IT was six men of Indostan
To learning much inclined,
Who went to see the Elephant
(Though all of them were blind),
That each by observation
Might satisfy his mind.
Not all colors of paper and/or ink and type styles are compatible with automated equipment.
Inverse (or reverse) printing — i.e., light print on a dark background — is not permitted for automation and machinable mail, including BRM and QBRM pieces. Paper color is relative to the printing color of the address, barcode, return address, and postage indicia. It is very important in the barcode clear zone. The Postal Service recommends that the paper color allow the PRD (contrast) to conform to the requirements listed in the discussion on reflectance — see 11-4.
Regarding type styles and the best readability on USPS machines, the Postal Service recommends proportional or fixed fonts, or as close to proportional or fixed fonts as possible (e.g., Arial, Tahoma). Avoid script or styles similar to Gothic because USPS machines cannot read them well.
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What is HomeBox?
Inventory management for regular people
Homebox
Keeping track of everything I own
Home Assistant
My smart home’s true brain
Nextcloud
My digital filing cabinet
Firefly III
Building a stable financial home
KitchenOwl
My personal kitchen companion
Homarr
Bringing all my apps together
I have been writing here for about a decade that wind and solar would inevitably prove to be far more expensive for producing useful electricity than other methods like fossil fuels, nuclear, or hydro. The reasons are not difficult to understand. Wind and solar, due to intermittency, are not capable of powering a full-time electrical grid on their own. To make the grid capable of fulfilling customer demand 24/7/365, wind and solar require large amounts of additional capital infrastructure — dispatchable back-up generation, energy storage, additional transmission capacity, and more. If wind and solar prove insufficient to eliminate dispatchable back-up generation, then you find yourself running (and paying for) two duplicative systems, when you could have had only one. Energy storage as a potential solution to intermittency turns out to be impossibly expensive. If the only back-up generation you can find that works is powered by fossil fuels, then you haven’t even succeeded in achieving zero carbon emissions in the electricity sector. //
In 2025, Louisiana had the third-lowest electricity rates in the United States. The reasons are simple—73% of Louisiana’s electricity is generated by natural gas and unlike California or New York, Louisiana has not attempted to implement carbon dioxide or renewable energy goals through its electricity generation system. //
em
2 days ago · 0 Likes
Can you please boil this analysis down to a soundbite? Voters already believe renewables are cheaper, so that soundbite should include something that slays that belief.
Richard Greene
7 hours ago · 0 Likes
Free electricity with windmills and solar panels.
At night, when there is no wind, you will not pay for electricity.
When an attorney of many years experience gets disbarred by a court, it is not a trivial thing, but a serious, serious punishment, and not something judges take lightly. But, congratulations to Philadelphia’s George Soros-sponsored, criminal-loving and police-hating District Attorney, Larry Krasner, for getting one of his minions kicked out of practice for deliberate lying to a a federal district court. From The Philadelphia Inquirer:
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The hidden costs of powering civilization //
I want to ask you a question we don’t usually think about when we flip a light switch or fill up a tank…and that is, where does the energy actually come from?
Sure, sunlight, wind, and even coal and gas are technically free, they are energy sources just sitting there in nature to be used… some facing more limitations than others. But turning them into power we can actually use to run Santa Claus’ chocolate factory or light our christmas trees? That’s a whole different story.
This is where the idea of primary energy comes in. It’s actually not about the electricity we see listed on our bills, but is really about all the raw energy we have to pull from nature, to process, convert, and deliver before we get anything useful, such as 24/7/365 electricity, every single second we need it. And once you start looking at energy this way, things get a lot clearer.
We often hear that solar and wind energy is “clean” and basically “free” and it does not have thermal losses like a nuclear or gas-fired power plant. But to make this wind and solar energy usable and reliable in the real world, we have to build enormous support systems, mine rare minerals, manufacture components, build storage, upgrade the grid, maintain everything, and then, eventually, dispose of it. It’s not just about a solar panel and a little breeze blowing over a turbine blade.
Now compare that to conventional fuels like coal or gas or oil… they might lose more energy during combustion in power plants or engines, but the upfront infrastructure is simpler, and the systems last much longer, with the average coal or gas plant running for a good 30-60 years, nuclear usually far longer. That is not nothing and this should be considered when speaking of “free” energy.
Understanding primary energy helps cut through the feel-good stats and get down to the physics. It assists in showing us the full cost of electricity (FCOE), time, money and materials used in making any source truly usable…and once you see it, you can’t unsee it.
That is why looking at the real problem with the “Primary Energy Fallacy” often used by supporters of grid-scale wind and solar, is worth it! //
The “Primary Energy Fallacy” a term coined eloquently by many, is the idea that all primary energy from fossil fuels must be replaced by an equivalent amount of “renewable” energy. However, those people say, this would not be necessary because more than two-thirds of primary energy is lost as wasted heat during the conversion processes.
The misunderstanding occurs in the belief that wind and solar generate electricity without any losses (a secondary or tertiary form of energy) while coal, gas, uranium may have a high energy content but have “thermal losses” ~60-70% during processing. This PE fallacy argument is used for power generation and also for internal combustion engine vehicles (ICE) in a slightly adjusted form.
- Stated Primary Energy Fallacy 1: “The conversion of gas and coal to power results in a loss of around 60%. This means that one unit of primary energy from wind or solar, replaces two units of that of gas/coal”
- Stated Primary Energy Fallacy 2: “The conversion losses during end use in internal combustions engines ICE are also high. Electric motors are much more efficient. Most car engines ‘lose’ 70% of fuel energy, which means that one final energy unit of electricity replaces three units of gasoline/diesel”
Romance From Violin Concerto In D Major Op.35
Erich Wolfgang Korngold
If I want to "disable" syncing a pair, I click on the local filter (found in the center between the two gear symbols) and add a wildcard to the exclude section, thus excluding every file. To reenable syncing for that pair, I right-click on the local filter and select "Cut", which removes that filter and the file exclusion.
As far as I can tell, this works pretty well and is reasonably quick to toggle.
But as is often the case when it comes to apocalyptic warnings related to climate change, real-world data doesn’t support the narrative.
In reality, the insurance industry, which provides coverage related to hurricanes, fires and other extreme events, is enjoying a streak of record profits. //
In the second half of 2025, things got even better, thanks in large part to hurricanes missing the United States for the first time in a decade.
S&P Market Intelligence announced of third quarter results, “For US P/C insurers, it just doesn’t get any better than this . . . the US property/casualty insurance industry had its best quarter in at least a quarter of a century—and maybe longer.”
The industry’s bountiful financial results of 2025 follow its most profitable year in at least a decade in 2024, according to the NAIC. //
Starting about a decade ago, the industry’s regulators began raising alarm about the possible effects of changes in climate on banking and finance. //
As far as the actual effects of changes in climate on expected annual losses in the insurance industry, Verisk, a catastrophe modeling firm long pre-dating the “climate risk” industry, estimates an annual impact of just 1%.
Insurance companies have spent many decades estimating risk. Perhaps regulators should allow them to come to their own conclusions, rather than insisting they use dodgy science and charge customers even more.
Based on some projected analyses, SpaceX is expected to have in the neighborhood of $22 to $24 billion in revenue next year. That is a lot of money—it’s on par with NASA’s annual budget, for example, and SpaceX can deploy its capital far, far more efficiently than the government can. So the company will be able to accomplish a lot. But with a large infusion of cash, SpaceX will be able to go much faster. And it will take a lot of cash to design and build the satellites and launch the rockets to deploy data centers in space.
Abhi Tripathi, a long-time SpaceX employee who is now director of mission operations at the UC Berkeley Space Sciences Laboratory, believes that once Musk realized Starlink satellites could be architected into a distributed network of data centers, the writing was on the wall.
“That is the moment an IPO suddenly came into play after being unlikely for so long,” Tripathi told Ars. “If you have followed Elon’s tactics, you know that once he commits to something, he leans fully into it. Much of the AI race comes down to amassing and deploying assets that work quicker than your competition. A large war chest resulting from an IPO will greatly help his cause and disadvantage all others.” //
Musk also believes that a larger and more financially robust SpaceX is necessary to undertake the settling of Mars. He understands that NASA will not pay for this, as the civil space agency is in the business of exploration and not settlement. For several years now, he has expressed that it will require about 1 million tons of supplies to be shipped to Mars to make a self-sustaining settlement. This is roughly 1,000 ships, and including refueling, at least 10,000 Starship launches. At $100 million per launch, that’s $1 trillion in launch costs alone.
Musk has frequently expressed a concern that there may be a limited window for settling Mars. Perhaps financial markets collapse. Perhaps there’s a worse pandemic. Perhaps a large asteroid hits the planet. Taking SpaceX public now is a bet that he can marshal the resources now, during his lifetime, to make Mars City One a reality. He is 54 years old.
Sending astronauts to the red planet will be a decades-long activity and cost many billions of dollars. So why should NASA undertake such a bold mission?
A new report published Tuesday, titled “A Science Strategy for the Human Exploration of Mars,” represents the answer from leading scientists and engineers in the United States: finding whether life exists, or once did, beyond Earth.
“We’re searching for life on Mars,” said Dava Newman, a professor in the Department of Aeronautics and Astronautics at Massachusetts Institute of Technology and co-chair of the committee that wrote the report, in an interview with Ars. “The answer to the question ‘are we alone‘ is always going to be ‘maybe,’ unless it becomes yes.”
Latest results from a recently discovered ancient Roman construction site confirm earlier findings.
Back in 2023, we reported on MIT scientists’ conclusion that the ancient Romans employed “hot mixing” with quicklime, among other strategies, to make their famous concrete, giving the material self-healing functionality. The only snag was that this didn’t match the recipe as described in historical texts. Now the same team is back with a fresh analysis of samples collected from a recently discovered site that confirms the Romans did indeed use hot mixing, according to a new paper published in the journal Nature Communications. //
Then archaeologists discovered the remains of what was once an active construction site in Pompeii, with tools and piles of raw materials scattered about, a half-built wall, completed buttresses, and even mortar repairs to an existing wall. Masic described it as a veritable “time capsule” holding even more secrets about how the Romans made their concrete.
Masic et al.’s latest isotopic analysis of samples taken from the site confirms that the concrete had the same lime clasts as those used to build Privernum. Intact quicklime fragments showed they had been premixed with other dry raw materials—a crucial early step in a hot mixing process. Furthermore, the volcanic ash used in the cement contained pumice, and those pumice particles would chemically react with the surrounding solution over time to create new, strengthening mineral deposits. As for Vitruvius, Masic suggests that the historian may have been misinterpreted, pointing to a passing mention of latent heat during the cement mixing process that might indicate hot mixing.
This page outlines how to create your own set of API keys for use with the YouTube add-on.
Sign in at https://console.developers.google.com/
NOTE: youtube.com/activate and google.com/device go to the same place.
Configure the Add-on
The final step is to add your keys to the YouTube add-on, this can be done using one of the following methods.
Method 2
Configure the add-on:
Settings -> API -> Enable personal API keys = ENABLED
Settings -> API -> API Key = BLANK/EMPTY
Settings -> API -> API Id = BLANK/EMPTY
Settings -> API -> API Secret = BLANK/EMPTY
Enable the api configuration page, to enable this go to the Settings - API and enable Enable API configuration page
You should then be able to update your keys by visiting http://<IP of Kodi device>:<port>/youtube/api
The port used is Settings - HTTP Server - Port which by default is 50152
You can bookmark the results page for quick updates in the future. Be sure to disable this feature after use.
- Melon Loader: https://melonwiki.xyz/
- TLD Mods Notes: https://a.plas.ml/shaare/Ksqi_g
- Sky Co-Op Mode: https://tldmods.com/?q=sky
- https://github.com/RED1cat/SkyCoopInstaller/releases/tag/v2.2
- verify Dependencies are copied to Mods folder
TL;DR: If you want to operate a secure environment you should use your own on-site stratum 1 NTP servers along with authentication. This is the only way to eliminate time spoofing attacks from the outside. Don’t reduce your overall security to a stateless and unauthenticated (read: easy-to-spoof) network protocol!
If you are using a couple of different NTP sources it might be not that easy for an attacker to spoof your time – though not unfeasible at all. And think about small routers with VPN endpoints and DNSSEC resolving enabled, or IoT devices such as cameras or door openers – they don’t even have a real-time clock with a battery inside. They fully rely on NTP.
This is what this blogpost series is all about. Let’s dig into it. ;)