Who and who?

IMHO they are pretty useless once the novelty wears off. You use it a few times and put it in the closet. So even a cheap model will be BIFL.

Yeah the founder is or was into that. Thus the idea that Wikipedia’s editorial decisions could essentially be made by algorithms. I have some jokes about it but will spare you for now. The WMF itself is just another tech company with some nonprofit virtue vibes though. Expect a typical campaign.

Up for me right now, northern California.

This sounds pretty neat. It sounds like it uses transformation optics, which I’ve just been reading about.

You know how a lens bends light, i.e. a light ray enters the lens and travels at a different angle that depends on the lens’s index of refraction? Now suppose the index of refraction changes continuously, like air’s index of refraction changes with temperature. So if you have warm air near the ground that gets cooler with height, light can actually travel through it by a curved path. That’s how mirages happen.

Now suppose you can somehow control the index of refraction in a volume of material. So you can imagine an “invisibility cloak” where light coming in from behind you gets steered around you and comes out in front of you. People looking straight at you see the light from in back of you so it’s like you’re invisible. This doesn’t seem technologically doable with visible light (at least for now) but it’s been demonstrated in the lab at microwave frequencies, with small objects like a few centimeters. It’s really cool how the math works.

This sounds like they’ve done something similar with heat. They use a 3D printed heat sink with a special shape to make the temperature in front of something look like the temperature behind the thing, masking the heat source in the middle.

If you look up “transformation optics” there’s a lot of stuff about invisibility cloaks, maybe because there’s military funding in the field and the army wants to make stuff invisible, lol. But the math and physics are interesting even if the applications are overstated. It turns out that the math used in studying how the materials curve light is similar to the math of general relativity, which is about how gravity bends light near stars and black holes. So that also leads to a bunch of breathless headlines about making black holes in the laboratory. It’s not 100% bogus (they do get some cool effects) but yeah, of course it’s an analogy, not an actual black hole.

Here’s a TED talk by one of the guys involved with this. I haven’t watched it yet but maybe I will. I saw another youtube lecture by him and it was interesting. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v9d-EBgro50

I think a lot of Codeberg users are refugees from Github who didn’t want Microsoft telling them what to do. Joke’s on them, now they also don’t want Codeberg telling them what to do. Self-hosting is the answer, but something like federation between self-hosted forges also seems like a good idea.

1. I’ve had trouble getting Jami to work at all, I think because of incompatibilities between versions and whatever. You might have better luck with something like Linphone.

2. I haven’t tried a VOIP hardphone but I use Linphone on Android sometimes. I would say call quality is worse than normal cellular voice calls even those are certainly VOIP at some level too.

3. VOIP is more crap to fool around with and periodically troubleshoot, but you can get it to work if you have to. I don’t find landlines to be worth it any more (I just use mobile voice) but they’re probably still the most reliable of the approaches, and I guess it depends somewhat on your family’s discomfort level with technology.

VOIP hardphones are nicer to use than mobiles, but I guess unlike traditional landlines, they don’t work in power outages. All the ones I’ve seen rely on a power cube.

Epub is html with some crap wrapping it. Converting it to text follows the html formatting, like using the lynx browser.

Mostly pandoc (for epub to text) and a few stupid python scripts. I’m a luddite and prefer reading text files. I don’t use any particular collection management beyond filenames and grep.

This is like those AI slop youtube channels where they make up stories about celebrities with a suspicious lack of details. Sorry this needs names and specifics.

For particulates you should use a real N95 instead of KN95. If you want something more permanent try a half-face or full-face respirator with replaceable cartridges. I have a 3M 6297 (https://www.3m.com/3M/en_US/p/d/b10013131/ ). I’m not convinced the particulate reduction is any better than an N95, but it’s easier to get a good seal and easier to breathe through, and gives more odor reduction. If doing it again I’d probably get the style with the trapezoid shaped cartridges (https://www.3m.com/3M/en_US/p/d/b5005625039/) instead of the round ones, since there are more choices of cartridges for different classes of contaminant. As an extra benefit, it gets you the stylish Darth Vader look. You can get them at hardware stores or Home Depot since painters and so on use them. I got mine at Office Depot. I think it was $25 or so including a pair of P100 cartridges.

The filter cartridges last a pretty long time but they are way more expensive than N95’s, like $10 a pair maybe? IDR, it’s been a while.

Don’t worry about N95 vs N100/P100, there really isn’t much difference under testing. Look up Aaron Collins’ youtube channel for a gazillion mask tests from 2020 or so. N95 vs P95 shouldn’t matter since the P designates oil resistance which isn’t relevant here.

Here are 3M’s full face respirators which is the next step up from half face: https://www.3m.com/3M/en_US/p/c/ppe/respiratory-protection/reusable-respirators/full-face/

I don’t have one but sort of wanted one some time back.

At least on my 6297, it looks pretty easy to convert it to a powered respirator (PAPR) by removing the cartridges and connecting an air hose to the cartridge ports to deliver filtered air from wherever.

Filter elements are consumables, though for heavier particulates you can wash them. Finer particulate filters rely on electrostatic charge to the filter that gets messed up more easily.

Also, if you’re talking about wildfire smoke, sleeping with a mask on is not very nice. You want some kind of powered filtration in your living space, if you have electricity. Look up “Corsi-Rosenthal box” for a DIY method using a box fan and furnace filters.

I mean that happens with humans too. You have to stay in contact with the real world to not get caught up in delusions. This explains a lot of news stories, more or less.