Ah, Minnesota. L’etoile du Nord, how you always seem to be leading the country by example.

I too would like to know, for when I one-day build myself a bike trailer suited for home improvement store hauling. I imagine there’s isn’t an established standard for how linking the brakes would work, but if RVs in the USA are any indication, there would be an electronic brake controller that uses an accelerometer to control the trailer brake. So the input from the lead bike could be a binary signal, and the brake controller figures out what makes sense.

I would guess.

Overall, it looks like you’re done your homework, covering the major concerns. What I would add is that keeping an RPi cool is a consideration, since without even a tiny heatsink, the main chip gets awfully hot. Active cooling with a fan should be considered to prevent thermal throttling.

The same can apply to a laptop, since the intended use-case is with the monitor open and with the machine perched upon a flat and level surface. But they already have automatic thermal control, so the need for supplemental cooling is not very big.

Also, it looks like you’ve already considered an OS. But for other people’s reference, an old x86 laptop (hopefully newer than i686) has a huge realm of potential OS’s, including all the major *BSD distros. Whereas I think only Ubuntu, Debian, and Raspbian are the major OS’s targeting the RPi.

One last thing in favor of choosing laptop: using what you have on hand is good economics and reduces premature ewaste, as well as formenting the can-do attitude that’s common to self hosting (see: !selfhosted@lemmy.world).

TL;DR: not insane. Don’t forget IPv6 support.

I see. Given those constraints then, I don’t see any option besides a new heater. Ideally, the new heater would be built with less circuitry, so there would be fewer things to break.

Looking at the Adax Clea product description, it seems overly complicated for a radiator, IMO. I’m not sure I’d want triac switching for something like a heating appliance. Resistive heating doesn’t strictly require silicon switches, when a relay should work. But I suspect an equally-svelt radiator that’s also simple may be hard to find.

Big hills demand bigger sprocket ratios. :)

In all seriousness, the limiting factor will be the rider’s ability to keep balance while spinning on the cranks, in order to climb a hill at 0.5 km/h. I wouldn’t normally recommend it, but this is one of the few scenarios to attach an outrigger to a bicycle.

Would it be possible to rewire the supply wires so that it provides 230v line and neutral? That should make it easier (and hopefully cheaper) to select a heater, although the heater would not be as powerful.

My experience is mostly with repairing lower voltage devices (eg 12v to 54v PoE). In your case, a phase to phase short has made quite the mark on that PCB, and being a much higher energy event than low-voltage DC, its possible that some delamination has occurred, with downstream effects on expected trace resistance, capacitance, and leakage/creepage.

Were this a low-voltage board, I personally wouldn’t be worried about those downstream effects. But for AC line voltage, I’d rather buy myself the peace of mind. Do keep parts from the dead board that are salvageable, but IMO, a thermal event on the AC side of a 400vac board would disqualify it from continued service.

P.S. does that circuit not have an onboard fuse? I’m not seeing one and I’m kinda surprised. Presumably an upstream circuit breaker or fuse was what tripped to stop this turning into a fire?

If your employer is able to pitch in for the costs of that degree, even better!

As an aside, I’m a big fan of ongoing elective education, especially when it’s available on one’s own terms (eg night classes, flexible or hybrid assignments). It’s part of my bent that learning ends only when breathing ends.

My cursory read of the Minnesota licensure requirements indicate two options: the first is if the electrical work you want to do is sufficiently related to the job, and a licensed electrician can supervise your work, then registering as an unlicensed electrician in MN would allow you to do that work.

If that’s not possible, then option two would be to pursue a master electrician license, but not following the journeyworker path. That would mean you’d have to either have five years of relevant experience, or obtain an electrical engineering degree.

Also, hello again!

I use GnuCash, because it’s the only FOSS accounting package I’ve found that sensibly handles transactions that involve more than two accounts (aka “splits”) at a time. There’s a bit of a learning curve if you’re new to double-entry accounting, but it does support CSV import, can manually reconcile its records to whatever statement period you want, and can export to graphs or spreadsheets as needed. While highly capable, it can be used for simple cash-flow management as well.

It is, however, strictly a desktop app, and is wholly a separate endeavour to *GnuCash for Android". That said, one reason that I’ve continued to use GnuCash for the better part of a decade is because the UI basically doesn’t change. There’s not much room for enshittification when it’s all GTK-based. Anything else I want from this program, I can do using Python by crunching the data exported as a CSV file.

EDIT: to put into concrete terms why multi-split transactions are useful, I will offer two examples. The first is about granularity of expenses, such as a day at the thrift store. If I’ve acquired some home decor, a vintage shirt, and a trinket for my bicycle, then I would want to record the transaction as such:

• Assets:Cash: -$32
• Expenses:Home Furnishings: +$20
• Expenses:Clothes: +$7
• Expenses:Bicycle: +$5

This does take extra effort to break down into each expense category, but how granular you make your expenses is up to you. Certainly, some transactions wholly fall into one expense category (eg McDonalds as Expenses:Dining) and so there’s no big effort there.

The second example is about multiple money flows as part of the same logical action. Suppose that I treat my credit card as though it’s a debit card – to live within my means – and every time that I use the credit card, I move an equal amount of money from my checking account into my savings account, precisely to pay off the credit card bill at month’s end. This is how the transaction might look:

• Assets:Checking: -$67
• Assets:Savings: +$67
• Liabilities:Credit Card:American Express: -$67
• Expenses:Entertainment: +$67

When it comes time to reconcile (aka “balance my checkbook”), I can do that for each account, one at a time. So my checking account statement is reconciled to Assets:Checking, my savings account to Assets:Savings, and my American Express credit card statement reconciled to Liabilities:Credit Card:American Express. These can happen on their own cadence, since while the bank accounts might end on a calendar month, credit cards often use their own statement dates.

This seems like a lot of data entry, but seeing as GnuCash helpfully finds and clones fields when manually entering a new transaction, it’s almost like a copy/paste followed by a bit of cleanup. In my regular workflow, my typical transactions have two splits. The most irregular transaction I’ve ever created had 28 splits, because it involved donations to multiple charitable causes, split across cash, checks, credit cards, and US Treasury bonds (which paid interest upon withdrawal, and so had to be accounted as well).

At the very minimum, gym in the morning (but after coffee/caffeine, plus the time for it to kick in) is the enlightened way. It helps if your gym is nearby or you have a !homegym@lemmy.world .

I personally also use the wee morning hours to reconcile my financial accounts, since ACH transactions in the USA will generally process a day faster if submitted before 10:30 ET.

The photos taken by the sorting machines are of the outside of the envelope, and are necessary in order to perform OCR of the destination address and to verify postage. There is no general mechanism to photograph the contents of mailpieces, and given how enormous the operations of the postal service is, casting a wide surveillance net to capture the contents of mailpieces is simply impractical before someone eventually spilled the beans.

That said, what you describe is a method of investigation known as mail cover, where the useful info from the outside of a recipient’s mail can be useful. For example, getting lots of mail from a huge number domestic addresses in plain envelopes, the sort that victims of remittance fraud would have on hand, could be a sign that the recipient is laundering fraudulent money. Alternatively, sometimes the envelope used by the sender is so thin that the outside photo accidentally reveals the contents. This is no different than holding up an envelope to the sunlight and looking through it. Obvious data is obvious to observe.

In electronic surveillance (a la NSA), looking at just the outside of an envelope is akin to recording only the metadata of an encrypted messaging app. No, you can’t read the messages, but seeing that someone received a 20 MB message could indicate a video, whereas 2 KB might just be one message in a rapid convo.

So no, no billion dollar company can make their own training data

This statement brought along with it the terrifying thought that there’s a dystopian alternative timeline where companies do make their own training data, by commissioning untold numbers of scientists, engineers, artists, researchers, and other specialties to undertake work that no one else has. But rather than trying to further the sum of human knowledge, or even directly commercializing the fruits of that research, that it’s all just fodder to throw into the LLM training set. A world where knowledge is not only gatekept like Elsevier but it isn’t even accessible by humans: only the LLM will get to read it and digest it for human consumption.

Written by humans, read by AI, spoonfed to humans. My god, what an awful world that would be.

The Venn Diagram between essentials for an ebike vs an acoustic bike is a circle lol.

In all seriousness, it’s a good list of accessories to consider from day 1, for starting off with any bike, electric or otherwise. I grant you that this community might be a tad more familiar with ebike basics already, but I think it’s occasionally good to have content aimed towards people who haven’t ridden a bike since childhood.

If nothing else, it’s an easy link to send to someone who just bought/received their first bike this holiday season.

I didn’t get much further, due to the paywall. Not really sure where the article was going.

A few factors:

• Human population centers historically were built by natural waterways and/or by the sea, to enable access to trade, seafood, and obviously, water for drinking and agriculture
• When the fastest mode of land transport is a horse (ie no railways or automobiles), the long-distance roads between nations which existed up to the 1700s were generally unimproved and dangerous, both from the risk of breakdown but also highway robbery. Short-distance roads made for excellent invasion routes for an army, and so those tended to fall under control of the same nation.
• Water transport was (and still is) capable of moving large quantities of tonnage, and so was the predominant form of trade, only seeing competition when land transport improved and air transport was introduced.

So going back centuries when all the “local” roads are still within the same country (due to conquest), and all the long-distance roads were treacherous, slow, and usually uncomfortable (ie dysentery on the Oregon Trail), the most obvious way to get to another country would have been to get a ride on a trading ship. An island nation would certainly regard all other countries as being “overseas”, but so would an insular nation hemmed in by mountains but sitting directly on the sea. When land transport is limited, sea routes are the next best. And whereas roads only connect places situated along the route, the sea (and the sky) allow point-to-point trading, exposing faraway countries to each other when their ships arrive at the port.

TL;DR: for most of human history, other countries were most reasonably reached by sea. Hence “overseas”.

I’m taking a guess that perhaps the fridge makes similar assumptions that automobiles make for their lamps. Some cars that were designed when incandescent bulbs were the only option will use the characteristics resistance as an integral part of the circuit. For example, turn signals will often blink faster when either the front or left corner bulb is not working, and this happens to be useful as an indicator to the motorist that a bulb has gone bust.

For other lamps, such as the interior lamp, the car might do a “soft start” thing where upon opening the car door, the lamp ramps up slowly to full brightness. If an LED bulb is installed here, the issues are manifold: some LEDs don’t support dimming, but all incandescent bulbs do. And the circuit may require the exact resistance of an incandescent bulb to control the rate of ramping up to fill brightness. An LED bulb here may malfunction or damage the car circuitry.

Automobile light bulbs are almost always supplied with 12 volts, so an aftermarket LED replacement bulb is designed to also expect 12 volts, then internally convert down to the native voltage of the LEDs. However, in the non-trivial circuits described above, the voltage to the bulb is intentionally varying. But the converter in the LED still tries to produce the native LED voltage, and so draws more current to compensate. This non-linear behavior does not follow Ohm’s Law, whereas all incandescent bulbs do.

So my guess is that your fridge could possibly be expecting certain resistance values from the bulb but the LED you installed is not meeting those assumptions. This could be harmless, or maybe either the fridge or the LED bulb have been damaged. Best way to test would be installing a new, like-for-like OEM incandescent bulb and seeing if that will work in your fridge.

Does anyone want to even guess what time this clock is supposed to be indicating?

I support your goal of finding a not-car for you needs, and the other commenter discussed more about the electric motorcycle + sidecar idea.

That said, regarding operating a car without foot controls, my understanding is that there are add-ons which convert the typical foot controls (accelerator and brake) into hand levers. A random example. These range from mechanical linkages to the existing pedals, but could also be more complex or bespoke for a given car. That said, I have to imagine there’s a learning curve to using these controls, so it wouldn’t be dissimilar to learning how to ride a motorcycle.

I’m very pro-micromobility but also recognize that when nothing else in the toolbox fulfills the need, then it’s alright to use a car. I just wanted to make sure that option wasn’t overlooked.

Truly, it could be anything that unsettles the market. A bubble popping is essentially a cascading failure, where the dominos fall, when the house of cards collapses, when fear turns into panic, even when everyone is of sound mind.

The Great Depression is said to have started because of a colossally bad “short squeeze”, where investors tried to corner the market on copper futures, I think. That caused some investment firms to go broke, which then meant trust overall was shaken. And then things spiraled out of control thereafter, irrespective of whether the underlying industries were impacted or not.

So too did the Great Financial Crisis in 2008, where the USA housing market collapsed, and the extra leverage that mortgagees had against their home value worked against them, plunging both individuals and mortgage companies into financial ruin. In that situation, the fact that some people lost their homes, coupled with them losing their jobs due to receding market, was an unvirtuous cycle that fed itself.

I can’t speculate as to what will pop the current bubble, but more likely than not, it will be as equally messy as bubbles of yore. But much like the Big One – which here in California refers to another devastating earthquake to come – it’s not a question of if but when.

Until it (and the AI bubble popping) happens though, it is not within my power to do much about it, and so I’ll spend my time preparing. That doesn’t mean I’m off to move my retirement funds into S&P500 ex-AI though, since even the Dot Com bubble produced gains before it went belly up. I must reiterate that no one knows when the bubble will pop, so getting on or getting off now is a financial risk.

Preparation means to build resilience, to decouple my home from my job, to keep my family and community safe even when the shaking starts. For some, this means stocking food and water. For others, it means building mutual aid networks. And for some still, it means downsizing and making their lives more financially sustainable, before the choice is made for them.

This is a rollercoaster and we’re all strapped in, whether we like it or not.