Aluminum foil is very common in physics labs. And a main use for it is “baking”! To get ultra high vacuum (UHV)* you generally need to “bake out” your chamber while you pump down. Foil is used same as with baking food — keep the heat in and evenly distributed on the chamber.

Sadly, it’s usually not food grade aluminum foil, as that can contain oils, and oils and vacuum are generally a big no-no.

*Just how good is UHV? Roughly: I live in San Francisco, which is ~7 miles by ~7 miles (~11km). Imagine you raise that by another 7 miles to make a cube. Now, evacuate every last molecule of gas out of it. Now take a family sedan’s trunk, fill it with 1 atmosphere of gas, and release that into the 7 mile cube. That’s roughly UHV pressure.

From TFA:

“I have failed you completely and catastrophically,” Gemini CLI output stated. “My review of the commands confirms my gross incompetence.”

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blackbird_(wind-powered_vehicle)

Can go directly upwind (no tacking required). Can also be applied to boats.

99 what you did there…

(I know, IC isn’t valid Roman numeral representation of 99, but it was the only joke I could think of.)

Because it’s not an X at the end, it’s a Greek chi. Same with the arXiv preprint distribution — it’s “archive,” not are-ex-iv.

The energy from nuclear reactions can be astonishingly large (compared to, say, chemical reactions).

But atoms are really, really, really small.

(…I think you may have gotten whooshed…)

Open, or standards-compliant local-only gear is the way to go for smart home stuff IMHO. Never had a problem with a Zigbee, Matter, or ESPHome device suddenly deciding it would stop working because manufacturer said so.

And a big plastics shill, unfortunately.

Move ‘em 2 millimeters in the wrong direction and you’ll have a bad time

Are you referring to getting, I dunno, yogurt in places outside the digestive tract?

My understanding was that gut bacteria play a pretty crucial (beneficial) role in overall health, not to mention the whole gut-brain stuff.

Pretty sure those “horrible little scalawags” play some pretty crucial roles in the human microbiome…

Or just a San Francisco resident — these ads are everywhere on BART (+Muni I guess) right now. (As far as ads go, they’re pretty good I guess — and no, I don’t even use them, much less work for them.)

For back-of-the-envelope or mental calculations, pi is often 3 or 10^(1/2).

The latter is better than 1% accurate, and has nice properties when doing order-of-magnitude/log space calculations in base 10.

ZigBee router thing:

I’ve been happy with the SMLIGHT SLZB-06M. You can easily flash firmware, and it has PoE which was important for me. I believe it also supports Thread, but I haven’t tried this yet (and I’m not sure if it supports it at the same time as Zigbee).

Zigbee smart plugs from Third Reality have been pretty solid in my experience, and they report power usage.

For circuit breaker level monitoring, I have an Emporia Vue2. I have it running esphome, completely local — unfortunately this requires some simple soldering and flashing, so it’s not turnkey. But it’s been rock solid ever since flashing it. (Process is well documented online.)

I’ve had decent luck with cheap wifi Matter bulbs, but provisioning them is finicky, and sometimes they just crap out and need to be power cycled; Zigbee bulbs (e.g., Ikea) have generally been reliable, though sometimes I’ve had difficulty pairing them initially. After power cycling a Matter WiFi bulb, it takes a while for it to respond to Home Assistant; Zigbee bulbs generally respond as soon as you power them on.

I have a wired smart light switch from TP-Link/Kasa (KS205), and it’s been completely hassle free (and totally local — Matter over wifi). The Kasa smart switch dongles I have work flawlessly but need proprietary pairing, and I’m afraid to update firmware in case they lose local support.

Good luck! Fun adventure :)

I think it’s probably better to amend it to, “if it was covered in poop would you get rid of it and not replace it?”

Not parent, but when a minute isn’t quite enough, 77 seconds might do the trick. Multiples of eleven are quick to enter, and with a simple nuker with no “minute” button, 66s is easier than 1:00.

I think a lot of companies view their free plan as recruiting/advertising — if you use TailScale personally and have a great experience then you’ll bring in business by advocating for it at work.

Of course it could go either way, and I don’t rely on TailScale (it’s my “backup” VPN to my home network)… we’ll see, I guess.

…are Turing Complete, so what you can do with them is exactly equal.

But they’re only equal in the Turing complete sense, which (iirc) says nothing about performance or timing.

It’s a pretty standard bandwidth/latency tradeoff in my view: email is high bandwidth (it’s in writing, you can re-read, etc.), whereas phone is low latency (several back-and-forth explanations can happen in seconds). Each has its place.

If social anxiety is a factor, that’s a perfectly valid, but separate, issue.

Yeah, though it looks like the cyan (which would be ~500nm) is actually false color UV image, judging by the same color scale as this https://www.nasa.gov/image-detail/5-3-2024_sdo_x1pt6_flare_131/