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Cake day: June 14th, 2023

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  • SomeoneSomewhere@lemmy.nztohmmm@lemmy.worldhmmm
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    1 day ago

    IR thermometers aren’t particularly accurate. Especially when pointed at reflective surfaces like glass, where some of the return will actually be reflected heat coming from you.

    Most wall thermostats are designed to read the temperature of the air; the wall behind may be warmer or colder.












  • SomeoneSomewhere@lemmy.nztomemes@lemmy.worldPower outage
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    2 months ago
    1. Most of these are in a metal box, which blocks signal. Adding careful routing to get an antenna in an unshrouded position where it’s still physically protected is a pain. Also, in the middle of an apartment building can give you pretty terrible reception in the first place.

    2. GPS doesn’t provide time zones or daylight savings info. The appliance would know where you are and what UTC time it is, but not which time zone you’re in. The manufacturer could pre-program shape files in (yay, more memory) but they become obsolete the next time a politician decides to move time zones or change daylight savings. If this happens to you, your device will keep repeatedly changing to be an hour fast/slow no matter how often you reset it.

      You could have the GPS satellites continually broadcast shape files for the time zone but this would be a big change, use up a lot of the limited bandwidth, and it would take your clock half an hour to set itself.

    3. it’s like an extra $5-10 in parts and unlike a WiFi module, the manufacturer can’t make any big data or ad revenue from it.





  • I mean, its trivial to prove something isn’t Bigfoot on the grounds that Bigfoot Isn’t Real. That’s just Hitchens’s Razor. The burden of proof is on the person presenting the claim, not the one refuting it.

    Shifting the burden of proof doesn’t disprove the claim. You can look at a picture and call someone an idiot for believing it’s bigfoot/a drone, but still not be able to swear that there is no way it could possibly be a drone.



  • It’s like trying to disprove Bigfoot. Someone comes to you with a shaky, out of focus video with no audio, time, date, or precise location.

    I can’t prove it’s not bigfoot. That doesn’t mean I think it is Bigfoot, or that you should think so.

    If you have good video and know where it was shot from and can cross-reference that with aircraft trackers? Then maybe they can do a good investigation. There’s been a few of those where it turns out to pretty obviously be a helicopter, a V-22, or just a 737.

    Especially since it’s rather hard to judge scale on airborne things some distance away.


  • Sorry, could have been clearer. I was talking about random dumb civilians.

    Quadcopters have been buzzing military bases for years, basically since they became available to the public.

    With all this PR about drones and people sometimes blaming the military, the number of dumb civilians thinking about ‘spying’ on military bases will be on the rise.


  • “We have had confirmed sightings at Picatinny Arsenal and Naval Weapons Station Earle,” the spokesperson said. “This is not a new issue for us. We’ve had to deal with drone incursions over our bases for quite a time now. It’s something that we routinely respond to in each and every case when reporting is cited.”

    It’s not explicitly stated, but my read is they get normal consumer-style quadcopters regularly, and this is simply a continuation of that. Perhaps an increase because people are now trying to explicitly spy on the military.

    The public drone sightings, on the other hand, definitely don’t seem to be consumer quadcopters. They mostly look suspiciously like 737s, V-22s, or out of focus stars.