frosted-flakes

Anyone who tried to pay for anything in Canada on 8 July 2022 knows that it's not that simple. The entire Interac network was shut down for over 15 hours, which meant that debit and credit payments through POS terminals were halted nationwide. It was chaos, I was away from home and was unaware that anything had happened because I had no phone service. There were long lines everywhere, and a stranger paid for my coffee with cash, because the single toonie I happened to have wasn't enough.

The cause of the failure was multi-fold: all of Interac's Internet links relied on the Rogers' network in one way or another, so when one went down, so did the other.

They are always pressurised during normal use. When they are depressurised because of a water main break or for maintenance (and they try to do this as little as possible), orders are given to flush the lines before drinking any of the water.

Lead solder hasn't been used in the US since 1986, when it was banned by the Safe Drinking Water Act.

It's not the width of the roads. It's about

- parking mandates that push everything very far apart because parking takes up a lot of space

- zoning restrictions that necessitate distant travel because your home is in a different sector of the city as your place of work, the grocery store, and places of leisure

- the disassembly of public transport systems after the war

- street design that makes it simply dangerous to travel on foot or on a bicycle, and extremely slow, because cars receive priority at all junctions

etc. etc.

The 3DS family of devices used standard SD and micro SD cards.

Oh it's definitely real, because I recognize the product I bought, and it all matches up perfectly to my records. It even has an old phone number on the letter (but current at the time), which is probably why they haven't called me.

I vaguely remember paying the duties and customs in cash to the driver, but I don't know for sure. This was likely the first international purchase I ever made that had a separate duties charge, and I remember being surprised by how much it was when it was delivered.

Any Logitech device that supported both Bluetooth and Unifying, such as the MX Master, allowed you to cycle through up to stored 3 connections of either type. The older, cheap devices generally only had a single connection.

Logitech also makes or made keyboards with 1-2-3 hot swap keys that allowed quick switching with a single press.

FedEx recently started sending me mail to my parent's address saying I owe them $65 for a product I bought from the US a while ago... in 2014. I wonder if this is related to the whole Trump tariff thing? I haven't paid it, and I won't unless there's a good reason for me to.

Yes we do.

https://caniuse.com/mdn-html_elements_marquee

The marquee element is deprecated but is supported by all major Web browsers.

HD has really good self checkouts though. They don't require any interaction with the touch screen except hitting "Done", nor do they have over-sensitive anti-theft scale systems.

It's just a wireless barcode scanner on a table with a receipt printer and a payment terminal. The screen shows everything you've scanned with pictures! and legible product descriptions, which makes it really easy to make sure you scanned everything correctly.

"The red one is gorgeous" would be the idiomatic way of saying that. Adding the word "colour" is redundant.

"Colourway" is just marketing-speak that is not common outside of tech reviewers.

For Apollo, the backup crew became the main crew two missions later (politics intervened on the last couple of missions, but this generally held true for all the manned Apollo missions).

> According to state law, all the money collected by local governments through paid fines can only be used for public safety initiatives like crossing guards and police training.

Should the broken flashing lights be fixed? Of course, and "school" times in regard to community safety zones should also be standardised state-wide.

What's the incentive for implementing misleading automated ticketing cameras if the revenue generated can only be used to do what the cameras already do? The purpose of the cameras is to improve safety. The money isn't going to Christmas bonuses so the police chief can buy a boat.

> “It’s violator-funded. If you don't want to pay $100, it is a very simple hack—don't speed in school zones and you won't get a citation.”

I have a set of bike lights from Topeak that will flash the main headlight into the eyes of oncoming drivers when the battery is low, even though it has a battery indicator on the top. It gives me a heart attack every time.

Some Bosch dishwashers do this, to let the steam escape quickly. Also, the controls are hidden at the top of the door, so it projects a red dot onto the floor when it's running, because it's so quiet that you would have no idea otherwise.

The specific use is to light the way when reversing. They are not intended for use as "reverse" indicators, even if that's what they're used for in practice. Trailers usually don't have reverse lights, for example.

I'm not sure how common the term is (I heard it in a YT video), but a "Dutch hill" is wind, because the Netherlands is very windy, and anyone who's ridden a bike in heavy wind knows that it can be just as much an obstacle as a moderate hill.

I sure that Amsterdam has plenty of Dutch hills.

Good design is just that: de-sign. US roads have so. many. signs. Instead of just designing the roads and streets to not need signs in the first place.

In Ontario a new speed zone is always signed with "BEGINS" below it, which is very helpful if you missed the last sign. I wish this was standard practice across Canada.

In much of Europe, including the UK, they have the concept of standardised "national" speed limits, which vary depending on the road type and which you are expected to know. When a road returns to the national speed limit, the sign is a white circle with a slash through it, indicating that there are no more local speed limits and the national speed limit is in effect.

If you look closely, you can see the springy retention clips in the plug. Below is a Stack Overflow answer with more details, it includes a link to the USB-C spec where you can also see the corresponding notches in the male part of the receptacle.

https://superuser.com/questions/1577898/how-does-the-retaini...

Also, some good USB-C cables have a very similar click to Lightning, including Apple's own USB-C cables. Lightning and USB-C are essentially the same design, except USB-C adds an automotive-style shroud around the male side.

USB-C uses an identical spring mechanism, actually, except the cord is the female side, and the port is male.

That depends on the cable. Apple's USB-C cables in particular have a very tactile non-squidgy click.

I did, and by many accounts CV is just as bad as Mozaik, although significantly more capable.

Mozaik is bad because it tries to do everything itself, badly, instead of adding functionality to established CAD software. That's the approach Microvellum takes with AutoCAD, and I expect it's probably a lot better software, but like everyone in this space except Mozaik, they do the whole "contact us for a quote" thing. In other words, it won't be cheap.

Do pedestrians need automatic detection? Not necessarily, although a beg button adds unnecessary friction.

Do cyclists need automatic detection? Yes, absolutely. If you think otherwise, would you want to park and exit your car every time you want to cross an intersection? It's no different for a cyclist.

The bit about Mozaik hits home. I use that software every day. It's terrible and I hate it and it's so bad that you have to quadruple check everything before cutting anything... but it does work, and it's cheap. The custom cabinetry company I work for has nested thousands of sheets of material using it, which has allowed the company to grow well beyond the manual cutting they used to do.

But the software is horrendously bad, and I struggle to understand how so many serious faults that have existed since the very beginning have never been fixed. Faults that hinder usability to the point you want to bash your head in. The fact that Mozaik is still in business (and has even been acquired!) is simply because there is no competition in the space—alternatives are either incredibly expensive (tens of thousands of dollars per year), or not suited to production use.

That's what turning around a train means. The point is that a train at a terminal station is "occupying" a disproportionately long section of track, and as a result you need a multi-tracking and a ridiculous number of platforms to allow storage of trains to handle enough trains... while a through-running station can achieve the same capacity with just two tracks and 2-4 platforms.

You can't? Refrigerators have always made a noticeable background noise as they cycle on and off.

The advantage of the newer variable speed scroll compressors in some high end fridges is that they can run continuously at a slower speed.

Are there are metro systems that run trains 30 seconds apart? I think the fastest is around 90 seconds.

Rarely used freight lines (aka branch lines) would never be automated, that wouldn't make sense. And some mainlines (I live near one) see as many as 4 100-car freight trains per hour. Those will never be less than one-man operation either, not least because at-grade crossings are everywhere.

Many service stations in Canada still operate this way.