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5 votes
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More than 1,000 couples got married in Taiwan's first month of equal marriage
12 votes -
Need advice for simple speaker setup
I just moved into a new apartment, and am using a 32" tv in the living room. The TV is already way too small, but I'd rather prioritize spending on the speakers first. I thought I could live with...
I just moved into a new apartment, and am using a 32" tv in the living room. The TV is already way too small, but I'd rather prioritize spending on the speakers first.
I thought I could live with the TV speakers, but have quickly realized that they have made watching movies impossible. The dialogue is impossible to hear without cranking up the volume. And then if there is anything other than dialogue, it's way too loud.
The walls in the apartment are fairly thin, so I'm pretty sure a subwoofer is out of the question. So I was looking at soundbars but keep seeing conflicting advice. There are articles like this that make them sound fine, yet when you go to place like /r/hometheater, everyone despises them.
So my next step was to look at powered bookshelf speakers. They seemed like a pretty good option, until I went to best buy to listen to them. I'm not sure if they just weren't set up properly or what, but none of them sounded that great. Especially when compared to the tower speakers they had.
So now I'm at a loss. Should I go with a soundbar, bookshelf, or tower speakers? My budget is under $500.
10 votes -
I’m a journalist but didn't fully realize the terrible power of US border officials until they violated my rights and privacy
41 votes -
Axios releases nearly 100 leaked internal vetting documents of top Donald Trump administration officials, showing "red flags" deliberations
12 votes -
The researcher behind the smartphone “horns” study sells posture pillows
23 votes -
Any hams around?
So, I am far from the most experienced, or the most knowledgeable, or the most active amateur radio operator out there, but it is something that has piqued my interest none the less. Before I got...
So, I am far from the most experienced, or the most knowledgeable, or the most active amateur radio operator out there, but it is something that has piqued my interest none the less. Before I got into the hobby, I always assumed that the FCC just game amateurs a small bucket of useless spectrum and that was it. Maybe you could fly an RC plane, but surely that is about as cool as it gets.
It turns out I was dead wrong. Amateurs are allocated bands all across the RF spectrum - more or less. Bands from way below the AM broadcast frequency to way above the microwave frequencies used by our cell phones and wireless routers. Also, you are allowed to legally transmit at up to 1.5 kilowatts of power! That's 3,000 times as much power as your average walkie talkie! :) Also, importantly, the license exam only costs $15.
At many of the lower frequencies, the signals bounce off the ionosphere and you can make contact with people all over the world (propagation gods permitting). At the higher frequencies, you lose that "skip propagation," but more bandwidth is available. There are analog voice repeater networks, digital packet networks, mesh networks running on modified commercial WiFi gear, and even a handful of old school packet BBSes. There are some LEO satellites which run voice repeaters which allow you make international contacts, and sometimes even the International Space Station will participate in events. Lots of cool stuff going on. This hobby is kind of a bottomless rabbit hole of possibilities.
I got my technician license about a year ago, and I have been most interested in the data networking end of the hobby. Despite being a pile of hacks, APRS is still very cool, and sometime soon I hope to set up an AREDN node of my own. Every once in a while I'll call into the local repeaters and shoot the breeze.
So there's my story. Are there any other hams out there?
25 votes -
The health benefits of sauna use
7 votes -
Ravelry (a popular site/community for knitting and crocheting) bans posts in support of Trump or his administration
20 votes -
Charlottesville white supremacist who killed protester asks judge for mercy and a sentence shorter than life in prison
14 votes -
UK forms citizens’ assembly on climate change
7 votes -
Compton's Cafeteria riot: A historic act of trans resistance, three years before Stonewall
10 votes -
The case for reparations
7 votes -
Citizens on patrol: What if your neighbor could give you a parking ticket?
9 votes -
How 3D printing could help shape surgery
5 votes -
'It's totally unfair': Chicago, where the rich live thirty years longer than the poor
7 votes -
New York is sixth state to outlaw gay and trans 'panic defenses'
13 votes -
What's the best advice you've been given regarding photography?
I'm interested in what you all have heard over the years or have learned on your own, that has stuck with you and made you a better photographer
16 votes -
One day of paid work a week is all we need to get mental health benefits of employment
16 votes -
Lightest, cheapest laptop out there with best battery life
My laptop is showing sings of death, and I know I will need a new one soon. Also, I am planning to get a tablet and ditch my smartphone, and to stop using the laptop for browsing content: I'll do...
My laptop is showing sings of death, and I know I will need a new one soon. Also, I am planning to get a tablet and ditch my smartphone, and to stop using the laptop for browsing content: I'll do most of that to the phone/tablet, and use the laptop as an authoring tool: writing and coding.
So I am looking for a laptop that is cheap, light, and can keep running for at least 3-5hrs under mild Debian+Emacs load. Ideally around 11"-13".
20 votes -
The Gorgon Stare, a military drone-surveillance technology that can track multiple moving targets at once, is coming to a city near you
13 votes -
Is having a business line worth it?
Does anyone have a business subscriber Internet connection? Is it worth it? I just spoke with my ISP, and for an extra $40/mo I can get a static IP address with 100mbps that I can host my own...
Does anyone have a business subscriber Internet connection? Is it worth it?
I just spoke with my ISP, and for an extra $40/mo I can get a static IP address with 100mbps that I can host my own website on. I have a virtualization server, and I've been thinking about hosting my own hobby-scale website for a while. I haven't had any luck finding rack hosting space that I'd feel comfortable using so I'm thinking about just going rogue, and operating solo. If I had a static IP address with a pipe that would allow me to host then all I'd need to do is stand up a server, register a domain, and point it at my IP address.
Other than the typical security risks, what do I need to worry about? Would the experience be worth it?
11 votes -
The LED traffic light and the danger of "but sometimes!"
7 votes -
Fleeing persecution, LGBT+ Brazilians find refuge in Portugal
7 votes -
It's the Effect Size, Stupid - What effect size is and why it is important
9 votes -
Antarctica: Journey to the heart of global warming
5 votes -
Eastern Front of WWII animated: 1944/1945
6 votes -
Biohackers with diabetes are making their own insulin
17 votes -
Valve looking to drop support for Ubuntu 19.10 and up due to Canonical's 32bit decision
35 votes -
NASA rover on Mars detects high amounts of methane gas, hinting at possibility of life
8 votes -
Is it possible to moderate a group chat on Facebook?
Long story, but I've ended up becoming the admin of a group on Facebook (the previous admin stepped down in a rush, and added me as he left). And the group has an existing group chat associated...
Long story, but I've ended up becoming the admin of a group on Facebook (the previous admin stepped down in a rush, and added me as he left). And the group has an existing group chat associated with it.
Is it possible to "moderate" this group chat? Specifically, as an admin of the group, can I remove unsavoury/unwanted messages from the chat associated with the group? It looks like I can't.
Can even the creator of a group chat do this? If I close the group chat and create a new one, will I (as its creator) be able to remove unsavoury/unwanted messages from that new chat?
I've done some searching via Google, and I'm not finding anything to indicate that this is possible. If someone posts something unsavoury in a group chat, it looks like the only option is to remove the person from the chat - but the unsavoury messages can't be deleted.
Please tell me that's wrong!
6 votes -
Reddit is moving forward with their Community Points ("donuts" in /r/ethtrader) experiment, including moving them onto the Ethereum blockchain
26 votes -
Capitalism isn't 'broken'. It's working all too well - and we're the worse for it
27 votes -
GE's smart light bulb reset process is a masterpiece... of modern techno-insanity
24 votes -
White House official once appeared on podcast whose host touted race pseudoscience and interviewed white nationalists
3 votes -
Fermi problem game thread
I thought it might be fun to make a little game out of asking Fermi problems and trying to work out solutions to others'. What is a Fermi problem? A Fermi problem is (to quote wikipedia ): an...
I thought it might be fun to make a little game out of asking Fermi problems and trying to work out solutions to others'.
What is a Fermi problem?
A Fermi problem is (to quote wikipedia ):
an estimation problem designed to teach dimensional analysis or approximation, and such a problem is usually a back-of-the-envelope calculation. The estimation technique is named after physicist Enrico Fermi as he was known for his ability to make good approximate calculations with little or no actual data. Fermi problems typically involve making justified guesses about quantities and their variance or lower and upper bounds.
Basically, these are questions that would be very difficult to calculate exactly without looking up the answer. The goal is to arrive at a good estimate by making justified assumptions. As such, looking up facts and statistics should be minimized or outright avoided (e.g., if the question is "What is the mass of the water in Lake Michigan?", you shouldn't look up Lake Michigan's volume to aid your answer. This should be estimated from things you know off the top of your head).
The way this thread works
- If you have a Fermi problem, post it as a top level comment.
- If you have a solution to an already posted Fermi problem, post it as a reply to that comment. Be sure to post your reasoning and thought process.
Fermi problems can be fun to come up with, and fun to answer. Examples of Fermi problems might include:
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How many piano tuners are there in Chicago? (this one is apparently one that Fermi came up with himself)
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How many keystrokes occur worldwide, daily?
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What is the mass of the water in Lake Michigan?
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How many cars are there in New York City on a given day?
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How many blades of grass are there on the National Mall?
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How many eggs are consumed in the US each day?
Since many of these have no definitive answer, it is not always possible to score the 'correctness' of an answer. Nonetheless, others can judge when an answer makes reasonable assumptions, so feel free reply to answers with suggestions of which assumptions can be refined or further justified.
21 votes -
Are your tinned tomatoes picked by slave labour?
8 votes -
Firefox zero-day was used in attack against Coinbase employees, not its users
11 votes -
As video reviews dissect penalty kicks, critics say stick to what’s obvious
3 votes -
NASA will conduct a delicate rescue mission to free a probe trapped just inches below the Red Planet’s surface
6 votes -
Monsters in the Middleboxes: Introducing Two New Tools for Detecting HTTPS Interception
9 votes -
The Digital Antiquarian: Sam & Max: Hit the Road
8 votes -
Staining The Timbre Review Series: Gunna
2 votes -
Open Place Reviews, an open data review site developed by osmand and maps.me
8 votes -
Carl Sagan’s solar sail is finally ready to fly
6 votes -
There’s a Legal Loophole That May Leave Some of Rock’s Greatest Riffs Up for Grabs
5 votes -
Born out of love and LSD: Pride Flag creator Gilbert Baker tells all in new memoir
4 votes -
Need a simple way to password protect a webpage
Hey Tildes! I've got a static, basic website, HTML and CSS. It's one page only. But I'd like to create a second page with some more private content that is password protected. I know that I can...
Hey Tildes!
I've got a static, basic website, HTML and CSS. It's one page only. But I'd like to create a second page with some more private content that is password protected.
I know that I can accomplish this via .htaccess but what I don't like about this method is that when the user navigates to the page, they get a pop up asking for a username and password. What I would like is having the user navigate to the page, and then they are met with a simple form asking for just a password (no username). After they enter the password, the "veil" lifts or the page forwards and they get the private content.
Here's the thing... the content really only needs to seem private. It's not super secret, personal information. I don't want it indexed by search engines (nofollow), and I want it basically hidden, but the password is only there to make the user feel exclusive. If some tech-minded person encountered this page and jumped through a bunch of hoops to get in without the password, it's not a big deal to me. In reality, 99.9% of people accessing this page will not be able to bypass the password.
I'm guessing this can be accomplished easily in Javascript, but I don't really know much Javascript apart from finding code snippets and plunking them in. I also want to be able to fully design the password entry page so that it looks branded, so a code snippet plunked down into my HTML doc would be great for this.
If there is an easy way to actually protect the content behind the password, that would be excellent. In this case, I imagine it would be much like a news site with an ad-blocker-blocker. Just some kind of pop-up that blocks all the content. Enter the password, and you're in.
Anyhow, I hope I've described what I'm looking for accurately enough. Anybody have any easy and quick ways to accomplish this?
14 votes -
Stylus userstyle that hides comment vote counts
This simple stylus userstyle hides vote counts on both voted and unvoted comments and your own comments. I really like what Deimos did, it significantly improved my time here on Tildes. If you...
This simple stylus userstyle hides vote counts on both voted and unvoted comments and your own comments. I really like what Deimos did, it significantly improved my time here on Tildes. If you want the feature back, install Stylus extension, click the Stylus icon > write style for tildes.net and paste this:
/* Hide vote count for unvoted comments */ .btn-post-action[name="vote"] { visibility: hidden; position: relative; } .btn-post-action[name="vote"]:after { visibility: visible; content: "Vote"; position: absolute; } /* Hide vote count for voted comments */ .btn-post-action[name="unvote"] { visibility: hidden; position: relative; } .btn-post-action[name="unvote"]:after { visibility: visible; content: "Voted"; position: absolute; } /* Hide vote count for your own comments */ .comment-votes { display: none; }
Known issues
- There is extra padding around Vote button
- Extensions such as Vim Vixen cannot interact with Vote button
10 votes -
Hobo Johnson - Typical Story (2019)
5 votes