Flowers grown floating on polluted waterways can help clean up nutrient runoff
Enlarge / The cut flowers could pay for themselves and even turn a profit. Margi Rentis Flowers grown on inexpensive floating platforms can help clean polluted waterways, over 12 weeks extracting 52 percent more phosphorus and 36 percent more nitrogen than the natural nitrogen cycle removes from untreated water, according to our new research. In […]
Bypassing the WiFi Hardware Switch on the Lenovo X201 (2023)
I recently received a ThinkPad X201 to start using as my daily driver. I purchased the X201 to replace my existing X260. Although some might look at this as a “downgrade” in terms of specs and hardware, I would have to disagree. The X201 is an absolute masterpiece in laptop hardware design and only faulted […]
Mysterious 280M-year-old fossil is mostly just black paint
Enlarge / Discovered in 1931, Tridentinosaurus antiquus has now been found to be, in part, a forgery. Valentina Rossi For more than 90 years, scientists have puzzled over an unusual 280 million-year-old reptilian fossil discovered in the Italian Alps. It’s unusual because the skeleton is surrounded by a dark outline, long believed to be rarely […]
The Early History of Usenet
14 November 2019 November 2019 is, as best I can recall, the 40th anniversary of the conception of Usenet. (What’s Usenet? The Wikipedia article is ok but not perfect.) I should have written a proper paper; instead, there will (probably) be an irregular series of blog posts. I’ll do Part I of N tonight. Here […]
We Have to Start Over: From Atom to Zed
February 12th, 2024 After the last conversation with Nathan, Max, and Antonio—Zed’s three co-founders—I still had quite a few questions to ask: why did you make the technological choices you did? How important is Rust to Zed? Did you consciously set out to own the technological stack the way you do now? How do you […]
IPissed: Apple is after web capabilities to protect close-to-100B App Store Tax
If you ship a Web App in the EU and will be impacted by this, please fill in our survey. It is critical that we gather as much evidence as possible to prevent Apple from breaking Web Apps in the EU. Nearly two weeks ago we discussed a bug on iOS Beta 17.4 breaking Web […]
Spnec fast-tracks ₱200B solar farm in Central Luzon
SP New Energy Corp. (SPNEC) is “expediting” the development of its P200-billion solar farm in Nueva Ecija and Bulacan, bannering it as the “world’s largest solar project.” Implemented by its subsidiary Terra Solar Philippines Inc., the Terra Solar Project involves the installation of over 5 million solar panels with a capacity of 3500 MW and […]
Considerations for a long-running Raspberry Pi
December 29, 2023 • Tagged: series:pi-reliability raspberry-pi Part of the Raspberry Pi Reliability series. I use Raspberry Pis around my home as everything from low-power FM transmitters to UPS energy monitors. Keeping a Raspberry Pi online and working with zero intervention for weeks, months, or years is somewhat of an art form. Several classes of […]
From engineer to manager: what I love, what I hate
It’s been almost 2 years since I moved to a team lead role, then to a full-time engineering management position after the expansion of our team. I’ve been a front-end developer for 7 years before that, and initially I took the “advanced individual contributor” career track before doing the management turnaround. How’s it been? Bumpy, […]
Raising Children on the Eve of AI
I think of us in some kind of twilight world as transformative AI looks more likely: things are about to change, and I don’t know if it’s about to get a lot darker or a lot brighter. Increasingly this makes me wonder how I should be raising my kids differently. Why I’m thinking about this […]