Not sure how it is in Ottawa but here in the US Midwest distances are frequently measured in units of time. I might say I'm an hour from Green Bay or two hours from Madison, though I don't remember the actual mileage. That said, it usually only applies to distances over 20 minutes (between 7 and 25 miles, depending on speed limits).

That practice is pretty widespread in Canada. Ever since metrification nobody is really sure whether the person they're talking to is more comfortable with miles or kilometres. So they just use time.

When I was very young in Canada, before the metric changeover, it was still common to measure distance with time.

Some time in the mid-2000s my dad showed me a website he'd found called Screams of Wheat which purported to show a pitched-down video of ultrasonic wheat screaming while being harvested. I always thought it was just a joke to troll vegans, but maybe there's a grain of truth to it?

> Can't help but see some parallels between this and current Scarlett Johansson vs. OpenAI debacle.

I think that's why this was posted... I saw it referenced in a comment on that thread.

Interesting, in cars the terms "generator" and "alternator" are used to refer to a DC device (dynamo?) and an AC device, respectively. Cars used DC generators for their electricity until the 60s/early 70s (depending on make/model) when they started using an AC alternator with a rectifier to make a constant 14VDC.

Right, I feel like between that and seeing it a lot over remote desktop I've never really appreciated the quality of the original. I always liked the wallpaper set from the windows 9x era because they were designed to look good in low quality 256-color modes.

For a moment I confused it with the one from W11 and wondered how they got all the folds so smooth and uniformly spaced.

A large percentage of people in my area eat venison regularly for at least part of the year. We already have controls on place for CWD so I have to hope that would catch any similar cases before someone eats the meat.

I took it to mean they're not worried about themselves catching it, but more about the implications if this disease were to spread more. How bad could it be if it started infecting more than just the eyes? How fast could it spread between people before we have a vaccine ready?

There's a bit of a meme among electronics hobbyists that for so many projects with an Arduino, somebody in the comments says "I could've done that with a 555”. It's a very common chip with a wide range of uses from arcade sound generation to the timer on a toaster to light/motion activated alarms.

As someone that grew up reading Elektor articles, that pretty much sums up most of the gadgets I see on Maker magazines.

The big difference is that is much easier to program a microcontroller in software, than mastering electronics, specially when analogue circuits are evolved, and the only debugging tools are a multimeter, pen and paper.

I've seen it often on Hackaday over the years, and while they probably could do it all with a 555, I certainly couldn't... My specialties are software and mechanical stuff, for everything in-between I shove in an Arduino and hope it works!

What's wrong with Ting?

I'm a current Ting customer for the last ~5 years and have had no issues with them.

Yes, and haven't had issues with it recently... Was there some bad news I missed?

The reddit forum for Ting has a lot of complaints about billing issues, lack of eSIM support, and poor customer service (for the TMobile/DISH customers, of which I was one)