Similar happened around Pittsburgh PA about a year ago. Storms came through and took out tons of power lines leaving people without power for well over a week. The “local” utility was impacted way more than surrounding utility providers due to years of underinvestment in infrastructure maintenance despite regularly raising rates. Turns out that’s what happens when it’s majority owned by overseas sovereign wealth funds (in this case mostly Singapore). When line must go up, maintenance becomes just a cost to be deferred. Good news is there was a ton of blowback and things have gotten better. The state PUC opened an investigation and have prohibited rate increase requests for multiple years at this point. We have had more short flickers but a lot less actual outages so maybe they really have learned a lesson? (Not holding my breath on that one)

You can take it to a local coin shop or coin collector show, most cities have them pretty regularly. That said many common errors aren’t really valuable and that one to my very untrained eye looks interesting but not super rare. Probably worth getting looked at but I wouldn’t bet the farm on it.

This is infuriatingly stupid, the whole point of using things like “longer than 4 football fields” is that most people at least have a solid idea how big a football field is so have a frame of reference, but who the hell understands the weight of the Empire State Building?!? That is just such a useless frame of reference. Height sure, volume maybe, but weight or mass is just stupidly useless for something like a building.

The current version is just in office and home, this announcement extends it to allow for specific on-site spaces/buildings which for large campuses is advantageous. I haven’t seen anything that says it will directly track and report your location Outside of the generic ones that an admin configures like the “Studio B” example in the article. It uses pretty benign signals to boot: a corporate WiFi connection, a specific peripheral like a monitor, or wake from sleep (which Teams already does for normal presence and presumably to note the absence of other location signals). Microsoft says it won’t track specific desks, offices, or floors but I’m guessing if an admin wanted to put the effort in that could be setup within the limits of how many locations are available to configure.

I think I could do that, assuming they want to. As frustrating as it is to be the smart person on a team of people who don’t know anything, if they at least care some then it’s not a total loss.

Again though the issue isn’t this feature, it’s that those are shitty managers and the solution is to deal with that, not complain about how a feature could be misused. Most features of most tools could be used in malicious ways but we keep them because they also provide value. Crappy managers have a thousand ways to try and track “productivity” and use those tools against you. Email counts, calendar availability, pull request metrics, etc.

The spray also helps to maintain freshness longer, so it’s not just a “pretty fruit sells better” tactic. Though it should be stickered if it’s coated and that coating is wheat derived (not all are).

This feature has been around for a while, at least the last year in our tenant as a voluntary feature and I genuinely like it to know if someone is in the office to help with something only according our on site systems or teleworking. Now we are unique since we have an air gapped system we need to maintain in addition to our internet connected system so there’s a real benefit to knowing if someone is around to work on an on-site issue.

If the concern though is that your employer is tracking you then the issue isn’t that Teams supports a location feature, it’s that you work for a shitty employer that doesn’t trust you and give you agency to do your best work. No feature in a productivity suite is going to change that, and it’s likely they are tracking work location anyways through things like VPN logs. This doesn’t change that.

When you say team of idiots, are these people that are just lazy, or don’t know how to do the work? I can work with people who want to do the right thing but lack experience and knowledge. But a team of people that are lazy and don’t care would be torture to work with so in that case ignorance is bliss.

They don’t make the yellow anymore, the green is good from what I hear though if you are just looking for home assistant and don’t expect to add a bunch of other apps to it (z2mqtt, node-red, etc.).

The Thought Emporium just put out a video on Nebula (should be up on their YouTube channel soon) about this. This is a huge part of why every guide out there tells you to leave your phone at home when going to a protest, or at a minimum turn it off before you get there and only turn it on when you are at least a few blocks away. A burner phone is an option of course but that’s an additional expense and you need to plan for it.

Try measuring your dry goods (including your legumes) by weight, if your recipes don’t give weights then spend an afternoon measuring and converting the volumes to weights or you can lookup common conversions. It will be significantly more repeatable for recipes where it matters (baking mostly but also if you are trying to track nutrition content).