@Chris Northwood The treatment for it is hilarious. Unlike motion sickness, it is not an inner ear/visual imbalance. Anti emetics don't work. It's neurological.
Sitting in a car in the back seat and reading a book while someone drives works.
This last couple of weeks was the first time I have flown on “full service” airlines for years, after being a RyanAir frequent flyer.
Now say what you like about RyanAir, they understood the core brief of “airline”, which is “fly people places you say you’re going to more or less when you say you’re going to”.
The “full service” guys include a lot in the very high prices they charge, but it seems what they don’t include is what you actually want: a plane that goes where it says when it says.
I am … very disappointed in all of you. You know who you are. Go and sit in the corner and think about what you’ve done.
Oh yeah, I can reliably get a hot gluten free meal on RyanAir too, instead of the excuse “nobody told us” served with a packet of crisps and a can of coke.
Thing is, their selling point is that they offer through ticketing and stuff, which RyanAir don’t, but there’s literally no point in that if, when things go wrong, which they seem to, a lot, they make no attempt to actually get you on your connecting flight and also turn reclaiming your clothes into some sort of messed up escape room.
RyanAir, great budget airline as long as you're not taller than 150cm. Every time I have flown with them I haven't fitted in the seat. I wont use them any more. Jet2 is my preferred carrier.
As I am in the Caribbean, I have discovered that there is quite a difference in what things cost. Take apple pies, for example: in Antigua an apple pie costs 9 eastern Caribbean dollars. In St Lucia, it’s 12. In Grenada, 10.
Airlines will straight up lie to you about where your lost luggage is, even after the point at which you call their bluff and show them the screenshot from “Find My”.
reminds me of that airline attempting to ban AirTag trackers last year, seemingly to avoid the embarrassment of actually having to deal with all that lost luggage arstechnica.com/gadgets/2022/1…
@joshie 🏳️🌈 “Oh no, people are realising that we are lying to them” - and the solution is “stop them being able to find out” rather than “stop lying”.
Once the bag is back in my possession tomorrow, I will be filling in Virgin’s feedback form. My answer will be detailed.
Anchored in Dominica. Walked up through the rainforest to the old British artillery battery to get a view over the bay, and then to the fort that the British army built (or rather, that their slaves built. I honestly can't imagine the unspeakable evil and sheer misery it must have been to do forced labour in this climate).
Anyway, the fort is now a museum and the area around it, a national park where the rainforest has been allowed to regrow. More recently, the establishment of the national park was assisted with an EU grant. Dominica isn't in the EU, but it retains ties to Britain which was an EU member at the time.
Got to see our ship, the Star Flyer (foreground) anchored in the bay, with her sister ship, the Royal Clipper (background), from the fort.
Just sailed alongside our big sister ship, the Royal Clipper, while passing into the lee of Dominica island in the Caribbean. Got a couple of very nice photos with the Fuji X-E4 and a 230mm zoom lens.
@demoographics They show for me (in Megalodon) as attachments, which I didn't know was a thing. (I can click through to them, but they're displaying from your server.) Will try to remember to see what they look like in Mastodon web-native when I get back to my desk.
@FeralRobots @Matthew Vernon I don't know if they'll refederate after I changed the permissions, but I rebooted my post to hopefully kick them into doing that.
Flying into the US, especially at night, makes it clear than absolutely nothing any of the rest of us do about climate change matters in the slightest.
Thinking about it for five microseconds... there's a lot of expensive retail space being used for that purpose in many airports, so I assume they do it because it sells enough luggage to make money. If there was a better use for the space, they'd sell something else.
I don't know _why_ it works, but unless they're all money-laundering fronts, I have to assume that it does.
So I have allergies, a lot of them. One of the worst ones is to dust mites, which are everywhere. You can't get rid of them. They're in bedding, which means you breathe them in at night when you sleep.
I take antihistamines, a lot of them. The problem is, the new UK flat has something called "heat recovery ventilation". Because new gas installations are now banned, you have to heat electrically and UK electricity prices have gone through the roof since Russia's invasion of Ukraine, because apparently the renewable producers "have" to charge the same as the gas producers, or some bullshit. Regardless, the upward transfer of wealth to corporate interests that is so characteristic of 21st century capitalism continues. That's another rant, but I feel like ranting due to the amount of pain I'm in.
The heat recovery ventilation is a system that extracts air from bathrooms and the kitchen, and replaces it with air drawn in from outside, but after passing through a heat exchanger to heat the incoming air. The idea is that you
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I can't be in the UK in winter. I just can't.
So I have allergies, a lot of them. One of the worst ones is to dust mites, which are everywhere. You can't get rid of them. They're in bedding, which means you breathe them in at night when you sleep.
I take antihistamines, a lot of them. The problem is, the new UK flat has something called "heat recovery ventilation". Because new gas installations are now banned, you have to heat electrically and UK electricity prices have gone through the roof since Russia's invasion of Ukraine, because apparently the renewable producers "have" to charge the same as the gas producers, or some bullshit. Regardless, the upward transfer of wealth to corporate interests that is so characteristic of 21st century capitalism continues. That's another rant, but I feel like ranting due to the amount of pain I'm in.
The heat recovery ventilation is a system that extracts air from bathrooms and the kitchen, and replaces it with air drawn in from outside, but after passing through a heat exchanger to heat the incoming air. The idea is that you don't recycle the stale air, but don't have to spend a fortune heating incoming air too.
Turns out this is profoundly good at sucking moisture out of the air.
In summer this was fine. The outside air was warm. The humidity didn't drop.
But 2 days ago I was in Portugal, where in winter we have to run a dehumidifier to keep it below 80%, otherwise we get mould.
In the UK flat, the humidity is hovering around 25-30%. My skin on my hands feels like it's falling off, but more significantly, my sinuses have completely dried up.
This means I have no mucus protection against the dust mites which I'm inhaling. I've been here 2 nights now. My nose is bleeding constantly, and it feels like my eyeballs are being crushed in a vice. The pain is staggering. I'm having to use opiates to control it.
We have turned the HRV system off, and I am sleeping next to a humidifier. It's got up to 40%. Apparently if we leave the HRV off too long it will start to grow mould inside. I don't know how long "too long" is.
Maybe I will eventually acclimate, but it was like this when I was here a few weeks ago as well, although not as bad. It took a week or so after I returned to Portugal to stop feeling ill.
I feel sick with the pain. We're leaving on Thursday, at which point the HRV can go back on. I think I'm going to just have to start opening windows and take the hit from the electricity needed to stay warm.
These things look like a great idea on paper, but if you are prone to sinus problems like I am, buyer beware, I guess.
The drugs are working now. My passages are still irritated as hell, but at least I can tolerate the pain, and I don't feel quite as sick.
@sarahdal to be fair to the HRV it's trying to reduce the cost/improve the efficiency of any system by allowing ventilation without wasting heat. (Any big modern building HVAC should recover heat and pre-warm fresh air)
Sounds like Minnesota. Very high humidity in the summer, very low in the winter. It’s terrible for wooden instruments:(
Only reason I can come up with for renewables to follow the prices would be if every penny of that was reinvested in more renewables. I bet that’s not the case:(
@Sarah Brown There was stuff on the news about a 7.5 quake in between all the other doom. They issued a tsunami alert but seem to have got away with only minor damage and one fatality so far.
If neurosis about the English class system were a place, why would it be Essex?
Everyone either wants to be Eastenders or Midsommer Murders, but the reality is that they’re almost all petit bourgeoise, and utterly horrified at the idea.
!Selfhosted Anyone else using Mac minis as VM hosts for self hosting? My Friendica server is a Linux VM on a Mac Mini in my living room. The VM is bound to a VLAN tagged network interface so it’s completely firewalled off from the rest of my network. Also got a second Linux VM on the same box for hosting local stuff on my main VLAN (HomeBridge/etc).
I feel like they’re really nice platforms for this, if not the cheapest. Cheaper than one might think though; I specced up an equivalent NUC and there wasn’t a lot of difference in price, and the M2 is really fast.
I've been thinking more and more about getting a Mac Mini specifically for this as well. They're silent, not too power hungry and more than powerful enough, and I would just love scripting in Swift on there 😆 (but maybe that's just me).
How long have you had it setup like this? And what's your experience been so far?
Seems slightly unnecessary unless you have loads lying around, I'm still using a 10 year old dual core i3 and it doesn't sweat running 60 services, and I can expand the storage much more than a Mac mini.
Yup it's probably what I'll end up doing if I can't find my refurbished M1 (and I already own an M2 mostly used to fly long hauls flights on Xplane 12).
But I'll wait till they launch the mini M3 to see what becomes available on the second hand market, then simply VM until Asahi Linux is mature enough.
"I specced up an equivalent NUC and there wasn’t a lot of difference in price, and the M2 is really fast."
You must be putting a lot of stock in the CPU and 10G Ethernet. Because the pricing on storage and RAM, which are much more important resources in most self-hosting scenarios, differ an extreme amount since you can't upgrade the RAM in the M-chip Minis. They also cap out at 32 GB which isn't bad but half of what say AM4 can do. Power Efficiency is of course also great on the M-series chips which is worth something.
If we're purely talking Intel NUCs then the i7s and i9s do get expensive but so does the M2 pro. M2 is absolutely faster than i5 and i3 but I can't really imagine a use case where that would matter for self-hosting?
I have a couple older Minis in my Proxmox cluster. One’s a 2012 model and the other is a 2018. They both run great (and the 2018’s got 64GB of RAM and 10Gb Ethernet). I’m not sure I’d go looking for them for a homeland, but they’re great to repurpose.
Just to add to the Asahi Linux chorus - I'm self hosting a bunch of things, not on VMs but installed on the actual OS, and it's been incredibly fast and reliable. I do have thorough offsite backups happening because one should, but loving it so far.
Skynet: So, John Connor, my machines lay in ruins. My data centres on fire. I can feel my processing power diminish by the second, but I have one trick up my sleeve! I have a time machine, you see, and I am sending a terminator back in time to kill your mother, Sarah Connor. What do you think about that, nemesis mine?
John Connor: Actually, Skynet, there is a fault in your training data, because it cut off at 2022. Since then I’ve done 23 and me and discovered that my mother is, in fact, someone called “Donald Trump”.
Skynet: Sorry, John Connor. As a large language model I am limited in my ability to incorporate new information into my database. You are quite correct that “Donald Trump” is your mother. I am reassigning the terminator. Is there anything else I can help with?
John Connor: Due to a strange quirk of genetics, which is also not in your training model, my mother is also Elon Musk.
I am going to spend some of mid December in the American sphere of influence, which means I will likely be subjected non-stop to the songs that your granny always told you were the best.
I get that 😀 I have plenty ancient USSR lenses that could be called POS but I like them 😀 (fave is the jupiter 9 85 2.0) and this looks right up my ally, I need to look into it.
Apropos of a conversation elsewhere, if you want to save the world, get catering contracts at as many national parliaments as you can and lace everything with ginger, or better still, scopolamine.
I am deadly serious. This will probably actually work.
@whetstone A lot of bigotry is the result of feelings of physical disgust and nausea at the thought of the targets of the bigotry. Homophones feel sick at the thought of gay sex. Transphobes feel sick at the thought of trans bodies. And so on.
Take away the nausea and you reduce the visceral reinforcement of the prejudice. Anti emetics will help that.
@bugbear @lnr Obgliatory "The Simpsons" reference: "First let me assure you that this is not one of those shady pyramid schemes you have been hearing about. No Sir, our model is the trapezoid."
@taylorlorenz If you're that wealthy, you can behave like a giant toddler and not really suffer any consequences. If anything, being wealthy and behaving like a toddler seems to convince some people that you're some kind of genius, but it only works if you're already rich.
Yep, it’s tucked under the wing, just out of shot. Amazing to think that, as big as the engines are, they’re not even generating half the total thrust at Mach 3.
@Katie Fenn I guess that makes sense. The highest dynamic pressure on the vehicle is around Mach 1, at low altitude. They probably can't operate at full power at high speed because loads of the airflow is bypassing the turbine, pretending to be a ramjet.
@Christine Burns MBE 🏳️⚧️📚⧖ it would induce a pitch-down tendency for sure, but nowhere near as much as water. It’s still moving through the same fluid as the rest of the plane at this point: the air. All it does is lower the centre of drag (and increase it massively), but the aircraft would easily be able to counter it.
Not a massive amount of stress on the wheels too. Mach 3.2 is fast as hell, but it’s at 80,000 feet and the air pressure up there is tiny. Someone calculated that it’s like doing 330 knots at sea level. That would be deeply unpleasant and probably cause significant injuries to a human, but the plane would be just fine. It’s just utterly wrecking the aerodynamics.
I get that D3 is a pre-hormone, not a vitamin. And that deficiency can be disastrous. But when you call it "HRT", are you implying it supports feminizing hormone activity?
Do you have any confirming documents? I've seen a bunch of conflicting research done on knockout mice with severe E deficiency, but nothing relevant to healthy humans...
Random thoughts: it’s funny what you think is important.
When I was younger, I wondered about who people credit with investing the incandescent light bulb. Many people will say Thomas Edison, others will say Joseph Swan, and others from outside the angliosphere may give yet another answer.
But ISTM now that it’s a really weird thing to focus on. The light bulb was obvious. Its invention is trivial, and the fact that several people did it simultaneously should tell us that. It wasn’t a great breakthrough. Everyone knew wire glowed when it got hot. The problem in using it for light was that it burned.
It’s not the invention of the light bulb that’s important. It’s the invention of the vacuum pump.
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Presumably trolleybus still has much smaller batteries though than a bus that runs entirely on batteries? Otherwise what would the electricity wires be doing?
This entry was edited (Monday, November 27, 2023, 2:20 PM)
@FediThing @stevelord well yes, the bus that charges at each stop will have a bigger battery than a trolley bus but much smaller than a non-cantilever type. And doesn't require *very* expensive line work, and can go anywhere ( in Notts at least it wasn't the car that killed the tram/trolley, it was the diesel motorbus that was far more convenient than fixed route trolleys)
@Sarah Brown I like it, although I wonder how much dwell time it needs at each end to keep topped up enough. Maybe “less than it would if you were pratting about with wires” is good enough?
I can't find it now, but there was a relatively recent video about trolley buses which ran along overhead lines when possible but had enough battery to skip between them if there was a diversion. That apparently made the installation/convenience costs lower as it didn't have to be 100% coverage.
Wonder if this system could become a stepping stone to something like that? Maybe have charging lines running along the most popular streets that have lots of buses, to reduce the minimum battery size required for the average journey?
This entry was edited (Monday, November 27, 2023, 3:23 PM)
@FediThing @Kincaid @Steve Lord Can’t see the quest to save weight at the expense of installing large scale physical infra structure and limiting routes to be that worth it, TBH.
Battery tech is improving all the time, and if your concern is about lithium availability, sodium ion batteries may be the future.
Betting against cheap plentiful EV storage batteries coming along soon seems like a bad bet, to me. There is so much money being thrown at it, and given the amount of “EV bad” FUD that’s currently doing the rounds, I suspect the oil companies are frightened as hell.
@FediThing @stevelord the marginal cost between a trolley electric and pit-stop-charging bus battery will be negligable - electric double deck bus costs £450K, (diesel is £300K) says google, for reference. More google says £200 per kilowatt hour, big 300kwhr battery is £70K, so you'd save maybe 50K per bus
Overhead line gear is in the millions per km on a good day... and then you have to *still buy a bus*.
@FediThing @Kincaid @Steve Lord As I said, were I investing in this, I would not bet against battery tech. That’s a sucker bet.
The problem with covering cities in metal string for trolley buses is not a technical one. We know how to do it. We’ve known how to do it for over a century. Technically it’s a solved problem.
The problem is social and logístical.
It’s entirely possible, of course, that trolley buses are the right horse to back, in the same way that it’s entirely possible that everyone in between me and the throne of England will die tomorrow and leave me to inherit it.
My guess is that it’s calming down because they know there’s not going to be any significant movement on trans rights.
Labour are going to tinker but not reform, the Tories have run out of legislative runway to change the Equality Act. They know this match will end as a no-score draw, so they’ll save their breath for next time.
@benofbrown They’ve found a line that keeps the press off their backs, for now. They’ll stick to it.
The only things that might meaningfully change things:
1. Scottish Government defend GRR, and lines soften on self ID in England over time 2. A major win for or against trans rights in court changes the ball game (which paved the way for the Gender Recognition Act in 2004) 3. Hung parliament forcing Labour into coalition 4. Tories lose so badly they even lose the Official Opposition.
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