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I live in a commie block — well, fashy block since it's Spain — and although the zone is something that in the US would be seen as "the projects", the zone is nicer than the surrounding neighbourhood: well oriented blocks with plenty of light, no inner courtyards, surrounded by parks, minimal walls with neighbours, etc. Something is failing in city planning when the absolute cheapest houses that were built in a post war economy to house poor families were more thoughtfully designed than the rest of the area under city hall code.

Fixed it:

> Zoning allows people _with enough money_ to choose the type of neighbourhood they want to live in.

The readme says there is also an additional device that can be used for copying the ERPROM, instead of doing it via the computer. It would be possible to integrate the copier in the firewall dongle but that would mean having a microcontroller in each device that is just used once, driving the unit cost and the size up.

The firewall dongle as it is is just holds an EEPROM, ancillary components, and the video passthrough traces.

It is worth noting that the Basque Country and Navarre have a special regime inside Spain, which roots back to the medieval _fueros_, going as far as having their own independent tax agencies. The rest of the autonomous communities have a lot of competencies devolved from the state (education, health, etc.) but are much more controlled by the central government.

I have found PlatformIO to be a good step up from the Arduino IDE: it generates a new environment for each project with a sane folder structure, and it is possible to dive into the implementation of any function just with the usual Ctrl+click. It helped me a lot to understand how the Arduino libraries worked under the hood and to make changes in them when I needed it.

I have read that niacin is used as a placebo, it has a very noticeable physical effect but no psychedelic properties.

Eliminating the middle step could be an option, then: isn't biowaste incinerated after collection? Just tell people to set fire to their discarded masks, many people are carrying hydroalcoholic gel which is quite a convenient accelerant.

Half kidding.

It's visually equivalent to a u, so without vowels it's still possible to get "fvck", for example.

Don't forget that although the base floats it is also tethered to the seafloor with chains and anchors! The mooring provides most of the stability, and if it were not tethered then it would not stay in place at all.

Yeah, because 100 years ago there were not any tramps, hobos or bums.

Well, we have already tried that with methadone clinics. To compete with the black market it needs to be the same product.

They are much more expensive to manufacture, since they are achieving that level of efficiency by using more LEDs and undervolting them, around four times the amount of a normal lamp. Big Clive did a complete teardown and reverse engineering in his youtube channel, if you are interested.

Modern work is as much a fundamental part of the human condition as much as hunting and gathering was before.

Pharma and mechanical engineering companies need IT people, too, even if their core business is not IT.

What? Does the fence itself vibrate and reproduce the sound? Or do you need to complete the circuit using the fence as the detector?

Tuna radar buoys are dropped regularly in the sea, and are quite a bit north of $500, I believe. They are not expected to be recovered, work completely off solar, and are closed solid. You need a magnet to turn them on through a reed switch, they don't even have a hole for a button to prevent water ingress.

We had a monitoring unit in a heavy aluminum box on a buoy a couple km off Biscay (the HARSHLab, heh...) that lasted half a year, until the stainless bolts corroded against the aluminum and the lid flew right off. Polycarbonate boxes have worked better for us.

My company [1] is developing a solution just like this one, with added inertial monitoring. It is meant for studying a vessel's or a platform's maximals movements at sea remotely, for fuel consumption optimization in principle, but it is also useful for black box purposes.

It does not use AIS but Iridium, so the device can relay custom information. In this case, it could have been useful to know about the vessel's health from how it was moving: it would have been very easy to know if it was going to sink if it would have begun to list to one side permanently, for example. It would have been just a matter of dropping our box and a big solar panel on deck.

[1] http://core-marine.com

A pyrotechnic battery disconnect, which I suppose cuts the connection to the battery instantly in case of accident to avoid shorting it. There are already pyrotechnic devices in cars: airbags are pyrotechnic, as well as safety belt detents. It's the fastest type of actuator.

Warning (NSFW?): if you're coming from HN, the link redirects to this somewhat entertaining image https://imgur.com/32R3qLv

Female mosquitoes need blood to obtain protein for the eggs. If they can't bite, they won't be able to reproduce either.

How traceable is buying through Aliexpress? I bought a couple of LoRa modules there last year.

Some professors take as a badge of honour to pass only the bare minimum of students they can get away with each year, at least in Spain. If there aren't enough passing grades to reach that legal minimum, they just give everyone from a certain grade up a 5.0.

On top of that, there are no limits on how many times you can retake a class, it is not unusual to be stuck with the same class for three or four years until you manage to pass.

Just to clarify, Industrial Engineering in Spain is a generalist engineering degree (mechanics/electricity and electronics/fluid mechanics/materials/etc). What the rest of the world calls "industrial engineering" is called "organization engineering" here.

The main difference between grades in Spanish engineering schools and the rest of Europe seems to be that the grade curve is heavily compressed between 4/10 and 6/10 (passing grade is 5/10). The amount of study needed to reach a passing grade would amount to an A elsewhere. As long as 25% (IIRC) of the students pass there are no consequences for the department. If less people pass, they just award a 5.0 to everyone from a certain grade up, they don't do curves. It is not unusual for people to retake a class for three or four years in a row.

There is not much guidance from professors either, no homework or extra assignments. There is just one or two midterms and a final exam, and if you're lucky there will be official course materials to study from but that is not a requirement. Most exchange students have a pretty bad time here, but on the other hand Spanish students abroad usually ace their exams with half of the work they are used to.

At least in Europe, since the introduction of the bag surcharge, the new plastic bags are thicker and much stronger. At most, they get punctured, but I have never had one break open on me.

Hmm. I hate to play the skeptic, but this "HMD vortex generator" looks like a cold fusion device. It somehow fuses deuterium nuclei into alpha particles while their electrons fall out and are harvested. On top of that, the slideshow claims that the rupture of the hydrogen bonds in water generates electricity (!).

The fact that it needs both a capacitor and a battery bank to be able to output electricity seems sketchy, too.

Edit: The homepage is full of UFO and conspiracy stuff. So, yeah, it very likely is a scam.

There is a LaTeX bot in Telegram, my mathematician friends use that in their group chats.