Grouping SF with Oakland is also a little weird IMHO — quick googling suggests that SF muni has about 3x the ridership of BART in SF.

OP needs to stop Chase-ing up votes.

They say “everything’s bigger in Texas,” but maybe that’s just because California hasn’t whipped it out until now…

Yeah, good point. The “app setup” is built into android and iOS as far as I can tell (generating matter credentials, etc.). Better than 3rd party IMHO but not ideal, and a nonstarter for a lot of folks. Hopefully HA will come out with their own onboarding process at some point.

Fair enough; I have a dedicated SSID which is VLAN’d off from the rest of my network with no Internet access. Only my HA server can talk to those devices.

+1 for ThirdReality. They’re a little pricey but I’ve generally had good luck with them.

I’ve also had pretty good luck with cheap Matter-over-wifi bulbs. Pairing them can be a little finicky and needs to go through an Android or iOS process, but after pairing you can block Internet access for them and they work great local-only.

There’s a bug in some wifi matter bulbs where they crash, especially when going from off to a desired brightness/color state (as in, “light on” works but “light to 50%, 3000K” will crash the bulb).

I don’t think you understand what local control of smart devices means…

But I thought they smelled bad on the outside?

Chuck Yeager’s Air Combat would ask for various airplane specs (“what is the service ceiling of an F-4E?,” “what is the ferry range of a MiG-15?”), and you had to flip through a booklet to find the answer.

You could copy the book, but it was fairly long so I guess the friction kept you in check.

No one “shatters,” “breaks,” or otherwise surpasses violates the diffraction limit. Rather, you operate in such a way that the diffraction limit does not apply.

This is not to take away from these accomplishments at all! All manner of super resolution techniques are fantastic, but they’re not violating the diffraction limit; they are violating the assumptions that go into the diffraction limit, or they are using a different definition of resolution (which is completely valid), or both.

For example, an APC-7 to type N (f) cost $105 in 1979.

Yikes that makes SMA/B, BNC and the like look cheap.

Just make sure it’s really a Confederate flag first.

Gosh I wonder why they’re against mail-in ballots.

Any voter in CA is eligible, and honestly, with the number of propositions and local stuff on the ballot it’s essential to do research ahead of time regardless of your political preferences. So much easier to fill it out over a few weeks IMHO.

Beware though, there may be new rules about needing it received rather than postmarked by the election date (which is obviously bullshit).

I had an…interesting…take home exam in college. The max score was 100, but the test had 200 points. So, if confident, you could answer half the exam and still get the highest score; if not confident in answers, you could answer more questions and rely on partial credit

It was a week long take home, “open everything” (book/Internet, but no discussions online or IRL). In some ways the hardest exam I ever took, but I learned a lot, and some of the questions were specifically meant to introduce new subjects.

Right, the SS were much better dressed.

I would probably add “transmit power” in there somewhere, but I guess if you’re assuming regulatory limits then it’s not a big variable.

Never tried it, but hot peppers can be added to birdseed to prevent this — birds aren’t sensitive to capsaicin, so it only affects the mammals.

Gnarly PDEs aren’t exactly the same beast as differentiating single variable polynomials.

Sounds like this was basically the plot of the first Nolan Batman.

If you really want to try some, you could use d-limonene. It’s just orange oil (like you get when you squeeze an orange peel), is edible, and is basically a kerosene-like hydrocarbon. It’s used in hand soap and works for stripping paint, and you can run multi-fuel camp stoves off of it, too!

Careful ingesting it though, as it isn’t always food grade due to extraction methods/additives. It causes kidney tumors in rats, but the mechanism is known and is not relevant to humans.