They're totally big enough to warrant a battery. Not everyone is running appliances all day and certain heavy duty appliances (AC, washing machine / dryer, cooktops) are not even on the 110v circuit.

Wrong. If solar is charging a battery and the battery has outlets as most power stations do then you have a backup power supply.

That depends if people are running AC and whether it's on the 110v circuit or something else.

I think if you own a house then you should. Not only can you generate more power, but it's hooked up to proper batteries and inverters that deliver more power back to the house, or to the grid. But as the name implies, a "balcony" system is meant to be a couple of panels you hang out of a window, or put on a balcony that are affordable and easy to set up especially for people in apartments and rentals.

Hooking up solar straight to a microinverter doesn't maximize the benefit. Plug the panels into the battery, and the battery (which includes an inverter) into an outlet. During the day, the battery will charge itself with any surplus over demand then the surplus can feed in during the evening. Probably pays for itself in a few years and can also serve as a backup if there is a power failure.

Your browser leaks uniqueness out of every orifice and every single one of those things has a legit use case. And in aggregate they supply enough bits to be unique to your computer.

It's not about browsers being "complicit" and all about browsers trying to deliver a modern experience which is capable of supporting things like accessibility, audio, video, camera, microphone, serial, graphics and every thing else.

I think there are settings and switches that browsers could do to mitigate some of this risk, but there is no easy solution to it either.

If some shitty McDonalds app is broken then that's a minor inconvenience. But if your bank / payments don't work, or you can't board a plane because of the app's protection then that's a serious problem. And while people might moan than apps use attestation, they have their reasons which are obvious in most cases.

We could argue that Google should provide attestation for "curated" forks and I'd be favourable to the idea. But until it happens, GrapheneOS is not something normal people should use. It breaks apps. The only people it's suitable for are people who are either hyper-paranoid, or genuinely have something to hide.

They're not "banning" Graphene, they're using a convenient device / app attestation as a security mitigation and Graphene happens to break it.

Anything that uses the device integrity / attestation services of Play won't work - banking apps, digital keys, government apps, crypto wallets, transit / ticketing apps etc.

The problem is the leak is very hard to plug. Sites legitimately need to know your screen dimensions for stuff like layout. They legitimately need to know your OS for recommending the right download links. They legitimately need to know your graphics capabilities to render the right thing. And so on. The problem is that in aggregate all these things basically make your machine and your browser unique and distinguishable from another.

As for why Aliexpress wants this uniqueness, it's probably to do with their business model of blasting offers at people and wanting to track engagement, fraud, bots and so on.

Same is true for the left too. People's buttons are so easy to push especially the more entrenched they are.

Twitter/X is a cesspit that encourages and promotes the most obnoxious, terrible people, and AI bots to dominate the narrative by paying money. It's not the only social media platform so why subject yourself to it? Just leave. As Syndrome says in The Incredibles - "when everyone’s super... no one will be" - leave all the blue ticks to rage and fight each other.

Your utility bills are not one off payments, they're recurring, so the whole "pay later" model falls apart. It's just a way to pay more for the same thing, and if somebody is short of money, for them to be caught in debt. Same goes for the likes of Klarna which splits payments into 4 smaller payments. For a one off thing maybe that's fine, but for recurring bills it ends up meaning you're just slammed with constant barrage payment deadlines.

While there are people escaping war and famine, the majority of people trying to get into Europe are young males looking for work. They're economic migrants, not refugees or seeking asylum. The allure of higher wages spurs them on but quite frankly they'd be better off staying put than risk being indebted to criminal gangs or dying attempting to cross. Even if they succeed Europe is taking a far harder line and will periodically sweep them up and deport them.

And Ceuta is a waste of time. Climbing the razor wire or arriving by boat does not grant immigration status or let somebody board a ferry to mainland Spain. The place is tiny 19sq km, and police / military will immediately escort people back out to Morocco even in normal circumstances, i.e. it's pointless to even try. The flash mob found this out too, the ones who didn't drown that is, getting escorted straight back out again.

Apple has longer support but software is only part of the story. Apple started the trend of planned obsolescence in phones by sealing in the batteries and making them hard to service & repair. It would be a lucky phone that managed to survive 5+ years without being consigned to the trash or a drawer because it's not economical to have it repaired.

It will be interesting to see what Apple do when the EU starts forcing user-replaceable batteries and repairability in phones. Maybe they'll be dicks by dropping the software support to their devices to make them obsolete that way.