As @papertowels@mander.xyz said.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Active_noise_control

Historically, if you were in a noisy environment, you could get closed-back, circumaural headphones — headphones that fit around your ears and had a lot of sound-absorption padding — to help soak up the sound. I still use decent non-ANC circumaural headphones at home.

There are also some people who are more-willing to tolerate discomfort than I am who get in-ear buds, which block noise in their ear canal, and on top of that, fit ear protectors intended for industrial use, like 3M X5 Peltor ear protectors, which have even more passive sound absorption stuff than current circumaural headphones do, and are even larger.

That sort of thing works well on higher frequency sound, but not as well on low-frequency stuff, like engine noise, large fans, stuff like that.

ANC basically has microphones in your headphones, picks up on what sounds are showing up at your ear, and then tries to compute and play back a sound that produces destructive interference at your ear. That is, if you look at the sound waves, where the environmental sound is low pressure, it plays back high pressure signal, and when the environmental sound is high pressure, it plays back low pressure signal. It’s not perfect, or it could make environmental sound totally inaudible. But high-end ANC headphones are pretty impressive these days. I have a pair of Sennheiser Momentum 4 headphones — good, though not the best ANC out there in 2025, and I don’t personally recommend these for other reasons — and when they kick on, the headphones are designed to have the ANC fade in; same thing happens in reverse, fades out when you flip the ANC off. It sounds almost as if fans and the like around you are powering up and down when that happens, very eerie if you’ve never experienced it before. Even the sounds that it doesn’t do so well on, like people talking, it significantly reduces in volume.

And ANC does best with the other side of the spectrum, the side that passive sound absorption doesn’t — the low-frequency stuff, especially regular sounds like fans. So having both a lot of passive sound absorption and ANC on a given pair of headphones let the two work well together.

People often use cell phones in noisy environments, with a lot of people around, and ANC makes it a lot easier to hear music or whatever without background sound interfering. I think that it’s very likely that people will, long term, mostly wind up using headphones with ANC (short of moving to something more elaborate like a direct brain interface or something). It’s not really all that important if you’re in a quiet environment, and I don’t bother using ANC headphones on my desktop at home. But if you’re in random environments — waiting a grocery store line, in a restaurant with music playing over the restaurant’s speakers, on an airplane with the drone of the airplane engines, whatever — it really helps to reduce that background sound. ANC isn’t that new. I think that I remember it mostly being billed as useful for airplane engine noise back when, which they’re a good fit for. But it’s gotten considerably better over the years. For me, in 2025, good ANC is something that I really want to have for smartphone use.

The problem is that in order to do ANC, you need at least a microphone, preferably an array, and somewhere you need to have a model of the sound transmission through the headphones and be running signal processing on the input sound to generate that output sound. In theory, you could do it on an attached computer if you had a fast data interface, but in practice, ANC-capable headphones are sold as self-contained units that handle all that themselves. So you gotta power the little computer in the headphones. That means that you probably have batteries and at least for full size headphones (rather than earbuds) you might as well stick a USB interface on them to charge them, even if the user is using Bluetooth for wireless connectivity. And if you’ve done that, it isn’t much more circuitry to just let the headphones act as USB headphones, so in general, ANC headphones tend to also be USB-capable. My Momentum 4 headphones have all of Bluetooth, USB-C, and a traditional headphones interface, but…I just haven’t really wound up using the headphones interface if I have the other options available on a given device. Might be convenient if I were using some device that only had headphones output. shrugs

If it honestly doesn’t permit the User password to be reset, is there a “factory reset the whole BIOS” option?

I mean, there were legitimate technical issues with the standard, especially on smartphones, which is where they really got pushed out. Most other devices do have headphones jacks. If I get a laptop, it’s probably got a headphones jack. Radios will have headphones jacks. Get a mixer, it’s got a headphones jack. I don’t think that the standard is going to vanish anytime soon in general.

I like headphones jacks. I have a ton of 1/8" and 1/4" devices and headphones that I happily use. But they weren’t doing it for no reason.

• From what I’ve read, the big, driving one that drove them out on smartphones was that the jack just takes up a lot more physical space in the phone than USB-C or Bluetooth. I’d rather just have a thicker phone, but a lot of people wouldn’t, and if you’re going all over the phone trying to figure out what to eject to buy more space, that’s gonna be a big target. For people who do want a jack on smartphones, which invariably have USB-C, you can get a similar effect to having a headphones jack by just leaving a small USB-C audio interface with a headphones jack on the end of your headphones (one with a passthrough USB-C port if you also want to use the USB-C port for charging).

• A second issue was that the standard didn’t have a way to provide power (there was a now-dead extension from many years back, IIRC for MD players, that let a small amount of power be provided with an extra ring). That didn’t matter for a long time, as long as your device could put out a strong enough signal to drive headphones of whatever impedance you had. But ANC has started to become popular now, and you need power for ANC. This is really the first time I think that there’s a solid reason to want to power headphones.

• The connection got shorted when plugging things in and out, which could result in loud sound on the membrane.

• USB-C is designed so that the springy tensioning stuff that’s there to keep the connection solid is on the (cheap, easy to replace) cord rather than the (expensive, hard to replace) device; I understand from past reading that this was a major reason that micro-USB replaced mini-USB. Instead of your device wearing out, the cord wears out. Not as much of an issue for headphones as mini-USB, but I think that it’s probably fair to say that it’s desirable to have the tensioning on the cord side.

• On USB-C, the right part breaks. One irritation I have with USB-C is that it is…kind of flimsy. Like, it doesn’t require that much force pushing on a plug sideways to damage a plug. However — and I don’t know if this was a design goal for USB-C, though I suspect it was — my experience has been that if that happens, it’s the plug on the (cheap, easy to replace) cord that gets damaged, not the device. I have a television with a headphones jack that I destroyed by tripping over a headphones cord once, because the headphones jack was nice and durable and let me tear components inside the television off. I’ve damaged several USB-C cables, but I’ve never damaged the device they’re connected to while doing so.

On an interesting note, the standard is extremely old, probably one of the oldest data standards in general use today; the 1/4" mono standard was from phone switchboards in the 1800s.

EDIT: Also, one other perk of using USB-C instead of a built-in headphones jack on a smartphone is that if the DAC on your phone sucks, going the USB-C-audio-interface route means that you can use a different DAC. Can’t really change the internal DAC. I don’t know about other people, but last phone I had that did have an audio jack would let through a “wub wub wub” sound when I was charging it on USB off my car’s 12V cigarette lighter adapter — dirty power, but USB power is often really dirty. Was really obnoxious when feeding my car’s stereo via its AUX port. That’s very much avoidable for the manufacturer by putting some filtering on the DAC’s power supply, maybe needs a capacitor on the thing, but the phone manufacturer didn’t do it, maybe to save space or money. That’s not something that I can go fix. I eventually worked around it by getting a battery-powered Bluetooth receiver that had a 1/8" headphones jack, cutting the phone’s DAC out of the equation. The phone’s internal DAC worked fine when the phone wasn’t charging, but I wanted to have the phone plugged in for (battery hungry) navigation stuff when I was driving.

Sony WH-1000XM4/5/6

I don’t have one of those, but they’re pretty popular as headphones with good ANC.

Jlab Epic Air Sport ANC

I do have those, though.

Phrases

Gotcha, thanks!

I’m assuming that it’s some sort of component from the air conditioner, but damned if I know what it is. Looks like power plugs on it, and someone else mentioned “caps”, so maybe a capacitor, though I wasn’t aware that there was some kind of plug standard for large removable capacitors.

kagis

Yeah, this capacitor looks similar.

EDIT: Apparently air conditioners can use large capacitors:

https://www.amazon.com/Capacitor-Conditioner-Multi-Purpose-Capacitor-5-Warranty/dp/B092ZQ3Y3N

Capacitor for Air Conditioner 5 uf MFD 370 or 440 Volt VAC, Multi-Purpose Round Capacitor for AC Motor Run or Fan Motor Start or Condenser Straight

EDIT2: Oh, I bet I know what it’s for, given the “Fan Motor Start” and what I assume is a misspelled “Condenser Start” text on the Amazon listing. Some hardware will draw a lot of juice when starting up. Laser printers are prone to this, for example. The references above are to mechanical things, moving components, and maybe one need extra power to overcome static friction, to get the parts in motion initially; once moving, they face (lesser) kinetic friction. One option is to just draw a ton of power from the line, but then that increases the peak power demands of a device. Another option, gentler on whatever circuit or external power source is providing the power, is to charge a capacitor for a bit and that’ll let you create a big surge of available power for a moment without having to have higher peak demands on the external power source. Adds to device cost, but limits its peak draw.

In fairness, rural America probably didn’t entirely understand the implications of said vote.

As I’ve pointed out on here before, I feel like a lot of people in mostly-Republican-voting rural American are going to be even more disappointed when they discover agricultural subsidies ending, healthcare subsidies ending that disproportionately benefit poorer, rural areas, illegal immigrant agricultural workers that farms rely on becoming unavailable, counter-tariffs that tend to target agricultural output from rural areas, etc.

This is an amazing graph.

That’s an older version rendered by the GitHub project that does those.

https://github.com/FabioLolix/LinuxTimeline

Their releases page has current ones:

https://github.com/FabioLolix/LinuxTimeline/releases

For the hell of it, I used one as my main work laptop for a while. $199 plus $20 of RAM when I got it, IIRC.

External keyboard, put the laptop on a cantilevered board so that it’s right in front of my eyeballs so that the screen size doesn’t matter, use it mostly as a thin client to a beefier machine so the CPU doesn’t matter much.

If you already have a larger Linux laptop that you’re otherwise happy with, have you considered just throwing it in a padded laptop backpack?

I have been known to use XMODEM over screen over telnet for file transfer.

THE FUTURE IS TERMINAL!

The past and present are also terminal.

All of that said, consider replacing your central ducted unit with a multi-head mini-split system in the long run.

Mini splits don’t provide ventilation, whereas ducted systems do. In general, if one can have a ducted system, I’d rather have that. The major problem with ducted systems is that ductwork takes up a lot of space, so it’s hard to stick into an existing house; much less of an issue if you can build it in during construction. A mini split is less invasive to an existing structure.

Just don’t get a portable unit. They suck and are just a waste of money most of the times.

Get a dual-hose unit if you get one. There are a lot of companies selling single-hose units. Those are a lot less efficient and aren’t much cheaper. I would guess that in a situation where they get any kind of meaningful use, a dual-hose unit pays for itself quickly.

I don’t think I’d agree that they suck, but if you can use a window unit — not all rooms and windows are amenable to this — you normally want a window unit instead of a portable unit, unless you must take down the AC unit on a regular basis. Less noise inside, more energy efficiency.

Yes.

The Threadiverse has multiple intercompatible “Reddit-alike” software packages.

• Lemmy (the biggest). Example: https://lemmy.world/ Written in the Rust programming language.

• PieFed. Example: https://piefed.social/ Written in the Python programming language.

• Mbin (the successor of the defunct Kbin project). Example: https://fedia.io/ Written in the PHP programming language.

There’s also Sublinks, written in Java, but I don’t know for sure whether that’s going to actually get the ball rolling. https://demo.sublinks.org/ Think they need more developers contributing.

EDIT: Note that while this approach is unusual for the centralized Web-oriented social media era, where typically one company controls the whole shebang and has one codebase, it is common for federated systems. There are many different NNTP server implementations for Usenet, many different XMPP server implementations for instant messaging, many different IRC server implementations for chat, many different SMTP server implementations for email, many different FidoNet implementations.

dull…fixed my washing machine

I mean, an incorrectly-operating washing machine can make things quite exciting indeed.

Not what you asked, but you might check that:

• The central AC doesn’t need to be recharged. If it has leaked coolant and is low, it will drop in effectiveness.

• Or, even more simply, that the air filters don’t need to be replaced.

• You can’t improve insulation. Doing so is a one-off cost, as opposed to the ongoing cost of throwing more air conditioning muscle at the problem. Weatherstrip leaks, replace any single-pane windows with double-pane, etc.

I strongly doubt that they’d render Steam not runnable on their distro.

Webster tried to reform English, and was a reason for a number of the American English changes from British English. Some of his changes caught on, like “public” for “publick” or “jail” for “gaol”.

But others did not.

I think that some of those ones that didn’t catch on would be good candidates.

https://www.mentalfloss.com/article/53723/26-noah-webster’s-spelling-changes-didn’t-catch

E.g. “Island” to “Iland”.

https://www.merriam-webster.com/grammar/noah-websters-spelling-wins-and-fails

Or “is” to “iz”.