murrayhenson (u/murrayhenson)

murrayhenson commented on Electric vehicles now represent 19% of the passenger vehicle sales worldwide twitter.com/janrosenow/st... · Posted by u/doener

caseyy · a year ago

It’s amazing. Unfortunate that infra for BEVs is wildly inadequate in the UK.

murrayhenson · a year ago

I assume you're talking about on-street charging? If so... I think you're right. The UK, like Poland (where I live), has a LOT to do in terms of supporting folks that live in a flat. On-street charging really needs to be properly prioritised, properly funded, the paperwork/process streamlined, etc.

Labour ought to be doing all of this already, but I haven't seen it yet and this article: https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cdrddz2407zo ... is a good example of the situation.

In Poland, especially in the cities, parking is always an issue and doubly so around large blocks of flats. I doubt the new coalition government has the backbone to do much about the situation, but while EV adoption is low here, they have the chance to get ahead of the curve and mandate new builds have a meaningful percentage of parking with ~11 kW charging points. Existing builds should be heavily supported but it should also be mandatory to retrofit charging at existing parking spots.

murrayhenson commented on First images from Euclid are in dlmultimedia.esa.int/down... · Posted by u/mooreds

beAbU · a year ago

Many years ago I read some sci-fi novel, and in it was a sub-plot of a warring alien species that started destroying anything and everything they came across in their travels.

The story went that their local system was in some sort of a dust cloud, so they had no stars visible from their planet. At some point, that cloud somehow dissipated. On the planet, one of the inhabitants bothered to look up one night, and it hated everything it saw. So the race developed a space program to go out there and destroy it all.

For some reason I think it was Adams' H2G2, but the tone of my recollection does not quite feel on-brand for those stories. Not sure.

murrayhenson · a year ago

The end of Chapter 12 from Douglas Adams' Life, the Universe, and Everything.

The darkness of the cloud buffeted at the ship. Inside was the silence of history. Their historic mission was to find out if there was anything or anywhere on the other side of the sky, from which the wrecked spaceship could have come, another world maybe, strange and incomprehensible though this thought was to the enclosed minds of those who had lived beneath the sky of Krikkit.

History was gathering itself to deliver another blow.

Still the darkness thrummed at them, the blank enclosing darkness. It seemed closer and closer, thicker and thicker, heavier and heavier. And suddenly it was gone.

They flew out of the cloud.

They saw the staggering jewels of the night in their infinite dust and their minds sang with fear.

For a while they flew on, motionless against the starry sweep of the Galaxy, itself motionless against the infinite sweep of the Universe. And then they turned around.

"It'll have to go," the men of Krikkit said as they headed back for home.

On the way back, they sang a number of tuneful and reflective songs on the subjects of peace, justice, morality, culture, sport, family life and the obliteration of all other life forms.

murrayhenson commented on Java Development on an Apple M1 – A One Year Review rieckpil.de/java-developm... · Posted by u/rieckpil

m_st · 4 years ago

I love my MBA M1. It's the best computer I ever owned. Super fast for the kind of stuff I need it for. The battery seems to be always charged and it is immediately available when opening the lid. And it doesn't even have a fan. Best Mac ever.

murrayhenson · 4 years ago

I just bought an MBA M1 with 16 GB of RAM. I had to check to make sure that it was actually going into sleep mode because the system seems to instantly turn on and unlock when coming out of sleep mode.

It's also cold most of the time; it takes ages to get up to what feels like "room temperature". I'm besmitten.

murrayhenson commented on Why does my diet soda taste off? Aspartame hydrolysis foodscienceinstitute.com/... · Posted by u/stvnitt

jnwatson · 4 years ago

That just happened to me. I left a 2 liter in the freezer. I then transferred it to the fridge, thinking the gradual temperature change would be fine.

I woke to a strange sound. The bottle had blown the fridge door open, a large gash down the side of the bottle, soda slush everywhere.

It took me an hour to clean the fridge.

murrayhenson · 4 years ago

I've had something similar happen. I was keeping home-made ginger beer in our refrigerator for some weeks after I'd made several bottles of it. Ginger beer is yeast, water, sugar, ginger juice, and a few other things. I didn't realize that - even at 3-4 degrees Celsius the yeast would continue doing their thing, albeit slowly.

I was sitting at the kitchen table, right next to the fridge, when a 750 ml glass bottle of ginger beer exploded. It took out another bottle along with the tempered glass shelf it had been sitting on.

Not only did it take more than an hour to clean up, the replacement shelf my wife ordered was the wrong one, so she had to order yet another replacement. It took ages to arrive.

I have not yet been allowed to make more home-made ginger beer, which is a shame because it's very tasty and is excellent for making cocktails in the summer.

murrayhenson commented on Ask HN: Consumer WiFi router options in 2021 · Posted by u/cyberlurker

PaulHoule · 4 years ago

I am a big fan of Ubiquiti. I live in an 1850s farmhouse that has a tremendous number of nails in the walls on the first floor, so Wi-Fi waves don't penetrate well. On top of that, when they worked on the wall between the kitchen and the wood shed they put a layer of metal foil in so that the penetration through that wall is close to zero. We also have an armoire with a mirrored back that blocks waves from the rest of the house.

We have 4 access points.

In summer we move an access point from the kitchen to the woodshed (with a powerline internet adapter). Tablets work in the kitchen but it would be ideal if we added one more access point to the bedroom above the kitchen.

It's no accident that Apple is not making a WiFi access point because "just works" is an impossibility. If you believe in the apple aesthetic you probably also feel entitled to install your access point at whatever corner of the house your cable box is installed, despite what physics has to say about it.

The awful truth is that different WiFi chipsets are just barely compatible with each other, high-end access points are chock full of workarounds for flaws in WiFi clients, and companies like Cisco and Ubiquiti have lots of patents on those workarounds. They have a "mutual assured destruction" policy that they don't sue each other, but they make sure that routers from companies like ASUS work only occasionally.

Powerline internet adapters are your friends. Their weakness, relative to modern switched ethernet, is that all the devices share a common bus. For best performance, use just two powerline adapters to make a "point-to-point" link to support one far-flung location.

murrayhenson · 4 years ago

Seconded for Ubiquiti. I've had a Dream Machine Pro (firewall/router), a couple of their USW-Pro-24/48-PoE switches, and some of their AP's (U6-LR mostly) for a few months now and everything seems to work well.

I went for the Ubiquiti stuff because it seemed like it would be fairly easy to configure and it was... and I don't have a lot of experience with configuring routers/firewalls. Ubiquiti's stuff was also less expensive than some Cisco gear I was looking at, though that may be more because of my location (Poland) than anything else. Also, because I'm in Poland, houses are constructed largely out of brick, concrete, and rebar. So, reasonably powerful AP's were needed and the U6-LR's seem to fit the bill.

My only issue with the Ubiquiti stuff is that everyone admonishes everyone else to not automatically upgrade due to some pretty serious issues from firmware upgrades from Ubiquiti in the past. However, because someone will always have issues with an upgrade, it can be hard to know for sure if the latest firmware is going cause real issues or not.

murrayhenson commented on iOS 15 Humane potential.app/ios-15-huma... · Posted by u/uffo

gwd · 5 years ago

How do I keep contact with relatives -- like cousins, aunts and uncles, etc -- who I care enough about to want to chat with / see what's up in their lives, but not enough to call on a weekly basis?

murrayhenson · 5 years ago

iCloud photo sharing? Works with people that do and do not have iPhones/Macs. At least I know that non-Apple users can see photos in a shared album; I don't know if they can add photos to a shared photo album as well - I've never tried that.

Several years ago I got tired for Facebook and quit it. My parents, in-laws, and siblings have an Apple shared photo album for "general" content and we occasionally set up albums for the same group of folks when there's a big event/trip/etc.

We occasionally Facetime or use chat via Messages. Email's are in the mix as well.

I feel that it works reasonably well.

murrayhenson commented on Noisy appliances: How loud is your house? bbc.co.uk/news/technology... · Posted by u/open-source-ux

montzark · 5 years ago

Appliances are least concern in city. To me most noise comes from cars and motorcycles. This area seems really underegulated, basically anyone can annoy a lot of people at once by making exhaust louder to establish I don't even know what?

Semi-joke: Anyone can do it, just drill holes to exhaust before muffler. I thought that maybe I should do that, like annoy so much people that something would be done in regarding this.

murrayhenson · 5 years ago

Agreed!

My wife and I are building a home at the moment and, when it came time to consider appliances, noise of a given appliance was a factor and something we took into consideration. For example, we chose a very quiet vent hood to go over the hob/stovetop since it's an open plan kitchen/living area. Vent hoods can be very noisy (65+ dB) when running maximum.

However, given that there are tractors in fields nearby, dogs, chickens, and other "sounds of rural life" ... we made sure to put in a LOT of insulation and also went for triple-paned windows. While the house isn't yet complete, we hear almost no outside sounds when we are inside.

When we compare that to our current location - on a side street, but a moderately busy one - with sometimes couriers on loud motorcycles, lorries, police/fire vehicles (sirens), and the occasional person with a car that has an exhaust tuned to be loud ...the difference is really quite remarkable.

murrayhenson commented on Svalbard's Alcohol Quotas sysselmannen.no/en/alcoho... · Posted by u/simonebrunozzi

fouc · 5 years ago

What's interesting about this?

murrayhenson · 5 years ago

Maybe that the quotas are very low, or that there are quotas at all. Mainland Norway definitely doesn't have quotas like this; rather alcohol is simply made to be quite expensive.

When I read this my first thought was something like, "I bet that those who don't drink are making a bit of profit on the side by selling their allowances." However, I'm guessing that for Svalbard's dedicated drinkers ...they're finding a way around the import restrictions.

It would be interesting to hear how folks deal with the restrictions by someone that lives on Svalbard or has spent significant time there.

murrayhenson commented on Feds asks Tesla to recall vehicles over failing touchscreen displays techcrunch.com/2021/01/13... · Posted by u/mardiyah

creeble · 5 years ago

My 2014 Tesla has 345k miles on it. The battery still gets 210 miles. Everything still works - but the eMMC chip is failing.

murrayhenson · 5 years ago

That's about 49300 miles a year, or about 200 miles a day if you drive five days a week, 50 weeks out of the year. That's a lot of driving. What has pushed you to be driving so much?

murrayhenson commented on Stable 1.2 Gigabit/s Internet achieved in moving train in Switzerland swisscom.ch/en/about/news... · Posted by u/richx

TuringNYC · 5 years ago

Your numbers on Washington State seem off. I dont think you are including Social Security Taxes (7.65%) https://smartasset.com/taxes/income-taxes#nyI48IDDLI

Also, Washington State is atypical for the US since they dont have a state income tax. In most other states, there is an added state income tax.

murrayhenson · 5 years ago

You could throw VAT/sales tax in there, too. In Switzerland it's absurdly low (for Europe) at 7.7%.