Yes and now. It was also the Age of Discoveries. That means that basically each ship crossing the oceans at the time also had a part time or full time scientist on board, who was measuring everything he could put his instruments on. The Royal Navy and its requirements for logs also demanded a lot of data to be taken daily, including air and water temperature.

Depending on the region you live in, it goes back until 1736 (e.g. Schoenbrunn, Vienna and Mannheim, Germany). In this year, several observatories in Central Europe agreed to take regularly measurements of weather data and keep a log of them.

And yes, that's the time when Daniel Gabriel Fahrenheit (1686 - 1736), Anders Celsius (1701 - 1744) and René-Antoine Ferchault de Réaumur (1686 - 1757) lived, each constructing his own type of thermometer, and defining his own temperature scale.

How hard would it be to replace the software on these devices?

You're gonna die of something, so make your choice.

This sounds attractive but what I've seen on their site and reviews is not very clear on how good it is as a phone. I don't care about most cell phone apps. I either don't need the functionality or I do it on my Linux laptop. I want a voice phone on which I can text, take photos, and run a browser. That's about it. The option attaching a keyboard is attractive as I find typical virtual keyboards very slow and error prone. So, how well does it work as a telephone? Is it limited in which services it is compatible with?

It was Attachmate, which swallowed Novell and spun of for instance SuSE Linux before being itself acquired by Micro Focus. SuSE S.A. is now a separate company in Luxembourg, and maybe, they are holding the original UNIX licenses, as it would fit into their portfolio.

Remote places here in Northern British Columbia, reached by logging roads. There are now chargers along some remote provincial highways (e.g. highway 20), but I have yet to see one on a logging road. Some of the places I drive, there isn't even a gas station. You have to carry a lot of gas yourself.

It's much less likely to crash than other software, and nobody will try to forcibly update it.

If you talk to your car about deep stuff, you should probably consider a visit to a psychiatrist. :)

I want a car that runs GNU/Linux or FreeBSD.

Interesting. Given some of the places I drive, a pure EV is not an option for me, but a hybrid might be.

Exactly. Using AI to edit the piece is like using a spellchecker. She's using a tool to do what she could do by hand. It has no bearing on the fact that many of her students have not learned basic math.

I definitely do not want a car with a giant touch screen. I have a 2014 Ford Explorer. The touch screen for that is modest in size but even so I would prefer some of the controls to be mechanical. I have driven a 2024 Ford Expedition belonging to a client. In many ways it is nice, but it has a knob instead of a gear shift lever, which I hate. It's distracting to have to look at a knob in the center console. Worst of all, it has a very large touch screen. It looks awful, but more important, it is very distracting to have to turn to it. Touch screens are okay for settings that you don't adjust while driving, but mechanical controls and gauges in front of you are much better for things you manipulate and look at while driving.

I never sold any power to the grid. I just offset some grid usage with my own power.

As I have paid 300 Euros for a pair of solar panels and a rectifier back in March, and despite the panels not being optimally mounted (straight upright, facing Southwest, and partly in the shadow from nearby trees), I harvested already 200 kWh as of today, I am pretty sure, "green energy" is not about twice as expensive as it should be. Even a badly mounted setup will return the investment in less than five years.