Salamander

  • 4 Posts
  • 46 Comments
Joined 3 years ago
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Cake day: December 19th, 2021

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  • Awesome! The one with the sustained source loop is my favorite:

    Also, the one that shoots out flames paints a picture similar to how a synchrotron behaves, shooting out X-rays into the beamlines as the electron bunches move around.

    Upon looking into it closer, the synchrotron is a bit of a mixture of those two concepts - the source loop (booster ring) that is fed by the linear accelerator, and then the larger loop (storage room) that feeds X-rays the beamlines. Of course, many details differ, but still it is interesting to notice the similarities !


  • If the timing is right, I would bring a mushroom grow bag with mushrooms sprouting.

    If not… probably my radiacode gamma spectrometer and some of my radioactive items. Maybe a clock with radium painted dials and a piece of trinitite. I think that there are many different points of discussion that can be of interest to a broad audience (radioactivity, spectroscopy, electronics, US labor law story of the radium girls, nuclear explosions, background radiation… etc). As a bonus I can bring a UV flash light and show the radium fluorescence. Adults love UV flash lights.





  • Search engines like google aggregate data from multiple sites. I may want to download a datasheet for an electronic component, find an answer to a technical question, find a language learning course site, or look for museums in my area.

    Usually I make specific searches with very specific conditions, so I tend to get few and relevant results. I think search engines have their place.



  • Fair enough. I just looked it up and if the scale in this image is correct, I agree that the size of the hole looks small in comparison. I also looked at the security video of the crash itself and it is frustrating how little we can see from it.

    Since this was such an important event and there seems to be a lack of specific pieces of essential evidence - either because of bad luck or because of a cover-up - I understand the skepticism. And I am not a fan of blindly believing any official narrative. But, without any context, if I see that photo and someone tells me that a plane crashed into that building, I would find it probable simply because the shape is so similar to the photo of the Bijlmer accident that I’m familiar with. A plane crash seems to me like a very chaotic process, so I don’t have a good expectation of what the damage should look like.

    Maybe I’ll look for a pentagon crash documentary some time.



  • I am not sure as I did not test this one. Maybe you can go in person and get a worker to get you access to the kiosk through your account to print the card. It is one of those massive chains with gyms in every corner. I think that by now they rely on their digital infrastructure and many of their workers are not trained to handle uncommon situations. At least I get that from some of my experiences, but I could be wrong, maybe if I would have called them could have helped me with this. It was just easier to get the app into my old phone, print a card, delete the app.


  • I think that it works, but for it to work you need to enable Google Play services. From what I understand, this is done in a sandboxed manner simulating a fake identity, so it is possible to do this while isolating Google from your phone to an extent. But I think that WhatsApp is in itself problematic and one of the direct offenders that I want to avoid, regardless of its reliance on Google Play services, and so I have not gone through this effort myself.


  • I made the switch when I got a new phone. So I kept both the old phone with android and the new phone with GrapheneOS. There was a transition period when I would bring both phones with me, just in case. Now my old phone is my “whatsapp” phone which I keep at home and turn on rarely. During the transition period I used my old phone number whenever I needed to provide my phone to use a service, but eventually I transitioned that to a VoIP. But, even then, many services will reject VoIP phone numbers, so I still make use of the old one.

    I had to request a special scanner from my bank because the banking apps do not work with GrapheneOS. And I had to make sure that nothing important goes into my gmail anymore because google would request that I used my old phone 2FA in the most inconvenient moments, and also I don’t want to access google from my GrapheneOS phone.

    I think that there are many annoyances that can and probably will happen if you try to jump right into GrapheneOS after having previously relied in the google/meta ecosystem. If you attempt to switch too quickly you might inadvertently lose access to your bank, and you might become suddenly unable to communicate with family and friends. My government’s online identification system requires that I use their app, which runs on google services, so I still have to use my old phone for that. And I have encountered situations in which the only reasonably convenient way to proceed is to download an app. For example, recently I registered for a gym that would then require me to use their google-store app so that I could identify myself when purchasing a physical card.