I grow cayenne peppers to save money. One plant yields so many peppers that it’s legitimately profitable.

I do save money growing mint over buying it at the store, because mint is eternal. I’ve been making juleps and jelly out of the same mint plant for about 6 years now. But mostly I keep mint around because I like it.

Tomatoes? It’s not really about the money, it’s that grocery store tomatoes are designed for durability rather than flavor.

I’m a CFI.

when r/fuckcars thinks they know anything about aviation.

You’ll hit a point where the payload is so poor it isn’t worth operating.

Multiple redundant motors are heavy.

That ain’t gonna happen on a civilian airliner.

Blown wings are basically powered lift. You’re planning on bringing a civilian passenger plane down final approach at a speed it can’t glide at if the power plant fails?

I could see that for a carrier based aircraft where STOL is a factor but no you’re not doing that in airline operations.

The Gameboy Advance is a little weird, but most cartridge-based game systems featured little to no boot or loading time because the ROM chips in the cartridge are attached to the CPU the same way the RAM does (electrically speaking), and has similar performance. So game data, things like textures, sprites, level data, audio, are just…accessible to the CPU already. It has to do a very brief initialization to set up some variables but other than that everything is just ready to go.

On a disc-based system like Playstations, the game data is on an optical disc. So the game has to be read into memory from the disc before the game can start. That takes time, hence boot times and loading screens. PCs are similar, it takes time to load the game data from a hard disk or SSD or optical drive or diskette into working memory. Fun fact about this: CD-based games usually stored the background music as red book digital audio, so the console would load game data into memory, start executing it from there, then the optical drive just starts playing the disc like a normal CD simultaneously, which 1. allows the background music to be very high quality and 2. completely frees the CPU from that task.

Another fun fact, on at least some consoles it was possible to add additional RAM or even sound or graphics accelerators to the cartridge. Super Mario Bros 3 on the NES has additional RAM in the cartridge, Star Fox on the SNES has a 3D accelerator chip.

Every time I hear of an all electric aircraft of any size, I always wonder what they’re going to do about landing weight.

Every modern transport category jet has a higher takeoff weight than landing weight, because of the simple unavoidable fact that landings are rougher than takeoffs. Taking off, the load gradually comes off of the landing gear, on landing it’s suddenly applied. Jets burn tons, literally tons, of fuel enroute, so they’re considerably lighter on approach. It’s why aircraft have dump valves to jettison fuel overboard in case of forced landing early in the flight.

Batteries don’t get lighter as they’re discharged, so…?

Wait, it threw a fan blade, out of the nacelle?!

Gnome is trying to do their whole “Macintosh with a concussion” thing, there’s a handful of tiling window managers that are difficult to describe, but…kinda yeah. Most of us also use QWERTY keyboards that date to the 19th century.

My local ham club treats that ultramarathon as an emergency preparedness drill. It requires us to bring radio equipment out into the woods away from power outlets and cell phone coverage and spend a day communicating by VHF FM over rugged wooded terrain. It’s a pretty solid simulation of setting up an ad hoc communications system during a disaster scenario such as a hurricane, no? We’re there so that we can figure out when a runner has gone missing, approximately where on the trail, find them, and maybe call for help if they’re hurt. That’s not dissimilar to our mission when we man the emergency shelters for the purposes of “do you have enough diapers” or “is this missing person at your shelter?”

“Ad hoc disaster communications” can mean anything from keeping in touch with your party if you have to split up to getting news from the outside world to calling for help from the outside world. Frankly I think any of those LoRa networks are next to useless for that. The hardware is kind of pathetic, from my hands-on experience, and in a wooded area it’s almost designed to not work.

For getting news from the outside world, an AM radio receiver as installed in every car can hear for a few hundred miles during the day and a thousand miles at night. Commercial broadcast FM radio has a range of 50 miles or so assuming a receiving antenna at about chest height. I might recommend having and knowing how to use a television antenna. Powering a modern television from a generator and receiving over the air broadcasts might just get you a news conference with the governor or something.

This part is US centric: NOAA operates a network of radio transmitters in the 160MHz range broadcasting weather updates. If you don’t own one of those receivers, get one. They’re cheap, easy and useful.

Communicating with your own group, a family or neighbors or whatever your situation is, GMRS or MURS is a better solution. Both allow 20+ times the power than LoRa. MURS is VHF, just above the 2 meter ham band, it punches through foliage a lot better but is limited to simplex only. GMRS is UHF, just below the amateur 70cm band, not as easy to push through the trees but repeaters are allowed. Depending on your situation and what other folks in your area are doing, those are likely better choices.

Reaching out for help…the problem with something like LoRa for this is you’re relying on a bunch of very cheap, shoddy little radios to relay a message to…someone. CB might be a choice here, it’s a standard in the trucking industry and you might get some propagation, but being or knowing a ham is probably your best bet. Emergency comms is one of the stated purposes for creating the amateur radio service, that’s what the ARES service is for, if you’re really interested in emergency comms you should probably look into it.

systemd would be a fantastic OS if only it had an init system.

Linux has a wide selection of GUIs. For those comfortable with Windows I would recommend either Mint’s Cinnamon or KDE.

Might have something to do with the PC’s origin as a de facto industry standard: How the only actual IP rights IBM had over the 5150 (other than the IBM and Personal Computer trademarks) was the copyright on the BIOS. The rest of the machine was off-the-shelf parts that IBM had no ownership of. Compaq’s compatible but different BIOS won in court and that’s how we got a bunch of random vendors making compatible computers.

Funnily enough that happened during the “DIP switches for amount of RAM” era when the BIOS was pretty much entirely transparent to the user.

I’ve only briefly glanced under USBs hood, and holy shit I’m amazed it works at all.

Allow me to do further psychic damage: at the turn of the century, USB keyboards happened.

I remember seeing a prototype of basically a pair, a pneumatic dildo and a pneumatic fleshlight that would record force applied in various places on their working surfaces…somehow, and then transmit that data across the internet. The insurmountable problem was latency.

Correct. Doctor should have his head put through the wall. Use a stud finder so you don’t miss.

That’s cheaper than my current gaming PC was and I bought it before the RAMpocalipse, so…sold!