down. Either it fails completely (Look up Brunel’s Atmospheric Railway) or has been so expensive and impractical that it gets reduced to cars in tunnels.

If you are most concerned with efficiency, then building the cheaper HSR infrastructure to get freight off of roads and passengers off of planes as fast as possible should be the first priority. Holding even a partial vacuum in tubes hundreds of miles long just to eke out a little more energy efficiency is laughable. Everything leaks. Maintaining cabin pressure in a 73-meter plane is a completely different beast from maintaining vacuum in miles of tube. It’s likely that maintaining the tubes will end up costing so much that any efficiency gains acquired from the vacuum will evaporate.

Just be careful with that. If Google is logging your sessions, then your country’s government can request that data. The idea that Google wouldn’t keep logs is laughable.

Atmospheric Railway and Hyperloop bullshit all over again. Unless you’re in space, this isn’t feasible.

Link to what? The person is either pirating or buying digital copies of TV/movies and storing them on a server. Likely being served with Plex, Emby, or Jellyfin.

Cinnamon has an official Ubuntu flavor now. I would recommend that over Mint, since mint is LTS-only. You can also do KDE-Plasma, but my personal preference is Cinnamon.

Is there a reason you recommend forks of Firefox rather than the official version with the same add-ons enabled? Firefox already has support for Ublock and will have full desktop add-on support soon.

My main desktop has 1TB of storage (NVMe, fast) but I have a whole separate home server that has one 500GB boot drive and three 6TB hard drives running in a ZFS pool. (ZFS is analogous to RAID, or Redundant Array of Independent Disks. basically one drive can die and I won’t lose any data as long as I replace the drive before a second one dies.) This 21TB storage bucket holds anything and everything that doesn’t need to be on my primary computer. It holds all my documents, photos, music, movies, TV shows, backups, and all of my disc images and ROMs for emulation. The only things I keep on my primary PC are games I am currently playing or will play soon and programs that need to be installed or run locally. Everything else is loaded over the network as-needed. For most stuff, I can just point my applications at the network share by mounting it to a drive letter in Windows.

I get the distaste, but language is a fluid thing. Plenty of words we use now do not mean the same thing as when they were first coined. I think Lame is a pretty safe word to use in modern times without people taking it poorly.

If you still have a distaste for it, then replacing it isn’t going to be that hard. Lame isn’t really part of my general speech, not for any particular reason, it just isn’t. I would say something sucks instead. If something doesn’t warrant the full suck to you, you could say “that’s rough” or something. Lame as a word fits in many situations, but maybe not all of those situations warrant the same word.

When I was a kid, everyone (and I mean everyone) in my age group described things as gay or retarded. Over time I grew out of that language and met people who were genuinely hurt by it enough for me to change it. It took a while to do, but now neither of those terms is something I use negatively. I can’t say that I consciously picked words to replace them with, though. Just being thoughtful about what language I used helped me remove those uses from my day to day life and the rest of language came in to fill the void more or less on its own.

Have a method for your loved ones to access all of your important passwords. If you have a password manager, having a shared vault with a trusted partner or family member is important.

“Thanks for calling in to 102.5! You’re on the air! What is your embarrassing poop story?”

You force a bunch of people to move away from their home town to change the future and finally kill your nemesis, a rabbit.