That is essentially what gluetun does. It is a little simpler to set up given that it is all preinstalled and you just select your provider and details and it is done. And again, you just specify the network for other containers to use the gluetun service and it is done. Very simple, easy for using many services through one VPN connection, and available on things like CasaOS with simple setup.

As a fellow Aussie I share your conclusion, though the Made in Australia plan from the Albanese government seems like it could change the game. Producing solar panels here would make purchasing them cheaper even if just from the shipping costs. Add the federal investment and the creation of demand and it should get cheaper again.

Now I do worry about things going the way of the NBN, starting with a goal of future proof fibre to the home being chipped away by the LNP until it was a small upgrade on internet service funded by the government but not anything like the goal. I want good green tech, not just barely solar sometimes.

Coal is dying as an investment but existing coal plants will likely run for a long while. Overall demand for energy is rising, the new demand is being met mostly with renewables, but there is a small amount of that increase that is being met by a small increase in coal usage. As renewable manufacture gets faster and more efficient I expect the coal growth will reverse, but it is all about when. If it happens quickly we have less apocalyptic damage. If it happens slowly then we will be more fucked.

Solar is far and say the cheapest form of new energy to roll out. Wind is a not so close second. Coal is getting more expensive by the day. The only reason to roll out coal is insufficient production of solar and wind. It takes time to increase manufacturing capacity but we are getting there and we can do this.

Yep, it started going bad when Google took over it fully and started making changes that didn’t go through to the Chromium browser project. And killing ad blockers. And the telemetry.

I would recommend trying a few of the Gecko engine based browsers. Zen is pretty cool and has become my desktop default recently but other people prefer different ones. In my opinion if you can’t read the code you can’t know what they are doing, so shouldn’t trust it. Not personally read the code, I mean I principle.

Yep, you can emulate, it does work, but there is a better option. Clone Hero works better, has lower performance requirements, supports all of the songs from all of the games, has great peripheral support, and has a whole community of people making modern songs available.

I would also recommend looking into a RetroCult controller mod if you really get into it. Quite a fun electronics project and suitable for someone with limited experience as it has been made very easy and only includes a little bit of soldering and cutting away a little bit of the case.

Yeah, I’ve seen some applications of hollow waveguides before, but yeah, visible spectrum has potential applications and honestly, anything they can do to reduce the number of boosting stages the better.

I love the idea of hollow core fibres, basically a long hollow tube with air inside so the laser can be carried through air not glass. It is really cool and a novel approach and we are only seeing the start. What happens if we change the internal gas to something else like argon? Maybe there will be a specific fluid for different laser bands, further reducing transmission loss.

They also say that the current result of 0.2dB per km of travel is a good starting point, but they think they will likely reach 0.01dB per km with this tech and a little more time. That means a massively increased distance before having to read out the signal with a sensor and then send it again with another laser. That means much less cost and lower latency at the physical level. Very cool, a good number of years before application but good news anyway.

Good choice, the DOI is usually a better link to use, my bad.

I think I have reasonable grounds to disagree, but I don’t want to cause offense or upset, so to be clear I am not attacking you or your thought process, just the conclusions.

There has been a long history of these religious approaches to diet influencing scientific research. If we discount all science done by ideologically biased institutions such as those in this study the actual field looks very different. If we further discount known bad methodologies, for example food frequency questionnaires (FFQs) which are shown to be absolutely inaccurate in most cases, then we again find less support for the conclusion that plant based diets are better for humans than meat based diets. In fact, we will find that there are almost no interventional studies of any length that even potentially could tell us that a meat based diet is worse than a plant based diet.

In most cases the researchers fail the very first step of defining plant based, meat based, high carb, low carb, ketogenic, Mediterranean, and so on. The studies are all way too short, most being done over less than 12 weeks, and very few have any sort of cross over or similar control. Most of the studies are purely observational and have no intervention, so no change can seen as causally linked to an outcome. Most studies are funded in such a way as to bias the outcomes. Most studies are not preregistered. Many suffer from p hacking. Many have no clear outcome measure but instead target a proxy, for example blood cholesterol, but they do not actually look at the true target outcome, heart disease and death.

The whole field of nutritional science is unfortunately very unreliable at this time due to ideological and financial conflicts of interest. This study is a great example. Given that it is well known that FFQs are unreliable why was this study approved at the outset? Why was a further clarification of the actual diets of participants not taken at some point in the study, even from a subset? Why is this type of study funded, executed, and then passed through peer review? If this arrived on my desk I would not approve it for publication simple for methodological reasons. Why does the journal allow a title which is so provocative and clearly useful for pushing an agenda when their supposed scientific credibility are riding on their reputation as gatekeepers of truth?

If we had real science I would be keen to see it. This does not meet that level of quality and the continued publication of this type of unfit paper is dragging down the whole scientific endeavour. If we continue to allow people to claim to know what they cannot show we will end up believing anything and making grave mistakes in our choices about how to live.

Yeah, so this study basically tells us nothing but can be used for propagandistic purposes. If I were a journal editor I would not publish a study that tells us nothing while being ripe for political and ideological use. It is unethical to act as if this is a purely scientific study when it obviously is not, and the editors of the journal are supposed to be experts in the field, they should be very aware of this issue and be taking appropriate steps.

Yeah, here is the link to the original study BTW

https://ajcn.nutrition.org/article/S0002-9165(25)00328-4/fulltext

Results

1. Yes, data was derived from food frequency questionnaires, a known bad method for understanding real consumption.
2. Definitely not controlling for health focus of participants
3. Yep, only diagnosed cases were listed, so not checking everyone to see if they had cancer. This leaves room for someone to not have had it checked and it will simply not show up
4. In this case they made several groups based on how much meat, but the vegetation was all grouped together.

This was also a religiously motivated study. The cohort was recruited from Seventh Day Adventists and that church has been involved in pushing unscientific propaganda about vegetarianism for decades. The influence goes much further, given that the bulk of the authors work for the Loma Linda University Medical Centre, a Seventh Day Adventist institution.

This is not a scientific study, this is religious lropaaganda.

About to go read the study, but my guesses are;

1. Probably using a food diary or similar recall based method to figure out food frequency
2. Likely not controlling for whether people are health focussed or not
3. The cancer link will be measured by risk of death by cancer, obfuscating whether the individual seeks treatment
4. The plant heavy nature will be vague, grouping all plants together rather than any specificity, eg sugar beets and kale both count the same

Back shortly to update.

As with all other scientific things someone knows more than me, but I will give my opinion.

The last step is the greatest weakness. The result has to somehow be sent to the website and verified. If you have physical access to the device doing the verification then it will eventually be spoofed. A man in the middle attack would be easy enough given that the device absolutely has to go via a network the user controls.

Beyond the transmission issues, biologically there are not any markers that are a clear and simple age measure. Most biomarkers are more of a range with ages that correlate to some degree. You could say for example testosterone, but that goes up through puberty from a baseline in kids to an adult level, but the adult levels are really varied. Some people are higher than others and some XX people have higher testosterone levels than some XY people, and visa versa for oestrogen. So with the sex hormones out, you would want something that accumulates over time. Unfortunately that is going to vary by where a person lives and what they are exposed to. Honestly it is not at all workable.

That said, a simple solution which would make much more sense than any of this crap is to just have something on the internet account end. If the ISP can offer a check box for “Block adult sites and services” and people can opt in to that then kids will only get access to the full internet when their parents allow it or they are old enough to have their own device on their own internet plan.

If the government want to make a system to protect kids from adult stuff on the internet that is great. If they make it opt in that is all fine with me. But if they make it something you have to verify your age for, using things like state issued ID or facial inspection by an algorithm, then I think it is disastrous. It will be circumvented rapidly by people who are old enough to verify but simply do not want to. That technique will be shared with kids. Kids will be able to bypass it. This nanny state approach is not actually about protecting kids in my opinion. I think the companies involved will use the data, the face images for during verification, as training data for AI models, use the licence data for various profit driven business activities, and in the process make us all less secure. They will eventually have a leak or hack that exposes your data including what site you were on and your licence. The only question is when.

Choosing a distro is both very easy and very hard. The easy answer is go with the flow, look for what the most popular distros are and see what appeals from those. A common distro will have lots of other people with the possibility of having the same issues you have finding solutions. It makes troubleshooting way easier and is worth the distro not being perfect if you can get more support.

The hard answer is don’t choose a distro. Try distros. Maybe before killing your Windows install get VirtualBox and install various distros in VMs and try them out. Performance is fairly good in a VM so you can get a realistic idea if how it will work for you in terms of how intuitive it is to find things, how the workflow is, and whether it is too opinionated about how things are done.

For example, Ubuntu has a little less ability to control things at a deep level, but it is more supportable because everyone using it either does or does not have a given problem.

At the other end is something like Arch which is more of a base than a distro. You choose your desktop environment, what services you want, all the back ends, and you have to configure it yourself.

I would recommend EndeavourOS as a great Arch based distro.

I have found that with Arch I don’t run out of troubleshooting before the problem is solved like I did with Debian. That said, the learning curve is a little steep so not switching makes sense, but I find it better personally. Just like in Windows things are out of your control I felt that Debian had strong defaults and I had trouble changing them too far. I am sure ignorance played a role but I have found the documentation on the Arch wiki was more useful in actually solving my problems.

Yes, as the other responder said, tell steam through the properties dialogue to use Proton for compatibility.

It would also be a good idea to tell the devs that they have this issue. They can take down the Linux release and let it default to Proton, but they have to do it on their end.

Yeah, it is a fairly large dataset depending on the tower location. For example, in an inner city locale you may have hundreds of devices on a single passenger train going past a local tower. These transient handsets used to cause a massive issue with drop outs and loss of signal as they would acquire and then drop service from a given tower. Nowadays we have solutions for this which centre around shaped beams along the direction of travel with communication between towers to ignore handsets which are moving along a travel corridor.

To make that clearer, imagine the overhead train line has passengers moving along and under the train line people are walking on the street. The various towers which are along the train line will pass information about which handsets are moving and which are local so the local towers can handle local handsets and specific towers above can handle the train customers. This keeps the lower towers from changing their directionality and dropping calls and data confections, but also allows the train handsets to have reasonable connection to the network.

Another interesting case is what used to happen at the edge of the range for a tower. The whole tower could modulate its power so it could reach a far off handset if nobody else was around, extending the effective range. This unfortunately meant that if someone came closer to the tower it would have to lower its power to not harm the handset and the person far away would lose signal.

Nowadays the power level can be handled per handset. Each handset gets a small portion of a second, actually a small handful of parts of a second, and the power of the tower is adjusted to reach them at their required level for their time slots. If someone comes online close to the tower you may have competition for the time of the tower and thus lower speeds but the power will still match your handset independently of the rest. Very cool technology, way better than what it was with GSM, and also much more secure.

Yeah, it is absolutely insane to think that as a person with a literal disability in attentional regulation I have had fewer collisions than most people who are not disabled. It seems like if it is too easy people stop trying and don’t take it seriously, so they text or change the music or reach over the back. I know I can’t do that without risking a major issue and I actively have to maintain focus, so I simply do not ever “let it slide” or “just this once”. Rules can save lives if followed, but do nothing if ignored.

Put simply the radio broadcasts a sort of hello message to the tower so the tower knows where to listen (this is about signal direction or beam shaping, but imagine the eye of Sauron swiveling to see Frodo). This includes the identifier of the handset, the IMEI number, so that the tower can keep track of who is who. The second step of getting connected to the network is done with the details inside the SIM card, specifically the IMSI number.

If your phone has no SIM card you can still make an emergency call. You can also have an eSIM which is a software version of the SIM card. In both cases you can bypass the SIM and get connected.

If you turn airplane mode on the radio is powered off in theory, but this is not absolutely guaranteed. It should be off, the system will report it is off, but there are fringe cases where it may still be very slightly active, usually from malware or similar things.

So no SIM means no IMSI, but the radio itself has the IMEI and that handset is hard coded to that identifier. If the radio powers on it will broadcast the IMEI to negotiate connection with or without the SIM and IMSI.