Almost two decades ago, I worked at a network service provider who had as a customer a company that provided the technology for serving those gas pump ads.

At each gas station they had a VSAT, a router and of course the digital signage boxes on each pump.

They fed the ads to thousands of pumps via a single T1 to HughesNet in Atlanta. They'd multicast the ads, and have a local cache at each pump that would receive the stream, cache it and serve it.

It was one of the most elegant setups I've ever seen, and should serve as a case study in multicast for efficient bandwidth utilization across an expensive data transmission medium.

Yup, specifically a base64 image encoded inside a Markdown document.

Mint, without question. A polished, conservative, stable experience with Ubuntu's broad compatibility baked in, and a familiar desktop experience. Few other distributions can deliver that. I'm very technical myself, but past the age of wanting to tinker with every little thing; I jist want an OS that is stable and gets out of my way to let me get things done - and Mint delivers.

Unless it's 'True Lies', in which case the terrorists are running Windows 3.1.

Other than backwards compatibility with previous IRC clients, is there anything IRCv3 brings that something like Matrix doesn't do? Despite myself being a pretty prolific EFnet'er 15-20 years ago, most of the world has moved from IRC and I question the value of splitting resources across too many different efforts, when I think we'd be better off if everyone adopting a federated protocol like Matrix; which I believe covers pretty much all of the IRC use cases in addition to a number of others.

My guess is people who use $100 bills for toilet paper.

You'd let a 4-year-old roam the streets at night with some friends?

Was at the game tonight. The first inning was a little tough to watch, and had to leave after the 6th as my two young kids had had enough (but got to see Matt Chapman's homer). I figured the Jay's were done for, but was pleasantly surprised when I learned standing in my driveway having a beer with my neighbour that Biggio had belted a 3-run Homer to win it.

To those calling it a long game.... I was at the 19 inning Toronto-Detroit monster in 2014 that was over 6.5 hours long, a very good portion of that with no concessions open in the blazing hot sun.

I'd say The Inner Light is almost universally considered the greatest TNG episode, although there are other great ones.

I in particular enjoyed The Measure of a Man, The Drumhead, The Chase, Who Watches The Watchers, Yesterday's Enterprise, The Offspring, The Best of Both Worlds, Darmok, Chain of Command, The Pegasus, Lower Decks, and All Good Things.

Almost certainly the worst episode is Masks (or maybe Shades of Grey)

yes.

For me it's Twix and Sour Patch Kids

They're called voters.

It's a Jem'Hadar from Star Trek: Deep Space Nine. They're bred for war and require a constant supply of a drug called Ketracel-white to survive. Ergo, "War, on drugs!"

Wish we still had those around. Would take my kids every few weeks so they could run around for an hour and have fun with the other kids there.

Unfortunately the two remaining restaurants with Playplaces in the city just underwent renovations and removed their Playplaces in the process.

I somewhat understand it as they were germ factories and probably hard to keep clean and maintain, but for better or worse my kids loved going there, and were devastated when I told them they weren't there any more. In fact, there's a good chance my kids were the last kids to play at the Playpace closest to us (they closed for renovations the day after the last time we went).

Have a reservation for a Chevy Blazer EV, which will be my first electric. Also keeping my eye open for other options, however, as it looks like right now they won't offer Supercruise on the RS trim, and probably won't see it until 2024.

Also, GM's announcement that they're moving to Tesla's NACS for 2025 would probably mean it'd be the last and only model year with a CCS charger.

Get out of my brain. This is how I solve 90% of my issues, I do most of my serious thinking with a cigarette. Something about the little ritual of stepping away and thinking about the problem more abstractly with a nice nicotine stimulant.

Looks like web works, but both Jerboa and Liftoff are broken.

Nope, they use a GUI program called 'Data Extraction Program':

https://www.reddit.com/...

This can probably be accomplished with Tasker. Tasker can definitely disable the screen timeout, and my guess can lock the phone as well.

I second that. Chamberlain's/Liftmaster's MyQ app grows more ad-infested by the day and the RatGDO gives you local control (no cloud required)