Regular trains don’t run underground. Lots of opencast mines exist .

Basically all mines have an above ground terminal where whatever you mined is unloaded from your underground trains, lifts, haul trucks or whatever else onto storage piles, then loaded onto the actual long distance trains.

If the mine entry is up a mountain, then the trip down from that point will be a net energy producer regardless of anything else.

I wouldn’t be surprised if there are electrified railway lines doing the same. Regenerate large amounts of energy into the grid while descending loaded; consume a relatively small amount of energy to haul the empty train back uphill.

If you’re thinking of that CGI crane lifting concrete blocks, it’s unfortunately a really bad idea.

Pumped hydro stores energy by lifting weight uphill, instead. Water is basically the cheapest thing you can get per tonne, and is easy to contain and move.

To store useful amounts of energy using gravity, you need pretty large elevation differences and millions of tonnes of mass to move.

It was a few years back, but after it hit ChromeOS EOL I’m pretty sure it just got some KDE distro; I don’t think I even used LXDE. Didn’t need to do much.

I was mostly using it for web browsing, forums, spreadsheets, documentation etc. Nothing particularly strenuous.

I did have one really fun time of modifying PDF engineering drawings by opening them in Libre Office Draw which it handled kinda OK.

It did get a 240GB SSD but everything else was soldered.

I got a surprising amount of use out of a similarly configured C720 as a general purpose portable machine.

Essentially no processors follow a standard. There are some that have become a de facto standard and had both backwards compatibility and clones produced like x86. But it is certainly not an open standard, and many lawsuits have been filed to limit the ability of other companies to produce compatible replacement chips.

RISC-V is an attempt to make an open instruction set that any manufacturer can make a compatible chip for, and any software developer can code for.

You’re better off putting the panel somewhere where it always gets sun, and isn’t extra weight you have to haul around.

Leafs have battery packs with no active heating or cooling, which significantly impacts their performance in bad weather and when fast charging. Coupled with very small packs in the early models, and you have a recipe for a bad experience.

Bear in mind also that the extra weight and possibly aerodynamic compromises actually reduce range. In some cases, particularly at night, in poor weather, and at high speed, the panels would be a net negative.

They would only be useful if your car sat around in the sun for long periods without access to a charger.

I’ll take ‘Violations of the Magnuson-Moss Warranty Act’.

HDMI and DP do not carry their signals in the same way. HDMI/DVI use a pixel clock and one wire pair per colour, whereas DP is packet-based.

“DisplayPort++” is the branding for a DP port that can pretend to be an HDMI or DVI port, so an adapter or cable can convert between the two just by rearranging the pins.

To go from pure DisplayPort to HDMI, or to go from an HDMI source to a DP monitor, you need an ‘active’ adapter, which decodes and re-encodes the signal. These are bigger and sometimes require external power.

Waze is of course owned by Google…

It’s pretty common to own a domain but not actually host the email server; doing on-premises email is a security PITA and most providers simply blacklist large swathes of residential and leasable (e.g. VPS) IPs.

Unfortunately, if you get someone else to host your email, they often charge by the account, not by the domain. Setting up a new mailbox is therefore irritatingly expensive.

A catch-all email works well, though, and is free from most of the hosting providers. Downside is you get spam…

Jane@JaneDoe certainly seems more common than mail@JaneDoe.

I’ve certainly never heard of a chicken ranch, but plenty of chicken farms.

With software that misuses /tmp, I’m more worried about burning out my SSD endurance than running out of RAM.

Yeah, I have no idea either, but it’s been around for more than a decade so it should be fairly easy to find a library that duplicates it.

I would be wary of AI-based solutions. There’s a risk of it picking up e.g. satirical/spoof sponsorships as actual ads, and perhaps not detecting unusual ads.

I’m slightly terrified of the day someone starts getting AI to reword and read out individual ads for each stream.

Indeed, the US has a major lack of fixed-line competition and lack of regulation. Starlink doesn’t really help with that, at least in urban areas.

I’m not familiar with the wireless situation. You’re saying that there are significant coverage discrepancies to the point where many if not most consumers are choosing a carrier based on coverage, not pricing/plans? There’s always areas with unequal coverage but I didn’t think they were that common.

Here in NZ, the state funding for very rural 4G broadband (Rural Broadband Initiative 2 / RBI-2) went to the Rural Connectivity Group, setting up sites used and owned equally by all three providers, to reduce costs where capacity isn’t the constraint.

You definitely would have legal issues redistributing the ad-free version.

Sponsor block works partly because it simply automates something the user is already allowed to do - it’s legally very safe. No modification or distribution of the source file is necessary, only some metadata.

It’s an approach that works against the one-off sponsorships read by the actual performers, but isn’t effective against ads dynamically inserted by the download server.

One option could be to crowdsource a database of signatures of audio ads, Shazam style. This could then be used by software controlled by the user (c.f. SB browser extension) to detect the ads and skip them, or have the software cut the ads out of files the user had legitimately downloaded, regardless of which podcast or where the ads appear.

Sponsorships by the actual content producers could then be handled in the same way as SB: check the podcast ID and total track length is right (to ensure no ads were missed) then flag and skip certain timestamps.

Starlink plugs the rural coverage gaps, but in urban areas it’s still more expensive than either conventional fixed-line connections or wireless (4G/5G) broadband. Even in rural areas, while it’s the best option, it’s rarely the cheapest, at least in the NZ market I’m familiar with.

It also doesn’t have the bandwidth per square kilometre/mile to serve urban areas well, and it’s probably never going to work in apartment buildings.

This is a funding/subsidisation issue, not so much a technical one. I imagine Starlink connections are eligible for the current subsidy, but in most cases it’s probably going to conventional DSL/cable/fibre/4G connections.

The screen turning off when it automatically locks is an added bonus; the priority is to be able to command the system to simultaneously lock and turn off the screen. You’re correct that the setting at zero seconds safely achieves that.

I’ve had other, more stupid uses for running commands, though I don’t think any are actively in use.

Taking actions on network reconfiguration, charge completion, and SMART failure are all things that spring to mind. It’s nice to be able to set those kinds of things in a GUI rather than putting them in /etc/something.d