... because their chip and technology companies are part of the military and propped up by government funding. Oh wait, that was the Chinese.

Wouldn't it be fun if NZ media at this point say "So remind us again why we should use Google Tag Manager and YouTube if you're not linking us, mate."

If the whole of NZ media is delinked from Google, you can bet your last kiwifruit that alternatives will pop up locally - as well as driving the NZ public from Google to Duckduckgo, Playeur and all the rest. Good thing IMHO, and the local IT industry would be cracking open a few celebratory beersies. The Kiwis have a lot to say about colonial attitudes at the moment.

I'm using a Quirkey, so normal keyboard rules don't apply :) https://www.printables.com/mod...

A giant brick for mankind.

Lots of outage reports and op ed about the search engine duopoly, but not too much about what actually went wrong though, is there?

Yep, and when you find one that isn't you'll need to invest some time in trawling the documentation. Because it is unlikely that an international privacy thief has invested billions in it, and you're going to have to do the groundwork yourself.

That said, I got HomeAssistant running pretty quickly with off-the-shelf modules and even created a couple of my own devices using ESP32 dev boards amazingly simply - HomeAssistant does the device identification, code, compiling, and flashing all for you! Leaving it alone is going to need therapy...

Vik :v)

The Brilliant light switches and some smart lights at least are recoverable. These can be re-flashed as detailed here:

https://devices.esphome.io/dev...
https://community.home-assista...

They can then be integrated with HomeAssistant, which is Open Source and not cloud-based (unless you particularly want it to be).

People don't realise that hydrogen is a greenhouse gas: It prevents atmospheric methane from degrading. Not only that, but about 10% of hydrogen inevitably leaks off during production and storage due to its remarkable ability to penetrate the most cleverly engineered seals.

My Android phone has no native SMS app. Google are moving to RCS, and Facebook (which I'm not madly keen on) was my previous option for not having separate messaging apps all over the place since the demise of Signal.

So what's left as an ordinary, boring, (and preferably Open) SMS app?

Methane is relatively easy, for a cryogenic, to keep cold and dense. Because it contains more energy per unit volume than, say, hydrogen, you don't have to pump it so fast into the combustion chamber. Your fuel tanks, pumps etc. are smaller and therefore lighter.

Because it contains much less carbon than kerosene, it does not decompose into a black mess inside the engine.

But it is cryogenic, and suffers density changes during pumping, compressing, etc. If this gets out of hand it behaves much like trapped air in a garden hose. This is hard on the engine innards...

Vik :v)

If something *almost* works, it's not there yet.

A big problem when travelling with an EV (ask me how I know) is when chargers are broken or otherwise unexpectedly inaccessible due to flooding, landslips etc. - particularly in rural areas. At that point, you are very glad of the "unnecessary" range.

Fortunately, there are a variety of vehicles available which people can pick required features from.

This is precisely the problem. We are looking at the material using our current knowledge of materials in our tech level, and it makes perfect sense to us in the same way that it made perfect sense to the Victorians that advanced computing devices would be made from fiendishly complex clockwork.

But advanced tech would be nanofabricated from lighter elements with high intrinsic bond strength, organised at the atomic scale. So in looking at exotic alloys we are barking entirely up the wrong tree.

A civilization with the technology to reach earth would have reached the point where they had control over molecular manufacturing. They wouldn't use metals. They would be using bulk nanocrystaline diamond or sapphire due to their greater strength/weight ratios and durability in the interstellar vacuum. So, no, I don't think he's found advanced alien tech.

So if a developer builds an application with the RHL files, and a client asks for the source, what does the developer do? Refuse to release the source files they got from Red Hat and breach the GPL, or release the full source and break their contract with Red Hat?

From here it looks like Red Hat have just worked themselves into a corner where using their Linux becomes a legal minefield.