Unlurker

↙ time adjusted for second-chance

He set out to walk around the world. After 27 years, his quest is nearly over (washingtonpost.com)

A couple of Youtubers who are also round-the-world travelers whom I enjoy watching, one a Dutch motorcyclist and the other a German cyclist. Noraly, the motorcyclist, has already traveled through South and North America, Africa, and Asia, some multiple times. Currently, I believe she is in Tajikistan about to enter Kyrgystan. https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCEIs9nkveW9WmYtsOcJBwTg Max Roving, the cyclist, has already cycled through Afghanistan and he is currently trying to ride Africa north to south. He just completed Algeria and is about to enter Morroco. https://www.youtube.com/@MaxRoving

There's also this couple, each has their own channel, who are filming their walk from England to Vietnam. https://www.youtube.com/@chubbytrekka https://www.youtube.com/@SophieTangTravels

I also enjoy watching Charles, a French-Canadian cyclist currently cycling from Canada to Europe. As a geologist he regularly explains rock formations and rock types he encounters. https://www.youtube.com/c/Charlesenv%C3%A9lo

If he said “I did the math” then he did the damn math, regardless of what country he's from or how you think he should be speaking.

I’ve of course got absolutely zero evidence and you’re taking this more seriously than I’d hoped people might, but I bet he didn’t. Us Brits just don’t say “math”. Or “Legos”. Of course he may have been indoctrinated by 27 years away from home but I thought it was more likely that he’d been misquoted / adapted for the WP audience. Anyway, it wasn’t a serious point, just a light hearted one. As you were ;-)

Idk, people are usually nice in my experience. News, forum opinions and youtube videos are not remotely representative of how things work in real life.

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Cadmium Zinc Telluride: The wonder material powering a medical 'revolution' (bbc.com)

> pulmonary embolism Ahh

This isn't much more than a factoid, but notice that many of the useful semiconductors are made from elements that straddle the column containing silicon and germanium. Making compounds whose outer shell electrons add up to be silicon-like lets you make semiconductors, but with electrical and optical properties that you can tune. GaAs is another one, and the LED's are made by choosing particular combinations that have specific bandgap energies corresponding to colors of photons. Part of the "magic" involves finding ratios of elements that have relatively little mechanical strain, because the atoms "fit" just right, which introduce defects that degrade the semiconductor behavior.

Factoids are facts without citation, I suppose the other factoid to be mentioned is the direct band gap (which CZT has?) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Direct_and_indirect_band_gaps

FYI "factoid" means it's an incorrect piece of information passed off as a fact.

In fact, your comment is a factoid (in your meaning or the other replies' interpretation)

Google De-Indexed My Bear Blog and I Don't Know Why (journal.james-zhan.com)

Traffic to my blog plummeted this year and you can never be entirely sure how it happened. But here are two culprits i identified. 1. Ai overview: my page impressions were high, my ranking was high, but click through took a dive. People read the generated text and move along without ever clicking. 2. You are now a spammer. Around August, traffic took a second plunge. In my logs, I noticed these weird queries in my search page. Basically people were searching for crypto and scammy websites on my blog. Odd, but not loke they were finding anything. Turns out, their search query was displayed as an h1 on the page and crawled by google. I was basically displaying spam. I don't have much control over ai overview because disabling it means I don't appear in search at all. But for the spam, I could do something. I added a robot noindex on the search page. A week later, both impressions and clicks recovered.

I encountered the same problem. I also use the Bear theme, specifically Hugo Bear. Recently, my blog was unindexed by Bing. Using `site:`, there are no links at all. My blog has been running normally for 17 years without any issues before.

No, you need to bust up Google as the monopolist it is. YouTube should get split out and then broken up. Google Search should get split out and broken up. etc. This is not a problem you solve with code. This is a problem you solve with law.

Yes. It's a political problem and a very old one. That's why we also already have solutions for it, antitrust laws and other regulations to ensure competition and fairness in the market, to keep it free. Governments just have to keep funding and enabling these institutions.

In the past I've heard that TripAdvisor has 60% market share for local reviews in the UK. Did Google Maps really climb that quickly? Are Instagram and TikTok not shaping tastes in London too? I feel like she might be assigning too much power to it just because that's what she used. That's not to say I don't have gripes with how Google Maps works, but I just don't know why the other factors were not considered.

I don’t think I’ve met anyone in the UK who routinely checked tripadvisor for anything! Almost certainly Instagram/tiktok are though. I know a few places which have been ruined by becoming TikTok tourist hotspots.

CRISPR fungus: Protein-packed, sustainable, and tastes like meat (isaaa.org)

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meet tastes great and all, but I wonder where science is at (if at all) on making original food that tastes good. How about food that doesn't taste like any natural food we've had, but still tastes really good? Jell-o (gello?) is a good example, nothing tastes like it naturally. Why aren't there tasty food that are original in terms of taste and texture but good for health and the environment? I suppose part of the struggle is that food is entrenched into culture so much. burgers and bbq are inextricable from july 4th and memorial day for example.

I find this highly annoying. Here we've had very tasty wheat based slices that can serve the same purpose as sliced salami/meats on bread, and didn't try to muck anything in particular. But they disappeared from the shelves while the stuff branded as Vegan Salami seemingly does well. I guess for casual buyers having a familiar reference point is just crucial.

Did you know they put nose rings with spikes on the calfs so they don't drink their mother's milk? https://as1.ftcdn.net/jpg/03/06/17/72/1000_F_306177230_izPAvBc5ZZ1dxV4jyHYCkO0uwMArmTfL.jpg

what is the context for this photo please? (that is not a calf btw?) It certainly does not look very nice, are you relating this to the "Ethically Raised in the Swiss Alps Cows" in the comment you replied to? In truth, they just take the calves away from the mothers after a short while, ship them out to the abbatoir. There is no benefit to them being in the same enclosure with a spiky nose ring, it seems that this must have a different purpose than the one you mentioned.

They've altered Fusarium venenatum which is currently what Quorn utilizes in its products. "The production process of gene-edited MP is more environmentally friendly than chicken meat and cell-cultured meat." That's good news, if they get to the point where it is more economically friendly than chicken meat it will be great news.

Neurospora crassa is also pretty good. Meati sells slabs of it.

If all the meat you eat is from chicken raised in your backyard , that's environmentally perfect. In the US per capita chicken consumption is 100 pounds per year.

Thats about 45kg, I wish I had that average American backyard.

Nokia N900 Necromancy (yaky.dev)

I still have one in a drawer from when I worked at Nokia around 2009. Great device. I also had the N800 before that. What made them interesting wasn't the hardware, though the full keyboard on the N900 was useful but the fact that it was Linux phone based on Debian complete with the ability to apt-get install whatever the hell you wanted. Including compilers, developer tools, openssh, and whatever you could think of. The big difference between the N800 and the N900 was that the N800 was more of a tablet form factor (released years before the ipad or the iphone were a thing). The N900 was smaller and had a proper phone built in. It could connect to mobile networks and make phone calls. The N800 was by operator decree basically crippled to be wifi only. Operators absolutely hated the notion of an open platform like Linux running on devices connected to their networks. The victory Steve Jobs imposed on operators was basically getting them to beg on their knees if he would please allow iphones on their networks. He completely turned the tables on them. The first iphones were exclusive to some networks only and people cancelled their subscriptions if they were on the wrong network. That's why iMessage is a thing and SMS texts are a thing that is no longer generating meaningful amounts of revenue for operators. There was no off switch for iMessage. Steve Jobs basically told operators to take it or leave it. Likewise MMS was not a thing on the first iphone. Nokia mistook that as a fatal omission. A missing feature. The truth was that MMS was dead as a doornail the moment 3G internet connectivity became a thing. Why have operators act as a middle man? Steve Jobs had no patience for any of that. Anyway, Nokia still obeyed the operators and it ended up crippling anything with software potential. There were big discussions about having Skype on these things. The N800 had that. And a webcam. You could make video calls with it. In 2007. The N900 did not have Skype. And it was positioned as a developer phone. Worse, it had to compete internally with Symbian and the Symbian team was in control of the company. So, it was positioned as a developer phone and the N9 was launched (2011) similarly crippled in the same week that they shut down the entire team working on the OS. That was around the time Symbian lost out to Windows Phone and the beginning of the implosion of Nokia's phone division. The key point here is that Nokia had an Android competitor long before Google launched the Nexus. Before they had the Nexus, they were dual booting N800s into Android. I flashed mine with a development build at some point even. Nokia screwed up the huge chance they had there long before the iphone was about to launch. The N770 launched late 2005. The iphone wasn't even announced until 2007. Nokia did not understand what it had and crippled the platform instead. And then it dropped out of the market completely.

I have such fond memories of the Nokia N810. I did my master’s thesis on that device. I had a custom hypervisor running a guest kernel, virtualized networking, and a buildroot I could SSH into the host N810, then SSH into the guest. I even virtualized the framebuffer at some point and got the “dancing baby” animation playing from the guest. It only ran at a couple frames per second, but it was _amazing_.

The only weird thing about it was that you couldn't charge a fully empty N810 with the micro(?) usb charger. It'd charge just enough to boot and then crash again, because it couldn't wake up far enough to negotiate a higher current with the charger. Had to use a barrel plug to charge it. Spent a very nervous and sweaty day figuring that out when I bought one used with no warranty or returns and it didn't boot properly =)

The N900 was my peak “mobile computing is awesome” device. I went to see District 9 in the cinema in Helsinki. Uh oh, the alien parts are only subtitled in Finnish and Swedish and my Finnish is not up to that. I installed a BitTorrent client, found the release on Pirate Bay, successfully torrented just the subtitle file, and used an editor to read the subtitles for scenes with a lot of alien. The N9 had much better UI, but there was something of the cyberpunk “deck” idea in that thing, it was great.

My N900 (Made in Finland, an early one) was great. I would have used it still if it wasn't for the fact that after 3G disappeared it was useless. The battery could be replaced (as others have mentioned), so it was perfectly fine still. Mechanically it was as good as new as well. As it was basically like Debian Linux inside I could do what I usually do - write hobby projects and run it on the N900. I had my minicomputer emulator running. Nice to see my old favourite minicomputer editor on my N900.

The N950[0] was literal perfection. I had multiple friends who rand self-hosted servers on retired N900's :D [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nokia_N950

Here's what I don't get: why can't we have a modern one? It doesn't need to blow flagship smartphones out of the water. It doesn't even need to have a GSM baseband – I'd rather just connect through my "normal" smartphone than deal with all the complications of having a whole extra computer in there. Surely this is getting close to realizable by hobbyists or a niche company?

Have you seen the Jolla preorder? It was on hn a few days ago. That is the spiritual successor of the N9XX line. https://commerce.jolla.com/products/jolla-phone-preorder

It's excciting, but I saw a review of a pre-release c2 on youtube [0] the other day, and it seemed extremely slow in the interactions. Otherwise, it seems like a cool device. [0] https://youtu.be/5titW5dclwg