Fiction:

12 books from the Deverry series
The Three Body Problem trilogy
Monkey
Treacle Walker
Various books on Powershell

Non-Fiction:
Linux Administrator's Guide
Linux Network Administrator's Guide
Both OpenZFS books
Ansible
Terraform
Various books on Oracle, MySQL, PostgreSQL optimisation
C++ manuals
Various Cisco manuals
OpenPF manual

but when activists are actively against Israel policies then it's NOT OK.

For the simple reason any criticism of Israel is not allowed. Nothing. Any criticism of any kind for any reason immediately brands you as anti-semitic. No exceptions. Even when Israel does to others which was done to them you are not allowed to say a single word. If you do, you're an anti-semite. Full stop.

Titan's atmosphere is rather calm; not an issue. At the surface, the winds measured by Huygens were 0,3 m/s.

You actually can use solar power in extreme environments - even Venus's surface has been shown to be compatible with certain types solar, though you certainly get very poor power density. Dragonfly, as noted above, uses an RTG.

Planetary scientists frequently refer to moons that are large enough to be in hydrostatic equilibrium as planets in the literature. Examples, just from a quick search:

"Locally enhanced precipitation organized by planetary-scale waves on Titan"

"3.3. Relevance to Other Planets" (section on Titan)

"Superrotation in Planetary Atmospheres" (article covers Titan alongside three other planets)

"All planets with substantial atmospheres (e.g., Earth, Venus, Mars, and Titan) have ionospheres which expand above the exobase"

"Clouds on Titan result from the condensation of methane and ethane and, as on other planets, are primarily structured by circulation of the atmosphere"

"... of the planet. However, rather than being scarred by volcanic features, Titan's surface is largely shaped..."

"Spectrophotometry of the Jovian Planets and Titan at 300- to 1000-nm Wavelength: The Methane Spectrum" (okay, it's mainly referring to the Jovian satellites as planets, but same point)

"Superrotation indices for Solar System and extrasolar atmospheres" - contains a table whose first column is "Planet", and has Titan in the list, alongside other planets

Etc. This is not to be confused with the phrase "minor planet", which is used for asteroids, etc. In general there's a big distinction in how commonly you see the large moons in hydrostatic equilibrium referred to as "planets" and with "planetary" adjectives, vs. smaller bodies not in hydrostatic equilibrium.

Why?

NASA's obsession with Mars is weird, and it consumes the lion's share of their planetary exploration budget. We know vastly more about Mars than we know of everywhere else except Earth.

This news here is bittersweet for me. I *love* Titan - it and Venus are my two favourite worlds for further exploration, and dragonfly is a superb way to explore Titan. But there's some sadness in the fact that they're launching it to an equatorial site, so we don't get to see the fascinating hydrocarbon seas and the terrain sculpted by them near the poles. I REALLY wish they were going to the north pole instead :( In theory they could eventually get there, but the craft would have to survive far beyond design limits and get a lot of mission extensions. At a max pace of travel it might cover 600 meters or so per Earth day on average. So we're talking like 12 years to get to the first small hydrocarbon lakes and ~18 years to get to Ligeia Mare or Punga Mare (a bit further to Kraken Mare), *assuming* no detours, vs. a 2 1/2 year mission design. And that ignores the fact that they'll be going slower in the start - the nominal mission is only supposed to cover 175km, just a few percent of the way, under 200 metres per day. Sigh... Maybe it'll be possible to squeeze more range out of it once they're comfortable with its performance and reliability, but... it's a LONG way to the poles.

At least if it lasts for that long it'll have done a full transition between wet and dry cycles, which should last ~15 years. So maybe surface liquids will be common at certain points, rare in others.

Quite.

I started tinkering with it as nothing more than a hobby, and I have some countless dozens of sensors on it now. And most of those are actually just operated in-house and don't require cloud integration at all.

I put three different SDRs on it and it captures multiple weather stations, fridge and freezer sensors, and even passing aircraft (using FlightAware). As well as the other useful integrations like what bin-day is today and what I need to put out.

I obtained for Matter smart plugs for free the other day and just out of interest I joined them - turns out HomeAssistant is a Matter server and requires no further integration or third-party to work. All kinds of switching and energy-monitoring now, and I have door sensors that I've put on my letterbox and parcel box, so I even know when I have a delivery and it triggers the cameras if I want it to.

I even added an ancient projector using "pjlink" into it, so when it's movie-time, I can dim my lights and turn on the projector and switch it to the right input just from my PC/phone.

It's a great little project - but it needs to shake the reputation of all that YAML nonsense being the only way to configure it. They really need to pull that out into the GUI entirely, because even as a programmer I was always put off by the concept of these large code-dumps on discussion forums to "fix" one particular sensor or similar. Turns out, 99% of that isn't needed and the other 1% could easily be folded into the GUI and probably will over time.

I don't even bother with voice, though, because it's just a home-sensor platform to me, I don't want it controlling anything itself and I don't want it listening. I just want alerts and a page of switches/graphs, and it's great for that.

Home Assistant runs my house and there isn't a single Zigbee device on it.

That's just "another module" in their huge libraries of integration modules.

It's "bespoke" because their own hardware that they choose to sell is not just an off-the-shelf device. However it's also just an open-source OS and software that you can put on a commodity Pi or other machine and don't need to buy their hardware or use any given protocol at all if you don't want to.

"Free rides can't last forever".

When the market is saturated, your return on each product diminishes.

But you're still getting free electricity!

Subsidies for solar were always going to be short-lived and rather pointless for the grid beyond a point - you want them to pay you for electricity they literally cannot use?

It's why when I started my little amateur installation at home, I didn't ever care about "feeding back" to the grid. I'd really rather not be tied to the grid at all, even for feeding back. It requires a larger investment - not least the cost of the connection - and it's reliant on subsidies staying around forever and never changing (which just isn't realistic). I'm sure if you got in on day one when panels were ridiculously expensive, and you had the capital to put into it, that the cost of doing so was profitable over many years. But once those subsidies started to dry up and the hardware became commodity, there was never any question of getting that free ride.

Instead I buy panels at my own pace, and increasingly move circuits off onto them, reducing my bill, and one day being "self-sufficient". The excess electricity generated from there? I'll use it for something else (hell, why not just a little Bitcoin farm or similar to acts as a very-easily-controllable on-demand power absorber? Or a heating water tank that you can just dump excess electricity into?), or let it go to waste. Only when I've not switched back to grid power for a few years would I consider severing the connection, but I would never bother to apply for the grants / subsidies / connection as the return is too uncertain because of things like this.

If you are considering it an income of your own, you have to consider it the same as a business, which means you have to take into account that the market changes and may not be profitable in the future.

But you're still going to pay off those assets and get free electricity, no matter what.

Really? Why? There is no uncertainty given on the measurement and they only quote it to one significant figure which implies that the uncertainty is at least 0.1 making that 0.3 gap less than 3 sigma from zero. Scientifically speaking that's not clear evidence of anything and signficances less than 3 standard deviations disappear all the time due to missing systematic effects or sometimes are even just statistical fluctuations.

I'd say the cloud storage is still relatively secure.

In that case, I have a part-used flying pig you might want to buy.

You probably also booted it to run the disc formatting software.

But yes, the manual was very good, also the magazines with their type-ins.

It's about time we gave free money to someone other than oil companies and coal miners.

Isn't it funny how people conveniently forget the decades we've been giving money to these two? How many billions (trillions?) of dollars have we the taxpayers been forced to hand over to these companies? Shall we include all that free money handed over to corn famers for their ethanol subsidies?

At least if people would be consistent in their "outrage" they might be heard more.

Today, I found a text file on my computer. It was a response to a ZDNet article back in 2016 or some such. My computer remembered every word I wrote; I'd forgotten I made the post at all.

Today, I entered my time sheet at work for the different on-site appointments I made last week. I'd forgotten one of them already. My phone kept a GPS log that knew exactly where I was and was able to ensure completeness.

The human brain is incredible in may ways...but computers do things human brains cannot...and unless we're willing to put up with the shortcomings of the human brain in our computing equipment, we'll likely need more than 27 watts to make it happen.

Don't blame people for problems that corporations cause.

How is it a "corporate" cause if people are too lazy to move around, stare at their 3 inch screen all day, eat bags of chips each day, don't bother to drink water, and don't make healthy lifestyle choices? Does personal responsiblity not enter into the equation?

There was an article on here a while back which discussed how fake credentials were being used by North Korea to allow its people to work on remote projects. They were given a fake name, fake skills, fake education, etc, which was then passed to a hiring company who then "vetted" the person without even seeing or talking to them.

So yes, it is possible the companies didn't know.