• 0 Posts
  • 20 Comments
Joined 1 year ago
cake
Cake day: June 20th, 2023

help-circle

  • So still not addressing the myriad problems the player has, especially on AppleTV where it’s been reported for nearly half a decade to not work well. But hey you get yet another place to do photos things (which they admit literally no one wants or uses, they’d be better off dropping support for photos altogether).

    This is super frustrating because plex is very polished despite its clear bugs and misdirection. I just switched over to JellyFin and it’s faster and much more focused but just still has a lot of rough edges. I’m not sure which will be my long term solution but plex needs to attract folks to subscribe and focusing on features that 1/5 of a percent of users utilize is not how you do that.


  • 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).


  • 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.


  • For me as the driver of not one of these cars, I think the driver monitoring and sheeting is perhaps one of the most important parts of these systems. I 100% want your car to scream at you for not paying attention while use the driver assist features because it’s such a common and easy thing to do (if it works 99 times without issues, human nature is to assume it will work that 100th time, so checking that email from work real quick is probably fine). When the consequences of a driver failing to post attention while using these systems is potentially other people dying in a horrific crash, your discomfort at an alert because you happen to be a perfect driver that never does other things in the car while driving doesn’t matter.


  • Trees and scratchers are a must, cats usually scratch furniture because there isn’t something else nearby to use. Trees give them a place to climb and feel safe up away from things. You should also have places for them to hide (boxes, piles of blankets, a bed in a quiet room, etc). As for toys, it really depends on the cat. Ours is super picky and only likes specific rattle balls from Amazon, small rattle mice, and some kickers (there are few others but they are all small and easy for her to cray around). But for every one toy we found she likes we have half a dozen she won’t touch. You’ll likely need to try a bunch to find what yours will enjoy.




  • 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.



  • 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.



  • Asking broadly like this is akin to asking for a guide on how to cook, it’s generally too broad for there to be a single guide. You first need to figure out what your goals are (you state one already, you’d like it to be externally accessible), determine what services you want to host, and then start looking at how to do so.

    The advice I’d give is to start with a solid base, you’ll need something to self host on and it really shouldn’t be the PC you use for other things. Get it setup to run a virtualization OS such as proxmox and use that as your starting point. Then do a lot of reading. I spend probably three to four times as much time reading about the service I’m planning to deploy compared to actually doing the work to deploy it. Lastly, plan. You should have a solid plan in the beginning of how you want your service to work (what will be external vice internal only, how will you setup the networking stack to do that, are you going to have a domain, and will you use subdomains or folders to divide services, what does your IP space look like, will you host your own firewall to make the networking more controlled or fight with your ISPs router, do you want to use docker, kubernetes, or maybe full VMs for each service, do you want/need a UI to manage things from or are you comfortable with CLI, etc). These answers will lead you to guides for various services as well as service specific forums where help is more focused.


  • 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).


  • 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.



  • 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.



  • So yes, most guides will tell you you need to wear a respirator while working with the resin, but personally I find it really depends on the type of resin I’m using. Generally if I’m just filling the vat then starting a print I won’t bother, same if I’m just removing my print from the plate and getting it ready to post process. But if I’m cleaning up and emptying the vat or I have a bunch of prints I’m working to clean and cure I’ll wear my respirator. Gloves are an always though.

    A few additional items you’ll want:

    • a silicon mat to work on to make clean up easier
    • paint filters an a funnel to strain the leftover resin when you’re done printing and want to store it for later
    • a plastic putty knife to scrape failed prints from the film (also good for removing your print from the build plate)
    • high quality isopropyl alcohol (better than 90%, any less and there’s too much water which makes cleaning not work as well). I pick mine up at the local big box home improvement store (Home Depot, Lowe’s, Menards, etc) in gallon cans. Find it in the aisle with cleaning stuff and paint thinners.
      • you’ll want to put some isopropyl into a bottle just for cleaning your equipment and work area. I use a spray bottle that I also use for cleaning the build plate on my FDM printer.
    • extra film since you’ll likely scratch yours after a few failed prints

    I found it takes some practice to get the prints setup and sliced for good printing, way more than when I later got into FDM printing, expect failed prints. Supports are much more necessary than on FDM prints, but the fact that it’s upside down doesn’t really make a difference since it’s still printing bottom to top, you just need to be careful of islands as you print since it’s all printed a full layer at a time. This also means the only thing that increases print time is height, something that is the full area of the build plate but only 1cm tall will print faster than a 10cm long needle printed straight up and down despite being way more volume. So fill up that build plate with multiple models to save time.

    It does require a lot more post processing than FDM, like at least as much work as prepping, slicing, and actually printing. I can take something off my FDM printer and it’s ready to use, I need to account for at least 30-60 mins of work once my resin prints are finished to clean them, cure them in my UV box, remove supports, and then clean up the vat and printer. I tend to batch print for this reason, getting 3-5 sets of items ready to go and then running them back to back over the weekend. This means I only need to clean the printer up once.

    You’ll want to print (likely on your FDM printer) an adapter to allow your build plate to be hung at an angle to allow resin to drain into the vat once a print is done. This will waste less resin when you clean.

    This is all just off the top of my head and written on mobile, so apologies for and autocorrect mistakes. Feel free to ask for clarification on anything.