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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 17th, 2023

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  • There’s nothing truly like a Framework, because they’re a whole unique category of one. But if you just want something that is user serviceable there are other options.

    I’m a big fan of my Star Labs laptop. It came with complete disassembly and reassembly instructions, and pretty much every part is available to buy individually as a replacement. It’s not magically “plug and go” like a Framework, but if you’re comfortable with a screwdriver you should have no trouble.

    They’re a Linux specialist small independent producer, too. And being based in the UK, imports to Switzerland should be more straightforward than imports from the States.


  • All licence applications cost the same in the UK, regardless of what you apply for (or to be more exact: the cost scales with the size of the venue according to fixed bands related to “business rates” valuations).

    Licensing conditions are actually entirely fluid and negotiable between the applicant and the local council, who act as the licensing body. Not only with regards to opening hours, but also to all sorts of weird and wonderful additional terms. In practice when it comes to opening hours, a lot of pubs and bars apply for (and are granted) licenses quite a lot later than their actual intended closing time, as it gives them leeway to open late for special occasions without the need to apply for a temporary extension, and gives flexibility for “lock ins” (i.e. continuing to serve customers after they’d normally have shut up shop).


  • Yes, “24 hour licensing” means that bars can apply for any licence they want, but they don’t need to apply for a full 24 hours if they don’t want to; they can apply for any licence terms they like.

    They also don’t need to open for the full terms of their licence. Just because they’ve been granted a 4am licence, it doesn’t mean they can’t still shut up shop at 10:30pm if they like. It’s permission to open during those hours, not an obligation.







  • Realistically Google Search and Google Maps don’t provide anything unique that isn’t provided by competitors, although a) they may provide a superior experience, and b) the competitors are not necessarily much more palatable (that is, Bing Search and Bing Maps are hardly a great ethical improvement).

    YouTube is probably the only Google service where this is a genuine monopoly of sorts. That is, content that is on YouTube is not generally available on other platforms, and if you want to watch that content you have to watch it on YouTube. We might all live for the day when all content creators are dual-hosting in PeerTube or the like too, but we’re a long long way from that right now.

    Although I write that as someone who only very rarely actually uses YouTube, because largely the content isn’t to my interest. Other than my local football club’s channel, I can’t think of anything on there that I actually seek out.


  • An EULA is nominally a binding contract, in the sense that it is presented as such. No court has ever ruled and given precedent to the effect that EULAs are universally non-binding (because companies have always settled out of court for cases where it looks like they’re going to lose).

    It is well understood that the arguments against EULAs being binding are solid ones, and that the reason why so many cases settle is because companies are not confident of winning cases on the strength of EULA terms, but you still need to go through the rigmarole of attending court and presenting your defence case. That’s how court cases work.

    Edit: And perhaps more to the point of the OP, if you want to sue a company over some defect or service failure, it’ll be them who introduce the EULA as a defence, and it’ll be for you/your lawyers to argue against it. Which adds complexity and time to what might otherwise have been a straightforward claim, even if you win.




  • I used to be a bit iffy on Dell years past when their reputation was largely as commodity shovelware and overpriced premium kit. But honestly, they’ve evolved over the years into by far my favourite of the big mass manufacturers. Not only is their hardware generally solid for the price point (with a few exceptions), but their customer service is absolutely second to none. I’ve never had such smooth and helpful customer support from any other hardware manufacturer, big or small.

    That alone puts them leagues ahead of HP and Lenovo for me.




  • For comparison, grey hydrogen currently costs around $2 per kg, and green hydrogen costs around $12 per kg. Filling a Toyota Mirai tank with green hydrogen would cost you about $70. That’s production at today’s electricity prices. The cost to fully charge a Tesla is about $15, same rates.

    So for green hydrogen to beat grey hydrogen on the open market, costs need to drop by a factor of 6. And because it can only do this if electricity prices drop off a cliff, it’d be doing this in an environment where you can fully charge a luxury BEV for $3…

    Hydrogen is also not the only game in town in terms of competitors with BEV. For those niches where fully battery-operated vehicles aren’t practical, there are also biofuels, which are (from a climate change point of view) greener than green hydrogen anyway (although they have their own controversies).


  • 1 - renewable surpluses. As wind and solar keep ramping , hydrogen is a fantastic way to store that energy. Sure, there are efficiency losses but it’s transportable, able to be stored long term, and able to be used from small scale to grid scale applications

    Grid storage is a genuine problem that needs solving, but there’s no particular reason to believe hydrogen is going to be the technology to fill that niche. There are much simpler and more efficient competitors, not least of which being pumped hydroelectricity, but also including exotic technologies like molten salt thermal plants or compressed air mineshafts. And batteries, for that matter; once portability stops being a concern, other battery chemistries start to be an option which don’t include lithium at all, like sodium-sulfur.

    And even if hydrogen electrolysis does make sense as a grid storage medium, there’s no particular reason to think it’s a good idea to package up this hydrogen, transport it, and stick it in vehicles to convert into electricity through their own mini power plants. The alternative, where hydrogen is simply stored and converted back into grid electricity on site to meet demand leveling requirements seems far more likely.



  • Currently literally 99% of the world supply of hydrogen is fossil fuels. Yes, in the “future centuries” sense of the long term things might be different, but in the “we need to stop climate change in the next decade or so” sense it’s a non-starter. If you banned companies from making hydrogen from fossil fuels, the world simply wouldn’t have enough hydrogen.

    It’s basically not possible to make electrolysis more efficient; the energy requirements are simple physics. The only way that technology can make green hydrogen cheaper is to reduce the capital cost of building an electrolysis plant, and to make enough surplus electricity that the cost to ring it comes down. Although as the latter also makes recharging a BEV cheaper too, that doesn’t necessarily get hydrogen anywhere closer to being competitive.