germinalphrase

Potentially. Depending on the style of skiing, you may only need a 2-3 ft wide pathway. That said, ski paths tend to be cleared of trees/large rocks and span about 10-15 feet wide.

I explored reviving an old iPod for my son, but that route proved cost prohibitive. Instead, I bought an Innoasys Y1. It supports RockBox (and, somewhat uniquely, Bluetooth with RockBox) and I was able to create a customized CoverFlow landing surface so my son (still learning to read) can listen to music and podcasts freely. It’s been great.

The Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act (FERPA) is the educational equivalent to HIPPA.

Do you have a water drain in your bathroom floor?

This is uncommon in the US, so a bath overflow quickly becomes a significant structural issue.

For a long time, no - it was completely unusually for my work that references biological information about migratory birds/other (innocuous) seasonal phenomena.

About a month or two ago, they must have tightened the black list on bio topics as it became more willing to process requests without visibly downgrading to Opus.

There is ~10-15% markup for Costco online delivery orders vs in-store prices.

For anyone trying start a small business, it’s frustrating to go through dozens to hundreds of potential company names before you can find a reasonable URL that isn’t being squatted for 4-5 figures.

What positive outcome comes from squatters sitting on unused domains?

Have you tried getting a good, unused name today? Anything remotely close to a dictionary word, if unused, is squatted with a $xx,000 price tag. Do registrars get a cut of these sales prices because it seems ridiculous to allow squatting.

I grew up in a small town in the upper Midwest and always had a strong pull toward the neighboring forests, streams and wetlands. There was a lot of wonder at that age, but I wasn’t prepared to really start contextualizing the depth/breadth of information until I was much older (which has obvious parallels to the systems/complexity thinking I enjoy elsewhere in my life/career).

As an adult, I have found great value in assistive tools Merlin and Seek/iNaturalist for bird and plant identification. I would encourage everyone to try out Merlin at least once to learn more about all the great variety of birds in your neighborhood.

I am also building a personal tool that captures and analyzes various environmental data sources (GIS, weather, phenological factors, species-specific habitat factors, etc) so that I can explore landscapes/ecosystems in my area (Minneapolis and MN/WI more broadly) to make the ecology/terrain legible and support observing various target species (fungi, migratory birds, fish runs, wildflower blooms, and so on).

The format of the tool is very map/visualization/dashboard heavy which is fine for me - but carries too much bulk for friends and family. The project for this fall/winter is rewrapping the iOS experience around a quiet phone/watch/earbuds field-mode that only surfaces information/guidance/cue-stake recognition in skill-preserving/developing and eyes-up/phone away experience.

It’s a fun project.

Let’s assume that all human labor goes through the same transition as agriculture: within a single human lifetime, 98% of all the human work is replaced by highly efficient machines and a small minority of highly productive people. If only 2% of the population have the required skills/talents/ownership to remain productive, on what basis does the remaining 98% participate in the economy? The answer has always been: people will invent new ways to be economically productive, but if the agriculture ladder of labor generalizes across the economy - what is left for the average, unexceptional, run-of-the-mill man on the street?

Increasingly, the answer is a “what”, not a “who”.

That’s interesting. I find it completely unusable for even simple reviews of existing project documentation that I wrote for an iOS app that isn’t even in public distribution.

Or link sales commission to delivery success, and have no sales people...

You have a source to share for that framing of the tax spend?

I actually think it is not cheap enough. Start adding basic, standard features and the price doesn’t look as competitive against legacy manufacturers. Do those manufacturers offer an equivalently cheap EV today? Maybe, but probably not. Though they could, and if they did, Slate is probably toast.

Someone created that environment within which you thrived. What is preventing you from doing the same for some other small group, early in their careers?

insurance compliance?

Communication is not deterministic. Communication cannot take place without a selection of communication method, and there are inherently subjective and lossy parts to any communication attempt. Aligning my communication method to the specific audience could be "just telling them what they want to hear", or it can be telling them what I intend to communicate in a manner that are prepared to/capable of understanding, i.e. "reading the room".

North-facing (in the US) tends to produce earlier due to the increased warmth with south facing producing mid to late season. Fruiting has been suppressed by me due to lack of rain. Best of luck!

My maps aren’t in public release, but reach out if you want to give it a look.

I’m building a small map application that allows me/friends/family to explore data overlays about morel mushrooms phenology and habitat (ground temp/moisture/terrain/aspect/tree species/etc) in our area. There’s some lightweight forecasting and timing models to help guess at near-term fruiting. I had a big push about a mouth ago to tighten things up, and initial experiences in the field this year have been very promising.

I’ll keep chipping away at it this year, and probably expand beyond morels to other seasonal natural phenomena that my people enjoy like smelt/salmon run, wildflower blooms, etc.

Yes - there’s interesting research on subvocalization.

Sky Rover is releasing binoculars that are very comparable to alpha tier Euro brands. I tested their Banner Cloud 6x32; the total build quality package isn’t quite there against my Swarovski 7x42 SLC, but optically the Sky Rover is excellent.

I started hand carving and painting fishing lures a few years back, mostly from gathered or gleaned materials.

It started as something to keep my hands busy in the Minnesota winter evenings, but there is actually quite a lot of depth to the materials/buoyancy/fluid dynamics that dictate how the lure moves in different water conditions. Each one is also a little work of art which is nice.

“ I've looked at three non-engineer vibe-coded businesses in the past month, and can tell that without taste, they're building a pretty mediocre product at best.”

Are you doing this altruistically for friends - or as a consultant?

“potentially makes humans inter-planetary”

What is the realistic, non-science fiction appeal of this?

Aren’t these kind of borderline fraudulent business practices the sort of thing state attorney generals are supposed to investigate?

Nobody takes “age-restricted account[s] for children” seriously.

Parental controls and age-restrictions are almost universally half-baked, buggy fig leafs to displace negative attention from software and content providers.

You’re overthinking my recommendation. It’s a one-time comment to set expectations. Nothing more.

I have found there’s a reciprocal nature to it. If I keep trying here and there, the friend more often than not does try me back in turn.

Many of us have kids/demanding jobs - so feeling free to just call when I’ve got ten minutes alone in the car means - at minimum - one of us is free at that time.

My perspective is very simple: our homes are simply a lot more comfortable than they used to be.

We have better heating/air conditioning, endless television/video games/entertainment, large refrigerators, lower density, etc and so on.

Back then, home covered a narrower set of needs - so the default option was to spend time elsewhere, even if it was just to escape the noise/heat/smells/smoke of home for a minute.