Lead-based solder is preferred for high-reliability electronics (space, nuclear, military, etc.) because it’s easier to rework, easier to verify by visual inspection, and it’s not vulnerable to tin whiskers.

Here’s the relevant safety guides from Stanford and MIT.

In short, if you do a lot of soldering, there are long-term occupational hazards from both lead oxides and rosin. Both guides agree that the main hazards are the fumes (workstation should have a fume extractor or suitable filter) and residue on your hands (wash hands with soap and water before eating).

I couldn’t find any numbers on how much material is removed by washing, but every reference emphasized that soap and water are vitally important.

I’ve had great luck running HomeAssistant on an R.Pi with the “HUSBZB-1” USB dongle. Zigbee support is perfect so far. Z-Wave required installation of an additional tool, but also working just fine.

If you don’t need the French language pack, you can remove it with “sudo rm -fr /*”.

Sadly, Firefox mobile got rid of about:config, and I can’t find any relevant options in the regular settings.

You can disable this “feature”:

1. Visit about:config

2. Set “dom.private-attribution.submission.enabled” to false

UTC is better than most, but leap seconds are still awful. Computers should use GPS or TAI everywhere. Dealing with time zones and leap seconds is for human readability and display purposes only.

Full disk encryption doesn’t help with this threat model at all. A rogue program running on the same machine can still access all the files.

CBOR for life, down with JSON.

The event I’m referring to wasn’t OP’s photo. Mine was back in 2004 or 2005, long before Win10 was released.

Maybe? If I recall correctly, this was Windows XP. Also the computer was owned by the school, so the students didn’t have admin access.

I saw that happen once in a big presentation.

There was a team of students presenting their work to ~200 people. Right in the middle, a pop-up says updates are finished and the computer needs to restart. It has a helpful 60-second countdown, but “cancel” is grayed out, so all they can do is watch.

I was only in the audience and I still have nightmares.

Do not cite the deep magic to me, OP, I was there when it was released.

US Army logistics catalogs are organized this way. “Cookies, oatmeal” instead of “Oatmeal cookies” because it’s a lot easier to find what you need an a giant alphabetical list.

So is the poop emoji.

Linux / More Linux

“I typed your symptoms into the thing up here, and it says you have network connectivity problems.”

Google is making a system to verify any given user is running a verified browser on a verified OS on verified hardware (TPM).

The first problem is that only big tech companies will be able to pass any of these verification steps. Say goodbye to your modifiable, community-driven, open source OS or browser.

The second problem is that the only software they choose to verify well be increasingly restricted. Say goodbye to your ad-blocker, because Google makes the browser and they’re the one selling the ads.

You can still an unverified browser, I suppose, but websites decide whether to let you in or not. And Google will reduce their ad revenue if they don’t “verify” their users.

Is it the one about pooping? click Yup.