FTA:

The so-called plug-in systems involve routing the direct current generated by the panels to an inverter, which converts it to an alternating current. They can then be plugged into a conventional wall socket to feed power to a home.

So, yeah, almost certainly illegal in pretty much any grid-powered home in the US.

The basic problem is that if the grid power goes down the inverter can back-feed the grid enough to electrocute the people who are working to fix it.

Utilities require an approved isolation system of some kind that prevents that happening. They are pretty strict about this for various other technical and political reasons too, but evidently it is mostly a safety concern.

I’ve got some good locations at home for panels, and about 500W in panels that I use for camping, but the equipment I’d need to handle easily and safely consuming the power at home is kind of expensive (just running an inverter and a battery for an isolated system is easy enough, I’ve got all that, but it’s not cheap to seamlessly connect it to my home power system). Would love to have a safe and approved system like what is described in the article.

I was curious if that would work on ethernet cable! I’ve seen it done on coax, wasn’t sure if it would work well enough on UTP to be useful outside a lab setting. Cheap too. Cool!

Wire tracker maybe? You might want a higher quality version than that particular one if the cable run is long, one of the reviews suggest that the distance is limited.

No, I agree that allegiance is a behavioral motivator, but I think it is distinct from loyalty and that people tend to conflate the concepts (similar to how people sometimes conflate or confuse infer/imply and borrow/lend).

Loyalty, a behavior, can be observed; allegiance, a commitment (maybe supported by emotion, maybe not), cannot.

loyalty is earned

For me, it’s not even that. Loyalty is not owed, nor is it earned. It is nothing more than a description of behavior.

Think of it this way: I always do my grocery shopping at Target instead of Walmart, even if I see that something is slightly cheaper at Walmart I’ll still most likely go to Target for it. Some might see that and say, “Look, he has loyalty to Target”, assuming that I shop at Target because I am loyal to that brand. But that’s backwards. Really it is that I can be described as ‘loyal’ because I consistently go to that brand. ‘Loyalty’ is a description of the behavior, not the cause of the behavior.

it can be used against you

Only if you have bought into the coercive bullshit that ‘loyalty’ is itself a reason to do something. Employee or customer loyalty is nothing more than an observation that people consistently support the company. That loyal behavior is seen because those people consistently have reasons to support the company. If you observe that people are loyally supporting your company, that is because they have reasons to do so (for example, you might be paying them to show up and do shit. Or maybe they think the shit they are doing is important or fun).

People who want something from you for less than it is worth will try to convince you that loyalty is something you owe them or that they have earned from you because if you believe the lie that loyalty is a reason for action that makes it easier to get you to give them something for free.

IMO acting out of loyalty is never good. That is a backwards application of the concept intended to make you to act against your own interests.

Some people like to flip the idea of loyalty around from a description of behavior to a reason for behavior as a method of manipulating other people.

Like, if people see me consistently supporting my friends even when that is difficult they might think I’m ‘loyal’, but that’s backwards. I’m not supporting them because I am loyal, I support them because I like them and want them to succeed (and hopefully they’ll support me too). If someone wants loyalty from me, that’s an immediate red flag that tells me they either don’t understand why I do things, or they don’t care and just want me to do whatever they want.

If you want to grow the sport, you need to facilitate a safe and welcoming environment for everyone.

Hm. In addition to a welcoming environment it might be fun to have a ‘cutthroat’ class with an opposite approach where intimidation, bullying, and over-the-top shit-talking is encouraged. They could have competitors come out in like pro-wrestling gear or something and have a stare-down at the beginning of the match.

the fact that I didn’t come in 2 hours early and nap at my desk meant I was lazy.

I’m curious, if you were in the office but obviously doing not-work activities like playing video games or table-top games with coworkers instead of napping would that be seen negatively?

C# is my primary language, so I’d certainly recommend it. It can be a little daunting to get into because it is a large ecosystem of tools, so you might want to watch some videos and keep things simple for a while.

For work I mostly use it for APIs for web sites, that might be a good place to start if you’re familiar with JS/TS front-end work. From there you might want to try Razor or Blazor for handling web UI work in C#. I’m not very experienced with that aspect of it, but it’s mostly been a positive experience (TBH I kind of prefer React, but I’d need to spend more time on the Razor/Blazor side to have a strong opinion).

The desktop development side in C# is kind of a mess at the moment. Maybe stick with web until you’re feeling pretty comfortable with the language.

My biggest problem is figuring out what I want to do with any coding skills

Maybe some dumb little games? If you aren’t interested in 3D gaming you can do 2D platformers, top-down Rogue-likes, or Zork-style interactive fiction (text) games (from scratch instead of with a Z-Machine).

As a self-taught developer, when I was learning I found it a lot more useful to just go code stuff, and then when I found something that seemed hard or ugly, I could go look for solutions to that kind of problem, which was much more interesting than just reading about various techniques. (Well, I was learning well before normal people had internet, so mostly I invented some shit to fix my own problem, but it got easier/faster after the internet became available).

“Hey, how do I get to the Plex server?”

“Open your browser and go to Hell”

“…”

Previously my server was just a Debian box where I had a ‘docker’ directory with a bunch of .sh files containing ‘docker run’ commands (and a couple of docker-compose files for services that that have closely related containers). That works really well, it’s easy to understand and manage. I had nginx running natively to expose stuff as necessary.

Recently I decided to try TrueNAS Scale (I wanted more reliable storage for my media library, which is large enough to be annoying to replace when a simple drive fails), and I’m still trying to figure it out. It’s kind of a pain in the ass for running containers since the documentation is garbage. The web interface is kind of nice (other than constantly logging me out), but the learning curve for charts and exposing services has been tough, and it seems that ZFS is just a bad choice for Docker.

I was attracted to the idea of being able to run my services on my NAS server as one appliance, but it’s feeling like TrueNAS Scale is way too complicated for home-scale (and way too primitive for commercial, not entirely sure what market they are aiming for) and I’m considering dumping it and setting up two servers, one for NAS and for running my containers and VMs.

they have a hard time seeing water

When my cat was a tiny kitten learning to drink from a bowl he would always dip his face in too far and get a nose full of water, causing him to sneeze. He learned to always dip his paw in the water first to see where the surface is before putting his face in. He still does it every single time. It’s pretty cute.

my theory is that they might also want something else.

I keep about 4 different kinds of food around for our cats. I have three auto-feeders in different parts of the house each with a different foot and dispense schedule. That way the cat has some choice about what they are eating, and there’s a bit of environmental enrichment where they can eat in different places.

I also hide little piles of cat treats in various locations around the house. Keeps the cats curious and exploring to see if they can find something good to munch.

cat didn’t like stale food

That’s a thing too. Dry food in bags has more odor than food that’s been sitting out for a while. The fats in food left out in the open air will eventually go rancid too, but that takes a long time and shouldn’t happen if you’re cleaning the bowls periodically.

Hey! It took nature and generations of farmers and gardeners to create those beans!

What you are describing about Twitter wasn’t my experience with it at all. I just followed my friends, interesting people I met at events, etc. I wasn’t looking to be connected to influencers or whatever was the popular chatter of the moment, and I freely used the block feature to filter out people who posted stuff I wasn’t interested in. It worked just fine like that. Decent experience (too shallow for my preference, due to the nature of the platform, but not unpleasant).

I feel like most social media platforms are, to a large extent, what you make of them. Like my Facebook feed is pretty nice. It’s about 60% family and friends that I like, 20% interest groups (kayaking and hiking mostly), and 20% ads for stuff I’m interested in (mostly authors right now). There’s none of the toxic bullshit that a lot of people complain about.

So yeah, I agree with the ‘follow people you are interested in’ advice, but that’s not unique to Mastodon or Lemmy or whatever.