https://viewer.weather.noaa.gov/water#layers=42904+40090+42133+41707+41708+41709+41631&x=-92.96832&y=40.68848&z=8.4&panel=legend

Has kind of a nice visualization of the flooding and related information.

I don’t know about that. It seemed to have a pretty rapid impact on the phone in that video, and it’s not like those are exactly open. And they weren’t pressurizing it.

Hydrogen

This says that hydrogen isn’t just a problem, just helium:

https://electronics.stackexchange.com/questions/669763/why-is-a-mems-device-affected-by-helium-but-not-hydrogen

It seems that MEMS is very sensitive to helium, but only helium. This Link stated that hydrogen does not affect MEMS, which surprised me.

Hmm.

That seems like it’d open a lot of potential abuses.

I wonder what the failure mode of various electronic locks is when they’re exposed to helium?

I’d be fine with hissy fits if they were about something real.

He fought to keep his job on First Amendment grounds.

looks dubious

One of the exceptions to “the government cannot restrict your right to speech” is the government acting in a “government-as-employer” role. There, they can act like any other employer, and don’t have special constraints just because they’re the government. Employers can normally let people go because they think that they’re bad for their image, and that’s what the article said happened here.

…university leaders said he sullied the school’s reputation and had to go.

https://www.nyclu.org/resources/know-your-rights/speaking-out-public-employee

Different rules apply if you are making these comments in your personal time as a private individual. Generally, your statements about topics that are of general interest to the public, including current events, are protected by the First Amendment. However, a public employer in New York may discipline you if your comments either disrupted its work or have the potential to disrupt its work, including by affecting public perception of your employer if you frequently interact with members of the public in your job.

Now, I suppose you can ask whether the professor publicly releasing porn videos of himself is actually damaging to public perception of the university, but the rationale they used is a legit rationale.

?

Plastic recycling isn’t fake. It’s often not been economical, so it often doesn’t make any sense to do it. But you can recycle plastics.

Plus, is this sending my data to HP to be processed remotely as a cloud service, or is this AI stuff being run locally? I don’t especially want to have the contents of my print jobs being sent to HP.

I haven’t been following this or US politics much, but looking at other stories, it looks like “manhunt” may be a bit over the top. It sounds like this relates to serving a subpoena:

https://www.newsweek.com/fani-willis-nathan-wade-missing-1959447

“The committee issued the subpoena on Friday, attempted to serve the subpoena to Nathan Wade’s lawyer, who declined, and subsequently the committee tried to serve the subpoena via email through Nathan Wade himself, never heard back. As a result the committee had to use the assistance of the U.S. Marshals, who have also not been able to find Nathan Wade,” Dye told Newsweek via phone Wednesday evening.

The committee spokesperson also told The Atlanta Journal-Constitution that the Republican-led committee has “served over 100 subpoenas this Congress. We have done so, for the most part, without controversy or the need to use the U.S. Marshals.” He added that “Nathan Wade’s evasion of service is extremely unusual and will require the Committee to spend U.S. tax dollars to locate him.”

Newsweek reached out to the Fulton County District Attorney’s Office for comment via email on Wednesday afternoon.

Andrew Evans, Wade’s attorney, and Dye have differing views on what transpired over the past few months as the committee has tried to get Wade to testify. Evans told Newsweek in a phone interview on Wednesday that his client previously “voluntarily agreed to go up to Washington, D.C., and the Republicans canceled it.”

Like, I don’t think that normally having a process server involved is described as a “manhunt”.

If you remember, Rudy Giuliani had been very openly dodging process servers for while until a few months ago, and I don’t think that anyone called it a “manhunt”:

https://www.politico.com/news/2024/05/18/giuliani-birthday-indictment-papers-00158783

Rudy Giuliani received a different kind of surprise at the end of his 80th birthday bash Friday night when he was served with a notice of indictment in Arizona’s 2020 election subversion case after weeks of successfully evading the state’s prosecution.

Arizona prosecutors had been attempting to locate the former Trump attorney since his indictment at the end of April, along with 17 other Trump allies, including former White House chief of staff Mark Meadows, and lawyers John Eastman and Boris Epshteyn. The indictment, which also names former President Donald Trump as an unindicted co-conspirator, includes felony counts of conspiracy, fraud and forgery.

In a since-deleted post to X in the middle of the celebration, Giuliani taunted: “If Arizona authorities can’t find me by tomorrow morning: 1. They must dismiss the indictment; 2. They must concede they can’t count votes.”

But around 11 p.m. as the festivities wound down for the night, agents from the AG’s office arrived and served Giuliani with indictment papers outside the house, causing several of the guests to express outrage.

There are some open-source systems for media PCs.

Kodi seems to me to be popular, though I don’t use a media PC myself.

You’ll need to have the technical knowledge to install it yourself.

I’m not really gung-ho about mandatory approaches either, like with licensing, but for an optional approach:

• I have to be able to assess a device and its drawbacks with a reasonable amount of knowledge and time spent researching it.

• There has to be at least one option on the market that does what I want.

For cars, at least, we’re really getting to the point where it’s not practical to get a new car without a cell data link that phones home.

And trying to stay atop of the privacy issues for all classes of device out there can’t be a full-time job, or it’s not reasonable to expect people to make informed purchasing decisions. Like, I should just be able to say that I don’t want a device that broadcasts any persistent unique IDs in plaintext over a radio, not have to research whether the current crop of smart automobile tire pressure valves has a protocol that exposes that information or not…

I’d like to avoid Europe’s prescription-heavy regulatory route, but the way things are now in the US isn’t my ideal either.

It’s also harder to find them in larger sizes any more, even for the few for which sell them at all, so if you want a larger one, you may not have much by way of options.

https://assetbasedlife.com/dumb-tvs-are-a-dying-breed/

This lists Insignia, which is a Best Buy store brand.

This has a couple, at least as of last year:

https://www.tomsguide.com/features/dumb-tvs-heres-why-you-cant-find-them-anymore

Your best bet of grabbing one is to head over to Best Buy and look out for the Insignia brand of TVs. There you can find a 43-inch dumb TV for around $169 or a 32-inch model for $69 . (Links to Best Buy.)

On Amazon, you can simply search for dumb TV and you should be able to find a few options from manufacturers like Westinghouse, RCA or Sceptre. (Links to Amazon.)

It’s also possible to buy a used TV, but obviously, as with getting used cars to avoid monitoring stuff in newer cars, the pool of those will only be around for so long, and you can’t take advantage of any technological advances subsequent to them.

As in other spots in Florida, mandatory evacuations were ordered for Taylor County, but Padgett estimated that as much as half of his population is choosing to stay put.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/nation/2024/09/26/evacuations-hurricane-helene-florida/

ST. MARKS, Fla. — Hurricane Helene is expected to bring a wall of water nearly as high as many of the buildings in this small coastal town, but Philip Tooke had no plans to heed the warnings from emergency management officials and evacuate.

He’d weathered plenty of strong storms before. And he worried about Susan D, Jenny Lee and La Victoria — his three boats. Stone crab season starts in nine days, and Tooke said he didn’t want to fall behind on business.

“There isn’t a storm I haven’t been here taking care of my babies,” he said as a light rain began to drizzle Thursday. “This is my livelihood.”

Tooke is precisely the type of resident giving emergency managers fits as Helene approaches Florida as a potentially catastrophic storm.

If your boats go down, I seriously doubt that your presence is going to do much aside from having you go with them.

One issue that has come up recently in discussions on here is that it’s hard to get dumb TVs or computer monitors in large format in 2024.

Not impossible, but surprisingly difficult. I went looking for a large computer monitor for some user who wanted a large one. I eventually found an older one on Amazon still for sale, but it’s not that easy to get large computer monitors, which I think is part of what drives people to use smart TVs as computer monitors.

You can get projectors, but that’s not what everyone’s after.

Thing is, it’s getting pretty cheap to build radios into devices, and companies are doing that and bridging them to whatever Internet connectivity they can reach, not just your own. You don’t necessarily have to personally plug something into an Ethernet socket to make a device Internet-connected.

From back when Amazon Sidewalk was rolling out:

https://www.statuscake.com/blog/what-is-amazon-mesh/

This time, however, the big news is Amazon mesh, a network to connect users and their devices. The tech giants have called this project Amazon Sidewalk+ with the idea first being made public back in 2019 where they announced they wanted to extend and expand the connectivity of their customers.

Why did Amazon do this?

According to Amazon, the main reason was to provide a better service for their customers whilst using their devices. Although there has been some backlash by those in the safety and security space, the idea seems to be very safe and simple.

How will Amazon mesh work?

The Sidewalk project will create a network mesh between all the connected devices so it can increase the connection field around the devices. It will be able to do this by using Low-energy Bluetooth and 900MHz radio signals to pass data with the connected compatible devices. By doing this, the network can extend the reach of the signal and thus it will be able to cover a larger area to allow devices to connect.

Here is an example of how this will work: imagine if you have a compatible device at the end of your garden such as a light which you normally can’t control with your phone. With the extended network, that light could connect to a neighbour’s device and by doing this it will be connected to the network, and you will have the ability to then use your phone to control the light.

There has been some concern regarding how much data the network will use for those who agree to be part of it and Amazon have estimated that the data usage could be around 400-500mbps a month. For most people, this is such a small amount that it won’t even be noticeable.

How can the mesh network be used?

Another use for this mesh is for users around the network to connect and possibly use the mesh to perform other tasks such as a Ring doorbell (Amazon-owned) to be installed in the part of the house where the usual Wi-Fi signal doesn’t reach. This provides customers with a great alternative to the far more expensive Wi-Fi extender mesh products on the market.

As is normal in situations like this, many users are concerned about the security of this project. According to what Amazon has released regarding how it will work so far, there will not be any security concerns as the connections will not identify which device was connected meaning that if your Ring doorbell extends the network to a nearby device, the system will not mention that this device was connected to that particular Ring doorbell. However, people need to be aware that Amazon itself can collect this data and the way the users interact with the network.

https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2021/jun/01/amazon-us-customers-given-one-week-to-opt-out-of-mass-wireless-sharing

The feature works by creating a low-bandwidth network using smart home devices such as Amazon Echoes and Ring security cameras. At its simplest, it means that a new Echo can set itself up using a neighbour’s wifi, or a security camera can continue to send motion alerts even if its connection to the internet is disrupted, by piggybacking on the connection of another camera across the street.

But the company’s plans have caused alarm among observers. Ashkan Soltani, a former chief technology officer of the US Federal Trade Commission, told the tech site Ars Technica: “In addition to capturing everyone’s shopping habits (from amazon.com) and their internet activity (as AWS is one of the most dominant web hosting services) … now they are also effectively becoming a global ISP with a flick of a switch, all without even having to lay a single foot of fiber”. The feature may also break the terms and conditions of users’ internet connections, which do not allow such resharing, warned Lydia Leong, an analyst at Gartner.

Users can disable Sidewalk in the settings section of the Alexa or Ring apps, but have until 8 June to do so. After that, if they have taken no action, the network will be turned on and their devices will become “Sidewalk Bridges”.

Amazon is not the first company to look to create such a network. Apple has taken a similar approach with the company’s range of AirTag item trackers, which can connect to the internet through any compatible iPhone they come into contact with, not simply their owner’s. And BT, through a long-term partnership with Fon, ran a service from 2007 until 2020 that allowed broadband customers to share spare bandwidth in a public wifi network.

When you have companies creating their own radio networks, they can use someone else’s Internet connection to move data.

For expensive devices, like cars, it also makes economic sense to have a dedicated cell modem and service phoning data home. But it’s not the only route.

Point is, you don’t have a monopoly over granting your devices Internet access any more.

I’d rather pay for pretty much all products up-front with money at purchase time rather than pay with my data.

Not gonna tell other people what to do, but for myself, whether it’s my car or television or search engine or whatever, I’d rather just pay the bill rather than having the manufacturer or service provider go data-mining my data to figure out how they can make money from it.

I think that YouTube is a great service. YouTube Premium, though, is ad-free. What I want isn’t no-ad stuff, but no-log policies. And there aren’t a lot of manufacturers selling privacy. And it’s hard to compare services and products based on that.

I’ll go one more step. I don’t want to go read through privacy policies and figure out what the latest clever loophole is. We had to deal with that kind of legal stuff back prior to standardization around a few open-source licenses, and it sucked.

And I don’t want to deal with privacy policies that change and maybe don’t do what I want.

What I want to do is look for a privacy certification, and let the certification agency deal with that.

They might be able to make some kind of test that could reliably identify damage.

I mean, I’m skeptical, but it’s not impossible.

Though then you have the specter of competitors clicking that.

Nah, I just used to write “googles” and when I switched search engines to Kagi, switched to “kagis”.

In this particular case, Kagi runs a Threadiverse – what they term “Fediverse Forums” – search lens. AFAIK, haven’t checked recently, Google doesn’t yet offer that, so that search depended upon a Kagi feature. Kinda the analog to site:reddit.com with Google, but spanning the Threadiverse instances.