Buelldozer

joined 2 years ago
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[–] Buelldozer 1 points 4 hours ago* (last edited 4 hours ago)

I’ve been hearing a lot about how unreliable the F-35s have been with it being hard to even get them off the ground half the time due to the maintenance needed on them.

The F-35 requires roughly the same amount of mmh / fh as the Gripen, exclusive of engine and air-frame. What's been hampering the readiness rate of the F-35, which is below that of the Gripen, is the lack of maintenance depots. This was always going to happen because Lockheed planned from the beginning to sell the planes first and build the maintenance depots later. The F-35 sold so well that it outstripped the capacity to build the maintenance depots which created a lack of on-hand parts and technicians. This is turning around and readiness rates are improving as Lockheed slowly gets caught creating maintenance yards.

The Gripen has lower sales (that's not a knock on it) which made it easier for Saab to keep up on the maintenance side. They also try to get maintenance depots setup simultaneous with deliveries. IMO they've done a better job of managing things.

[–] Buelldozer 5 points 4 hours ago* (last edited 4 hours ago)

Meh, the politicians can say whatever they want. The Market talks a lot louder.

Coal production in the United States is down 60% from it's peak in 2008 (1172 vs 526). In that same time frame Wind Power is up from 55 Tw/h to 425Tw/h and Solar Power is up from 864Gw/h to 164,502Gw/h.

We still have a long ways to go but there's been massive changes in the last 15 years.

[–] Buelldozer 1 points 5 hours ago

You should also be changing with time to take advantage of such technological growth.

Whoo boy that's funny, thanks for the chuckle. I've been technology professional so long that I literally predate NAT. To say that I've changed with the time would be an understatement.

TVs are admittedly geared towards single wide screen tasks like the obvious: media consumption.

Huh, media consumption. You mean like Lemmy or any other web media?

That’s what additional monitors can be used for; but the point is with a single wide monitor you don’t have to run a second monitor.

Here's where we diverge and despite considering the issue for several hours now I'm still not sure if this is a generational issue or something else. Obviously I'm from the time before widescreen and it looks like to me like you're trying to use a workaround (multiple windows on a single screen) to justify what is objectively a downgrade in display technology.

You are in essence saying "Yes I know the monitor doesn't have enough vertical space but you are supposed to use the extra horizontal space to overcome that." I am going to counter by saying that computer monitors shouldn't be 16x9, that's a TV / Movie format forced into the computer industry by display makers who wanted to leverage their investment in television panels to produce cheap computer monitors. In short you are forcing yourself to find ways to work around display tech that doesn't fit the use case; the screen is wider than it needs to be while not being tall enough.

Amusingly I was discussing this with a peer about an hour ago and he brought up ultra wide monitors like the Samsung Odyssey QD-OLED G9 (5120x1440) and after looking at it we decided that a monitor with the same physical width (48") but double the physical height (20" vs 40") and double the horizontal resolution (2880) would be near perfect. With such a monitor there would be so much real estate that app windows would stay large enough to be readable while still being capable of displaying lots of data vertically.

You could mount one vertically, you could use different sized displays, you could stack them.

Ahhh, now we hit the rub. I do a lot of remote GUI work and what I'm dropping into expects widescreen and uses all of it. Downscaling that into an app window makes the problem worse because it leaves large areas unused horizontally and there's still not enough vertical. I could flip a monitor to portrait but then it's too narrow to be handled correctly because what was a lack of vertical resolution has now become a lack of horizontal resolution. This is another symptom of 16:19 being a bad aspect ratio for computer displays.

Be your own person.

This person is seriously considering a pair of frameless ultra widescreen displays in a vertical stack. Expensive AF but potentially oh so usable.

You do you with multiple app windows squished to fit into today's displays. If it works for you then it works for you.

Enjoy your day.

[–] Buelldozer 2 points 9 hours ago (1 children)

Saying “You’re using it wrong” is blaming the user for using the computer the way it was presented out of the box.

It's also the way we've used computers for nearly fifty years and the way we interact with every other display in our lives. As examples almost no one uses less than the full wide of their TV, Smart Phone, or Tablet. There's no reasons that computer displays should be any different and they weren't until pretty recently.

[–] Buelldozer 2 points 9 hours ago (1 children)

If you’re using anything full screen, you’re doing it wrong

I'll make sure to start watching YT videos in tiny little boxes like we did in the 90s and 2000s. 😜

I have 3 curved monitors in the home office. Left monitor is browser, center monitor is primary task, right monitor is comms or secondary task. I can't track more than three things at a time anyway and I bought these big ol' curved monitors for a reason.

This is how computer monitors have been used since I first touched an Apple II+ in 1980. It's how you use every other display in your life. The problem isn't with people using apps full screen.

[–] Buelldozer 2 points 10 hours ago (6 children)

Stop making a single browser window full screen and use the additional space on the side for something useful.

So stop using monitors the way I've been using them since 1982? Stop using them the way that literally every other screen I interact with functions?

A chat application, a notepad, a calculator, file browsing, a second browser window, documents, etc.

That's what 2nd and 3rd monitors are for.

Or rotate the display to be tall instead of wide if you really want the extra vertical space.

That's not so easy when you're using multiple curved monitors with a stand or mount.

I get what you're saying, I really do, but from my point of view it's incorrect. It breaks the usage paradigm that's been in place since these things were invented and there's no other screens in our lives where we intentionally use less than the full width available for a single task.

[–] Buelldozer 2 points 22 hours ago* (last edited 22 hours ago)

But web devs seem universally to assume that if it’s a tall narrow screen, to show the mobile version.

Web Devs are also highly allergic to using the 25% of the screen on both the right and left so only the middle 50% is useful space. It's god damned infuriating!

[–] Buelldozer 3 points 22 hours ago (19 children)

With that in mind; a wide monitor is useful for ... web browsing

Are you serious? As I'm typing this comment Lemmy has just over 4" of totally unused space on the left of my monitor and 3 1'2" of unused space on the right!

Seriously, see for yourself!

Granted that's not the fault of the monitor but not only does widescreen reduce the amount of viewable area top to bottom modern web hackery doesn't even fucking use all of that extra space side to side!

I have about the same viewable area now as I did in 2000 with a 20" "square" monitor!

[–] Buelldozer 3 points 4 days ago

I have my smoke / CO detectors, KIdde Z-Wave units, tied to my Home Assistant setup. HA will push a notifier to my phone if the smoke or CO alarm goes off and it's able to track the battery life and let me know I need to change them before they start beeping.

[–] Buelldozer 10 points 6 days ago

"Bans ARs" but specifically exempts the Ruger Mini-14. 😂

 

Great news for those of who are still carrying a torch for TES: IV

 

As originally conceived, the House was supposed to grow with every decennial census. George Washington spoke just once at the Constitutional Convention — and on its final day — to endorse an amendment lowering the ratio of constituents to members to 30,000.

Today, House members represent roughly 762,000 people each. That number is on track to reach 1 million by mid-century.

10
submitted 7 months ago* (last edited 7 months ago) by Buelldozer to c/linuxmint@lemmy.ml
 

One of my computers is an HP Elitebook X360 1040 G8 (convertible) and I'm happy to report that in Laptop Mode both LM21 and LM22 work perfectly. There's full control of the normal hardware including the touch screen, good performance, and good battery life.

With a couple of exceptions Mint also handles the shift to tablet mode pretty damn well. The keyboard and trackpad are disabled, the keyboard backlight shuts off, and the screen easily changes orientation with rotation.

The exceptions though are so fundamental to touch screen use in general though that I feel like I must be missing something?!

First and foremost is an on screen keyboard. I know it can be enabled under accessibility settings but when I do that it splashes up a keyboard that permanently fills half the screen. If I close the keyboard window it goes away but I can't find a way to get it to come back except to unfold the machine and re-enable it again.

It may not be possible to make it launch predicatively, although Gnome itself does. but why isn't there an icon at the top or bottom of the screen that I can tap to bring it back on demand?

The second one is scrolling, especially in Firefox. I know that Grab and Drag is possible because you can do it with the regular Firefox scroll bar but the scroll bar can be difficult to get on because of it's size and even then the scrolling action is backwards of both iOS and Android. This should be fixable be enabling gestures but surprisingly gestures don't have any assignable scroll functionality.

I'm really confused by these two issues. They seem so fundamental to how a touchscreen is used, especially the on screen keyboard, that it seems impossible they weren't addressed year ago. It's far more probably that I'm missing something obvious, but what?

6
I tried LMDE "Faye". (self.linuxmint)
 

I've had at least one computer with regular Mint + Cinnamon installed since V19 and it's always worked well for me. I somehow only learned about LMDE last month and since I've previously run Debian I figured I'd give it a shot.

I took the drive with my LM22 installation out and installed a brand new 1TB NVME, put LMDE "Faye" on it and YIKES.

I'd forgotten how "raw" regular Debian is in nearly everything from Grub to package management and even Cinnamon is somehow less sharp and sort of lackluster on LMDE.

The first boot up went okay but trying to swap the nouveau drivers for the Nvidia drivers did not go well at all and somehow ended up with all the fonts and icons broken.

I couldn't figure out how to fix it and decided to simply re-install LMDE from scratch, no big deal.

On the 2nd install I started getting AER errors on boot and every time I rebooted I got more of them. At one point the DE locked up entirely and I had to manually power cycle the machine. I couldn't get to the desktop after because of an endless string of AER errors.

In between reboots, while I could still get into the desktop, I was installing updates and while that process was pretty much the same as regular Mint it was also slower, even after changing over to the fastest repositories available. The update manager also didn't work as well. For instance the first update run said it was complete and wanted a reboot but before I could do that the update manager automatically ran again and it showed me all the updates it had just installed as needing installed again. WTF?

After frustrations with the Nvidia drivers, the weirdness of updating, broken desktop environment, and the AER errors I decided to see what would happen if I installed regular LM22.

With LM22 on that exact same hardware, including the new NVME, everything works perfectly. No errors, Nvidia drivers installed without issue, updates worked as expected and Cinnamon looks and behaves just like you'd expect.

Swapped out the NVME for the original drive that had LM22 on it and it too works just like I'd expect.

I'm not running weird-o hardware either; it's a Gigabyte motherboard and an Intel i5 10700k with 32G of RAM and an Nvidia 2060. No overclocking or performance tweaks.

I have no idea what I did wrong, if anything, or why LMDE seems to hate my hardware but for me on that system LMDE is not at parity with regular Linux Mint.

17
Well Hello There! (self.announcements)
submitted 10 months ago* (last edited 10 months ago) by Buelldozer to c/announcements
 

Yes I am actually an OG Star Wars nerd. I saw the release of "New Hope" in the theater on opening weekend with my Dad. We've actually seen every SW movie in the theater together. Yes all of them.

Anyway I'm a new Admin here at lemmy.today and @mrmanager@lemmy.today asked me to introduce myself so here goes.

As a GenX my 'online' experience started back in the mid-80s using my Commodore to dial into BBSs then it was BBSs on my custom built 286 (Computer Shopper FTW!) By the early-90s I was running rampant on CompuServ using my Tandy 386, in the mid '90s it was AOL on my IBM Aptiva, and by the late 90s it was ISP connections on my custom built Pentium II PCs.

Along the way I've participated in the rise, fall, and replacement of all the Operating Systems, Applications, Forums, and Aggregators that the last four decades have had to offer. (Dammit I'm old!)

Like many Lemmy users I ~~left~~ escaped Reddit last summer when they started seriously enshittifying the site in the IPO runup. I was actully on lemmy.world first but ended up here after they had too much downtime and too many defederations. I like it here, it's a fast and fairly open instance with very little drama.

Speaking of admin / mod styles mine is "Digital Janitor" and I really try to be as no/low drama as possible in that role. I'm here to to keep this instance functional, federated, and the content in line with whatever policies mrmanger or a community sets for itself. I clean up after spammers, remove objectionable or illegal content, and help with user management. That's pretty much it. I'm simply not interested in the power tripping rot that seems to infect so many Admins / Mods.

I ended up as Admin through an offer to help mrmanager when some other instances were threatening to defederate us due to spam and content problems. In the thread where it was being discussed I offered to lend a hand and the next thing I knew I had a red "A" next to my name! (I'm joking, they did actually ask me first and I took a couple of days to think about it before I agreed.)

I'm around quite a bit so if you run into something that needs attention feel free to reach out. 🙂

 

New York may become the first state to bar gun companies from selling pistols that can easily be converted into machine guns.

14
submitted 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) by Buelldozer to c/protonprivacy@lemmy.world
 

I read the sidebar and didn't see anything about asking questions so apologies in advance if this post breaks a rule.

I'm in the U.S. and wanting to knowif Proton Family is a good choice for my use case.

Two decades ago I got tired of changing email addresses whenever my ISP changed so I registered my surname as a .net vanity domain and started running my own email server at home. When Google started offering Google for Organizations for free if you had less than 10 users I folded up my personal email server and shifted everything over. We use it for e-mail and basic family calendaring.

Last month when going through bills my wife and I were once again frustrated by coordination required to sign into various accounts. "Hey what's the password for $CreditCard?" or "What's the MFA you just got for $BankAccount?" or "What's the password for Disney"?"

That got me started looking for a family password manager so we could easily share and keep this stuff up to date.

At the same time we realized that were paying for YouTube TV, YouTube Premium, two YouTube Music, and an Amazon Music subscription. Whoops.

Well, no problem. We'll just "family share" the YTTV and YTP subscriptions so everyone has everything and we save some money.

Nope. G-Suite doesn't allow family sharing. So we're all going to have to create seperate @gmail.com addresses to make this work. Oh, and I'll have to shift the YTTV subscription from my vanity domain to a regular @gmail as well. Which breaks the entire idea behind the vanity domain in the first place.

While I researching a Family Password Manager of course I found Proton Pass. While I was looking at the pricing for it I realized that they also have a "Family" setup for email which looks interesting.

So now I'm considering porting my vanity domain and all it's email out of G-Suite and over to Proton Family. At nearly $300 a year it's not exactly inexpensive, since I'd basically be paying it until I die, and it will be a fair bit of work to switch everything over so I don't want to do it unless it's going to work.

So would Proton Family be a good choice? Are there any significant technical challenges to migrating a custom domain and email out of G-Suite and into Proton?

Edit: This post was rambly and unclear. The TL;DR is that I’m increasingly annoyed with G-Suite and since I’m looking at Proton Pass anyway I'm wondering about Proton Suite (which includes Email, Calendar, and Pass).

16
submitted 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) by Buelldozer to c/homeassistant@lemmy.world
 

Always surprises me when I go to do something in HA and realize that I can't figure out how.

This time its lights, specifically making sure that they don't get left on.

Until now I've simply been creating an automation for each light switch so that if it changes state from Off to On and when it's 30 minutes after sunrise it's starts a 15 minute wait and then changes the state of the switch to off.

This approach mostly works but it's less than ideal.

First I'm having to create an automation for each device. How do I do it by Area, or list / group of devices, instead?

Second if a device is turned on too early there's no state change for the automation to catch and it never fires. I could fix this by creating another automation that checks for it but then I'll have even more of them to manage.

Third this doesn't work very well if you want different things to happen on the weekends as opposed to during the weekday. For instance on a Saturday I may WANT that closet light to stay on longer because I'm putting away clothes.

It'd be really nice if I could program HA like this 'On a weekday if you see any device on this list turn on 30 minutes after Sunrise I want you to turn whichever one(s) it was off again 15 minutes later.'.

I'm must be missing something here because surely HA can do this, right?

5
submitted 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) by Buelldozer to c/general
 

Both FireFox on PC and Connect on Android keep signing me out, throwing general "error" messages, and refusing to load the next page.

Liftoff on iOS can't even find lemmy.today in order to add it as an instance!

I'm not seeing any discussion of these kinds of problems elsewhere but they've been consistent since the .19 upgrade and they've persisted after the .19.1 update.

17
submitted 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) by Buelldozer to c/homeassistant@lemmy.world
 

Shortly after the ratGDO v2.5 was released I ordered one and a couple of days later I ordered a case from Etsy to go with it.

Two days later the Etsy seller messages me asking if have the v2.5 or v2.5i because the cases are different. WTF? There's already a new version?! I tell the seller to make it the v2.5i because that's probably what I'll get.

So last week I received a very nice red case from the Etsy Seller HighTower3D out of the North Carolina. Seriously, this thing is nice. The build quality is high, it has magnets in the bottom for mounting, comes with allen screws (and the allen wrench you need) and a couple of little zip ties.

So this week my ratGDO shows up and...it's v2.52i! A quick check of the website shows that there's now a v2.53 and that makes four revisions in the last month!

You can't make this stuff up so all I can do is laugh...and give away the v2.5i case that I spent $26 on and doesn't fit the ratGDO version I ended up with.

I have no use for this case so I'm giving it away to someone who can; make sure you have a v2.5i though because this call will NOT fit any other version.

If you are in the United States and can use this case then leave a reply below. 😊

 

I ordered some sidewalk heating mats from HeatTrak and I want to automate them with HA so that they come on when it makes sense to do so based on the data from my Tempest Weather Station.

According to HeatTrack my mats will have a combined resistive load of 5A which is well within the spec of the Zooz ZEN05 or ZEN14, both rated for 15A resistive loads, but when I asked them about it they did not recommend using either of them with heated mats. They couldn't, or wouldn't, explain why and it doesn't make sense to me why this wouldn't work.

My next thought was to simply swap the outlet to something smart but this is an outdoor outlet so it needs to be GFCI and there's essentially no Z-Wave GFCI outlets made.

Do I really need to use something like an Enbrighten Z-Wave Plus 40-Amp contactor for this or am I missing something here?

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